Joseph Mallord William Turner The Tenth Plague of Egypt 1802
Highly appreciated Automatic Earth commenter TAE Summary presents another one of his series “A Tale of Two..”, and if only just for the obvious effort he put into it, let’s dig in. How do you feel about what each president has achieved? No wrong answers.
TAE Summary:
Biden is a Great President and Trump was an Awful President
Biden
• Appointed a diverse cabinet
• Signed executive orders addressing systemic racism and discrimination
• Passed the infrastructure bill to repair roads and bridges and improve internet access
• Reduced the deficit
• Led NATO in its support of Ukraine and opposition to Vladimir Putin
• Lowered the child poverty rate by increasing the tax credit for children
• Launched a program to protect earth from killer asteroids
• Officially recognized Turkish genocide of Armenians in 1915
• Sidelined the court-packing movement of the left
• Stepped up US support for Taiwan
• Announced a historic trilateral security agreement with Australia and Britain to counter Chinese hegemony
• Accelerate Covid vaccine delivery at home an abroad
• Improved the American economy by championing competition and reining in the power of big business which helped create millions of jobs
• Gave Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices and made the price of things like insulin and hearing aids cheaper
• Attacked hunger and fostered better nutrition in the US
• Funded opioid recovery programs
• Eliminated the statute of limitations for child sex abuse
• Tried to reform student loans
• Issued important cybersecurity regulations
• Chose humanity over politics when getting Brittney Griner released
Trump
• Colluded with the Russians to get elected in 2016
• Appointed unqualified family members to important positions in his administration
• Tried to ban TikTok
• Withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Accords
• Increased the deficit every year of his presidency
• Approved the Keystone Pipeline through native lands
• Disallowed transgender students from using the bathroom of their choice
• Attacked John McCain as a loser
• Ended curbs on auto emissions
• Cracked down on legal immigrants
• Impeded regulation against toxic chemicals
• Shrank the food safety net so that over 700K Americans lost their access to food stamps
• Suggested vaccines cause autism
• Accused Barack Obama of spying on his campaign
• Cut corporate taxes to the lowest level since 1939
• Oversaw the longest government shutdown in US history
• Acted as a racist and xenophobe when he implemented a travel ban from Muslim countries, blamed the Chinese for Covid, separated families at the US border, tried to build a wall between the US and Mexico and gave racist speeches
• Tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act which would have left millions without healthcare
• Inadequately responded to Covid, downplaying the dangers
• Use his influence as president to try to get Ukraine to provide damaging narratives about his political opponent
• Challenged the outcome of the 2020 election undermining democratic institutions and the public’s trust in elections which led to the events of January 6th and the deaths of 5 people
Trump was a Great President and Biden is an Awful President
Trump
• Negotiated three Arab-Israeli peace accords
• Fostered a strong economy and stock market by signing into to law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and other policies
• Started the Space Force
• Attempted the first Defense Department wide audit
• Cracked down on unwanted robo-calls
• Attempted to build a wall on the border with Mexico to stop illegal immigration
• Helped American farmers with billions of dollars in aid
• Tried to fix health technology by removing rules blocking the sharing of medical information
• Rescinded rules for federal contractors that protected them from sexual harassment claims
• Made it easier to prosecute financial crimes like money laundering
• Renegotiated trade deals with Mexico, Canada and China which benefitted American workers and businesses
• Appointed three Supreme Court justices and many other conservative judges to federal courts leading to pro-Constitutional decisions like the overturning of Roe
• Passed the VA MISSION Act which improved healthcare access and services for veterans
• Oversaw the defeat of the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate in Syria and Iraq
• Kept us out of war
• Signed executive orders and laws combating human trafficking
Biden
• Opened the borders to illegal immigrants
• Discharged thousands of troops for refusing the Covid vaccine
• Opposed efforts to stop biological males from competing in women’s sports
• Lied about border patrol agents whipping migrants
• Claimed that January 6th rioters were a bigger threat to democracy than Confederates in the Civil War
• Described terrorism from white supremacy as the most lethal threat to the US
• Oversaw the disastrous withdrawal of American troops for Afghanistan
• Mis-handled the response to Covid mandating vaccines and dividing the nation on the basis of vaccination status
• Supported lockdowns and other pandemic polices which damaged the supply chain and the world economy
• Supported violent protesters instead of the police during the BLM riots
• Lied about Hunter’s laptop saying it was Russain disinformation
• Stated that election reform is the new Jim Crow
• Suppressed first amendment rights by influencing policies of social media outlets
• Supported the war in Ukraine and vilified Russia as our enemy
• Blocked American energy production
• Illegally attempted to forgive student loans
• Printed massive amounts of money causing massive inflation
I have one comment: I don’t think that “Joe Biden” (in Jim Kunstler language) only “supported the war in Ukraine and vilified Russia as our enemy”, “Joe Biden” did a lot more to poke the bear and instigate and fire up the war. But that’s just me. You can be the judge of that too.
Also just me: when Trump left and Biden came, we were at peace. Look at us now.
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Statements made by Vadim Skibitsky, a representative of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, confirm that the United States is directly involved in the ongoing conflict there, according to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. In an interview with the Telegraph published on Monday, Skibitsky refused to answer questions about whose satellites are used for strikes when talking about American HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems. He did acknowledge, however, that they consult with Washington before launching strikes and that Washington has veto power over decision-making.
“No other confirmation of the direct involvement of the United States in hostilities on the territory of Ukraine is required,” Zakharova said on Tuesday, because the US doesn’t just arm and train Ukrainian forces but essentially shoots the weapons themselves. Zakharova stressed that the US is directly involved and that its distance from the situation is irrelevant. “They are fully involved. Now Kiev representatives are talking about their military involvement not only through the supply of weapons, but through personnel management in the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, direct instructions and the choice of targets,”Zakharova added.
Speculation has been ongoing about Washington’s involvement in the conflict. For example, in April French journalist Georges Malbrunot went viral on social media after claiming to have seen first-hand that Americans are “in charge” of the Ukrainian war effort on the ground.However, he stressed that this was not an official involvement as it was American mercenaries that he met in Ukraine. Nevertheless, skeptics have questioned the veracity of promises by US officials to avoid direct involvement or so-called “boots on the ground.”
“Advises”? They supply the weapons, the intelligence, and have a veto on “decision-making”. They might as well pull the trigger too. And for all we know they do.
A senior Ukrainian military intelligence official has claimed his agency was getting advice from British and American counterparts on which targets to attack with Western-supplied weapons, like the HIMARS multiple-launch rocket systems. The Americans can ban any strike they don’t like, the general reportedly said. The revelation came on Monday in an interviewthat Major General Vadim Skibitsky gave to The Telegraph newspaper. When discussing Ukraine’s reported successes in destroying Russian military targets with weapons provided by the West, he claimed Ukrainian forces were using “real-time information” to direct fire. “I can’t tell you whether [we are directly tasking] British and American satellites, but we have very good satellite imagery,” the British newspaper cited him as saying.
The general did not claim that US officials were feeding targeting information directly to Ukraine, but said troops were getting feedback from Washington and London before launching rockets. This allows “Washington to stop any potential attacks if they were unhappy with the intended target,” The Telegraph said. US officials have frequently claimed that America does not have direct involvement in Russia’s hostilities with Ukraine, since it would put it at risk of escalating the conflict. Russia and its allies in Donetsk and Lugansk accused Ukraine of using the US-made launchers to strike non-military targets. In a recent incident a rocket attack hit a detention facility, where dozens of Ukrainian POWs were kept. Officials from the Donetsk People’s Republic showed images of what they described as fragments of HIMARS rockets used in the strike.
Over 50 of the prisoners were reported killed in what Russia alleged to be an assassination of potential witnesses and perpetrators of war crimes committed by the Ukrainian side. Kiev denied responsibility for the incident and accused Russia of hitting the prison camp in Elenovka. Ukrainian officials claimed the attack was meant to cover up either abuse of the POWs or the embezzlement of money.
Over 200 foreign mercenaries have reportedly been killed in a missile strike in southern Ukraine, Russia’s Ministry of Defense reported on Tuesday. The statement also added that over 20 units of military equipment were also destroyed during the attack. In its daily briefing on Telegram, the ministry reported that Russian Aerospace Forces delivered a blow to a temporary deployment point of the Ukrainian ‘foreign legion’ near the city of Nikolaev, using high-precision weapons. As a result, up to 250 foreign mercenaries were eliminated, according to the report. Russia also claims to have neutralized up to 500 nationalist fighters in the Kharkov region via high-precision strikes, as well as “a significant amount” of military equipment.
Last week, Russia also claimed to have killed over 40 foreign mercenaries, most of whom were Polish citizens, after a missile strike on a temporary deployment point near Konstantinovka in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). The week before that, the Russian military claimed it had killed up to 250 such soldiers in the same settlement. Kiev’s international military unit was created in late February at the request of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, and is officially known as the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine. In April, the Russian military estimated their numbers at almost 7,000.
However, an updated estimate provided by the Russian defense ministry earlier this month suggests that only about 2,700 of these soldiers remain in Ukraine. Many of them were eliminated while others fled abroad, some complaining about disorder in the ranks of the Ukrainian forces and about poor equipment. Moscow has repeatedly warned that it will not view foreign mercenaries in Ukraine as combatants as defined by the Geneva Convention and that “the best thing that awaits them if they are captured alive is a trial and maximum prison terms.”
Leaders of African countries are likely to use the next UN climate summit in November to push for massive new investment in fossil fuels in Africa, according to documents seen by the Guardian. New exploration for gas, and the exploitation of Africa’s vast reserves of oil, would make it close to impossible for the world to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. However, soaring gas prices have made the prospect of African supplies even more attractive, and developed countries, including EU members, have indicated they would support such developments in the current gas shortage.
The Guardian has seen a technical document prepared by the African Union, comprising most of Africa’s states, for the “second extraordinary session of the specialised technical committee on transport, transcontinental and interregional infrastructure and energy committee”, a meeting of energy ministers that took place by video conference from 14 to 16 June. The five-page document, and accompanying 25-page explanation, indicates that many African countries favour a common position that would inform their negotiating stance at the Cop27 UN climate summit, scheduled for this November in Egypt, which would entail pushing for an expansion of fossil fuel production across the continent.
The document states: “In the short to medium term, fossil fuels, especially natural gas will have to play a crucial role in expanding modern energy access in addition to accelerating the uptake of renewables.”Member states of the African Union will meet again, in Addis Ababa, this week to confirm the stance to be taken. They are expected to argue that Africa must be allowed to benefit from its fossil fuel reserves, as rich countries already have done, and that developed countries by contrast must take the lead on sharp cuts to their emissions.
The EU may run out of gas during the upcoming winter season amid supply shortages, the bloc’s senior diplomat Josep Borrell has warned. “Europe is facing a perfect storm: energy prices are up, economic growth is down and winter is coming,” the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy wrote, in a blog published Monday on the website of the Diplomatic Service of the EU. There is “real uncertainty” over whether the EU will have enough gas and whether it will be able to afford it, Borrell said in the piece, titled “Europe’s energy balancing act,” describing the upcoming winter as “exceptional.” His comments come amid a reduced flow of natural gas from Russia, a major supplier to the bloc. Borrell warned that countries of the continent must prepare for a possible total cut-off by Moscow, and suggested that Europe has struggled to replace Russian supplies.
“The hard truth is that for this winter, we are approaching the limits of what extra gas we can buy from non-Russian sources. So, the bulk will have to come from energy savings, i.e. demand reduction.” he wrote. Last month the EU approved a plan that would see member states voluntarily reduce their gas consumption by 15%, to enable the bloc to accumulate the fuel ahead of winter. In case of an emergency, the voluntary reduction may become mandatory. According to Borrell, the bloc has managed to reduce the share of Russian gas in its imports from 40% at the beginning of the year to around 20% today, by buying more LNG and receiving gas via pipelines from Norway, Algeria and Azerbaijan. Russia has repeatedly said it remains a reliable supplier and honors its contractual obligations, but that international sanctions are preventing pipeline operator Gazprom from delivering gas to the EU at full capacity.
Smog and particulate pollution will rise in the Netherlands this winter, public health authorities have warned. The rise is linked to more households choosing to burn firewood as gas prices skyrocket. Sales of wood and pellet stoves have increased by 30% since last summer, De Volkskrantreported on Sunday. Demand is now so high, the newspaper reported, that manufacturers are struggling to deliver enough of these stoves. Firewood suppliers, meanwhile, are already running out of stock, and sourcing more logs is a difficult proposition, as the Dutch forestry agency refuses to supply trees to the firewood industry. With gas and electricity bills at record highs, the shift among some consumers to wood burning will have environmental consequences, the National Institute for Public Health (RIVM) warned.
“The sale of wood is linked to consumption and it is indeed expected that this will not have a positive impact on air pollution,” a spokesperson told De Volkskrant. While the institute is investigating what measures can be taken to reduce this pollution risk, its powers are limited at present. It can warn households against lighting fires on days when the smog risk is high, but cannot enforce a ban. Health experts called for a ban last month, telling parliament that such a measure would be necessary in winter when more fires would increase the chance of smog. However, there is currently no other viable heat source to replace either gas or solid fuel, although the RIVM is investigating heat pump technology, according to the newspaper.
The Netherlands is not the only European country where wood fires are making a comeback. Poland gave its citizens permission to hoard timber for burning last month, while Latvians have rushed for firewood collection permits and Hungary has ordered a halt to firewood exports. In the UK, the London Fire Brigade said in May that its officers had responded to 100 house fires in the preceding months, started by people burning wood in open fires to stay warm. While gas prices throughout Europe were steadily rising since the end of the coronavirus pandemic, the increase accelerated sharply since Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine in February. The EU has begun phasing out Russian fuel imports in response, while Russian gas giant Gazprom has said that sanctions are impeding its ability to deliver gas to the region.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban lashed out at the European Union on Monday evening in a Facebook post, reminding his followers that Brussels doesn’t dictate European affairs. “The European Union is not in Brussels. The European Union is in Vienna, Budapest and Warsaw, Berlin and Madrid,” the prime minister said. “Brussels is not our boss We are an independent, sovereign Hungarian nation. We make decisions together. If they’re not good for us, we’ll tell them. If they are not good and we can prevent them, the common decision will not be made.” Orban has made international headlines in recent weeks for his blunt statements criticizing the West’s policies. On July 28, the premier blasted NATO’s support for Kiev during a meeting in Vienna with Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer.
“The Hungarian assessment is that the concept of NATO supporting Ukraine with weapons and training officers, and the Ukrainians fighting against the Russians, is a construct that has now been shown not to result in a Ukrainian victory,” Orban said at a press conference. The prime minister has been a holdout amongst European leaders in jumping on board Brussels’ harsh sanctions campaign against Russia, particularly a total embargo of Russian natural gas. In his remarks criticizing NATO, Orban also made reference to the fact that sanctions on Moscow are causing serious economic hardship in the bloc. He said that a peaceful settlement needs to be reached in Ukraine because its absence it will spur economic recession in the EU that will be accompanied by political instabiliy.
On August 13, 2021, the Canadian government announced that anyone who hadn’t been vaccinated against Covid would soon be barred from planes and trains. In many cases, The Backward could no longer travel between provinces or leave the country. If you lived in Winnipeg and wanted to visit your mother on her deathbed in London or Hong Kong or, perhaps, Quebec City, you’d better get jabbed—or resign yourself to never seeing your mother again. Jennifer Little, the director-general of COVID Recovery, the secretive government panel that crafted the mandate, called it “one of the strongest vaccination mandates for travelers in the world.” It was draconian and sweeping, and it fit neatly with the public persona that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had cultivated—that of the sleek, progressive, forward-looking technocrat guided by fact and reason.
The Canadian Medical Association Journal, in a June 2022 article, observed that “Canada had among the most sustained stringent policies regarding restrictions on internal movement.” But recently released court documents—which capture the decision-making behind the travel mandate—indicate that, far from following the science, the prime minister and his Cabinet were focused on politics. (Canadians are hardly alone. As Common Sense recently reported, American public-health agencies have also been politicized.) Two days after announcing the mandate, Trudeau called a snap election—presumably expecting that his Liberal Party, which was in the minority in the House of Commons, would benefit from the announcement and be catapulted into the majority. As it turned out, the Liberals failed to win a majority in the September 2021 election.
In the meantime, roughly five million unvaccinated Canadians were barred from visiting loved ones, working or otherwise traveling. (Trudeau, for his part, stayed in power. Even though the Conservatives have won the popular vote in the past two elections, because of Canada’s parliamentary system, they have been denied the top job.) The court documents are part of a lawsuit filed by two Canadian residents against the government. Until last month, they were under seal. Both plaintiffs are business owners. Both have family in Britain. Both have refused the vaccine on the grounds of bodily autonomy. Both were reluctant to identify their businesses out of fear of losing customers
The present coronavirus crisis caused a major worldwide disruption which has not been experienced for decades. The lockdown-based crisis management was implemented by nearly all the countries, and studies confirming lockdown effectiveness can be found alongside the studies questioning it. In this work, we performed a narrative review of the works studying the above effectiveness, as well as the historic experience of previous pandemics and risk-benefit analysis based on the connection of health and wealth. Our aim was to learn lessons and analyze ways to improve the management of similar events in the future.
The comparative analysis of different countries showed that the assumption of lockdowns’ effectiveness cannot be supported by evidence—neither regarding the present COVID-19 pandemic, nor regarding the 1918–1920 Spanish Flu and other less-severe pandemics in the past. The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is high: by using the known connection between health and wealth, we estimate that lockdowns may claim 20 times more life years than they save. It is suggested therefore that a thorough cost-benefit analysis should be performed before imposing any lockdown for either COVID-19 or any future pandemic.
WHO Treaty Christine Anderson
https://twitter.com/i/status/1554364529236234240
It seems like governments across the Western world are hellbent on destroying the lives of their farmers, and New Zealand is no different, with the government bringing in a “burp tax” for livestock. It’s become almost a meme to talk about the government taxing you for breathing in oxygen in the age of climate insanity and carbon taxes, but New Zealand is by far the closest to doing so. According to climate radicals in the country, cow and sheep burps are just too harmful to the environment due to the methane released, and they need to be reduced, and farmers need to be taxed into submission. “There is no question that we need to cut the amount of methane we are putting into the atmosphere, and an effective emissions pricing system for agriculture will play a key part in how we achieve that,” New Zealand Climate Change Minister James Shaw told BBC News.
Under the proposed legislation, the government would begin taxing livestock farmers for their gas emissions starting in 2025, with incentives and lower tax rates being offered to farmers that feed their livestock special anti-burp diets and plant more trees to offset their supposed emissions. According to WebMD, other strategies the government is recommending include “face masks for cows that trap and turn methane into water and carbon dioxide, a method that reduces emissions by more than 50% according to Zelp, the company that invented the contraption. Some farmers are already experimenting with feed made from seaweed. And scientists are tinkering with cow genetics to increase their digestive efficiency.” Face masks. Yes, face masks for cows.
Hale, a 34-year-old former Air Force signals intelligence analyst, is serving a 45 month prison sentence, following his conviction under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified documents about the U.S. military’s drone assassination program and its high civilian death toll. The documents are believed to be the source material for “The Drone Papers” published by The Intercept, on October 15, 2015. These documents revealed that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations drone airstrikes killed more than 200 people — of which only 35 were the intended targets. According to the documents, over one five-month period of the operation, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”
The terrorizing and widespread killing of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of civilians was a potent recruiting tool for the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents. The aerial attacks created far more hostile fighters than they eliminated and enraged many in the Muslim world. Hale is composed, articulate and physically fit from his self-imposed regime of daily exercise. We discuss books he has recently read, including John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden and Nicholson Baker’s Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, which explores whether the U.S. used biological weapons on China and Korea during World War II and the Korean War. Hale is currently housed in the Communications Management Unit (CMU), a special unit that severely restricts and heavily monitors communications, including our conversation, and visitations.
The decision by The Bureau of Prisons to lock Hale up in the most restrictive wing of a supermax prison ignores the recommendation of the sentencing Judge Liam O’Grady, who suggested that he be placed in a low-security prison hospital facility in Butner, North Carolina, where he could get treatment for his PTSD. Hale is one of a few dozen people of conscience who have sacrificed their careers and their freedom to inform the public about government crimes, fraud and lies. Rather than investigate the crimes that are exposed and hold those who carried them out to account, the two ruling parties wage war on all who speak out. These men and women of conscience are the lifeblood of journalism. Reporters cannot document abuses of power without them.
The silence on the part of the press over Hale’s imprisonment, as well as the persecution and imprisonment of other champions of an open society, such as Julian Assange, is stunningly shortsighted. If our most important public servants, those with the courage to inform the public, continue to be criminalized at this rate, we will cement in place total censorship, resulting in a world where the abuses and crimes of the powerful are shrouded in darkness. Barack Obama weaponized the Espionage Act to prosecute those who provided classified information to the press. The Obama White House, whose assault on civil liberties was worse than those of the Bush administration, used the 1917 Act, designed to prosecute spies, against eight people who leaked information to the media including Assange — although he is not a U.S. citizen, and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication — along with Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling and John Kiriakou, who spent two-and-a-half years in prison for exposing the routine torture of suspects held in black sites.
Also under The Espionage Act, Joshua Schulte, a former CIA software engineer, was convicted on July 13, 2022 of the so-called Vault 7 leak, published by WikiLeaks in 2017, which revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones and turned internet-connected televisions into listening devices. He faces up to 80 years in prison.
Yale University epidemiologist Harvey Risch is expecting insurers to seek financial compensation from COVID-19 vaccine makers to cover “early unexpected mortality claims,” as they “they have a major financial risk that they have to figure out how to manage.” Insurers’ actuaries estimated COVID vaccinees would “live longer than they have” based on misrepresentations about “all-cause mortality … from the original [clinical] trials,” Risch told the “Just the News, Not Noise” TV program. In a followup interview he pointed to statements by insurers that offer group life insurance. OneAmerica CEO Scott Davison told a healthcare conference in December that death rates had risen an “unheard of” 40% in the working-age people it insures compared to pre-pandemic rates, when a “one-in-200-year catastrophe” would only bring a 10% increase.
Most claims aren’t filed as COVID-related deaths, he said. Public records show that Lincoln National, a much larger insurer, reported a 163% increase in death benefits paid out in 2021, the first year of the COVID vaccines: $1.4 billion, compared to $500 million in pre-pandemic 2019 and $548 million in 2020. It largely blamed a $41 million operations loss in the first quarter of 2022 on “non-pandemic-related morbidity, including unusual claims adjustments, and less favorable returns within the company’s alternative investment portfolio.” Lincoln Financial Group Vice President of Corporate Communications Kelly DeAngelis told Just the News the 2020 statutory filings didn’t include Lincoln Life Assurance Company of Boston. The 2021 supplement includes results from both companies, which merged that year.
This little vignette written by Don Werkheiser remains one of the best concise explanations of inflation I’ve ever seen. It was published in the spring 1982 edition of Green Revolution, the journal of the School of Living a non-profit organization with which I was associated throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s.
A rural village has no money. All trade is by barter. A farmer comes to town and deposits 10 bushels of corn with a man who has a store room. This operator gives the farmer 10 receipts, each redeemable in a bushel of corn. But the farmer asks for receipts in smaller denominations. The storekeeper gives him 40 receipts for 40 pecks. The farmer trades ten of these corn-receipts for other products; they are each accepted at the value of a peck of corn. That acceptance constitutes the issue of corn notes as money. Such receipts are generalized credit instruments. They refer to stored corn, but not to any specific peck of corn. When the seller wants a peck of corn the receipt is redeemed. Otherwise it is spent again, and ownership of a peck of corn is conveyed to the next seller.
The next day the farmer returns to town and spends 10 corn notes (each of one peck of corn in value) for his wife’s birthday present. Now the farmer has doubled the money supply in circulation, but there is no inflation; there are redeemable goods back of them. What then is inflation? We must understand “money” and the storekeeper’s actions. The store room owner noticed that the corn notes were accepted in trade. So he made 40 more “peck-receipts” looking just like corn-receipts and then he spent them into circulation. That is inflation–counterfeit receipts passed as valid receipts. Assume that the counterfeit receipts were accepted at face value. In that case, the counterfeiter effected a robbery of commodities equal in value to 40 packs of corn, while those who accepted them received receipts which measured the extent to which they had been robbed.
So long as confidence lasts, the game would continue and receipts could be spent. New sellers would be holding empty receipts. The game would collapse when all the corn in the warehouse was redeemed, and holders of the 40 counterfeit receipts found no one who would take them in trade. Worse could happen if the counterfeiter had the skills of a politician. If, when confronted by angry holders of his counterfeit receipts he declared himself a benefactor of the community–and showed that the original issue by the farmer was too limited, and that his own issues stimulated industry and trade (he would not mention that the farmers issue was redeemable while his own was not). He noted that most people did not want corn; they wanted a medium of trade that they could use to speed up trade.
They were told: “If the game stopped then, the holders would be losers, but if they continued, they could all buy what they wanted. In fact if they elected him Mayor he would declare pseudo-corn-notes to be legal tender, and he’d also begin a program of public works. Soon everyone would be rich.” An ignorant public agreed. Elected Mayor, the counterfeiter issue another stock of corn-notes called “pecks” and declared them to be worth a peck of corn in the market (but not anywhere redeemable). On each note was a picture of a peck-basket, but what it contained was not specified. Just a peck of value.
Ukraine could disappear from the map unless the conflict with Russia is resolved peacefully, former Trump military adviser Colonel Douglas Macgregor said in an interview with Sky News Australia on Wednesday. When asked what more could be done to help Ukraine in the ongoing military conflict, Macgregor stated that “the longer this lasts, the more people are going to be needlessly slaughtered, the more damage will be done to Ukraine,” adding that it is now “effectively a failed state, it could be erased completely from the map.” Noting that Ukraine’s military has suffered enormous losses during the conflict and that Russian forces were “by no means overstretched or hurting at this point,”Macgregor argued that “we need a ceasefire”and that countries like Australia should be pushing for it since “no one in Washington is going to do it.”
“We can’t afford to fight this until there are no longer any Ukrainians left,” he insisted, noting that he has heard from people in Berlin, Paris, and London that there is growing support for a ceasefire or coming to “some sort of an arrangement” between Moscow and Kiev. The former adviser also commented on the prospects of Russian President Vladimir Putin agreeing to such a ceasefire, noting that he has “never been interested in all of Ukraine,” and that the territory currently under Russia’s control is the “traditional Russian-speaking area.” Macgregor noted that Ukrainian forces which were concentrated in the Donbass region were of “great concern” to Vladimir Putin, who feared these forces “would attack Russia,” and the US would “inevitably deploy theater ballistic missiles there to hold his [Putin’s] nuclear capability at risk.”
“He’s not going to withdraw, that’s out of the question,” the former top Pentagon adviser said, suggesting that if the two sides were unwilling to come to some sort of arrangement on a territorial basis, then an armistice should be achieved, lest the conflict grow into a “wider, regional war.” Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
Last Sunday when the remaining Ukrainian soldier withdrew from Lysychansk, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said evacuating his troops from the city “where the enemy has the greatest advantage in fire power,” was the right call, but “means only one thing… That we will return thanks to our tactics, thanks to the increase in the supply of modern weapons.” While many in the West would like that to be true, the reality is very different: there is no basis upon which to hope for a future offensive to drive Russian troops out of conquered territories. The most likely result for the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) if they continue fighting the Russians is that more of Zelensky’s troops will be killed, more Ukrainian cities will be turned to rubble, and more territory Kyiv will lose to the invaders.
A sober analysis of the capacity of the of the two armed forces, an assessment of the military fundamentals that have historically proven decisive on the battlefield, and an examination of the sustainability potential for both sides, make it plain that Russia will almost certainly win a tactical victory. Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Oleksiy Arestovych said that, to the contrary, the withdrawals in Severodonetsk and Lysychansk weren’t defeats at all, but instead “successful” in that he claimed they allowed Ukraine to “buy time for the supply of Western weapons and the improvement of the second line of defense, to create conditions for our offensive actions in other areas of the front.” This is a common belief in the West but one not borne out by the facts.
In some instances, fighting tenaciously in the face of considerable enemy superiority can prove to be the difference between victory and defeat. For example, in the famous Battle of the Bulge, the U.S. 101st Airborne Division refused to surrender in Bastogne even after it had been surrounded and cut off by the advancing German army. [..] The much-ballyhooed supply of “heavy weapons” from the West that both Zelensky and Arestovych claim is coming will not be enough to turn the tide. Not even close. Zelensky advisor Mykhailo Podolyak correctly noted that the minimum needed by Ukraine to have a chance at reaching parity with the Russian invaders would require modern kit in the range of 1,000 howitzers, 500 tanks, and 300 rocket launchers.
As detailed by The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the sum total of all heavy weapons delivered or promised by the West through last week’s G7 and NATO summits amounts to a paltry 175 howitzers, 250 Soviet-era tanks, and an anemic dozen or so rocket launchers. To date, no other help is being considered. The ramifications of this mismatch should be clear: despite numerous and boisterous claims of Western support, it is militarily unsound for Ukraine to base its defense plans on the hope that major quantities of high quality Western heavy weapons will show up to help Ukraine stop the Russians. But there is a bigger, less obvious truth at play as well: even if Zelensky got everything on Podolyak’s list, it still would not likely change the battlefield dynamics.
“People in most countries do not want such a life and such a future,” he said. “They are simply tired of kneeling, humiliating themselves in front of those who consider themselves exceptional.”
President Vladimir Putin on Thursday challenged the West to try and defeat Russia “on the battlefield” and said Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine marked a shift to a “multi-polar world.” Delivering one of his strongest speeches since he sent troops to Ukraine on February 24, Putin also raged against “totalitarian liberalism” that he said the West has sought to impose on the entire world. “Today we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield. Well, what can you say here? Let them try,” Putin told senior lawmakers on the 134th day of Russia’s offensive in Ukraine. He accused “the collective West” of unleashing a “war” in Ukraine and said Russia’s intervention in the pro-Western country marked the beginning of a shift to a “multi-polar world.”
“This process cannot be stopped,” he added. He also warned Kyiv and its Western allies that Moscow has not even started its military campaign in Ukraine “in earnest.” “Everyone should know that we have not started in earnest yet,” he said. “At the same time we are not refusing to hold peace negotiations but those who are refusing should know that it will be harder to come to an agreement with us” at a later stage. Putin said most countries did not want to follow the Western model of “totalitarian liberalism” and “hypocritical double standards.” “People in most countries do not want such a life and such a future,” he said. “They are simply tired of kneeling, humiliating themselves in front of those who consider themselves exceptional.”
Putin
Putin to West: You want to defeat Russia on the battlefield? Try it! But keep in mind that we haven’t even started anything serious yet. pic.twitter.com/JZF62zQbUh
* Lvov and Lutsk regions will be annexed by Poland (marked on the map with the Polish flag). Almost a certainty – both Polish and Ukrainian officials made statements about “common land” and Poland already started to take over some administration functions there. The Head of the Russian External Intelligence Service made 2 or 3 public statements about it too, and he very rarely goes public. Poles will find the opportune moment to move in a military “peacekeeping force” to solidify their hold. This will be neither smooth nor bloodless because of history – Ukrainian Nazi collaborators performed ethnic cleansings there, killing up to 100000 ethnic Poles during WW2.
Polish political leaders see this as a populist move to restore historical justice (it will work, too), Polish far-right groups see this as a huge unpaid blood debt, and Polish police and security services see modern Ukrainian neo-Nazis as big trouble to be eliminated (through thorough denazification or other means). They were fine with it as long as neo-Nazis were acting against Russia, but when borders solidify and it will be their territory to govern it will be another matter entirely. It’s not out of the question that all ex-Ukrainians will become second-class citizens, like Russians in Baltic states.
* Zakarpatye region of Ukraine will be annexed by Hungary (marked on the map with the Hungarian flag). Looks very probable, but I didn’t see Hungary making any definitive statements about it. Hungary has been steadily building its influence there since the Soviet Union broke up – supporting Hungarian schools, language, and culture, even going so far as issuing passports. Ukrainian neo-Nazis issued threats of ethnic violence because they want “Ukraine for Ukrainians”, which mandates a set of standards for everyone in Ukraine – Russophobia, language (Ukrainian, other languages are not allowed), “ethnic purity” (this stuff is disgusting to even type). This annexation will be pretty smooth and bloodless, like Crimea was, due to how thoroughly Hungary prepared the ground there. If there is any trouble it will be caused by Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Hopefully, Hungarian police and security services are up to the task to keep people safe there.
* Regions marked with the Russian flag will join Russian Federation, the process has already begun. A follow-up anti-terrorist operation by FSB and RosGuard has started as well because the current regime in Kiev (heavily influenced by US+UK governments and Ukrainian neo-Nazis) already started terrorist attacks there. Thankfully Russian security services have a lot of experience with this sort of thing (Chechnya, Syria). The region in the bottom left, with a red exclamation point is a special one – on May 2, 2014 people protested in Odessa against neo-Nazis, burning the neo-Nazi flags. In response, neo-Nazis shipped their well-organized militia groups into the city, drove the protesters into a building, and set it on fire. 42 people died burning alive, shot, falling to death, or beaten to death. They’ve also killed 8 other protesters on the street.
Ukrainian new government (heavily supported by the US) basically ignored it – police had orders to observe but not interfere, a lackluster investigation was started but never yielded any results, and neo-Nazis had support from local law enforcement. This was a pivotal moment in Ukrainian history – the neo-Nazis made a loud and bloody statement “our ideology is the law in Ukraine, we will kill anyone who disagrees”. There is a high symbolic value in taking the Odessa region, I want to see a memorial to this atrocity right in front of that building. Odessa city itself is (or was) very international (this is common for many warm-water ports around the globe actually, due to sea trade) – Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, and many other ethnicities.
Possibly the greatest clown UK politics has ever seen is on his way out of the door. Ministers and aides, forty-one within twenty-four hours, have left his sinking ship. As for Johnson himself, he is spending his last days or hours rearranging the deckchairs with only the last yes-men by his side. The unsinkable Titanic is starting to go down. Let the band play. The Titanic is sinking. If you are a rat, get off now. Already, before Johnson has actually gone, some are speaking of a future Indian Prime Minster for the UK, the resigned Rishi Sunak, former Chancellor (Minister of Finance), married to the daughter of one of the richest billionaires in India. What an irony: the coloniser is colonised and the top job may go to a man from the most exploited and pillaged British colony of all.
Johnson is the first political victim of Western support for the bandit terrorists of the Ukraine. With swathes of his sanctions-hit population eating from foodbanks, people unable to afford travel or to heat and light their homes, shops closing down and strikes breaking out across the UK, but with billions of pounds to send to the Ukraine and waste on the already absurdly high spending on the military, Johnson’s political choices are being punished by the masses. His continual lies have destroyed all trust in him. The question is: Who will be the second to sink with the bad ship Titanic? Some suggest it will be Biden, in the mid-term elections in the USA on 8 November.
Frankly, he seems unlikely to be the second. It is only early July and the political situation of various political leaders in various European countries is so fragile that it is difficult to predict who or even how many will go before November. The fact that Johnson the Ignominious has been the first to be on his way to leave is significant. For Johnson, master of the moral vacuum, was the fanatic who supported the Fascist junta in Kiev more than any other Western leader, in rhetoric at least even more than Biden the Demented, master of the mental vacuum. Poets know all about poetic justice. Now atheists too should listen. Maybe, just maybe, given that Johnson has gone, there is a God who grants justice after all.
In yesterday’s White House press briefing, there was an extraordinary moment when White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refused to discuss a 2018 voicemail from President Biden that showed that the President lied repeatedly in denying ever speaking with Hunter Biden about his foreign business dealings. Jean-Pierre refused to answer a question from Fox News’ Peter Doocy and then refused again to answer a question from RealClearPolitics reporter Philip Wegmann. The rest of the press seemed content with an answer that was not just openly evasive but contemptful of the press. It is continuing evidence of the success of the Biden campaign to get the media to maintain a false narrative that they helped create during the campaign.
As previously discussed, the recording clearly proves that President Biden has lied about his knowledge of these dealings. The audiotape of the President concerned a Times report on Dec. 12, 2018 detailing Hunter’s dealings with Ye Jianming, the head of CEFC China Energy Company. Ye was later arrested amid allegations of economic crimes. Biden associates reportedly worked on the Times to change aspects of the story and President Biden appears to view that effort as successful. The plan with the Bidens (which included Joe Biden’s brother) specified a proposed 10 percent share for Hunter for “the big guy.” According to Biden associate Tony Bobulinksi, that was a reference to Joe Biden. The voicemail, discovered on Hunter’s discarded laptop, reveals that Joe Biden was following the stories of his son’s alleged influencing peddling and specifically his Chinese dealings.
In his message, Biden tells Hunter, “Hey pal, it’s Dad. It’s 8:15 on Wednesday night. If you get a chance, just give me a call. Nothing urgent. I just wanted to talk to you. I thought the article released online, it’s going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good. I think you’re clear. And anyway if you get a chance, give me a call, I love you.” Some of us have written for two years that Biden’s denial of knowledge is patently false. Indeed, it is baffling how Attorney General Garland can ignore the myriad of references to Joe Biden in refusing to appoint a special counsel. Doocy asked the obvious question now that we have an actual audiotape of the President: “Why is there a voicemail of the president talking to his son about his overseas business dealings if the president has said he’s never spoken to his son about his overseas business dealings?”
Despite clearly contradicting the President, Jean-Pierre declared “Well, first I’ll say that what the president said stands. So if he — that’s what the president said, that is what stands.” Such an absurd response is only possible when you know that most of the media will go along with the evasion. [..] There is no plausible reason why the President would not be willing to answer a question about his own statement captured on audiotape. He is not denying that it is his voice, which appears obvious. He simply will not answer a question about whether he lied during the campaign and repeatedly as president. Again, this is only possible when you have the media in your pocket. Could you imagine if this was Trump caught on a tape and refusing to answer a question about the content?
The Biden administration sold roughly one million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese state-controlled gas giant that continues to purchase Russian oil, a move the Energy Department said would “support American consumers” and combat “Putin’s price hike.” Biden’s Energy Department in April announced the sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation. That company, which is commonly known as Sinopec, is wholly owned by the Chinese government. The Biden administration claimed the move would “address the pain Americans are feeling at the pump” and “help lower energy costs.”
More than five million barrels of oil released from the U.S. emergency reserves, however, were sent overseas last month, according to a Wednesday Reuters report. At least one shipment of American crude went to China, the report said. The Biden administration also claimed the Unipec sale would “support American consumers and the global economy in response to Vladimir Putin’s war of choice against Ukraine” and combat “Putin’s price hike.” But as the war rages on, Unipec has continued to purchase Russian oil. In May, for example, the company “significantly increased the number of hired tankers to ship a key crude from eastern Russia,” Bloomberg reported. That decision came roughly one month after Unipec said it would purchase “no more Russian oil going forward” once “shipments that have arrived in March and due to arrive in April” were fulfilled.
The White House did not return a request for comment. Its decision to sell barrels from the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese conglomerate comes as the American public increasingly sours on Biden’s energy policies. According to a January Gallup poll, roughly three in four Americans are not satisfied with the federal government’s national energy policy, the highest level in roughly two decades. Power the Future founder Daniel Turner admonished Biden for selling “raw materials to the Communist Chinese for them to use as they want.”
“We were assured Biden was releasing this oil to America so it could be refined for gasoline to drive down prices at the pump. So right off the bat, they’re just lying to the American people,” Turner told the Washington Free Beacon. “What they’re saying they did and what they did are not remotely related.” Turner also said the decision highlights the Biden family’s “relationship with China.” Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is tied to Sinopec. In 2015, a private equity firm he cofounded bought a $1.7 billion stake in Sinopec Marketing. Sinopec went on to enter negotiations to purchase Gazprom in March, one month after the Biden administration sanctioned the Russian gas giant.
India and China have both been spending more money on Russian oil in 2022 compared to 2021, but, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, for different reasons. China’s spending on the commodity rose by 78 percent between March and May 2021 and the same time period this year. According to a report by Bloomberg, this increase can be chalked up to the price increase of oil on the world market. China receives oil from Russia through pipelines crossing the countries’ shared border which makes delivery cheaper but also harder to increase. In addition, China had already been buying most oil that can be shipped out of Russia’s Pacific ports previous to the invasion of Ukraine, another factor showing that the increase in spending in China is for approximately the same amount of oil – which the country hasn’t majorly increased but also didn’t try to decrease since the Russian war in Ukraine started.
This shows that India has been buying additional shipments of Russian crude, which are – according to the report – those coming from Russian ports in the Western part of the country and would normally be shipped to Europe. But since European countries have decreased their buying of Russian oil, India has been accepted more shipments at a discounted prices as the route would normally be too long to be economically viable. The data also shows that despite India’s increase in shipments, the money it pays Putin’s regime is still far lower that the funds coming from China. While India paid $3.5 billion for the three-month period, China shelled out an much higher $15.7 billion.
The current SC-2 pandemic is still expanding as it is a pandemic of ‘more infectious’ variants and is thus enhancing the susceptibility of vaccinees to infection (infection-enhancing antibodies) while diminishing the susceptibility of the unvaccinated (infection-mediated training of innate cell-mediated immunity). In the pre-Omicron era, we saw more infectious variants becoming dominant; however, thanks to the neutralizing antibodies, vaccinees were still protected against disease. However, with the advent of Omicron and its growing resistance to neutralizing antibodies, vaccinees became more susceptible to infection; what we are now seeing is more virulent variants becoming dominant (Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5[1]).
However, thanks to the virulence-neutralizing antibodies (which are the same as those enhancing infection at the upper respiratory tract!), vaccinees were still protected against severe disease (e.g., in case of BA.1 and BA.2). I’ve no doubt, however, that with the growing resistance of BA.4 and BA.5 to the virulence-neutralizing Abs, vaccinees will now rapidly become more susceptible to virulence. Due to repetitive activation of the immune system in C-19 vaccinees, several infectious diseases can now be spread asymptomatically by vaccinees. Due to widespread asymptomatic transmission in highly vaccinated countries and the subsequent rise in infectious pressure, infection-mediated immunity in certain subsets of the population no longer suffices to prevent productive infection.
This is now basically igniting the global spread of a number of acute, self-limiting microbial infections (e.g., ‘seasonal’ Flu, RSV but also vaccine-preventable viral and bacterial infections in countries that interrupted their childhood vax program due to Covid crisis) and also of some acute, self-limiting viral diseases (e.g., monkeypox, pandemic [avian H5N1] flu). In addition, depletion of cytotoxic CD8 T cells due to repetitive cycles of re-infection has also led to an increased recurrence/reactivation rate of chronic infections (e.g., herpetic diseases + CMV, EBV, CMV, HIV, tuberculosis..) and relapse or metastasis of certain cancers in vaccinees. In the summary appended, I am sharing my informed predictions on the health impact these pandemics will entail in different subgroups of a highly vaccinated population.
While these new pandemics are developing, the super C-19 pandemic I’ve been warning about is coming our way soon. In highly vaccinated countries, it will definitely overhaul the pandemics mentioned above. This is because massive replacement of ‘natural infection-acquired’ immunity to SC-2 by ‘imperfect’ vaccine-induced immunity is now driving the evolution of the C-19 pandemic in highly vaccinated countries. This will not be the case in poorly vaccinated countries where natural immunity has been largely preserved and the population is often much younger (e.g., African countries). Last, I’d like to repeat my advice: If you’re C-19 vaccinated: Make sure you’ve access to antivirals and antibiotics and that you’ve established a contact with an MD you can trust.
Australia is facing a devastating ‘multi-demic’ assault from a vicious cocktail of viruses attacking the nation, a top medical expert has warned.The country’s defences against a range of different diseases have dropped after Covid lockdowns left Aussies’ immune systems untested by common viruses. Now the rapid spread of killer bugs is being fuelled by cold, damp winter conditions, combined with staff returning to offices and commuting on packed trains and buses. And that’s on top of the new, more infectious Omicron variant BA.5 which is sweeping through the population. ‘We’re facing a multi-demic of respiratory viruses,’ Sydney University infectious disease expert Professor Robert Booy told the Courier-Mail.
‘There’s three or four of them causing trouble – influenza, RSV, para-influenza, adenovirus, HMPV… there are a lot. ‘Because were locked down for two years, the level of natural immunity dropped off against flu and Covid, so we have a lot of cases and deaths due to Omicron and the opening of a society with less natural immunity. ‘If you want to spread an infection, you open up society.’ NSW alone is facing a massive outbreak of RSV which can kill infants, with numbers skyrocketing tenfold from 355 to 3775 cases a week in under a month. Businesses across the east coast have also been decimated by staff falling ill as the range of viruses wreak havoc and spread like wildfire.
This video is a list of 22 inventions that could make the Earth a better place by cutting back on plastic & reducing garbage in the sea including whirlpool turbines, edible cutlery, water blobs, package-free shampoo, and toothpaste https://t.co/az91ouIAeypic.twitter.com/5eLPgvX5Fh
We associate the term “mass psychosis” with the reaction(s) to Covid, but I would argue it’s been around a lot longer, and broader. At least since 2015, and the media coverage (if you can even call it that) of Donald Trump, his campaign and his presidency. I have no special sympathy for Trump (though some people doubt that), but that episode, and the “coverage” of it, did wake me up -even more- to how the media -and US “intelligence”, and Trump’s various opponents- influenced the way they wanted people to think.
And perhaps the best way to illustrate this is the “heroes” they have been promoting ever since. It’s not just Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden during the “Trump days”, this model is still used to date. They make people like, and thereby trust, certain characters, and we’re off to the races. One thing that sticks out is how in the cases of Trump-Russia, Covid, and Ukraine-Russia, there are these personae that were getting adorned with celebratory candles and stuff like that.
The first person we saw that with was Robert Mueller. He did a 2-year “investigation”, which resulted in absolutely nothing -other than some vague allegations he had no proof of either-, and which he should have halted at least a year before he did, something nobody ever called him on. At his “closing” testimony he even claimed he had never heard of Fusion GPS, one of the key components in his own “investigation”, so we wondered if he ever had any control of this probe, or if it were perhaps Andrew Weizmann and the other 40-odd lawyers, paid god knows how many millions, and had god knows what other resources.
Robert Mueller turned out to be an utter disgrace to the whole nation, and he was never called on it. Nor was anyone else involved in the Steele Dossier, or any of the other false papers in the Trump persecution. This is a pattern. And you cannot and will not have a healthy country if these things do not happen, if the invented out of whole cloth falsehoods can be swept under the carpet. The complicity of US intelligence, moreover, means that nobody will ever know. They won’t investigate themselves. Or the Democratic party that ran the whole thing. Here is Mueller on July 24, 2019. Watch and weep.
Another main character in the Trump era was Adam Schiff, who repeated numerous times that he had “ample evidence” of collusion between Russia and Trump. But who, like Mueller, never showed one single shred of evidence for it. And now Schiff is back in the January 6 committee. Look, the guy lied in Congress and the Senate, so many times he would put Pinokkio to shame, but he’s still a Congressman, and he gets to do it all over again. You cannot have a functioning society, or political system, if people get away with lying incessantly, and there’s no penalty for that.
But still, here we go again. Legal expert Jonathan Turley noticed the exact same thing:
Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) went on CNN’s “Don Lemon Tonight” to tout the work of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6th riot. In that interview, Schiff declared that the Committee has enough evidence showing former President Donald Trump “engaged in likely multiple criminal acts.” While vague on the specific crimes, Schiff emphasized that the Justice Department did not have to wait any further to launch a criminal investigation based on what has already been disclosed.
While the Committee has disclosed new evidence in the form of videotapes and testimony, it has not presented new material evidence of criminal acts in my view. That could still come but the first two hearings largely focused on a “conspiracy” to challenge the election certification and allegations that Trump knew the there was no compelling evidence of widespread election fraud.
And from the Trump investigation disgrace for America, we moved on seamlessly to Covid. Another bizarre freak show, and another media-appointed hero for whom candles were dedicated and burned: Anthony Fauci. We’re two years and change after Fauci caught the limelight, and we now know nothing, absolutely nothing, he said was true. Face masks don’t work, they instead risk making people sicker, if anything; lockdowns: same thing, and the vaccine injuries have only just started. Saw the first study today that says unvaccinated people have less risk of severe Covid, which is the 180º opposite of the last alleged positive effect the jabs were supposed to bring. Game over.
What an insane story. But Fauci, and the FDA, and all these “experts”, are preparing to jab babies. Which puts them at great risk, who have no risk from Covid . Because it puts their immune systems in danger. For life. For Pfizer and Moderna profits. How many people were killed by lockdowns? How many by vaccines? We will never know. Your grandchildren are not going to believe you allowed it to happen. But yeah, go burn a candle for Tony. And for all his brethren in all other countries. They will try again this fall. Based on no other “proof” than that provided by Pfizer. Clown world. Latest EU vaccine deaths number is 44,348. That Eudra Vigilance number, like the US VAERS system, catches maybe 1 in 10 adverse effects. If that. But we saved so many lives! No, you did not. You were killing people, under coercion, all along. For money.
Today, then, we have the Russian Special Military Operation, totally unprovoked, unless you ask Pope Francis I. And again, the media present you with a hero for whom, again, celebratory candles are consecrated. And y’all fall for it again: Vlod Zelensky. Who’s doing the most elaborate PR campaign we’ve ever seen, dozens of media appearances per day, while hundreds of his people are dying daily in a “war” effort that has zero chance of succeeding.
Sending him more weapons will only mean killing more of his people, but that doesn’t appear to be his main concern, does it? How strange! Zelensky is the alleged -but not actual- leader of one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and certainly the no. 1 in the “west”. But he provides the western arms industries with a theater in which they can test their new weapons, while at the same time raking in huge profits for old and new systems. And as the only casualties are Ukrainians and Russians, but no Americans or Germans, Raytheon and Boeing couldn’t have asked for a better set-up.
And do remember that Zelensky has also claimed that the Russians want to eradicate the entire Ukrainian population, obliterate their whole culture, kill as many Ukrainians as they can, and that Russians kill Ukrainians just for fun. Among many other things. While the reality is that Russia has sacrificed the lives of many of its soldiers in order to prevent many more Ukrainian deaths. Russia could have taken Ukraine much faster than they have without that. That is, the consideration that they are brotherly people. But that reality does not fit the west’s picture.
We are a utterly sick culture, and we don’t have much time left to wake up from that and repair it. Our real heroes have been silenced, banned, imprisoned or murdered. We will not be able to live like this much longer.
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The leaders of France, Germany and Italy plan to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv this week, officials said, as reports showed Russia making gains in the country’s east and Ukrainian officials urgently sought arms from Western nations to hold Russian forces at bay. French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi were planning to visit the Ukrainian capital on Thursday, said two European officials, who cautioned that plans could yet change. The trip would be the first to Ukraine since the beginning of the war for the three Western leaders.
News of the planned meeting came as Ukrainian officials said Russia had made fresh gains in its efforts to encircle and capture the city of Severodonetsk, which would bring Moscow significantly closer to its goal of controlling the Donbas area in the country’s east, its foremost target recently in the war. Serhiy Haidai, the Ukrainian governor of the Luhansk region, which includes Severodonetsk, said on Sunday that Russians had destroyed a second bridge connecting Severodonetsk to Lysychansk, a Ukrainian stronghold just across the Siverskyi Donets river. Russian forces also shelled a chemical plant in the city’s industrial section, where civilians had taken shelter in bunkers, Mr. Haidai said.
The battlefield advances were the latest evidence that Russia is outgunning Ukrainian forces, using its superior artillery power to steadily take territory. Its gains have thrown added focus onto Ukraine’s pleas for more powerful and longer-range artillery and other weaponry from the West, as well as on Ukraine’s lack of capacity to manufacture ammunition for the Soviet-era heavy weapons in its arsenal.
Russia’s war on Ukraine shows no sign of ending, but it is not too soon to start thinking about how to ensure postwar Ukraine’s stability, prosperity, and security. Already, two discussions are occurring: one about financing economic reconstruction, and the other about affirming Ukraine’s external security. The problem is that these discussions are proceeding separately, even though the issues are intimately related. Reconstruction costs are uncertain because the course of the war is uncertain. Ukraine’s prewar GDP was about $150bn (£120bn). Given a capital-output ratio of three, and assuming that a third of the capital stock will be destroyed, we are again talking about $150bn. As always, alternative assumptions yield alternative scenarios, but $150bn seems like a reasonable starting point.
This is not an impossible amount of aid for donors to commit. It is one-sixth the size of the NextGenerationEU program on which EU states agreed in July 2020. It is one-twelfth the size of the American Rescue Plan Act signed by Joe Biden in March 2021. Still, it seems wrong to ask the US and Europe to repair what Russia has broken. So, it is tempting to suggest that Ukraine’s reconstruction should be financed by garnishing Russian assets. At $284bn, the Bank of Russia’s frozen reserves would certainly fit the bill. True, there is a moral case for reparations: Russia started an unprovoked war and has almost certainly committed war crimes in prosecuting it. There is also an argument grounded in deterrence. As Volodymyr Zelenskiy put it at Davos this year: “If the aggressor loses everything, then it definitely deprives him of his motivation to start a war.”
Since Russian forces swept into Ukraine on Feb. 24, swaths of the country’s buildings and infrastructure have been damaged or destroyed, leading to calls for Moscow to pay for the damage. As the leading western backer of Ukraine in the conflict, the U.S., which also holds some of Russia’s frozen assets, would likely be critical to any effort to get Moscow to pay for that damage. Yet even if Washington were to try to force Russia to pay reparations, the Biden administration would have limited options for making Moscow comply, particularly while the war rages on, according to former officials and legal experts. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on Russia to compensate his country, saying in early May the war had caused more than $600 billion in damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure. The figure has only grown as the war continues.
There is, in theory, a pot of money for the West to draw on if it wants to force Russia to pay. Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in March that half the country’s gold and foreign-currency reserves were frozen as a result of sanctions, denying Moscow access to roughly $300 billion, according to the TASS news agency. The share of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves held in Chinese currency wasn’t affected. When the Biden administration in late April submitted its $33 billion supplemental funding request for Ukraine, the White House said it was “proposing legislation to streamline the process to recoup proceeds from seized and forfeited assets and use them to remediate the harm caused in Ukraine.”
The global nuclear arsenal is expected to grow in the coming years for the first time since the cold war, and the risk of such weapons being used is the greatest in decades, a leading conflict and armaments thinktank says. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and western support for Kyiv has heightened tensions among the world’s nine nuclear-armed states, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) thinktank said on Monday in a new set of research. While the number of nuclear weapons fell slightly between January 2021 and January 2022, Sipri said that unless immediate action was taken by the nuclear powers, global inventories of warheads could soon begin rising for the first time in decades.
“All of the nuclear-armed states are increasing or upgrading their arsenals and most are sharpening nuclear rhetoric and the role nuclear weapons play in their military strategies,” Wilfred Wan, the director of Sipri’s weapons of mass destruction program, said in the thinktank’s 2022 yearbook. “This is a very worrying trend.” Three days after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which the Kremlin calls a “special military operation”, President Vladimir Putin put Russia’s nuclear deterrent on high alert. He has also warned of consequences that would be “such as you have never seen in your entire history” for countries that stood in Russia’s way.
Russia has the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal with a total of 5,977 warheads, 550 more than the United States. The two countries possess more than 90% of the world’s warheads, though Sipri said China was in the middle of an expansion with more than 300 new missile silos according to the latest estimate. Sipri said the global number of nuclear warheads fell from 13,080 in January 2021 to 12,705 in January 2022. An estimated 3,732 warheads were deployed with missiles and aircraft, and around 2,000 – nearly all belonging to Russia or the US – were kept in a state of high readiness.
A U.S. military official predicted a pause in the administration of the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines could happen if more cases of post-vaccination heart inflammation were detected, according to newly obtained emails. Harry Chang, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, made the prediction on April 27, 2021—the same day the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the agency was not seeing a safety signal when it came to heart inflammation experienced after getting a COVID-19 vaccine. Chang noted the pause in the administration of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine over blood clots and said an increased number of heart inflammation issues could trigger a similar action.
“A pause of the Pfizer/Moderna administration (much like the J&J blood clot pause) will have an adverse impact on US/CA vaccination rates; assessed as unlikely due to causes of myocarditis can come from multiple sources (eg. COVID, other conditions, other vaccines/prescriptions, etc),” Chang wrote in an email. Myocarditis is a type of heart inflammation. “However, increased reported #s & media attention is likely to trigger a safety review pause by ACIP/FDA,” he added, referring to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the CDC on vaccines, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which decides whether to clear immunizations. Chang was talking to Tricia Blocher, an official at the California Department of Public Health, and other California and military officials. He was reacting to a story about the U.S. Department of Defense detecting a higher-than-expected number of cases of heart inflammation in troops following COVID-19 vaccination.”
Montagnier
Another Dr who has started to warn us and was SILENCED FOREVER He was getting ready to testify against the shots.
His name was Luc Montagnier. And he called out VAIDS… Destruction of the immune system by the injections pic.twitter.com/TooVh4EPL5
The VAERS data shows that Ramsay Hunt Syndrome (RHS) is 160 times more likely after a COVID vaccination than for all the other vaccines combined in any given year. And if you exclude the anthrax vaccine from that comparison, the likelihood is simply too high to calculate (0 cases in 32 years). So the COVID vaccine should definitely be considered as a possible cause for this rare disease because when you’ve been vaccinated, it’s no longer rare. For example, one doctor tweeted he say 4 cases in a month, but had never seen any cases before in the 32 years he’s practiced medicine. All the cases had gotten the COVID vax 3 to 4 months earlier.
I show below that the estimated rate of RHS after COVID vaccination is likely at least 338 cases per 100,000. The medical literature says it occurs naturally in 5 cases per 100,000. Therefore, because it is much more likely after vaccine than by chance, it is 99% likely that Justin’s RHS was caused by the vaccine, and only 1% chance that he got “unlucky.” Sadly, it’s unlikely Bieber’s doctors will ever acknowledge that so it’s unlikely he’ll get the care he needs (treat both the RHS and the vaccine injury). He’ll simply assume he is just unlucky. The mainstream press isn’t doing its job if they don’t report this (which they won’t).
It is a property of the past to sink into oblivion, and of unpleasant truths to fade into evanescence. To such past belongs the attack on the USS Liberty. When to the session of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, Israel’s 1967 war of Middle East invasion is/was for me but a negligible blip compared to other important personal events. Such as my getting ready to read the thesis for my degree in Electronic Engineering, in Genova, Italy. Therefore, without particular consciousness I submitted to the sentences of the official media without examining the authority of the judge. My first doubts arose not long later when I decided to visit the Eastern Orthodox Saint Catherine’s Monastery, located on the Sinai Peninsula at the very foot of Mt. Sinai. It could then only be reached from Tel Aviv via Sharm-el-Sheikh and a bus trip.
On welcoming the tourists on the bus the guide announced with pride that the Sinai was “now and forever an unalienable part of Israel.” I found the declaration irrelevant, if not odd, but I consider that moment as the beginning of my associated historical interest. The official US line is that, on Jun 8, 1967, the Israelis mistakenly attacked by air, and torpedoed by sea, an unarmed US intelligence ship, killing 34 sailors and wounding 171 others. 2022 marks the 55th anniversary of that attack. Following are some details of the ship, of the episode and of its aftermath. For, similar to occasions that perhaps we all have felt, a detail that uncalled-for returns to mind, rekindles fuller memories of a larger connected event, not otherwise spontaneously recalled. The detail is the inspired arrogance of the Israeli guide I mentioned. More in general, I think that the attack on the Liberty dramatically demonstrates the nature of who exercises actual power in the United States.
“..there is simply no way of maintaining even a fraction of the western standard of living in the event that anyone were foolish enough to remove the fossil fuels..”
By 2017, real-life James Bond Villain Klaus Schwab was inviting celebrities, representatives of the technocracy, the godzillionaires and the political class to fly their carbon-belching private jets to Switzerland to learn about The Fourth Industrial Revolution, and to discuss how they could get the little people to cut their carbon footprints. By 2020, this had morphed in to the Green New Great Reset in which we – but not they, of course – would own nothing, and allegedly be happy as we ate our insects, spent our central bank digital basic incomes, and were driven around in a new fleet of corporate-owned, hydrogen-powered self-driving cars. There was – to paraphrase Captain Blackadder – just one teensy-weensy problem with the Great Plan adopted by the Davos crowd… it was bollocks!
Only by ignoring the physicists, engineers and technicians who were expected to make it happen, and by listening instead to the siren voices of climate NGOs, bankers and economists, could the technocracy convince itself that the world could seamlessly transition to the proposed bright green future. And to our cost, politicians of all stripes who bought into this nonsense are now grappling with the inevitable economic consequences. The problem, at is simplest, is that much of what was considered “green” was largely a conjuring trick. States like Britain and Germany, which claim to be world leaders simply offshored their most polluting industries (and a large part of the waste) to less prosperous parts of the world where governments were happy to load the environmental costs onto the indigenous population in exchange for tradable foreign currency.
This was the only politically-acceptable means of hiding the fact that there is simply no way of maintaining even a fraction of the western standard of living in the event that anyone were foolish enough to remove the fossil fuels which make up some 80 percent of the energy mix in the UK, and 85 percent of the global economy. Even this is a simplification of the problem because each fuel source has its uses in specific niches of the global economy and so is not interchangeable. Wind and solar, for example, cannot generate the heat required to manufacture steel (although they can recycle it) or, ironically, to produce the silicon wafers and high-grade glass required in solar panels.
A fire at one of the world’s biggest suppliers of liquefied natural gas has thrown Europe’s fragile energy security into doubt and spooked global gas markets. Freeport LNG, a liquefied natural gas (LNG) producer in Texas, will shut its doors for at least three weeks, the company confirmed to CNN Business. “The cause of the fire at Freeport LNG’s liquefaction facility on Quintana Island remains under investigation,” Heather Browne, a company spokesperson, said.
Europe has snapped up global stocks of LNG in recent months as it attempts to sharply pivot away from Russia’s natural gas exports. The region, including the United Kingdom, imported 28.2 million tons between February and April, according to Independent Commodity Intelligence Services — up 29% from the same period last year.
The United States is the world’s largest supplier of LNG, accounting for just over a fifth of global exports, according to data from analytics firm Vortexa. Output from the Freeport LNG facility makes up 18% of these exports. With no direct pipeline between the United States and Europe, American energy companies cool their natural gas for export to -260 degrees Fahrenheit and place the liquefied gas on tanker ships for overseas transport. That process, though more complex than land transport, has become crucial to Europe meeting its energy demands during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Freeport blast could deal a blow to that stopgap solution, particularly if the facility fails to come back online soon. “Despite the initial estimate of three weeks of downtime by the operator, the production impact is likely to stretch into July,” Felix Booth, head of LNG at Vortexa, told CNN Business.
The January 6 committee is facing pressure as details reveal it lied and altered evidence to favor Democrat’s radical narrative of the Capitol Hill protests. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) called out the committee for changing text messages between him and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows during an interview on Fox News. A spokesperson admitted that the messages Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA.) showed during the hearings had been adjusted to support the idea that Meadows wanted former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election results. In a statement, the spokesperson confessed that “the Select Committee on Monday created and provided Representative Schiff a graphic to use during the business meeting quoting from a text message from ‘a lawmaker’ to Mr. Meadows.
The graphic read, ‘On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.’ In the graphic, the period at the end of that sentence was added inadvertently. The Select Committee is responsible for and regrets the error.” Jordan fired back saying “this committee has altered evidence and lied to the American people about it, so much so that they had to issue a statement which says, ‘We regret the error,’ which is government speak for, ‘We got caught lying.’” The “error” was that Schiff presented the message out of context by cutting out key words and ending it with a period.
According to the Federalist, the original text message was a summary of a legal briefing Jordan forwarded from lawyer Joseph Schmitz to Meadows the day before the Capitol protests, meaning that a “lawmaker” did not write the message at all. Jordan has been blocked from taking part in the committee by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA.). He is now undergoing his own investigation of the events that took place that day last year.
“..the ability of governments to respond to this cost-of-living crisis via either tax cuts or increased benefits is limited due to the hit to public finances caused by lockdown-induced government spending.”
The cost of living crisis and runaway inflation are a result of imposing ruinous lockdowns on society, experts have told MPs and Peers. The comments came in the latest meeting of the the Pandemic Response and Recovery All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG). Chaired by the Rt Hon Esther McVey MP, the group heard from experts about the societal consequences of closing businesses and schools, prohibiting healthcare, ordering the public to stay at home and unchecked money printing. One businessman told the group how government COVID-19 policies personally affected him, costing him £120,000, destroying his previously thriving business and leaving him in debt. Professor of Industrial Economics at the University of Nottingham Business School, David Paton, explained why lockdowns are at the root of the current crisis:
“Eye-watering sums of money were spent during lockdowns, on furlough and business support schemes which helped mask the inevitable economic consequences we are now seeing. Many of our current problems could have been avoided had the government carried out an effective cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns and other restrictions. Quite simply, the lack of spending opportunities during lockdown contributed to a build up of personal and corporate savings. As restrictions eased, people began to spend these savings and, combined with the supply chain issues that built up in the meantime, sustained inflation became the inevitable result. Even worse, having spent about £70 billion, paying healthy people not to work and some £150 billion in total on support measures, the ability of governments to respond to this cost-of-living crisis via either tax cuts or increased benefits is limited due to the hit to public finances caused by lockdown-induced government spending.”
[..] here’s the viewpoint of two bankers, one who has worked with his Tesla board, and another at a firm involved in his Twitter financing machinations. They say virtually the same thing. Musk is telling people he still wants Twitter. He thinks he can make it work as a private company, clean up the bot problem and sell it at a profit sometime in the next five years. But Musk wants the company (like everything else) on his terms, which are always in flux. He doesn’t read balance sheets but goes by his gut and has no issue with flouting conventional banker norms (i.e. your word is your bond) to get his prize. His gut told him to waive due diligence. It’s now telling him that even though he signed a deal leaving him on the hook for the $1 billion breakup fee and maybe more in damages, he can get Twitter to the table and agree to his terms, aka a much lower purchase price.
He might be right. Twitter first said it would enforce the initial deal terms, maybe even go to court, but now appears to be playing ball with Musk. It recently said it will turn over more data on its bot issue — a move that means talks are back on. The bankers tell me the Twitter board knows that finding another suitor will be difficult even at around the $40 a share it’s trading at now. The board can’t just accept anything, but also can’t tell Musk to just pound sand. So the thinking among my two guys is that Twitter agrees to a lower price, possibly significantly lower, and Crazy Elon gets his public square, albeit for much cheaper. That means the deal is on, right? Seems so. But no one really knows with Crazy Elon.
Henry Kissinger turned 99 on May 27. Born in Germany at the height of the Weimar hyperinflation, he was not yet ten years old when Hitler came to power and was just 15 when he and his family landed as refugees in New York City. It is somehow almost as astonishing that this former US secretary of state and giant of geopolitics left office 45 years ago. As he heads towards his century, Kissinger has lost none of the intellectual firepower that set him apart from other foreign policy professors and practitioners of his and subsequent generations. In the time I have spent writing the second volume of his biography, Kissinger has published not one but two books — the first, co-authored with the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher, on artificial intelligence, the second a collection of six biographical case studies in leadership.
We meet at his rural retreat, deep in the woods of Connecticut, where he and his wife, Nancy, have spent most of their time since the onset of Covid. The pandemic had its silver linings for them. It was the first time in 48 years of marriage that the compulsively peripatetic Dr Kissinger came to an enforced halt. Cut off from the temptations of Manhattan restaurants and Beijing banquets, he has shed pounds. Though he walks with a stick, depends on a hearing aid and speaks more slowly than of old in that unmistakable bullfrog baritone, his mind is as keen as ever. Nor has Kissinger lost his knack for infuriating the liberal professors and progressive or “woke” students who dominate Harvard, the university where he built his reputation as a scholar and public intellectual in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 2011, Japanese telecom company Docomo created one of the most beautiful adverts we've ever seen. A giant xylophone in Kyushu playing Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" with a wooden ball rolling down its keys [full video, HD: https://t.co/8tyG7wPeLa] pic.twitter.com/bqjinVPcdh
“It was a gross injustice, and it hurt the United States in many ways, including what we’re seeing in Ukraine these days. It distorted our foreign policy, and so forth..”
Former United States Attorney General Bill Barr has given a stark warning to former Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over her “seditious” conspiracy against former President Donald Trump. “I thought we were heading into a constitutional crisis. I think whatever you think of Trump, the fact is that the whole Russiagate thing was a grave injustice. It appears to be a dirty political trick that was used first to hobble him and then potentially to drive him from office,” he said on Glenn Beck’s Blaze TV podcast. “I believe it is seditious,” he said, but he warned that those charges would be tough to prove in a court. “It was a gross injustice, and it hurt the United States in many ways, including what we’re seeing in Ukraine these days. It distorted our foreign policy, and so forth,” the former attorney general said.
He said that he named Special Counsel John Durham to lead the case in private so it would stop President Joe Biden and Attorney general Merrick Garland from interfering with him. “I was highly confident he would remain in office and they wouldn’t touch him,” he said. “The Biden administration had no real interest in protecting either Hillary Clinton or Comey,” he argued. “And at the end of the day, for them to lose the capital and appear to be covering something up that would then never get resolved, I didn’t think was in their interest,” he said. “And I think institutionally that would’ve destroyed the new AG if he had tried that. “If you don’t have the threat of a grand jury, no one will come in and talk to you. You’ll say, the usual thing is, ‘Please come in for a voluntary interview,” the former attorney general said.
“And people come in because they know if they don’t, they’re subpoenaed. “But if there is no grand jury, they say, ‘No, I’m not coming in,’ and there’s nothing you can do,” he said. “And people don’t understand that that state of affairs lasted until the month before the election,” he said of the pandemic that delayed the Durham probe. “So his hands were very much tied as to how far he could push things and how much pressure he could bring on people through most of 2020,” he said.
Stuck in their trenches, the Ukrainian volunteers lived off a potato per day as Russian forces pounded them with artillery and Grad rockets on a key eastern front line. Outnumbered, untrained and clutching only light weapons, the men prayed for the barrage to end — and for their own tanks to stop targeting the Russians. “They [Russians] already know where we are, and when the Ukrainian tank shoots from our side it gives away our position,” said Serhi Lapko, their company commander, recalling the recent battle. “And they start firing back with everything — Grads, mortars. “And you just pray to survive.” Ukrainian leaders have projected and nurtured a public image of military invulnerability — of their volunteer and professional forces triumphantly standing up to the Russian onslaught.
Videos of assaults on Russian tanks or positions are posted daily on social media. Artists are creating patriotic posters, billboards and T-shirts. The postal service even released stamps commemorating the sinking of a Russian warship in the Black Sea. Ukrainian forces have succeeded in thwarting Russian efforts to seize Kyiv and Kharkiv and have scored battlefield victories in the east. But the experience of Lapko and his group of volunteers offers a rare and more realistic portrait of the conflict and Ukraine’s struggle to halt the Russian advance in parts of Donbas. Ukraine, like Russia, has provided scant information about deaths, injuries or losses of military equipment. But after three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries and desertions.
The volunteers were civilians before Russia invaded on Feb. 24, and they never expected to be dispatched to one of the most dangerous front lines in eastern Ukraine. They quickly found themselves in the crosshairs of war, feeling abandoned by their military superiors and struggling to survive. “Our command takes no responsibility,” Lapko said. “They only take credit for our achievements. They give us no support.”
Remember the claims that Russia’s economy was more or less irrelevant, merely the equivalent of a small, not very impressive European country? “Putin, who has an economy the size of Italy,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in 2014 after the invasion of Crimea, “[is] playing a poker game with a pair of twos and winning.” Of increasing Russian diplomatic and geopolitical influence in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, The Economist asked in 2019, “How did a country with an economy the size of Spain … achieve all this?” Seldom has the West so grossly misjudged an economy’s global significance.
French economist Jacques Sapir, a renowned specialist of the Russian economy who teaches at the Moscow and Paris schools of economics, explained recently that the war in Ukraine has “made us realize that the Russian economy is considerably more important than what we thought.” For Sapir, one big reason for this miscalculation is exchange rates. If you compare Russia’s GDP by simply converting it from rubles into U.S. dollars, you indeed get an economy the size of Spain’s. But such a comparison makes no sense without adjusting for purchasing power parity (PPP), which accounts for productivity and standards of living, and thus per capita welfare and resource use. Indeed, PPP is the measure favored by most international institutions, from the IMF to the OECD.
And when you measure Russia’s GDP based on PPP, it’s clear that Russia’s economy is actually more like the size of Germany’s, about $4.4 trillion for Russia versus $4.6 trillion for Germany. From the size of a small and somewhat ailing European economy to the biggest economy in Europe and one of the largest in the world—not a negligible difference. Sapir also encourages us to ask, “What is the share of the service sector versus the share of the commodities and industrial sector?” To him, the service sector today is grossly overvalued compared with the industrial sector and commodities like oil, gas, copper, and agricultural products. If we reduce the proportional importance of services in the global economy, Sapir says that “Russia’s economy is vastly larger than that of Germany and represents probably 5% or 6% of the world economy,” more like Japan than Spain.
Amid the unprecedented waves of EU and US sanctions imposed on Russia in the wake of its Ukraine invasion, and as tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions continue between Moscow and European capitals, among the last frontiers of Russia-Europe cooperation remains in the area of crime monitoring and data sharing. But that too appears to be winding down, as Russian state media has announced the European Union has suspended its drug traffic data sharing program with Russian law enforcement agencies. “The EU has suspended contacts and data sharing with Russia as part of the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official said,” TASS reports.
“The European Union has unilaterally suspended expert contacts and data sharing with us” as part of the EMCDDA, Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov confirmed. “The annual OSCE-wide Anti-Drug Conference has been postponed indefinitely,” he added. The Russian official slammed the move as counterproductive, with the inevitable consequence being that drug traffickers will be able to act with greater impunity as a country the size of Russia (literally the world’s largest by land mass and border area) is cut out of the program. “We believe this is a destructive approach. It plays into the hands of drug traffickers, who are taking advantage of the disagreements among countries to increase illicit drug supplies to Europe,” he said.
Russia, however, remains and will likely continue to remain a vital country within INTERPOL – the world’s largest international policing organization, representing 194 member countries. According to the INTERPOL website, “Russia is the world’s largest country by area, and shares borders with countries in northern Asia and Europe. Identifying, investigating and preventing serious crime across Europe and Asia is a large part of the daily work carried out by INTERPOL’s National Central Bureau (NCB) in Moscow.”
The first Covid lockdowns saved 10,000 lives in Europe and US had ‘little or no effect’ on the virus death rate, updated analysis suggests. A review by an international team of economists found draconian shutdowns only reduced Covid mortality by 3 per cent in the UK, US and Europe in 2020. The experts, from Johns Hopkins University in the US, Lund University in Sweden and the Danish think-tank the Center for Political Studies, said that equates to 6,000 fewer deaths in Europe and 4,000 fewer in the US. This figures is a revised from the group’s first report last year, which found lockdowns cut Covid deaths by just 0.2 per cent. The team said the updated figure is down to changes in their calculations and new studies. But they still conclude: ‘Stricter lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.’
MailOnline was one of only three major British media outlets to cover the initial findings when they were released back in January. Experts at the time told MailOnline it is unsurprising that some left-wing publications avoided the story because they wanted to ‘maintain fear around the pandemic’. Their 3.2 per cent figure is the average effect of all lockdown measures combined. When looking at stay-at-home orders specifically, the team estimate this had even less of an impact, reducing the death toll by just 2 per cent. Their report does not look at the effect of lockdowns excess deaths, which includes people who died from other causes because hospitals were shut, for example. It did find mask wearing to be the most effective intervention, leading to a 18.7 per cent drop in virus fatalities — however this result was based on just three studies.
The WHO recently announced plans for an international pandemic treaty tied to a digital passport and digital ID system. Meeting in December 2021 in a special session for only the second time since the WHO’s founding in 1948, the Health Assembly of the WHO adopted a single decision titled, “The World Together.” The WHO plans to finalize the treaty by 2024. It will aim to shift governing authority now reserved to sovereign states to the WHO during a pandemic by legally binding member states to the WHO’s revised International Health Regulations. In January of 2022 the United States submitted proposed amendments to the 2005 International Health Regulations, which bind all 194 UN member states, which the WHO director general accepted and forwarded to other member states.
In contrast to amendments to our own constitution, these amendments will not require a two-thirds vote of our Senate, but a simple majority of the member states. Most of the public is wholly unaware of these changes, which will impact the national sovereignty of member states. The proposed amendments include, among others, the following. Among the changes the WHO will no longer need to consult with the state or attempt to obtain verification from the state where a reported event of concern (e.g., a new outbreak) is allegedly occurring before taking action on the basis of such reports (Article 9.1). In addition to the authority to make the determination of a public health emergency of international concern under Article 12, the WHO will be granted additional powers to determine a public health emergency of regional concern, as well as a category referred to as an intermediate health alert.
Poor Jerome Powell. With US inflation close to a 40-year high, the Federal Reserve chair knows what he needs to do. He has professed great admiration for Paul Volcker, his 1980s-era predecessor, as a role model. But, to paraphrase US Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s famous 1988 quip about his vice-presidential rival, Senator Dan Quayle, I knew Paul Volcker very well, and Powell is no Paul Volcker. Volcker was the quintessential US public servant. He smoked cheap cigars, wore rumpled off-the-rack suits, and had a strong distaste for the glitz of Washington power circles. His legacy was a single-minded discipline in attacking a pernicious Great Inflation.
Unlike the modern Fed, which under Ben Bernanke’s intellectual stewardship created a new arsenal of tools – balance-sheet adjustments, special lending facilities, and the “forward guidance” of outcome-dependent policy signals – the Volcker approach was simple, blunt, and direct. Monetary policy, in Volcker’s view, started and ended with interest rates. He once said to me, “If you are not prepared to act on interest rates, you may as well get out of town.” Volcker, of course, raised US interest rates to unheard-of levels in 1980-81, and there were many who did want him to get out of town. But howls of protest from builders, farmers, citizens’ groups, and members of Congress demanding his impeachment did not dissuade him from an unprecedented tightening in monetary policy. It was long overdue.
Under Volcker’s predecessor, Arthur Burns, the Fed had become convinced that inflation was part of the US economy’s institutional fabric. The price level was thought to have less to do with monetary policy than with the power of labor unions, cost-of-living wage indexation, and regulatory pressures on costs stemming from environmental protection, occupational safety, and pension benefits. Burns argued that oil and food-price shocks reinforced the institutional biases of an inflation-prone US economy. In other words, blame the system, not the Fed. The Fed’s research staff, which at the time included me, squirmed but raised no objections.
Volcker did more than squirm when he took over as Fed chair in August 1979. At the time, the consumer price index was surging by 11.8% year on year, on its way to 14.6% in March 1980. Volcker was determined to find the interest-rate threshold that would break the back of US inflation. Using the political cover provided by the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act, which formalized the Fed’s price-stability mandate, and drawing operational support from a shift to targeting the money supply, Volcker went into action. The Fed increased its benchmark federal funds rate from 10.5% in July 1979 to 17.6% in April 1980. Volcker then reversed course during an ill-advised but short-lived experiment with credit controls in the spring of 1980, before resuming a monetary-policy tightening that eventually pushed the funds rate to a monthly peak of 19.1% in June 1981. Only then did the fever of double-digit inflation break.
By late 1982, with the US in deep recession, annual headline CPI inflation had slipped below 4%, and the Fed started to reduce the benchmark policy rate. Mindful of the deeply entrenched inflationary psychology still gripping America, the Fed moved slowly and cautiously. Volcker, having broken the back of inflation, was not about to “leave town” until the Fed’s mission was complete.
The art of leaking, as recent events suggest, are integral to upholding American values when the upper echelons of power seek to denigrate them. The story of Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, is a case in point to why whistleblowing must be protected under American law at all costs. Her story is being recounted via a Starz miniseries that pays tribute to her whistleblowing efforts and pours scorn on those who treated her with contempt. Mitchell offered the press a behind the palace walls glimpse into the goings-on in the White House, and her vivacious truth-telling was key to the unravelling of the Watergate scandal that consequently cost Nixon the presidency.
Mitchell was drugged and kidnapped by her husband’s coterie of sycophants for her role in trying to expose Nixon’s unjust involvement in the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. She was tainted as mentally unfit by the White House in their bid to tarnish a critic ready to spill information on corruption at the highest level. Why must the nation of the free world, a purported bastion of democratic principle, hasten to launch a smear campaign against anyone who seeks to divulge the truth? There’s been a smear campaign like no other against Wikileaks founder and thorn-in-the-side of American cover-ups, Julian Assange, for years. Assange is currently held in a maximum security prison in the U.K., awaiting his fate by the Home Office on whether he will be extradited to the U.S. over disclosure of national security information.
Wikileaks uncovered numerous scandals committed by the American establishment, but it’s the establishment that attempts to absolve itself by lamenting the website as treasonous. Assange’s willingness to reveal dark secrets emboldened other whistleblowers to follow suit. Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was responsible for releasing a tranche of classified materials by the U.S. military, which included videos of merciless airstrikes in Iraq and thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables. Manning was castigated by international governments, as was Edward Snowden for leaking to The Guardian documents on global surveillance programs headed by the National Security Agency. Both have become polarizing figures in world history where critics call them cowards, while others hail them as patriots.
The leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion is the latest in a long line of events committed to uncovering the truth and subsequently holding those in power accountable. This leak is timely, with a milestone that marks a period of reflection for the whistleblowers at the center of the Watergate affair, particularly those like Mitchell who were routinely admonished. The leaker within the Supreme Court, alongside the art of whistleblowing itself, must be protected under democracy without question. Decisions are currently being made that will affect Americans for generations to come. If it wasn’t for those who have the courage to blow the whistle, crimes committed by an increasingly autocratic America would continue to imperil the thriving democracy it claims to be.
Among the headaches that Elon Musk faces regarding his proposed takeover of Twitter is now an investor lawsuit claiming that Musk “manipulated the company’s stock price downward” during the course of his involvement in the company. Investors are alleging that Musk saved himself $156 million by not reporting, in a timely fashion, that he had purchased more than 5% of Twitter by March 14, a new report from Bloomberg/Yahoo says. The investors also asked to be certified as a class and to be awarded both punitive and compensatory damages. In addition to Musk, Twitter was also named as a defendant, as investor agued that the company didn’t do enough to look into Musk’s conduct. The suit alleges his conduct was to “drive Twitter’s stock down substantially in order to create leverage.”
“Musk’s market manipulation worked. Twitter has lost $8 billion in valuation since the buyout was announced,” the lawsuit reads, according to a follow up writeup by Bloomberg Law. The suit alleges that Musk continued to buy stock after not disclosing his stake, amassing a 9.2% stake. “By delaying his disclosure of his stake in Twitter, Musk engaged in market manipulation and bought Twitter stock at an artificially low price,” the lawsuit says. It also claims that Tesla’s drop has hampered Musk’s ability to consummate the transaction. The lawsuit alleges that Musk’s Tweets about Twitter – namely allegations that the company had too many spam bots and the resultant decision to put the buyout “temporarily on hold” – also were an attempt to drive the share price lower.
Musk’s motive may have been to stave off a margin call, the report notes: According to the proposed class action, Musk’s moves were aimed at staving off the risk of a margin call stemming from the fluctuating value of shares in Tesla, the electric vehicle maker he leads, which is “worth much less now than when Musk agreed to buy Twitter” after a 37% drop over the past month. The suit came the same day Musk disclosed that he was partly restructuring the transaction to offset that risk by providing more than $6 billion in additional equity financing.
We have entered Punjab and will InshAllah be heading towards Islamabad. No amount of state oppression and fascism by this imported govt can stop or deter our march.#حقیقی_آزادی_مارچpic.twitter.com/NMRNRU2F3G
Dr. Julie Ponesse: “@JustinTrudeau’s 2021 deal with Pfizer (35M boosters in 2022 & 30M in 2023) and the option to extend vaccine delivery until 2024 up to 120M doses, means he MUST keep the mandates on pain of breaking the contract or wasting funds. This isn’t a fight he’ll give up easily.”
Pfizer Kids under 5
BREAKING: Pfizer has withdrawn its application to the FDA for authorization on COVID vaccinations for kids under 5, due to not "enough data." pic.twitter.com/z11j9Rv8Oq
“..all the misery of lockdown probably saved not a single life from covid. That is staggering. All that pain and anguish; all those elderly forbidden to play with their grandchildren; all those leaving this life uncomforted by their loved ones; all for nothing.”
Research, if it is to have value, has to be slow, meticulous, gruelling hard work and careful of all the pitfalls deliberately placed before it. But if it is good, checked and published, it enlightens us all and exposes the manifest lies constantly rained upon us by those in power. For two years we have been drenched with assurances, supposedly backed by “modelling science” that covid was a pandemic so vicious, so virulent, that it could wipe us all out unless we did what we were told. What we were told was to become a nation of obedient servants. I have never seen the once-feisty, freedom-loving, independence insisting British people reduced in this way, not even during the Second World War, despite bombs, casualites and rationing. Then, at least, we fought back. But for the past six months, and in growing volume, research revelations have proved we were repeatedly and comprehensively misled.
The latest scholars are from the USA, Sweden and Denmark but are none the less believable. They reveal all the misery of lockdown probably saved not a single life from covid. That is staggering. All that pain and anguish; all those elderly forbidden to play with their grandchildren; all those leaving this life uncomforted by their loved ones; all for nothing. The researchers say normal people, if they had it explained to them that certain precautions would keep them pretty safe, would have done the sensible thing of their own accord. Our Government could have done just that. Instead it went down the East German road as during the Cold War. Total surveillance by state agencies, informants encouraged to sneak on neighbours, a sort of Stasi in the form of Covid marshals, fines on the spot for rule-breakers.
As a foreign correspondent in east Berlin in 1964 I remember it well. It was little worse than what happened here under our elected Government. Prof Steve Hanks of America’s John Hopkins University, writes: “Lockdowns in Europe decreased covid mortality by 0.2 percent (two per thousand) on average while the economic costs of lockdowns were enormous.’ This merely hints at the role lockdowns played in our economic ruination and the scientists have hardly started on the death toll caused by neglect as every other cause of fatality was ignored and still is. So why did our Government choose to inflict this unnecessary pain and destruction on us all? Simple. From the outset, Boris Johnson and co swallowed hook line and sinker the “models” of co-called Sage scientists rebuffing all those, just as qualified or more so, who advised the reverse.
But there is a mood out there and it will not go away. Millions of voters, all parties, who now know they were conned and had misery inflicted on them without cause are ceasing to believe the codswallop. The phrase was coined during the Brexit campaign but now applies in a quite different sense and against a different target. We Want Our Country Back and we are going to have it.
Third shots of the coronavirus vaccines become significantly less likely to protect against serious illness after about four months, according to a new study released Friday. The effectiveness of the third booster doses against hospitalizations during the Omicron era of the pandemic dropped from 91 percent in the first two months after a third dose to 78 percent around the fourth month, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest. Effectiveness against emergency department or urgent care visits in that same period went from 87 percent in two months to 66 percent by the fourth month after the third dose – and only 37 percent after about five months, the data show.
In a summary of the study, the CDC recommended all eligible people “remain up to date with recommended COVID-19 vaccinations to best protect against COVID-19-associated hospitalizations and [emergency and urgent care] Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, recently told the Financial Times said he foresees a time where vaccinations and previous infections will mean fewer COVID-19 restrictions. Regular boosters may not be needed for everyone, he said. “It will depend on who you are,” Fauci said. “But if you are a normal, healthy 30-year-old person with no underlying conditions, you might need a booster only every four or five years.”
The study, conducted with cases across 10 states from Aug. 26, 2021 to Jan. 22, 2022, suggests vaccine protection is stronger overall against hospitalizations than it is for emergency visits. The vaccines also appeared to be more potent when the Delta strain accounted for a majority of cases than when the Omicron variant did.
Public Health Scotland (PHS) publish a weekly Covid-19 Statistical report containing data on Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccination status. The following chart has been collated from data found in table 11 of the PHS Covid-19 Statistical Report published 12th Jan 22, and table 12 of the PHS Covid-19 Statistical Report published 9th Feb 22, and it shows the number of Covid-19 cases by vaccination status betweeen 11th Dec 21 and 7th Jan 22, and between 8th Jan and 4th Feb 22.
Overall cases have dropped in the last month in all demographics significantly compared to the number of cases recorded between 11th Dec and 7th Jan 22, but in both months the vaccinated have accounted for the vast majority of cases. The main difference between the two months is that the double vaccinated accounted for the majority of cases between 11th Dec and 8th Jan 22; recording 145,890 cases, but the triple vaccinated accounted for the majority of cases between 8th Jan and 4th Feb 22; recording 46,951 cases. However, despite cases declining in all demographics over the past two months the data is still quite concerning in regards to the effectiveness of the Covid-19 injections, because as is illustrated in the following chart; the percentage of Covid-19 cases in the unvaccinated has descreased, whilst the percentage of cases among the vaccinated has increased significantly, but mainly in the tripple jabbed.
Between 11th Dec and 7th Jan 22 the unvaccinated population accounted for 15% of cases, but fast forward one month and we find that between 8th Jan and 4th Feb 22 the unvaccinated only accounted for 13% of cases despite the huge roll-out of the third dose to millions in December. The vaccinated population accounted for 85% of cases between 11th Dec and 7th Jan 22, with 9% of those cases among the one-dose vaccinated, 32% of those cases among the triple vaccinated, and 59% of those cases among the double vaccinated.
But fast forward one month and we find that the vaccinated accounted for 87% of cases, with the one-dose vaccinated accounting for 4% of those cases, the double vaccinated accounting for 33% of those cases, and the triple vaccinated accounting for 63% of those cases. This means that despite cases falling among all demographics they actually fell the most among the not vaccinated, single vaccinated, and double vaccinated, with the lowest drop coming in the triple vaccinated. This doesn’t make sense if the Covid-19 vaccines are effective. Clearly they are not, at least when it comes to preventing infection.
The number of lipid nanoparticles (LNP) injected in a dose of these anti-COVID vaccines is utterly flabbergasting: up to 50 billion viral vectors for AstraZeneca, 40 billion LNPs for Moderna, and likely 10 for Pfizer. It’s not very clear how many intact messenger RNA are in each NLP, but even if we agree to only 1, and that each one produces 1000 spike protein, we are talking your body having to deal with a minimum 30 trillion pathogenic spike proteins in a a few months time… Those are numbers way beyond very severe SARS-COV-2 infections: typically at infection peak between 1 and 100 billion virions, are present in the body.
What the medical and public health community hasn’t realised is that all the healthy cells that will be infected3 by these nanoparticles will eventually be destroyed by the immune system. When you take the Pfizer vaccine 3 times, you accept sacrificing up to 45 billion of your healthy cells4… with AstraZeneca it’s 150 billion! While many of these LNPs will transfect the same cell, or will simply get destroyed before ever transfecting, for a reason or another, these numbers remain truly gigantic. And it’s no surprise that some people’s arms are painful – or other die quasi instantly – post-vaccination as T-cells attack these spike-producing cells to start ridding the body of the infection mimicry.
Of course, these are supposedly intramuscular vaccines which were meant to stay in the muscle. Straight forward, no chaos, no unforeseen consequences: Theoretically, LNP fuses with muscle cell, mRNA is inserted, muscle cell’s intra-cellular machinery starts producing spike proteins, cells are identified by the immune systems as “compromised”, T-cells attack infected cell and the spike proteins are spilled into tissues and blood stream to trigger antibody selection and production, antibodies neutralise and rid the spike protein. If the bouncing balls stay in the same place, then there’s no domino effect, nothing happens apart from muscle cells being destroyed and ultimately replaced. End of story.
There’s 2 different routes by which the LNP can escape the muscle, the blood stream and the lymphatic system. Both networks behave very differently, and the possible consequences of a leak are likely to be very different … The Circulatory system is a closed-loop network circulating the blood throughout the body to bring nutrients, oxygen and immune elements to organs, to filter out pathogens, dangerous or unwanted circulating material, and to refill on oxygen and unload carbon dioxide. So the blood flows in concentrated fashion to the heart, to the lungs, to the liver and the spleen, not to mention, the brain and the reproductive system. The Lymphatic system is an open ended network, it’s the tissue drainage system as well as the immune systems network linking lymph nodes, thymus, spleen and bone marrow.
The European Medicines Agency’s safety committee said on Friday it was reviewing reports of heavy menstrual bleeding and absence of menstruation from women who had received COVID vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. The assessment was in view of reports of menstrual disorders after receiving either of the two vaccines, both based on messenger RNA technology, and it was not yet clear whether there was a causal link, the agency said. It was not yet clear whether there was a causal link between the vaccines and the reports, the agency said. Menstrual disorders can occur due to a range of underlying medical conditions as well as from stress and tiredness, the EMA said, adding that cases of such disorders had also been reported following COVID-19 infection.
Vaccination against COVID-19 was linked with a small, temporary change in menstrual cycle length, according to a recent study funded by the National Institutes of Health, which collected data from nearly 4,000 users of a smartphone app that tracks menstrual cycles. But the EMA said in December it had not established a link between changes in menstrual cycles and COVID-19 vaccines, after a study in Norway suggested some women had heavier periods after being inoculated. read more After reviewing the available evidence, the EMA’s Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee (PRAC) said it decided to request an evaluation of all available data, including reports from patients and healthcare professionals, clinical trials and the published literature. The agency on Friday added that there was also no evidence to suggest that COVID-19 vaccines affected fertility.
The medical system has picked the most unsafe and ineffective vaccine – now completely outdated to the strain of virus circulating – with which to violate basic human rights. Medical professionals are denying organ transplants to people who opt not to get the shots, even if they have natural immunity and even today, when the vaccines are ineffective for the current variants. Yet this atrocity is going on in red states without any sign of swift action from GOP supermajorities. Where is the outrage? It started out as the spirit of the age in blue states for medical systems to cruelly deny organ transplants to those who don’t bow the knee to Pfizer. But now the denials have become nearly universal in most states.
On Feb. 1, the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) announced that the system would be removing 23 people from the organ transplant list because they refused to get the shots. They “convinced” several dozen others who didn’t want the shots to change their minds. It’s unclear whether they mean you must get three shots and whether they will require a fourth as Dr. Fauci contemplates his next move. The denial of medical treatment is rapidly becoming the most immoral aspect of COVID apartheid. Republicans have become complacent because they perceive an end to the broad-based COVID restrictions imposed by Democrats at the federal and state levels. However, it appears the tyrants are only relinquishing the mandates affecting large numbers of people, such as masking of schoolchildren. After all, they can’t head into an election while angering most of the voters. But what about the small number of people who need special medical care, such as organ transplants, and are being discriminated against? There is no evidence that those restrictions will be lifted.
Canadian police have set a midnight deadline for truckers to clear the Ambassador Bridge on Friday night, after they decided to defy the original deadline of 7pm, and handed out flyers warning those refusing to retreat that they risked CA $100,000 fines ($78,000) and the permanent loss of their commercial driving license. The drivers are now setting themselves up for a showdown with police after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that ‘everything is on the table’ to end the Freedom Convoy demonstrations, after speaking directly with President Joe Biden. A Canadian court on Friday issued the injunction to end the blockade at the key bridge connecting Windsor, Ontario with Detroit. Ontario Superior Court Chief Justice Geoffrey Morawetz granted the injunction on Friday evening, which will last for 10 days and means that blocking the bridge is unlawful.
With an hour to go until the midnight deadline, several hundred protesters were milling around in the chilly night, stomping their feet to stay warm. Temperatures were a comparatively mild 38 degrees Fahrenheit, but many of the demonstrators had been out in the cold all day. Police patrol cars were parked with their lights flashing, but few officers were visible. Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, earlier on Friday said his cabinet will enact orders to make it illegal to block borders and highways and will impose CA $100,000 ($78,000) fines and prison terms for those who defy them. Trudeau claimed that the protest is being fueled by political activists in the United States, and said that more than 50 percent of donations to campaigns to support the protesters came from the U.S., which he referred to as ‘foreign financing’ of the protests.
On Friday night, several convoys were gathering in U.S. cities, ahead of a planned journey to the Canadian border in support of their fellow truckers. Fears are high that some may try to disrupt Sunday’s Super Bowl, or Biden’s March 1 State of the Union address. An organization dubbed ‘Convoy to Save America’ said on its website that two separate vehicle convoys will converge this weekend at the Peace Bridge, a U.S.-Canadian border crossing in Buffalo, New York. One of the convoys will leave New York City on Friday and the second from Mount Juliet, Tennessee, on Saturday.
US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg have urged their Canadian counterparts to “use federal powers” to stop truckers protesting against Canada’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate from blocking the busiest border crossing between the two countries. Angry truckers have been disrupting traffic across the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Detroit, Michigan with Windsor, Ontario, for four days straight. The last access point to the bridge was completely shut down early on Thursday morning, CBC News reported. Windsor Police, meanwhile, have asked drivers to take alternative routes. Mayorkas and Buttigieg offered the “full support” of their respective departments to the Canadian government in resolving the crisis.
“US and Canadian border and customs authorities are working with great urgency to ensure the continued flow of goods and services across our international border, leveraging alternative land routes, as well as air and sea options,” a White House official said. “We know that disruptions like these hit hard-working American families the hardest,” the White House said, as quoted by CBC News. A US official further told the outlet that Washington was working “around the clock” to resolve the matter. Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens told CNN that authorities were prepared to start “physically” removing protesters unless they stop disrupting the traffic.
“..the elites—the people who have Zoomed their way through the pandemic—had better start paying attention to the fentanyl overdoses, the suicides, the crime, the despair. Or else.”
Ostensibly, the truckers are against a new rule mandating that, when they re-enter Canada from the United States, they have to be vaccinated. But that’s not really it. The mandate is a moot point: The Americans have a similar requirement, and, anyway, “the vast majority” of Canadian truckers, according to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, are vaccinated. (The CTA represents about 4,500 truckers nationwide.) So it’s about something else. Or many things: a sense that things will never go back to normal, a sense that they are being ganged up on by the government, the media, Big Tech, Big Pharma. One thing was indisputable: There was this electricity coursing through the streets, and it felt like it could get out of control. It didn’t help when a handful of protesters sported swastikas and Confederate flags.
Or when GoFundMe shut down the convoy’s fundraiser, announcing that donors had two weeks to reclaim their money before it was sent to “established charities” chosen by Freedom Convoy organizers. Or when the cops started arresting locals, including the elderly. It is hard to capture how thoroughly Trudeau has misjudged the moment. “This pandemic has sucked for all Canadians,” he said Monday. As for the protest? “It has to stop,” declared the prime minister. If he sauntered down to the mess of rigs on Wellington Street, across from the Parliament building, opposite the mall and the war memorial, if he talked to these people for a few minutes, he would understand: It will not stop. What’s happening in Canada right now is bigger than the mandates.
The convoy is spearheaded by truckers, but its message of opposition to life under government control has brought onto the icy streets countless, once-voiceless people declaring that they are done being ignored. That the elites—the people who have Zoomed their way through the pandemic—had better start paying attention to the fentanyl overdoses, the suicides, the crime, the despair. Or else. [..] A lot of the truckers who had driven in from Vancouver and Winnipeg and Quebec City expressed this same uncertainty. It was getting really expensive to get by: rent, utilities, groceries, everything. Almost everyone who was poor or even middle-class was mired in debt. They told me that they expected this sort of wealth gap in America, but not in Canada. The divide that already existed between the haves and have-nots largely mapped onto the new chasm between those who supported the mandates and those who did not. And that was creating this huge, weird fracturing everywhere.
In the actions of the governments of Ottawa and Canada, we are now able to clearly see the previously hidden face of global Fascist totalitarianism, by which I mean the fusion of the power of large corporations with the power of the State- as Facism has been defined by Mussolini. We are now seeing shocking signals of desperation from our globalist, corporatist opponents. The incompetence of the Party of Davos is becoming plain for all to see.
1) For the first time, we can clearly see that they are willing and able to collude with Silicon Valley to weaponize the banking system against us. Taking 10 million US Dollars from a political fundraising campaign is something that most of us could not have imagined two years ago. Clearly, this has backfired, because its exposed to everyone that there is an unnatural coordination between government, the information technology sector, and the banks. And now we have direct video evidence of this collusion from the infamous Zoom call recording documenting the involvement of the Government and Mayor of Ottawa.
2) The censorship is ramping up, and our opponents are no longer really trying to justify it. The attacks on Joe Rogan are truly a desperate act. To attack the most beloved media icon in North America has so much downside and again, shows they are coordinating. DID YOU KNOW THAT SPOTIFY AND MODERNA SHARE THE SAME #1 INVESTOR? “BAILEY GIFFORD” ASSET MANAGEMENT OWNS 11.5% OF BOTH COMPANIES. And now we know that Neil Young has a financial conflict of interest because of the large investment bank that owns about half of the financial rights for his song catalog. This strategy is backfiring – Joe Rogan is still strong, and the central pharmaceutical and banking system hated more than ever. It will take more than Neil Young to shut down Joe Rogan.
3) So desperate are these conspirators, they’ve now literally asked the US Department of Defense to commit a felony; changing data in the Defense Medical Epidemiological Database. Stupidly, it had already been released – and is now being studied by the medical community. THEY WERE CAUGHT WITH THEIR PANTS DOWN, CHANGING DATA AFTER THE FACT. My guess is that this deserves criminal investigation. This will also backfire, because now people are personally exposed and my guess will run for the hills or become whistleblowers. I hear that lawyer Thomas Renz is being inundated with new whistleblower actions and information releases.
I have previously lamented what I call “the age of rage” and how many seem addicted to rage in our society. That was evident this week as many vented against groups ranging from the Canadian truckers to the unvaccinated. CNN analyst Juliette Kayyem seemed to suggest vigilantism as a proper response to the Canadian protesters while James Carville said that he wanted to punch the unvaccinated. I do not view either Kayyem or Carville as seriously advocating or condoning violence. However, the heated rhetoric highlights the danger of past demands from the left for censoring or prosecuting others for violent speech. On her Twitter account, Kayyem responded to a Wall Street Journal article on the gridlock caused by the truckers: “The convoy protest, applauded by right-wing media as a ‘freedom protest,’ is an economic and security issue now.
The Ambassador Bridge link constitutes 28% of annual trade movement between US and Canada. Slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks.” For his part, Carville longs for even more personal satisfaction, saying that anyone without a vaccine was a “piece of s–t” and he wanted to punch them in the face. These snarling, violent comments are all-too-common in today’s environment. However, they also raise the question of how we treat violent speech. Various Democrats are calling for the disqualification of members of Congress, and former President Donald Trump, for their comments made before the January 6th riot. Some members have brought lawsuits over allegations that such speeches constituted incitement for insurrection.
However, violent language continues to be common on both sides of our political divide. What constitutes hyperbole and what constitutes incitement is dangerously undefined. If CNN viewers went out on a tire slashing frenzy, would Kayyem or CNN be legally responsible? I would oppose such claims as inimical to free speech. Likewise, MSNBC hosts and politicians like Minnesota Attorney General Kieth Ellison have supported Antifa, but I do not attribute the violence of that group to their support. Trump has still not been prosecuted (as previously suggested by some) for incitement. It is not in my view, but, if it were to be prosecuted, some Democrats could face similar allegations. Likewise, many have called for conservative figures to be barred from social media for engaging in violent or incendiary rhetoric. Should Twitter now bar Kayyem or Carville?
All authority, from Vienna to Vancouver stands revealed as psychopathic — it apparently seeks to kill and injure as many as possible. Talk about the needle and the damage done! Why else persist with vaccines that don’t work and which provoke the most lethal disease mechanisms as side-effects? The most mysterious element of the story, of course, is what motivated the various actors in this accursed melodrama. You could start by asking Dr. Anthony Fauci why he suggested this week the need for yet another round of the same mRNA booster shots that already proved completely ineffective against the omicron generation of Coronavirus.
People are dropping dead from the boosters. Each successive shot sends a fresh cargo of toxic artificial spike proteins into the bloodstream, which remain at work for more than a year, insidiously gumming up the capillaries of vital organs and throwing toggle switches in the coded proteins of immune systems that turn off the body’s natural defenses against a panoply of diseases, including cancers. The life insurance companies are starting to notice and squawk about the astounding rise in all-causes mortality. Nobody else in the loop dares to speak up, most conspicuously the doctors, except a brave few… McCullough, Malone, Kory, Bhattacharya, Kheriaty, Cole, Risch, Marik, Urso….
Dr. Fauci, of course, has an entire career of public health malpractice to cover up. In his quest for medical immortality, he bungled the institutional response to the AIDS epidemic, introducing toxic drug protocols still inexplicably in use today — namely, AZT, which got FDA approval despite its botched 1986 Phase II trials. Next, Dr. Fauci attempted a miracle cure for the terrifying Ebola virus: remdesivir. More botched trials. Anyway, the drug didn’t work against Ebola. But he hauled it out again for his crowning creation, Covid-19, and got the NIH to anoint remdesivir as the standard-of-care for hospital in-patients — at the same time that he got the bureaucracy to ban and demonize effective early treatment protocols, including ivermectin and HCQ — while pushing his next-gen miracle cure, the mRNA vaccines, which also flunked their rushed and inept trials.
Omicron is the best vaccine available. You can pick between BA.1 and BA.2. That allows us to do a little overview, also because “new“ findings have come out recently. New only in the sense that the media now report on them for the first time, not because we didn’t already know.
Then again, how would YOU know, if not through Joe Rogan, and his recent guests Dr. Malone and Dr. Mc Cullough, and websites like Peak Prosperity and the Automatic Earth? Media capture has been pretty total for 2 years, because 1/ bad news sells better than good news, and 2/ Big Pharma owns the discussion, through its ownership of media and medical “experts”.
That’s all about to change. Omicron can -and will- still be sold as a potentially devastating disease, but if the numbers don’t add up, people will stop listening and reading. So the media’s hands will be forced. The treatment of Joe Rogan is only the culmination of that, of so many voices since early 2020, and it’s good it led to him.
Because Joe doesn’t care, he’s bigger than all of the media assembling against him, and he did nothing but give some people a voice and a space that were being ostracized -and still are, maybe even more-, and Spotify is a Sweden-based company, which not many will be able to touch.
Yeah, yeah, Neil Young, Joni, Streisand, they’re all in Biden and Pelosi’s age-range, but do you think many people will care who are not over 70, if and when Omicron keeps on lowering death numbers? Or are they more likely to side with Canadian truckers and their ideas of freedom?
Will Justin send the army to “take care” of the protests? You would almost hope so. I don’t think he’s stupid enough, not even him, but he’s in an ugly spot. All he would have had to do is go talk to them, but then that’s the overriding theme here, isn’t it, to not talk, let alone discuss?
The idea has been all along to NOT talk to Dr. Malone and Dr. Mc Cullough, or Joe Rogan, or anyone else who doesn’t toe the Pfizer line. And at some point, like when people realize Omicron is the best vaccine available, all that’s left is to enforce mandates with police or armed forces. As I said, you’d almost hope they do it. The “let them eat cake” moment.
I saw this pic yesterday of a headline from German TV channel NTV, which says Pfizer will sue Denmark for loosening its vaccine mandate, because fewer people will get jabbed, and that means less profit. How much of this will we see?
Back to reality: We have found (or rather, seen confirmed) in the last 2 weeks or so that:
1/ Masks don’t work. The CDC admitted that the cloth masks they recommended for 2 years have no effect whatsoever. But along their own lines of “evidence”, neither do surgical masks, which have holes 1000x bigger than a virus particle. N95 masks could work to some extent, but only if they’re fitted perfectly, by a professional, every time they’re worn.
Maybe the fact that the US government, and CDC and FDA, waited 2 years in promoting them tells you the whole story. And yes, P100 masks might work to some extent, but at that point we might as well go for full-blown gas-masks. In short, face masks “for Covid” have been as entirely useless as they have been completely destructive, in the lives of all of us, but in particular our children.
But the masks still haven’t been as big a disaster as:
2/ Lockdowns don’t work. For 2 years running, all the media and their loyal followers have been citing the CDC, FDA and Johns Hopkins University. But now that Johns Hopkins releases a report that says lockdowns prevented only 0.2% of potential deaths, crickets are a very popular life form all of a sudden. What’s not to love? But yeah, we get it, good news doesn’t sell. In the same vein, an “imminent” Russian invasion of Ukraine, tanks in the streets of Kyiv, gets a lot more clickbait than “nah, all quiet on the eastern front”.
But the lockdowns haven’t been as big a disaster as (we’re working up to a climax here):
3/ The vaccines don’t work.
3.1/ The vaccines were never needed.
The way to create demand for them was to prohibit all other substances that could have saved millions of lives in prophylaxis or early treatment. As I’ve said repeatedly, I think vitamin D could have prevented 50% of all infections and deaths, zinc could have taken care of the next 25%, and for the remaining quarter an entire scala of repurposed drugs, ivermectin, HCQ, fluvoxamine, melatonin, aspirin etc. would have been enough.
You don’t have to aim for zero. Bring the numbers down by 50-75-90%, and any reason to lock down or wear masks is gone. Pfizer needed to ban all these substances, and ban the possible news coverage of their potential, to get an EUA for its vaccine. And that’s why they were all swept under the carpet. Thing is, there are millions of dead bodies under that carpet, too.
But not only were they never needed:
3.2/ The vaccines don’t work.
To be honest: what we know in early February 2022 is that yes, they do seem to “work” for a few months, we’re not exactly sure how or how long. That should never be a question about a vaccine, however, and if it is, call it something else. Moreover, as far as they “work”, they do that by -trying to- take over control from your immune system, which you cannot survive without. Your best option today is to have an immune system strong enough to fight off the vaccine, which is as insane as it sounds. A booster 3rd or 4th or 12th shot will work for even less time, and in the meantime you run the risk of spike proteins lingering and gathering in all of your organs, including your heart and brain. For the rest of your life.
Because:
3.3/ The vaccines cause enormous damage.
The main issue about mRNA vaccines is not even the scores of vaxxed young athletes dropping dead, or the elevated numbers of 10-15 year olds who have myocarditis, devastating as they are; it’s the long-term consequences, never tested for. I’ve been reading a lot about mRNA and cancer recently. Because I see it pop up all over.
This will not affect everyone. Some of us have robust immune systems. But those that do not, due to age, obesity, you name it, will see the negative effects of spike proteins and other vaccine “by-products”. Not all in the same way, and not all to the same degree. And not all at the same time either. But you’re still all unleashing (cyto-) toxic elements into your body, your bloodstream, your organs.
You’re unleashing more of them with each next shot, or booster, into a body whose immune system has ever less defense against the invading toxic elements. Because your immune system may have “learned” to defend itself against these elements, but then the jabs add ever more of them, and the original antigenic sin kicks in for real. Until the immune system is overwhelmed and gives up.
So why the shots, and the boosters? It doesn’t appear to have much to do with logic. In Britain, Covid is already less threatening than the flu. You may argue that this is due to the vaccines, but how realistic is that given we know their efficacy drops so fast you need a booster every few months?
Whereas, if you catch Omicron, and many “Experts” now state that we will all catch it at some point (or more than once), the amount of toxic elements entering your body is manageable. Sure, you may need to boost your immune system, lose weight, change your diet, but how could that ever be a bad thing?
Still, if you combine vitamin D with zinc and perhaps IVM, your chances look much better than with 3-4-5-6 boosters. But, you know, if that’s what you want, go for it. Ditto for face masks, and lockdowns, etc. But with what we know today, there is no reason why anyone should dictate any of these things to you. You’re not any safer because of them.
The main difference appears to be that you, the vaxxed/boosted, have a lot more to be wary about for the rest of your life, 30-40-50 years, from “vaccines” that were poorly tested, and not at all tested for that sort of timespan.
Omicron is a one-off that appears to protect you from all -or most- previous and future Covid variants. The vaccines are geared towards one older variant only, which hardly exists anymore. I won’t advice anyone to get Omicron, but if given the choice between Omicron and Comirnaty, is the choice really that clear?
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A lot of farmers will not grow wheat at present fertilizer prices. In the US, many will switch to soy beans.
“Retail fertilizer is ripping in the Midwest as growers begin to put on purchases for spring product. Anhydrous has set a new record at $1492/ton, which is 200% more than this time last year. With harvest delivered corn in the low $5/bu range right now, it doesn’t pencil.”
Tyranny is nothing new. People who embrace it, and who lust after power, tend to follow a similar pattern. There are no brakes. They always push it too far. They always overplay their hand. They can’t seem to stop themselves once they have a grip on the population. Canada experienced a shocking amount of tyranny over the last several years. And yet, under the extreme pressure that the Canadian people were forced to endure, it appears that a diamond has been formed. Out came a force for liberty that has caught the attention of the entire world! We are born free, and meant to always stay free. Authoritarians, no matter how much data they chase after, can never know or anticipate everything.
Who could have predicted that a major spark would emerge in Canada? Yet, that is how the history of Liberty vs. power has always been. Who could have predicted that 13 colonies would secede from the biggest empire on earth back in 1776? In our world of perpetual uncertainty, it’s impossible to centrally plan human life. Yet, there’s never a shortage of misguided individuals who are willing to give it a try….and create mass human suffering in doing so. It’s hard enough to plan one’s own life, let alone venturing out and foolishly sticking your nose into someone else’s business. But this fact never seems to dawn on authoritarians, no matter how much logic, theory, and history backs it up.
The desire for freedom is innate. It can be suppressed, but not abolished. Life and Liberty are two sides of the same coin. Without Life, there is no Liberty. Without Liberty, there is no Life. When backed into an impossible corner, Life and Liberty always finds a crack to burst through. After 2 years of hardcore tyranny around the world, the ideas of freedom are bursting forth, first in Canada…
The public participation in online crowdfunding for public protests related to the Freedom Convoy taking place in Canada continues to be hit with roadblocks and is becoming a further threat to free expression and the right to protest. After first having GoFundMe temporarily block the release of some of the funds that Canadians have donated to help support the livelihoods of the truckers taking place in the demonstration, GoFundMe began to pay out the funds, with the first payment of $1M in Canadian dollars being released, the campaign organizer tweeted on Friday. However, the campaign has raised more than $7.3 million in Canadian dollars and those funds could now be at risk of being seized by the local government if some politicians get their way.
Mathieu Fleury, the Ottawa City Councillor of Rideau-Vanier Ward, has today announced his support for the government to launch a legal challenge to seize the remaining GoFundMe donations that had been collected online. “This morning, I have asked the city manager and city solicitor to immediately launch court proceedings targeting the millions of dollars in funds frozen by @GoFundMe so Ottawa taxpayers are not left holding the bag for these protests,” Fleury tweeted, before locking his account after facing backlash.
“While COVID testing may be clinically valuable for people with symptoms, testing millions of asymptomatic people can lead to large-scale, unnecessary quarantines and disruptions (as Fauci has now admitted).”
In December 2021, the CDC announced a change in quarantine guidelines from 10 days to five, with Fauci confessing that the purpose of the change was to “get people back to jobs” and Walensky stating that the guidelines were based on “what we thought people would be able to tolerate.” These statements came after months and years of restrictions based on the idea that no concern superseded the mitigation of COVID risks—that COVID policies were, by definition, above cost-benefit analysis. In 2020, Fauci and Francis Collins (then director of the National Institutes of Health) had orchestrated a media-assisted smear campaign to this effect against the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration, who argued for more focused protection of the elderly and immunocompromised instead of blanket lockdowns.
This effort to quash dissenting viewpoints lasted well past the point when vaccines became available for any adult who wanted them. Now, having attempted to damage the reputations of these scientists, Fauci believes that COVID mitigation policies must be balanced by other priorities. The CDC has also determined that Americans no longer have to test themselves at the end of the new quarantine period because they can stay positive for up to 12 weeks after infection. But this change in testing protocol only confirms that detection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has never meant that someone is ill or contagious. A clinical case of a disease almost always involves symptoms, but for COVID, the definition of a “case” for the past two years has been a positive PCR test, symptoms or no symptoms.
In other words, while major news outlets presented rates of “cases” as synonymous with rates of illness, the number of positive PCR tests has never necessarily reflected the number of people sick with COVID (because the SARS-CoV-2 material detected by PCR may not be intact, abundant, or infectious). This was a problem in 2007 when the use of PCR tests to detect pertussis led scientists to believe they were observing an epidemic, only to discover that the tests had been generating false positives and patients most likely had other respiratory infections like the common cold. While COVID testing may be clinically valuable for people with symptoms, testing millions of asymptomatic people can lead to large-scale, unnecessary quarantines and disruptions (as Fauci has now admitted).
Nevertheless, state and city governments used “rising cases” to rationalize shutdowns, school closures, and mask mandates. Public health officials and the media portrayed these raw case numbers as a meaningful metric and presented testing as an infallible tool. In the past month, this approach has abruptly changed. When questioned about child hospitalization rates, Fauci recently cited broken bones and appendicitis as among the reasons for high hospitalization numbers, telling MSNBC, “It’s over-counting the number of children who are, quote ‘hospitalized with COVID,’ as opposed to because of COVID.” By the first week of January, data released by New York state showed that about half of all COVID patients in New York City hospitals were admitted for reasons other than COVID; in Los Angeles, the same was true for about two-thirds of COVID patients. The Los Angeles Times argued that the number of incidental hospitalizations during omicron means “this surge is different.” But how different is it, really?
Refusal or reluctance to have a Covid-19 vaccine may be linked to traumatic events in childhood, such as parents separating, neglect, or physical, verbal and sexual abuse, new research suggests. Those who suffer in childhood are also least likely to trust official NHS coronavirus information, follow the rules of restrictions or wear masks during the pandemic, public health experts found. Two years after the virus first reached the UK and a year after vaccines to protect against it were made available for free on the NHS, millions of people have yet to be vaccinated. Almost one in 10 people in the UK – 9% – have still not had a single dose. Health experts and policymakers are urgently trying to figure out why.
Now the findings of a new study funded by Public Health Wales and published in the journal BMJ Open suggests that Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy may be linked to childhood trauma. Researchers surveyed 2,285 people aged 18 and over in Wales during lockdown restrictions between 2020 and 2021. They were asked about nine different adverse childhood experiences (Aces) as well as low trust in NHS Covid-19 information, whether they backed the removal of social distancing and mandatory face coverings, and breaking Covid rules and vaccine hesitancy. Aces include neglect, physical, psychological or sexual mistreatment, and growing up in a household affected by domestic violence, substance or alcohol abuse and other criminal justice problems.
Parents separating or divorcing, abandonment, or having a parent with a mental health condition are other examples of Aces. The nine Aces included in the study were: physical, verbal and sexual abuse, parental separation, exposure to domestic violence, living with a household member with mental illness, alcohol and/or drug misuse, or a family member in prison. Half of those in the study had not experienced any childhood trauma, one in five had suffered one type, about one in six reported two or three, and one in 10 reported four or more. The results showed that the more trauma people had experienced in childhood, the more likely they were to mistrust NHS Covid-19 information, to feel unfairly restricted by the government and to support the end of mandatory face masks.
Lockdowns in the U.S. and Europe had little or no impact in reducing deaths from COVID-19, according to a new analysis by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. The lockdowns during the early phase of the pandemic in 2020 reduced COVID-19 mortality by about 0.2%, said the broad review of multiple scientific studies. “We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality,” the researchers wrote. But the research paper said lockdowns did have “devastating effects” on the economy and contributed to numerous social ills. “They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy,” the report said.
“Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument,” the paper concluded. Early on, many states and 186 countries imposed bans on work, socialization, in-person schooling, travel and other restrictions to limit the spread of the disease, citing recommendations by top health care experts. Researchers at the Imperial College London, for example, predicted that such steps could reduce death rates by up to 98%. That never happened, according to the new study by researchers Steve Hanke, Jonas Herby, and Lars Jonung at Johns Hopkins. “Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic,” they wrote.
The campaign to get Joe Rogan booted from Spotify may have failed for now, but Big Tech appears to be ramping up its COVID-19 “misinformation” crackdown on medical and other figures. Two permanent social media bans bookended Rogan’s interview with mRNA vaccine pioneer-turned-critic Robert Malone, which birthed the trending phrase “mass formation psychosis.” Twitter cited Malone for COVID misinformation shortly before the interview, while LinkedIn “flushed my 30,000 connections and de-platformed me” days after, Malone wrote in his newsletter. “No explanations, no warnings were given.” The last complete archive of his page was Jan. 3.
Malone said he had rarely posted anything “controversial” on the Microsoft-owned professional social network due to his brief suspension last summer, which a LinkedIn “senior executive” blamed on the platform’s purported difficulty in “detangling complicated, subtle scientific claims.” YouTube reportedly removed uploads of the Rogan episode as well, and Malone and others claimed Google was manipulating search results for “mass formation psychosis” to hide the episode, contrasting the search engine’s results with competitor DuckDuckGo. The censorship has not chastened Malone, who has since claimed he “almost died” following his second Moderna vaccine dose, likely due to a “bad batch.”
LinkedIn shut down former Harvard Medical School epidemiologist and lockdown critic Martin Kulldorff’s account last week, allegedly reinstating it without explanation several hours after his affiliated Brownstone Institute noted the removal. It was also Kulldorff’s second brush with LinkedIn, which censored two of his posts for purported misinformation last summer. Twitter suspended his account for a month last spring for disputing the protective powers of commonly worn masks — a position that is now mainstream. The actions suggest “the whole history of the pandemic and the response are being rewritten in real time by Big Tech to cover up what happened, who wrote what and when, and how the thing fleshed itself out in real time,” wrote Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker.
Malone Big Tech
https://twitter.com/i/status/1488548271505170433
Some scientists have begun speaking out about efforts to silence researchers who raised concerns about the possibility that COVID-19 could have originated in a Chinese lab. “It shot from every direction from people who we now know were actually thinking exactly the same thing but have chosen to say the opposite, which is extraordinary,” Australian Dr. Nikolai Petrovsky, a Flinders University Medicine professor, told Fox News of the backlash he received for voicing concerns that the pandemic may have originated in a lab. Petrovsky was not alone, according to reporting from Fox News’ Benjamin Hall, who spoke with scientists from Israel, the U.S., Australia, Germany, the U.K., Australia and Germany. The scientists told Fox News that they received backlash and resistance to getting their work published, even from those who quietly believed in the possibility of the “lab-leak theory.”
“It’s taken two years for that to finally come out and be exposed,” Petrovsky said. The scientists say that there was a top-down effort aimed at protecting the scientific community from negative public attention, with fears spreading among scientists that a public realization that the pandemic may have spread due to gain-of-function research in a lab could hamper future experiments. Many in the scientific community who attempted to speak out about COVID-19’s origins were labeled conspiracy theorists in the media and by fellow scientists early on in the pandemic, even though the possibility of human error has now gained renewed attention from experts. The scientists expressed fear to Fox News that the silencing of such voices has led to little change, with gain-of-function research continuing both in the U.S. and abroad despite growing calls for international regulation.
Let’s cut the crap eh? It’s established that DARPA was handed a proposal from Ecohealth, Duke, UNC and Palo Alto Labs that intended for work to be done at the WIV and then intentionally released into bat caves in China related to coronaviruses. It’s also established that DARPA told them to pound sand, because, as I’ve pointed out, it not only violated gain-of-function but also raised grave concerns about being dual use (that is, bioweapon use) and that Ecohealth was apparently claiming the right to do same on a foreign land where they neither owned the cave or the people around there that might get screwed. As it turns out people did get screwed and it appears to have initiated right there. There is evidence NIH funded this after DARPA told them to go to Hell. The evidence points to that how Covid-19 occurred.
Proved? Not yet. But if not… it’s a hell of a coincidence, isn’t it — both on what was being done and the timing. But note well that Trump, and Fox, are all over the Wuhan Institute only. Oddly silent is that institutions right here in the United States appear to have been part of it. They most-certainly were in the original proposal which has surfaced, I remind you. Exactly nobody has called for a full and open investigation into that, and there is evidence that they were involved after DARPA rejected the work too in the form of transfer agreements in late 2019, just before everything went to Hell. Where be the subpoenas out of Congress, may I ask? Where be anything other than the focus on China? Yeah, China was involved and covered it up. That’s clear.
But what’s also clear is that China has also not released the information including exactly what was transferred back, to whom and when. So yeah, let’s bag on China because they deserve it. But at the same time where’s the big fat wrecking ball and even criminal charges for those in the so-called “public health” and “research” community right here in the United States that got involved in this crap and, it appears, may well be equally responsible for what happened? Oh, you want to know why not? Here you go: The scientists expressed fear to Fox News that the silencing of such voices has led to little change, with gain-of-function research continuing both in the U.S. and abroad despite growing calls for international regulation. There you are. They’re still doing it.
After instruction from President Joe Biden and federal government regulators, a number of corporations fired workers who refused the Wuhan coronavirus vaccine. They did so before the Supreme Court ruled Biden’s vaccine mandate for large companies was unconstitutional. Now, with worker shortages and long delayed scientific evidence from the Centers for Disease Control that the vaccine does not prevent the transmission of the virus, a number of companies are hiring back previously fired workers. Dr. Marty Makary, a top doctor for John’s Hopkins University, has been calling on companies to rehire fired employees for weeks. Now, he’s calling for workers to not only give people their jobs back but to issue an apology.
“Public-health officials ruined many lives by insisting that workers with natural immunity to Covid-19 be fired if they weren’t fully vaccinated. But after two years of accruing data, the superiority of natural immunity over vaccinated immunity is clear. By firing staff with natural immunity, employers got rid of those least likely to infect others. It’s time to reinstate those employees with an apology,” Dr. Makary writes in the Wall Street Journal. “None of this should surprise us. For years, studies have shown that infection with the other coronaviruses that cause severe illness, SARS and MERS, confers lasting immunity. In a study published in May 2020, Covid-recovered monkeys that were rechallenged with the virus didn’t get sick. Public-health officials have a lot of explaining to do.”
In one-fourth (or more) of consumer bankruptcies, medical debt is the predominant causal factor, often triggered by “sudden adverse events.” As of 2022, vaccine adverse event reporting of heart disease following COVID vaccines had increased 15,600% in young people under the age of 30, compared to the previous 31 years of heart injuries reported following receipt of FDA-approved vaccines. Autism, linked to vaccines as well as other toxic exposures, furnishes a cautionary tale, potentially saddling families with lifetime care costs of $1.4 to $2.4 million. In 2010, a government study estimated 1 in every 38 vaccine doses (2.6%) produced an adverse reaction. However, the sluggish and adversarial vaccine injury compensation process and a sky-high burden of proof leave two-thirds of claims dismissed or in limbo.
Emergency Use Authorization COVID shots are even less likely to garner vaccine injury compensation. Attorneys caution, “If you have suffered a serious injury from a Covid-19 vaccine, you are basically on your own.” With over a million COVID-vaccine-related adverse events reported since December 2020, households are racking up extraordinary debt and turning to crowdfunding for help. Heart conditions, among the 20 most expensive conditions treated in American hospitals, pack a financial wallop. According to CDC, 96% of those under age 30 who experience heart injuries following COVID vaccination are hospitalized. Children tend to have a more sudden and severe myocarditis presentation than adults, with an estimated 7% to 15% mortality rate. Children hospitalized with myocarditis are more likely to die than children admitted with other diagnoses.
Studies of children and adolescents who developed myocarditis following COVID vaccination show a “potentially poor prognosis despite the heart seeming to have returned to normal.” According to Mayo Clinic, “the greatest burden of myocarditis may not be apparent for 6-12 years after diagnosis when children die or need to undergo cardiac transplantation.” Cardiac injuries triggered by dangerous COVID injections appear to be good for business. A July 2021 BusinessWire report forecast a booming market for cardiac assist devices, noting “increasing incidence of heart failure is driving growth.” Families, however, are left holding the bag not just emotionally, but financially, blindsided by financial impacts they surely never anticipated.
Another historically high 4.3 million workers quit their jobs in December, according to the Labor Department’s latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover report, closing out a record-shattering year when roughly 47.4 million people voluntarily left their jobs for better work during the pandemic and Great Resignation. For comparison, 42.1 million people quit in 2019, at the time considered the tightest labor market on record. “All of this is uncharted territory,” says Rucha Vankudre, a senior economist at Emsi Burning Glass, a labor market analytics firm. The U.S. saw record-breaking months of turnover throughout 2021, with early signs of trouble kicking off in April as vaccination efforts improved, consumer activity rebounded and businesses scrambled to re-staff to meet demand.
Workers, especially in low-wage service roles, quit their jobs for higher pay and better work conditions. Employers responded to record turnover by “trying to get employees in the door” with signing bonuses, higher salaries, the option to work remotely and expanding their geographic hiring boundaries for teleworkers, Vankudre tells CNBC Make It. They’ve increased retention efforts by offering more employee training and development opportunities. “Employers are doing what they can at this point,” Vankudre says. She expects pay increases to continue unabated as a means of attracting new hires, retaining workers and pulling people back into the workforce. “What else can they do? We’ll have to see. They’ve done the things we’ve expected them to do at increasing rates, but what’s next?”
Even still, rising wages may not be enough to keep pace with the rate of inflation. Though wages rose 4.7% from a year prior, according to the Labor Department, consumer prices reached a 40-year high in December, when the consumer price index (which measures the cost of goods and services) showed a 7% jump year-over-year.
Ever since Jonathan Greenblatt, a woke former Obama White House official, took over the Anti-Defamation League, it reflexively screams “Anti-Semitism!” when critics fault Soros’ political work — and the left loyally follows suit. It therefore falls upon established rabbis with authentic Jewish lifetime bona fides, like yours truly, to assert unequivocally that it’s a mitzvah (a righteous act) — not “anti-Semitism” — to castigate George Soros for his radical attempts to undermine public safety and the American republic. I’ll be clear: Political pundits, ranging from columnists to cartoonists to on-air talent, should not hesitate to condemn Soros as perhaps the most despicable person in public affairs.
Disbursing tens of millions of dollars, Soros has funded local campaigns across America to elect progressive district attorneys who agitate for the lethal cocktail of defunding police and decriminalization. These prosecutors tend not to prosecute property crimes or severe misdemeanors. Instead, they purposefully undercharge felonies as misdemeanors, then plead them down to disorderly-conduct violations. The result? A new term, “smash and grab,” has entered the crime lexicon. Soros just poured a whopping $125 million into a super PAC called Democracy PAC, noting the donation is a “long-term investment.” Prior to this, between 2015 and 2019, he and his affiliated PACs spent more than $17 million on local DA races. That number is believed to have topped $20 million from just 2020 to 2021.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner received $1.7 million from a Soros PAC for the 2017 campaign that put him into office, an unheard-of sum for such a race. Last year, 559 people were murdered in his city, the most in history. Cook County, Ill., State’s Attorney Kim Foxx received $2 million from a Soros PAC. In 2021, 797 people were murdered in Chicago, 25 more than in 2020. Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby was one of the first individuals Soros supported by when in 2014 he decided to fund progressive prosecutors’ election efforts. Despite progressive Mayor Brandon Scott’s attempt at “violence reduction” strategies, Baltimore’s homicide rate rose for a second year in a row, climbing to 337 in 2021.
Liberal billionaire George Soros called for the replacement of Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday, comparing the upcoming 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics to the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. In a speech delivered at the conservative Hoover Institution, Soros called China the “world’s most powerful authoritarian state” and “the greatest threat that open societies face today.” Soros claimed that China, “like Germany in 1936,” will “attempt to use the spectacle” of the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games “to score a propaganda victory for its system of strict controls.” He also called Xi “a true believer in communism,” unlike former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who introduced free market reforms, and warned that “Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin are his idols.”
Soros concluded his speech with a call for regime change in China – echoing the current line of many American conservatives, who also oppose Xi’s leadership. It is to be hoped that Xi Jinping may be replaced by someone less repressive at home and more peaceful abroad “This would remove the greatest threat that open societies face today and they should do everything within their power to encourage China to move in the desired direction,” the billionaire declared. Soros is the founder and chairman of the Open Society Foundation, which backs liberal and left-wing causes in the US and around the globe, including Black Lives Matter, Planned Parenthood and immigration reforms. He has also taken an interest in US district attorney races, pouring millions into these contests, with some of these Soros-backed candidates now overseeing prosecution in America’s major cities.
China’s Xi Jinping is the greatest threat that open societies face today. The country’s roiling real estate market, falling population, and fast-spreading omicron variant might be his undoing, all during his prestige project of the Winter Olympics. https://t.co/1Pf0XEy29Mpic.twitter.com/WMyWpPKg0y
We have repeatedly discussed the virtual new blackout on the influence peddling by the Biden family, particularly Hunter Biden. Despite overwhelming evidence of millions given by foreign companies and officials, the media has preferred to cover literal scoops over a story of breathtaking levels of self-dealing and corruption by the Bidens. Now, however, the New York Times has sued to force the Biden Administration to turn over information on Hunter Biden’s Romanian dealings. The lawsuit comes after another report that, in 2019, the FBI subpoenaed JP Morgan for records on Hunter Biden’s Chinese dealings.
In a new lawsuit on Monday, the Times sued the State Department to obtain emails from Romanian embassy officials sent between 2015 and 2019 mentioning a number of international business figures, including the president’s son and his former business associate Tony Bobulinski. While the request was sent in December 2021, the Biden Administration told the Times that the soonest that it could possibly turn over the information is April 15, 2023. That is after the mid-term elections. This story could be a bit awkward for the White House staff. When the New York Times Ken Vogel wrote about Hunter Biden’s dealings as a potential “significant liability,” Biden officials viciously attacked him while others suggested that he was a pawn of Russian or Trump disinformation. Of course, the allegations proved to be true and the infamous laptop is now considered authentic.
One of the most outspoken aides denying the entire story was Kate Bedingfield, who is now the director of White House Communications. She denounced the story as an “egregious act of journalistic malpractice.” Andrew Bates, who is now deputy director, tweeted “SCOOP from Philadelphia: KEN VOGEL (@kenvogel ) is a COWARD.” They will now handle questions on this story as White House officials. That includes why President Biden repeatedly said that no one had accused Hunter or his family of “doing anything wrong” when he was presumably aware of the FBI subpoena and the seizure of the laptop. Given these investigations, there is also the question of why a special counsel has not been appointed given President Biden’s past comments that have been contradicted by witnesses (as well as references to his own financial accounts in these emails).
The media and FBI investigations now cover transactions ranging from China, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, and other countries. Millions flowed to the Biden family while Joe Biden was Vice President and later as he prepared for a presidential run. Biden is still running out for ice cream and the media is dutifully covering it. The question however remains whether this will remain just desserts . . . or whether Hunter and others will receive their just deserts for influencing peddling.
The government of El Salvador on Monday rejected a recommendation by the International Monetary Fund to drop Bitcoin as legal tender in the Central American country. Treasury Minister Alejandro Zelaya angrily said that “no international organization is going to make us do anything, anything at all.” Zelaya told a local television station that Bitcoin is an issue of “sovereignty.” “Countries are sovereign nations and they take sovereign decisions about public policy,” he said. The IMF recommended last week that El Salvador dissolve the $150 million trust fund it created when it made the cryptocurrency legal tender and return any of those unused funds to its treasury.
The agency cited concerns about the volatility of Bitcoin prices, and the possibility of criminals using the cryptocurrency. After nearly doubling in value late last year, Bitcoin has plunged in value. Zelaya said El Salvador has complied with all financial transaction and money laundering rules. The trust fund was intended to allow the automatic conversion of Bitcoin to U.S. dollars — El Salvador’s other currency — to encourage people wary of adopting the highly volatile digital currency. The IMF also recommended eliminating the offer of $30 as an incentive for people to start using the digital wallet “Chivo” and increasing regulation of the digital wallet to protect consumers. It suggested there could be benefits to the use of Chivo, but only using dollars, not Bitcoin.
“In the near-term the actual costs of implementing Chivo and operationalizing the Bitcoin law exceed potential benefits,” the report said. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had been dismissive of the IMF’s recommendation’s concerning Bitcoin. Government officials told the IMF that the launch of “Chivo” had significantly increased financial inclusion, drawing millions of people who previously lacked bank accounts into the financial system. They also spoke of the parallel tourism promotion targeting Bitcoin enthusiasts.
Western Australian government have banned unvaccinated parents from visiting their sick children in hospital… The main stream media are laughing on air about it and saying that they hope it’s the last straw to change these parents “philosophy”. The world needs to see this… pic.twitter.com/lCtbdrnzMy
Julian #Assange attending today’s hearing by video-link from H.M.P. Belmarsh. It is astounding how much he seems to have aged in the space of six months. Puffed-up face and tired eyes. Hair and beard growing unruly. Very sad state of affairs. – Tareq Haddad
Dr. Charles Hoffe has been practicing medicine for 28 years in a small, rural town in British Columbia, Canada, and recently gave a long interview. He has given about 900 doses of the Moderna experimental mRNA vaccine to his patients. So, contrary to some critics, he is no anti-vaccine doctor. The core problem he has seen are microscopic clots in his patients’ tiniest capillaries. He said, “Blood clots occurring at a capillary level. This has never before been seen. This is not a rare disease. This is an absolutely new phenomenon.” Most importantly, he has emphasized these micro-clots are too small to show up on CT scans, MRI, and other conventional tests, such as angiograms, and can only be detected using the D-dimer blood test, a standard test that indicates whether blood clots are being actively formed somewhere within a person’s vascular system.
Using the latter, he found that 62 percent of his patients injected with an mRNA shot were positive for clotting, not a small fraction that can be easily dismissed. He has explained that what is happening in bodies is that the spike proteins in the vaccine become “part of the cell wall of your vascular endothelium. This means that these cells which line your blood vessels, which are supposed to be smooth so that your blood flows smoothly, now have these little spikey bits sticking out. … when the platelet comes through the capillary, it suddenly hits all these COVID spikes, and it becomes absolutely inevitable that blood clots will form to block that vessel.” He made an important distinction: “The blood clots we hear about, which the media claim are very rare, are the big blood clots, which are the ones that cause strokes and show up on CT scans, MRI, etc.
“The clots I’m talking about are microscopic and too small to find on any scan. They can thus only be detected using the D-dimer test.” “The most alarming part of this is that there are some parts of the body like the brain, spinal cord, heart and lungs which cannot re-generate. When those tissues are damaged by blood clots, they are permanently damaged.” This is his pessimistic, scientific view: “blood vessels in their lungs are now blocked up. In turn, this causes the heart to need to work harder to try to keep up against a much greater resistance trying to get the blood through your lungs. This is called pulmonary artery hypertension – high blood pressure in the lungs because the blood simply cannot get through effectively. “People with this condition usually die of heart failure within a few short years.”
[..] The eminent Dr. Peter McCullough noted, “So, this is a very different type of blood clotting that we would see with major blood clots in the arteries and veins, for instance, blood clots involved in stroke and heart attack, blood clots involved in major blood vessels in the legs. This was a different type of clotting, and in fact, the Italians courageously did some autopsies and found micro blood clots in the lungs.” “And so, we understood in the end, the reason why the lungs fail is not because the virus is there. It is because micro blood clots are there. … When people can’t breathe, the problem is micro blood clotting in the lungs. … The spicule on the ball of the virus itself which damages blood vessels that causes blood clotting.”
Some of this stuff is plain weird. This guy admits his vaccine fails to do what it promised, but says it’s only because there’s a new variant. And herd immunity can only be reached with vaccines. Which is contradicted even by the WHO’s new distorted definition that now says: “Herd immunity is a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that can occur with some diseases when a sufficient percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through vaccination or previous infections..”
The Delta variant has changed the equation for achieving herd immunity, the developer of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has said. Speaking at a UK parliamentary meeting on Tuesday, Sir Andrew Pollard, a professor of pediatric infection and immunity at the University of Oxford, said that achieving herd immunity is “not a possibility” now that the Delta variant is circulating. “We know very clearly with coronavirus that this current variant, the Delta variant, will still infect people who have been vaccinated, and that does mean that anyone who’s still unvaccinated, at some point, will meet the virus,” Pollard said. He said it was unlikely that herd immunity will ever be reached, saying the next variant of the novel coronavirus will be “perhaps even better at transmitting in vaccinated populations.”
Some experts had hoped that herd immunity could be reached with COVID-19, as was the case with measles, which is also highly infectious. Many countries have achieved herd immunity with measles by vaccinating 95% of the population against it, such as the US, where endemic transmission ended in 2000. That is because once a person is vaccinated against measles, they cannot transmit the virus. With COVID-19, vaccines still fulfill their primary role: protecting against severe disease. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, vaccinated people who catch the Delta variant are 25 times less likely to have a severe case or die. The overwhelming majority who do catch it will have mild or no symptoms. But growing evidence suggests that, with the Delta variant, fully vaccinated people can still transmit the virus.
In a leaked report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made a surprising claim about the delta variant of the coronavirus: It “is as transmissible as: – Chicken Pox,” the agency wrote in a slideshow presentation leaked to The Washington Post on July 26. Chickenpox is one of the most contagious viruses known. Each individual can spread the virus to as many as “90% of the people close to that person,” the CDC reports. Is the delta variant that contagious as well? The short answer is no, says evolutionary biologist and biostatistician Tom Wenseleers at the University of Leuven in Belgium. “Yeah, I didn’t find the CDC’s statement entirely accurate,” says Wenseleers, who was one of the first scientists to formally calculate the transmission advantage of the alpha and delta variants over the original versions of SARS-CoV-2.
Nonetheless, delta is still highly transmissible, he adds. It’s one of the most contagious respiratory viruses that we know of, he says. Here’s why. When scientists measure a virus’s transmissibility, they often use what’s known as R0, or “R nought. ” It’s the number of people a sick person will infect when the entire population is vulnerable to the virus. “So it’s the virus’s potential of spreading, given ideal conditions for the virus, when no one has any immunity,” says computational biologist Karthik Gangavarapu at the Scripps Research Institute. For example, the flu has an R0 of about two. Each person infected with flu passes the virus on to two people on average. Some people will infect more than two people, and some will infect fewer. But over time, the average will be about two.
Chickenpox, on the other hand, is way more contagious, Gangavarapu says. Chickenpox has an R0 of about nine or 10. So each person with chickenpox infects about 10 other people on average. Outbreaks are explosive. For SARS-CoV-2, the R0 has actually risen over the course of the pandemic as the virus evolved. When the coronavirus first emerged in 2019, SARS-CoV-2 was slightly more contagious than flu, Gangavarapu says. “The initial COVID-19 strain had an R0 between two and three.” Then about a year later, the virus began to mutate quickly. The alpha variant emerged, likely in the U.K., and was more transmissible than the original strain. A few months later, the delta variant emerged, most likely in India. It was even more transmissible than alpha.
“For the delta variant, the R0 is now calculated at between six and seven,” Wenseleers says. So it’s two- to three-times as contagious as the original version of SARS-CoV-2 (R0 = 2 to 3) but less contagious than the chickenpox (R0 = 9 to 10).
Google translate from Argentina. Bit confusing, 4 different percentages in a few paragraphs. And I don’t get why they specifically focus on mortality (or even how), given that 99.9% of people survive.
“The primary objective in the community of the two populations was to evaluate mortality related to COVID-19. In this context, we studied 3,269 patients older than 18 years of the Ivermectin Group, and in the same period we compared it with a group of 18,149 patients who did not participate in the program. In the results of the mortality analysis in the Ivermectin Group, we found that it was 27.4% lower compared to the group of patients who did not use the drug. And when we evaluate the population over 40 years of age, the cut-off point that we established, the decrease was 33.4%. It means that, if confirmed with a randomized clinical study, 1 out of every 3 deaths would be avoided, it is a very strong figure, ”said Kohan.
The minister added that, in the Program, a dose of 0.6 milligrams per kilo of weight was used, in a period of 5 days. “The previous work carried out gave the clue that this was the correct dose in the first 5 days of transit of the disease with mild symptoms,” he added. Kohan. With the statistical data in hand, he considered it valuable that the study carried out in La Pampa was made known to the scientific community through the fastest possible channels. “We are going to publish it, we have discussed it with the working group, and we believe it is important that it be made available. And we are going to try to pave the way for rapid dissemination, so we first thought of making a preprint (in academic publication it is an original manuscript of an author before peer review) in a specialized journal.
We want others to discuss this issue and, as I said in June, we are not fans of Ivermectin but we found valuable elements in favor of the population. The statistics are there, and we also find more favorable statistics even in patients with comorbidities ”he added. Even under the encouragement of positive statistics, Kohan considered it important to be cautious with the dissemination of them. “Those who intervened and signed the consent are specifically detailed in specific files, those of the Control Group are not. For this reason, when you add the risk factors in people over 40 years of age, the mortality reduction is 44%, it is amazing, but you have to take it with great caution, “he said. Finally, he gave an account of the evaluations of intensive care hospitalizations and/or deaths “where we verified a 38% reduction in the patients of the Ivermectin Group” he concluded.
The graphs and data from the Johns Hopkins University CSSE database do not lie. On the contrary, they provide a compelling trail of truth that no one can dispute, not even the NIH, CDC, FDA, and WHO. Just as Galileo proved with his telescope that the earth was NOT the center of the Universe in 1616; today, the data from India shows that Ivermectin is effective, much more so than the vaccines. It not only prevents death, but it also prevents COVID infections, and it also is effective against the Delta Variant. In 1616, you could not make up the telescopic images of Jupiter and its orbiting moons, nor could you falsify the crescent-shaped images of Venus and Mercury. These proved that the earth was NOT the center of the Universe – a truth the Catholic Church could not allow.
Likewise, the massive drop in cases and deaths in India to almost nothing after the addition of Ivermectin proved the drug’s effectiveness. This is a truth that the NIH, CDC, and FDA cannot allow because it would endanger the vaccine policy. Never mind that Ivermectin would save more lives with much less risk, much less cost, and it would end the pandemic quickly. Let us look at the burgundy-colored graph of Uttar Pradesh. First, allow me to thank Juan Chamie, a highly-respected Cambridge-based data analyst, who created this graph from the JHU CSSE data. Uttar Pradesh is a state in India that contains 241 million people. The United States’ population is 331 million people. Therefore, Uttar Pradesh can be compared to the United States, with 2/3 of our population size.
This data shows how Ivermectin knocked their COVID-19 cases and deaths – which we know were Delta Variant – down to almost zero within weeks. A population comparable to the US went from about 35,000 cases and 350 deaths per day to nearly ZERO within weeks of adding Ivermectin to their protocol. By comparison, the United States is the lower graph. On August 5, here in the good ol’ USA, blessed with the glorious vaccines, we have 127,108 new cases per day and 574 new deaths. Let us look at the August 5 numbers from Uttar Pradesh with 2/3 of our population. Uttar Pradesh, using Ivermectin, had a total of 26 new cases and exactly THREE deaths. The US without Ivermectin has precisely 4889 times as many daily cases and 191 times as many deaths as Uttar Pradesh with Ivermectin.
Uttar Pradesh on Ivermectin: Population 240 Million [4.9% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 26
COVID Daily Deaths: 3
The United States off Ivermectin: Population 331 Million [50.5% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 127,108
COVID Daily Deaths: 574
Let us look at other Ivermectin using areas of India with numbers from August 5, 2021, compiled by the JHU CSSE: Delhi on Ivermectin: Population 31 Million [15% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 61
COVID Daily Deaths: 2
Uttarakhand on Ivermectin: Population 11.4 Million [15% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 24
COVID Daily Deaths: 0
Now let us look at an area of India that rejected Ivermectin. Tamil Nadu announced they would reject Ivermectin and instead follow the dubious USA-style guidance of using Remdesivir. Knowing this, you might expect their numbers to be closer to the US, with more cases and more deaths. You would be correct. Tamil Nadu went on to lead India in COVID-19 cases. Tamil Nadu off Ivermectin: Population 78.8 Million [6.9% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 1,997
COVID Daily Deaths: 33
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday updated its COVID-19 tracker for Florida over the past few days after the state’s department of health appealed publically for an update. The CDC told Fox News in an email on Tuesday that it was working with the state’s health department to correct the information. The state took to Twitter on Monday to ask the CDC to update its COVID-19 case tracker because it incorrectly combined “MULTIPLE days into one.” The Sunday total was the state’s worst ever, according to the CDC data. Multiple media organizations picked up on the number and the department corrected the stories online with some bite.
“Wrong again. The number of cases @CDCgov released for Florida today is incorrect,” it responded to a report in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “They combined MULTIPLE days into one. We anticipate CDC will correct the record.” The CDC initially reported 28,317 new cases on Sunday but adjusted that number to 19,584 by Tuesday. The health department said there were 15,319 cases on Sunday.
A top SAGE adviser to the UK government says that COVID lockdowns can no longer be justified and that measures to control the virus should instead be aimed at protecting the most vulnerable. Professor Andrew Hayward, a University College London epidemiologist, said that the days of disruptive restrictions imposed on everyone should end in favor of a more targeted approach. “I think as we generally move into an endemic rather than pandemic situation the potential harm that a virus can cause at a population level is much less,” Hayward told BBC Radio 4. “So you can’t really justify such broad population-wide control measures and we tend to target the control measures more to those who are most vulnerable,” he added.
“And so I think, not only in testing but in all sorts of forms of control, as we move into a situation where we’re coming to live with this virus forever, then we target the measures to the most vulnerable rather than having the more disruptive measures,” said the professor. Hayward’s view that we need to learn to live with the virus was echoed by signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration, in which 12,000 scientists asserted that the strategy should be centered on “focused protection,” not endless lockdowns. However, the UK government is still pursuing the idea of vaccine passports for some venues from September onwards while eliminating the option of negative COVID tests, despite the fact that fully vaccinated people can still catch and spread the virus.
The domestic passports have proven highly controversial in France, where police were seen earlier this week checking the medical papers of people sitting outside at cafes. As we previously highlighted, some lockdown advocates appear to be upset that the restrictions might not make a return, with a Guardian journalist writing about how he is “going to miss being locked down.”
A top US disease expert who was among the first to sound the alarm when the Covid pandemic first appeared in Wuhan has painted a bleak picture for millions of Australians hoping to be released from stay-at-home orders. Harvard-trained epidemiologist Dr Eric Feigl-Ding warned that even with 90 per cent of Australia’s population vaccinated – 10 per cent higher than the federal government’s reopening target of 80 per cent – it still won’t be enough to fend off the relentless cycles of lockdowns. Dr Feigl-Ding said in order to live with the highly infectious Indian Delta variant, life will need to remain in a perpetual state of restrictions including a ban on indoor dining and a move to premium face masks.
But despite the grim outlook, he’s still urging everyone to get the potentially life-saving jab as its proven to reduce hospitalisation rates by about 90 per cent. ‘Even for highly vaccinated countries, relying on vaccines alone is not a panacea to stop Delta,’ he told A Current Affair. ‘What that means is just relying on that single vaccine approach is very, very narrow minded. ‘We must do other layers in addition to waiting around for vaccines.’ He says life returning to normal is still a long way off and suggests a public health strategy ‘in between’ being locked down or fully opened is needed. This would include bans on indoor dining and cloth-made masks, improved ventilation standards and a nationwide vaccine passport system.
‘No one wants lockdowns… but if you don’t have these in place I guarantee you, you will be headed towards a lockdown because the cases will be surging so quickly and the hospital beds will be filling up,’ Dr Feigl-Ding said. ‘Without these measures you’re headed for disaster.’
As a number of politicians push for ‘vaccine passports’ amid fears that a new brand of medical apartheid is coming, a re-surfaced CDC publication advocating internment camps for the ‘high-risk’ has some people fearing the worst. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a paper that floated the totally not suspicious idea of relocating “high-risk” individuals into green zone “camps.” While the proposal didn’t attract much attention at the time, as draconian anti-Covid measures are beginning to ramp up, and basic human rights and liberties are coming under attack, the document has attracted newfound attention. And not without reason, it seems.
The very first line of the document discusses the implementation of a “shielding approach in humanitarian settings… focused on camps, displaced populations and low-resource settings.” Essentially, and this will be important later on, ‘humanitarian settings’ is just another way of saying ‘camps’. Many people are quick to associate the idea of camps with the containment of refugees, for example, or illegal aliens who have breached the border. Yet the only time the word ‘refugee’ is mentioned in the paper is in reference to a camp in Kenya. At the same time, ‘camp’ and ‘camps’ are referred to about 20 times. There is another ambiguous thing about this document, and that involves its description of “high-risk” individuals and the “general population.”
The paper reads: “In most humanitarian settings [i.e. camps], older population groups make up a small percentage of the total population. For this reason, the shielding approach suggests physically separating high-risk individuals from the general population to prioritize the use of the limited available resources and avoid implementing long-term containment measures among the general population.” In other words, the CDC is saying that older people being held in camps (humanitarian settings), because they are in the ‘high-risk’ category, should be separated from the ‘general population’ in these facilities so as to reduce the ‘containment measures’. OK, fine. But the document never explains who makes up the general population inside the camps, and why these ‘low-risk’ individuals are being held in these humanitarian ‘green zones’ in the first place.
Fear is the primary tool of authoritarians. It mentally disarms the population. We know about the desire to physically disarm the population, by trying to take away guns. Well, fear is the tactic for mental disarmament. When one is afraid, one makes bad decisions. One doesn’t think things through. One tends to act impulsively in an attempt remove immediate dissatisfaction. One tends not to question, but blindly obey. In a state of fear, one may submit and agree that 2+2=5; only to afterwards be filled with regret at doing such a stupid thing. Fear is meant to break your individual will. Your will to say the word “NO” stands in the way of every authoritarian scheme. The authoritarian needs you to say “YES,” even if you don’t really believe it. The authoritarian will pull all the levers available, and move all the pieces on the board to corner you, all with the goal of getting you to say “YES.”
Mass propaganda is designed to get you to say “YES”. Everywhere you look, you see the same exact message. “Say YES”…”Say YES”…”Say YES”… Slapping the mask on your face provided two wins for authoritarians: First, you said “YES” to allowing authoritarians to dress you when you left your house. Second, it conditioned you to realize that all others had their wills broken too. Everyone’s face was now dressed up, and hidden from view. What a powerful visual to break down your will. Saying “YES” to unprecedented “Lockdowns” and isolation has led to massive mental and physical illnesses that will reverberate through the ages, and will be talked about for the rest of our lives, much in the same way that the World Wars and Great Depression are talked about.
Now, the levers are being pulled, and pieces are being maneuvered for the grand slam: Saying “YES” to having foreign chemicals injected into your body, even if you don’t want them and don’t need them. Medical treatments, especially those that will be with you and inside of your body for the rest of your life, should never (EVER) be mandatory. Most people would agree with this in a heartbeat. Yet, with a constant diet of fear, the goal is to get you to say “YES.” Saying “YES” to this not only breaks your will, but surrenders your sovereignty over the one (and only) body that you will ever have. Allow this, even a single time, and saying “NO” to future mandated injections will be neutralized. It’s too late. Whatever injections are decreed, your body will always be at the mercy of other human beings.
One word from you puts an end to this: “NO.” One word keeps your sacred will intact: “NO.” One word can possibly and literally save your life: “NO!”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is giving up the powerful job he’s dedicated most of his life to keeping within his family, but his resignation won’t end a bevy of pending investigations into him and his administration. No fewer than five district attorneys have made preliminary inquiries into Cuomo’s alleged sexual harassment detailed in the scathing, 165-page report last week from Attorney General Letitia James’ office that ultimately led to the governor’s announcement Tuesday that he will resign in two weeks. That includes Albany County District Attorney David Soares, who is in the midst of a criminal investigation into claims by a Cuomo executive assistant who says the governor groped her breast at the Executive Mansion last year.
There’s also a pending investigation by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn who are looking into the Cuomo administration’s handling of COVID-19 in nursing homes and its withholding of certain death data at the height of the pandemic last year. And that’s not all. James is still looking into whether Cuomo illegally used state resources to pen his book on the COVID-19 crisis, for which he is due to be paid $5.1 million. And the Assembly’s impeachment inquiry continues on, though its immediate future is no longer clear. The investigations and litigation could enmesh Cuomo for months or years after his scheduled departure from public office in two weeks. “The inquiry into criminal conduct in our jurisdiction remains open and pending,” Soares spokesperson Cecilia Walsh said Tuesday, just after Cuomo announced his pending resignation.
[..] Separately, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York have subpoenaed material related to Cuomo’s recent memoir as part of an investigation of the state’s handling of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes on Cuomo’s watch, The Wall Street Journal reported in June. [..] James, meanwhile, told reporters last week that her investigation into Cuomo’s book deal remains underway. “The investigation with respect to the book and whether or not public resources were utilized is ongoing and it’s separate and apart from this investigation,” she said Aug. 3. The Assembly Judiciary Committee, which has been investigating various Cuomo-related issues to determine whether to impeach the governor, is scheduled to meet Monday.
Lawmakers had been moving toward impeaching the governor, but Cuomo’s resignation could change their plans. The Assembly could still pursue an impeachment that could prevent Cuomo from running for state office again. Such an endeavor, however, would cost millions of dollars in taxpayer money, which Cuomo himself highlighted during his resignation speech. “It will consume government,” Cuomo said of his potential impeachment. “It will cost taxpayers millions of dollars. It will brutalize people.”
The presence of judges makes you think this is about law. It is about politics. No matter that the key witness, without whom there would be no case, says he made it all up. No matter that Julian helping Manning crack something was a blatant lie. Those things have become part of the case, accepted as facts.
Yesterday was only about whether his two kids will prevent him from suiciding. As if this should ever have been allowed to become about that.
There have been people walking around with signs for a decade, and writing righteous texts on social media. When will they realize this is no use? As a society, we will never process the death through torture of our bravest and smartest. And we don’t deserve to. We deserve to be forced to explain this to our grandchildren.
The High Court in London has allowed the US to challenge a psychiatric evaluation of Julian Assange, which was key in an earlier court ruling refusing Washington’s request to extradite him for trial. Wednesday’s appeal proceeding is the latest development in the continuing effort by the US to extradite Assange to stand trial on American soil for alleged computer-related crimes. A British judge refused the request in January on humanitarian grounds, ruling that there was a high risk of Assange taking his own life if she agreed to his extradition. Testimonies by psychiatrist Michael Kopelman about the poor state of the Australian’s mental health were crucial in the case. The US was allowed to challenge the ruling of the District Court on three points and wanted to pursue two further arguments.
One of their extra lines of attack, which was granted by Lord Justice Tim Holroyde, was to seek the dismissal of Kopelman’s testimonies, due to the fact that he initially concealed Assange’s relationship with Stella Moris and the fact that they had two children together. Clair Dobbin, who represents the US side, argued that the professor had misled the court and that his opinion about Assange’s state of mind should have been dismissed by Judge Vanessa Baraitser. The name of Assange’s partner was not public at the time of Kopelman’s initial testimony, but it became known before the ruling was passed. The expert witness for the defense did report Assange’s fatherhood, and said when pressured by the US side during the extradition hearings that he didn’t disclose Moris’ identity out of respect for her privacy.
Judge Baraitser decided when rejecting the extradition request that although Kopelman did mislead the court, he didn’t fail in his role as an impartial witness. Edward Fitzgerald, who represents Assange, argued against the challenge, saying concern for family safety was natural in his situation. He recalled that a Spanish private security firm hired to spy on Assange allegedly snatched a diaper from his baby son to test his DNA and identify the child’s parents. The baby boy was regularly brought by an associate of Assange to visit him at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was staying for seven years to avoid extradition proceedings. The firm is suspected to have worked on behalf of the US government, and its alleged activities were cited extensively before Judge Baraitser.
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Inflation, right? So what’s going to make the money flow?
I recently had the privilege of speaking with @maxkeiser about #Inflation, #Stocks, and #Gold. Despite the evidence, nobody wants to accept our new inflationary reality. The inevitable intrusion of reality will be vicious.
“I think #JulianAssange will walk free in October because the case is so overwhelming in his favour in terms of real law & natural justice…& if doesn’t the whole system is a disgrace.” @johnpilger on his belief that the extradition case against will #Assange fail. #AssangeCasepic.twitter.com/BYQsnWBlbG
