Jan 192023
 
 January 19, 2023  Posted by at 9:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  88 Responses »


Theo van Doesburg Counter-Construction 1923

 

US May Assist Ukrainian Strikes On Crimea – NYT (RT)
NATO Inflates Russia Threat To Justify Its Existence – Chinese Media (TASS)
Putin: Victory In Ukraine Is “Unavoidable” (ZH)
West Expects Ukraine To ‘Succeed On The Battlefield’ – Blinken (TASS)
‘Fragmented World’ Sleepwalks Into World War III (Escobar)
West ‘Tired’ Of Ukraine Situation – Poland (RT)
Lavrov Lambasts Zelensky’s ‘Absurd’ Ideas Of How To Settle Conflict (TASS)
Russia Posts Record Current Account Surplus (RT)
Saudi Arabia Ready To Ditch Dollar In Trade – Finance Minister (RT)
500 Advertisers Paused Spending At Twitter, Daily Revenue Plunges 40% (ZH)
Microsoft Announces Mass Layoffs (RT)
John Kerry Fuels Davos Controversy With ‘ET’ Speech (RT)
Against the Tide (Jim Kunstler)
The Biden Scam Unravels (Denninger)
Hunter Biden Lived In Classified Doc House While Raking In Chinese Millions (ZH)
After 4 Shots Covid Jabs Sharply Reduced Immune Function In Mice (Berenson)
Jacinda Ardern Resigns As New Zealand’s Prime Minister (PM)

 

 

 

 

Arestovich

 

 

 

 

Tucker FAA
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615605196280799235

 

 

 

 

All Vaccinated Will Die Soon
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615160992371019782

 

 

What?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615754513994125314

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..willingness to help Ukraine “go on the offense – including targeting Crimea.”

US May Assist Ukrainian Strikes On Crimea – NYT (RT)

The US government is weighing whether to supply Ukraine with the capability to attack the strategically important Crimean Peninsula, according to the New York Times. The discussions highlight a gradual shift among US officials toward more brazen support for Kiev, even as Washington insists it does not seek confrontation with Moscow. Following months of hesitation, the White House is now warming up to the idea that Ukraine may “need the power” for strikes deep inside Russian territory, namely its military stronghold in Crimea, the Times reported on Wednesday, citing several unnamed US officials.

“American officials are discussing with their Ukrainian counterparts the use of American-supplied weapons, from HIMARS rocket systems to Bradley fighting vehicles, to possibly target … Crimea,” the outlet said, adding that Washington “has come to believe that if the Ukrainian military can show Russia that its control of Crimea can be threatened, that would strengthen Kiev’s position in any future negotiations.” Despite Moscow’s heavy fortifications on the peninsula, which hosts Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and other military bases, Crimea remains a “major focus” of Ukrainian battleplans, according to the Times. It is unclear exactly how Washington hopes to assist attacks on the region, but the outlet suggested the decision to supply Kiev with Bradley infantry fighting vehicles showed willingness to help Ukraine “go on the offense – including targeting Crimea.”

Alongside troop transports provided by France and Germany, the military vehicles “could be the vanguard of an armored force that Ukraine could employ in a counteroffensive this winter or spring,” unnamed “government and independent analysts” told the Times. However, even as the White House considers supporting attacks on Russian soil, President Joe Biden continues to refuse Ukrainian requests for longer-range missiles and heavy battle tanks that could be used in a future offensive. He has previously warned that such aid could provoke direct hostilities with Moscow and even kick off a nuclear war, though such concerns appear to be slowly waning as the conflict drags on. “The fear of escalation has changed since the beginning,” an unnamed US defense source told a British newspaper last month, suggesting the Pentagon had “given a tacit endorsement of Ukraine’s long-range attacks on targets inside Russia.”

While State Department spokesman Ned Price insisted on Wednesday that the US is not placing any “limits” on Ukrainian strikes or “making targeting decisions” on Kiev’s behalf, the latest discussions at the White House may indicate a shift in opinion among some officials. Historically a Russian territory from the late 18th century until its transfer to Ukraine under Soviet authorities in 1954, Crimea held a referendum to reunify with Russia following the Euromaidan coup of 2014. Kiev and its Western allies have refused to recognize the vote, however, and say the peninsula is still rightfully Ukrainian land, with President Vladimir Zelensky reiterating hopes for the “reconquest” of the region last month.

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“Without the function of dealing with such a so-called threat as Russia, NATO would have no use at all…”

NATO Inflates Russia Threat To Justify Its Existence – Chinese Media (TASS)

NATO is trying to inflate the so-called Russia threat to justify its existence, China’s Global Times newspaper said in an editorial on Wednesday. “Without the function of dealing with such a so-called threat as Russia, NATO would have no use at all. Therefore, the NATO chief needs to consider how to prolong the alliance’s life. NATO finds a way to justify its existence by setting up targets, including Russia,” the editorial reads. “But it is impossible for the West as a whole to cut off relations with Russia completely. Russia is an important pole in the multipolar world that the Western world cannot avoid or ignore,” the paper noted.


“If the West and Russia continue to fall into an abnormal state of relations, such as confrontation and conflict, Europe, which is closely connected with Russia, will suffer the most. What’s more, European countries are not monolithic. As large-scale military conflicts in Ukraine ends and sporadic conflicts occur, some European countries may relax sanctions against Russia and develop their bilateral relations, because they know that continuing to contain Russia may undermine their interests, even more than Russia’s,” the editorial added. “The Russia-Ukraine conflict is not a confrontation between the West and Russia, but simply between Washington-led NATO and Moscow,” the newspaper emphasized.

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“Putin said once that his mother was declared dead and was about to be taken for burial when his father, who had just come home on a visit from the frontlines, managed to ward off a funeral team at the last moment and helped her recover.”

Putin: Victory In Ukraine Is “Unavoidable” (ZH)

In a highly anticipated speech Wednesday on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Red Army breaking the Nazi siege of St. Petersburg (during Soviet times: Leningrad) on Jan. 18, 1943, President Vladimir Putin said that victory in Ukraine is “unavoidable”. Addressing military veterans, Putin said, “Large-scale combat operations involving heavy weapons, artillery, tanks and aircraft haven’t stopped in Donbas since 2014.” He added: “All that we are doing today as part of the special military operation is an attempt to stop this war. This is the meaning of our operation — protecting people who live on those territories.” The talk was filled with the usual themes he’s emphasized since the February invasion, but absent was what many pundits and officials in the West were anticipating when the speech was first unveiled a day ago: formal declaration of war.

But the full mobilization has yet to come; instead, he again reviewed Moscow’s perspective of the causes underlying the conflict. He asserted that Russia attempted to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the years-running war in Donbas, in order to prevent the need to send troops, but emphasized “we were just duped and cheated” by Ukraine and the West. He also said that Russia had a duty to protect the Russian-speakers of eastern Ukraine. The Zelensky government has of late cracked down even harder on Russian culture, placing severe restrictions on Russian books and music, and even arresting Ukrainian Orthodox clerics that maintain unity with the Moscow Patriarchate church.

The Associated Press references some interesting background regarding Putin’s personal family history, which makes the West’s ‘Putler’ references hollow and shallow, given that the Nazi siege of Leningrad (Petersburg) directly impacted Putin’s family: “Putin on Wednesday laid a wreath at the city’s Piskaryov memorial cemetery, where 420,000 civilian victims of the siege and 70,000 Soviet soldiers were buried. He also put flowers in a section where his brother, who died as a child during the siege, was buried in a mass grave.” Putin said once that his mother was declared dead and was about to be taken for burial when his father, who had just come home on a visit from the frontlines, managed to ward off a funeral team at the last moment and helped her recover.

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I don’t think he thinks that.

West Expects Ukraine To ‘Succeed On The Battlefield’ – Blinken (TASS)

Western countries are adapting their military aid to Kiev and expect Ukraine to “succeed on the battlefield,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a joint press conference with UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly on Tuesday.According to him, Ukraine has been “strongly supported by our two countries and many other countries.” “We continue to adapt along the way,” the US top diplomat said. “The bottom line is we are determined to make sure that Ukraine has what it needs to succeed on the battlefield,” he asserted. As Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine evolved, so did Western military aid to Kiev, according to Blinken. He stressed that it started “months before the Russian aggression.”


“If you look at the trajectory from Stingers, to Javelins, to HIMARS, to Bradley Fighting Vehicles, to Patriot missile batteries, we have continuously provided what Ukraine needs,” the diplomat said. According to his estimates, Kiev has already received “some $25 billion in security assistance to Ukraine over less than a year.” “I would anticipate that you’ll hear more announcements in the days to come,” he added. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other Russian officials have repeatedly noted the danger of Western weapon supplies to Ukraine ending up in other regions. Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov cautioned that the militarization of Ukraine by the West directly threatens European and global security.

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“The resistance of Russia’s economy is leading the imperial American system to the precipice. Nobody had foreseen that the Russian economy would hold facing NATO’s ‘economic power’”

‘Fragmented World’ Sleepwalks Into World War III (Escobar)

Emmanuel Todd was not at Davos. But it was the French anthropologist, historian, demographer and geopolitical analyst who ended up ruffling all the appropriate feathers across the collective West these past few days with a fascinating anthropological object: a reality-based interview. Todd spoke to Le Figaro – the newspaper of choice of the French establishment and haute bourgeoisie. The interview was published last Friday on page 22, sandwiched between proverbial Russophobic screeds and with an extremely brief mention on the bottom of the front page. So people really had to work hard to find it.

Todd joked that he has the – absurd – reputation of a “rebel destroy” in France, while in Japan he’s respected, featured in mainstream media, and his books are published with great success, including the latest (over 100,000 copies sold): “The Third World War Has Already Started”. Significantly, this Japanese best seller does not exist in French, considering the whole Paris-based publishing industry toes the EU/NATO line on Ukraine. The fact that Todd gets several things right is a minor miracle in the current, abysmally myopic European intellectual landscape (there are other analysts especially in Italy and Germany, but they carry much less weight than Todd). So here’s Todd’s concise Greatest Hits.

– A new World War is on: By “switching from a limited territorial war to a global economic clash, between the collective West on one side and Russia linked to China on the other side, this became a World War”.
– The Kremlin, says Todd, made a mistake, calculating that a decomposed Ukraine society would collapse right away. Of course he does not get into detail on how Ukraine had been weaponized to the hilt by the NATO military alliance.
– Todd is spot on when he stresses how Germany and France had become minor partners at NATO and were not aware of what was being plotted in Ukraine militarily: “They did not know that the Americans, British and Poles could allow Ukraine to fight an extended war. NATO’s fundamental axis now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.”
– Todd’s major give away is a killer: “The resistance of Russia’s economy is leading the imperial American system to the precipice. Nobody had foreseen that the Russian economy would hold facing NATO’s ‘economic power’”.

– Consequently, “monetary and financial American controls over the world may collapse, and with them the possibility for the US of financing for nothing their enormous trade deficit”.
– And that’s why “we are in an endless war, in a clash where the conclusion is the collapse of one or the other.”
– On China, Todd might sound like a more pugnacious version of Liu He at Davos: “That’s the fundamental dilemma of the American economy: it cannot face Chinese competition without importing qualified Chinese work force.”
– As for the Russian economy, “it does accept market rules, but with an important role for the state, and it keeps the flexibility of forming engineers that allow adaptations, industrial and military.”

– And that bring us, once again, to globalization, in a manner that Davos roundtables were incapable of understanding: “We have delocalized so much of our industrial activity that we don’t know whether our war production may be sustained”.
– On a more erudite interpretation of that “clash of civilizations” fallacy, Todd goes for soft power and comes up with a startling conclusion: “On 75 percent of the planet, the organization of parenthood was patrilineal, and that’s why we may identify a strong understanding of the Russian position. For the collective non-West, Russia affirms a reassuring moral conservatism.”
– So what Moscow has been able to pull off is to “reposition itself as the archetype of a big power, not only “anti-colonialist” but also patrilineal and conservative in terms of traditional mores.”

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“Support for Ukraine only ranked sixth among Democrats and tenth among Republicans.”

West ‘Tired’ Of Ukraine Situation – Poland (RT)

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Wednesday that Ukraine’s backers seem to be growing “a little tired” and showing less “emotional” involvement in the ongoing conflict, despite a steady flow of Western weaponry and other aid to Kiev and unprecedented economic pressure on Moscow. “A few months ago, the discussions were on a different emotional level – and the interest was different,” Morawiecki said in an interview with the state broadcaster TVP, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos. “The West, the free world, is a little tired and would like to live a normal life,” Morawiecki claimed. “Today, I see this very clearly and I want to warn world leaders, because Russia is patient and looks to tighten its grip on Ukraine in the long term.”

“Everyone would like to live a normal life, but if Ukraine falls, will it be a normal life?” he argued, adding that “fortunately” he sees a “broad consensus” on the issue of Ukraine among the Western leaders in Davos. After Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine last February, the US and its allies imposed unprecedented sanctions on Moscow, freezing half its gold and foreign currency reserves and targeting Russian energy exports. The restrictions, however, caused energy prices and living costs to surge, prompting multiple protests across Europe over the past year. Ukrainian officials pledged to fight until their forces seized control of all the territory the country considers its own, while the leaders in Washington and the EU have vowed to help for as long as it takes.

However, according to this week’s opinion poll, roughly half of the people in nine EU nations favor a swift end to the armed conflict in Ukraine, even if it means Kiev would have to relinquish some territory. Americans also don’t consider the ongoing conflict as their top priority, according to a Morning Consult poll made public in December. Democrats cared more about things like climate change and preventing another global pandemic, while Republicans wished the government would focus on immigration, terrorism and drug trafficking. Support for Ukraine only ranked sixth among Democrats and tenth among Republicans.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said in July that helping his country should be more important for Americans than domestic concerns, claiming that inflation and coronavirus are “nothing” compared to Ukraine’s struggle, and urging Americans to make sacrifices and support aid for Kiev “until we win.” Since the beginning of the conflict, Poland has become a key hub for the transfer of military aid to Ukraine. Addressing the WEF on Wednesday, Polish President Andrzej Duda pleaded for more deliveries of heavy weapons and ammunition to Ukraine, saying the country may not continue to exist otherwise.

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“..food security, energy security, biological security, withdrawal of Russian troops from everywhere, Russia’s repentance, tribunal and condemnation..”

Lavrov Lambasts Zelensky’s ‘Absurd’ Ideas Of How To Settle Conflict (TASS)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is putting forward absurd ideas of how to handle the conflict, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a press conference devoted to Russian diplomacy in 2022 on Wednesday. “Zelensky puts forward completely absurd initiatives, like a ten-point plan, where everything is piled up – food security, energy security, biological security, withdrawal of Russian troops from everywhere, Russia’s repentance, tribunal and condemnation,” Lavrov said. Lavrov stressed that negotiations with Zelensky were out of the question. “At least because he legally forbade negotiations with the Russian government,” he recalled.


While addressing the G20 summit in mid-November by video link, Zelensky said that Kiev had its own ten-point “peace plan.” He mentioned nuclear, food and energy security, the exchange of “held persons” according to the “all-for-all” formula, and the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Once again Zelensky recalled that Kiev was insisting on international security guarantees and had developed a draft of the corresponding document. The Ukrainian leader added that Kiev wished to see the establishment of an international mechanism to compensate for Ukraine’s losses from hostilities at the expense of Russian assets.

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“..severe sanctions on Russia that will plunge the Russian economy into recession for decades..”

Russia Posts Record Current Account Surplus (RT)

Russia’s current account surplus almost doubled last year and hit a record high amid rising global energy prices and despite the imposition of Western sanctions, the country’s central bank reported on Tuesday. The current account – which measures the difference between outgoing funds and money coming into the country through trade, investment and transfers – grew by almost 86% year-on-year in 2022 to $227.4 billion, the regulator’s preliminary data showed. The central bank said soaring commodity prices throughout 2022 had helped push the current account balance higher, while imports slowly recovered in the second half of the year.


“The value of imports of goods and services was reduced,” the regulator said. “Nevertheless, the decline in imports observed in the first half of 2022 compared to last year’s indicator was replaced by their gradual recovery.” Russia’s foreign trade surplus in goods and services also surged by 66% from $170.1 billion in 2021 to $282.3 billion last year, reaching a historic maximum for the second straight year. It comes as Moscow has rerouted the bulk of its trade flows eastwards after Western sanctions largely disrupted supply chains with European markets. Trade between Russia and China soared by nearly a third in 2022 to over $190 billion, according to China’s customs data.

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Yes, the riyal is still pegged to the dollar.

Saudi Arabia Ready To Ditch Dollar In Trade – Finance Minister (RT)

Saudi Arabia is ready to discuss trading in currencies other than the US dollar, according to the Kingdom’s finance minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan, as cited by Bloomberg. Al-Jadaan’s comments come a month after China’s President Xi Jinping said that Beijing is ready to make energy purchases in yuan instead of the US dollar in trade exchanges with members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). China’s leader highlighted the necessity of the shift while speaking at a Chinese-Arab summit hosted by Saudi Arabia earlier this week. “There are no issues with discussing how we settle our trade arrangements, whether it is in US dollar, in euro or in Saudi riyal,” Al-Jadaan said on Tuesday during an interview with Bloomberg in Davos, Switzerland. The oil-rich kingdom is seeking to deepen its ties with vital trade partners, including China.


The readiness for talks on the issue expressed by Riyadh may signal that the world’s biggest oil exporter is open to diversifying away from the US dollar after decades of pricing crude exports in the US currency. The riyal, the Saudi national currency, has been pegged to the greenback, too. The trend towards the shift to national currencies that is recently being observed among the major participants in global trade chains is partially attributed to the policies of secondary sanctions that Washington is pursuing. Initially, the steps towards ditching the US currency in trade, particularly in the energy sector, were intensified in the wake of the sweeping sanctions introduced by Western nations against Russia, one of the world’s major energy producers and exporters, over the military operation in Ukraine.

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I think they’ll be okay.

500 Advertisers Paused Spending At Twitter, Daily Revenue Plunges 40% (ZH)

Questions are swirling about the health of Twitter Inc.’s ad business. Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has faced an exodus of executives and advertisers. Nearly three months as ‘Chief Twit,’ Musk’s social media platform might be experiencing a significant decline in daily ad revenue and hundreds of top advertisers paused spending. The Information reported that a senior Twitter manager told staff on Tuesday that more than 500 of Twitter’s top advertisers have paused spending since Musk bought the company on October 27.

An alarming crisis is festering in the company’s core ads business. Siddharth Rao, a manager supervising the engineers working on Twitter’s ad business, also told employees that daily revenue plunged 40% versus the same day a year ago, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. “While Musk plans to diversify Twitter’s revenue away from ads in the long run, continued deterioration of that business will make it harder for the company to break even on a free cash flow basis in 2023 as Musk predicted it would three weeks ago,” The Information said. Musk reduced the company’s headcount by thousands of employees to supplement sliding ad revenue and quickly pushed a paid verification subscription for users.

However, Axios reported under Musk’s leadership, the social media company has secured content sponsorship deals with three dozen news outlets, media companies, and sports leagues. “This year, almost all of the major sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, NASCAR, PGA Tour and more, plan to run content deals on Twitter around regular season games and tentpole events, like March Madness, NBA Playoffs and the Super Bowl, according to the schedule seen by Axios.” Twitter makes most of its money through advertising and now user subscriptions. It remains to be seen if Musk’s radical overhaul of the social media platform will be successful.

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It’s not just Twitter.

Microsoft Announces Mass Layoffs (RT)

Microsoft announced on Wednesday it will eliminate 10,000 jobs worldwide, almost 5% of its workforce, and take a $1.2-billion charge as global growth is slowing down. In a note to employees seen by Reuters, the company’s chief executive Satya Nadella said the layoffs would conclude by the end of March, with notifications beginning Wednesday. According to the CEO, the company was grappling with a slump in the personal computer market as customers that were accelerating their spending on digital technology during the pandemic are now trying to “optimize their digital spend to do more with less.”


“We’re also seeing organizations in every industry and geography exercise caution as some parts of the world are in a recession and other parts are anticipating one,” Nadella wrote. He added, however, that Microsoft will continue to hire in key strategic areas, emphasizing the importance of building a “new computer platform” using advances in artificial intelligence. Microsoft’s jobs-cut announcement follows similar ones from other big tech companies amid rising concerns of a global slowdown. Amazon said earlier it will be slashing about 18,000 positions while Facebook parent Meta is laying off 11,000, about 13% of its workforce. Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk has recently also slashed the company’s workforce.

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Delusions of grandeur. They can be dangerous.

John Kerry Fuels Davos Controversy With ‘ET’ Speech (RT)

US climate envoy John Kerry has drawn widespread mockery for his speech to the World Economic Forum, in which he sought to portray the people gathered there as wise saviors of the world. “When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we – a select group of human beings, because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives – are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet,” Kerry told a WEF panel on Tuesday. “I mean, it’s so almost extraterrestrial to think about ‘saving the planet.’ If you say that to most people, most people think you’re just a crazy, tree-hugging, lefty liberal, you know, do-gooder, or whatever, and there’s no relationship. But really, that’s where we are,” he added.

Later in the speech, Kerry lamented that “allegedly wise adult human beings” ignored the science, mathematics and physics of climate change, and said he was certain the world will “get to a low-carbon, no-carbon economy” because “we have to.” Kerry lost the 2004 US presidential election but went on to be secretary of state during Barack Obama’s second presidential term, taking over from Hillary Clinton. He returned to Washington in 2021 as President Joe Biden’s “climate change czar.”While some critics on social media pointed out that Kerry preaches carbon caps while jetting around the world on a private jet, others zeroed in on his “extraterrestrial” remarks about a select few. “Who are you going to sacrifice to save the planet,” tweeted psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson, “and do you think and how will you ensure that they have any say in the matter?”

“I always knew they were aliens,” joked Timcast co-host Luke Rudkowski. Others, like conservative radio host Vince Coglianese, compared the Davos event to a summit of cartoon supervillains. “WEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want,” billionaire Elon Musk commented on the gathering. The 2023 WEF summit is reportedly being attended by 2,700 participants, including more than 600 global CEOs, 116 billionaires and over 50 world leaders.Kerry’s speech about a “touched” few special leaders wasn’t the only controversy at this year’s gathering in the Swiss Alps. Someone at the WEF also decided it was a good idea to have former CNN employee Brian Stelter host a panel on “Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation,” at which European Commission VP Vera Jourova asserted the US will “soon” have laws against “hate speech,” just like the EU.

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“The payments per patient ranged wildly, state by state from $18,000 (NJ) to a whopping $471,000 (WVa). Why was that?”

Against the Tide (Jim Kunstler)

Former US attorney and chief-of-staff to the SecDef, Kash Patel, had a good idea: start with the latest insult to the country. Haul in the newly-appointed special counsel assigned to the “Joe Biden” purloined document scandal. His name is Robert Hur. He was a top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the height of RussiaGate, and liaison to the Robert Mueller operation. Mr. Hur participated in filing falsified warrants based on Steele Dossier nonsense to the FISA court. He should have been accountable for that. He’s not fit to serve as any sort of legal arbiter in a national scandal. He was not appointed to shed any light on the issue, but to bury it under a load of procedural horse-shit, in particular, the dodge that questions about “ongoing investigations” can’t be answered. Let’s disarm that weapon from the get-go. And why not appoint Mr. Patel chief counsel to the Weaponization of Government Committee?

Another person who must answer right away is CDC Director Rochelle Walensky because her agency is still aggressively pushing mRNA shots strongly implicated in causing injury and death among the American people. There are no more obvious weapons against the people than these deadly products retailed by Pfizer and Moderna. The government’s “vaccination” crusade has to stop ASAP. Not one more dose of the stuff should be given to anybody. An audit needs to be run on the CDC’s data base to determine exactly how it was manipulated to hide the facts about “vaccine” injuries and deaths. The public should also hear why Ms. Walensky’s CDC promoted “incentive payments” to hospitals for each patient who died testing positive for Covid-19 (not necessarily from Covid-19). The payments per patient ranged wildly, state by state from $18,000 (NJ) to a whopping $471,000 (WVa). Why was that?

The payments amounted to a bonanza for hospital administrators, who were incentivized not only to misattribute cause-of-death — the proverbial motorcycle crash victim who tests positive — but to let people die on ventilators. The Weaponization of Government Committee might also subpoena FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf and his two predecessors during the Covid-19 event, Janet Woodcock and Stephen Hahn. The country needs to hear what they knew about the operation that produced the “vaccines” with such astonishing speed — as if these products were somehow in development before Covid-19 even appeared on the scene. They also need to answer about the shenanigans behind the following: the fudged and expedited “vaccine” trials; the demonization and virtual outlawing of existing safe and effective FDA-approved drugs for early treatment, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and other meds; the promotion of toxic remdesivir as a primary therapy for C-19; and the initiation and extension (for three years) of an emergency use authorization that shielded the drug companies from liability while injuries and deaths mounted.

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Puzzled by this:

Hunter also claimed that said house was owned by him, but the tax and deed records say otherwise.

The Biden Scam Unravels (Denninger)

Well now the classified document scandal has really blown up in Biden’s face. But even more-intriguing is that there is an apparent set of evidence of both hinky dealing and intentional cover-up to be found in Biden’s tax returns and the revelation that Hunter was paying Joe $50,000 a month to rent a house that was worth a couple of million. Hunter also claimed that said house was owned by him, but the tax and deed records say otherwise. That, however, is Hunter’s problem — not Joe’s. Joe’s tax return not only shows the property tax paid on the house it also deducts mortgage interest. It’s his house both by deed and by who’s covering the mandatory bills. Joe’s tax returns from the subject year shows business income from pass-throughs (two S corps) which is perfectly legal.

The tax returns do not show income in that classification from other sources; ergo, said “rental” has to be inside one of those two corporations or there is a serious felony involved, because that would be $600,000 of undeclared (and untaxed) income. Line 17 of Schedule 1 shows this and ties back from Schedule E, as it must. The other “business income or loss” from Schedule C is inconsequential in amount. But this leads to a very serious question: There’s nothing wrong with an S corp owning property but does it not have to be titled into the corporation? It wasn’t; at all times material the house was owned by Jill and Joe Biden in their personal capacity. It was not in a trust of some sort nor was it retitled into an S-corp as there’s no record of either.

That seems rather hinky but perhaps not. In any event rental property is very different than a personal residence in that with rental property there’s depreciation and all other manner of things you can deduct that isn’t true for a personal residence — but if you convert it back to a personal residence that gets recaptured which is something I’ve warned other people to be careful of. So let’s see the records on those two S-Corps that the Bidens declared and paid taxes on during that year. Is the rental income from Hunter in there, and if so, how does the S-Corp, which I remind as a corporation must keep formal books of account and not lie in any material respect account for income from an asset it does not own?

If the rental income isn’t in those two S-Corps then either it never existed or Joe and Jill ripped off the government and committed tax fraud on the $600,000 paid by Hunter to Joe that is not declared anywhere in their state or federal tax returns. In any event someone is hiding something in there. Whether this is more confabulation of a drug-addled Hunter or was disclosure of “10% for the big guy” kicked back to his father under the table and either improperly buried in an S-Corp “profit” that never owned the asset in question and thus can’t do that or Joe and Jill got $600,000 worth of undeclared income and didn’t pay taxes on it is now the question that demands an answer.

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“..the same media which suggested the Trumps were Russian operatives based on a hoax – are virtually silent at actual risks to national security posed by the Biden family.”

Hunter Biden Lived In Classified Doc House While Raking In Chinese Millions (ZH)

[..] Second, the Washington Free Beacon reports that photos from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop place him at the Wilmington House in July, 2017. Of note, the classified documents were reportedly brought to the house in January of that year. The photos ‘are the most concrete evidence to date’ that Hunter – who was actively negotiating a deal with a CCP-linked Chinese energy company – had access to areas of his father’s home where classified documents were stored. A Washington Free Beacon review of the laptop found four 2017 photographs of Hunter Biden, clad in a white collared shirt and a camouflage baseball cap, behind the wheel of his father’s 1967 Corvette Stingray. GPS metadata embedded in the photos indicate they were taken within a minute of each other at 6:49 p.m. on July 30 of that year, just outside the president’s Wilmington, Del., residence. The photos show Hunter Biden posing in the vehicle beside two young girls. One appears to be his then-12-year-old niece, Natalie Biden. The other could not be identified.

Former Secret Service agent and certified cyber forensics expert, Konstantinos Gus Dimitrelos, analyzed the photos and confirmed their authenticity. “If requested, I will testify the photographs are genuine and were taken on July 30, 2017,” he told the Free Beacon. And as the Beacon further reports – corroborating Breitbart’s reporting, “At the time the photos were taken, Hunter Biden was negotiating a lucrative business deal with the now-defunct Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC, which was closely tied to the Chinese government. Biden’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski claimed to have met with Joe Biden in person in early May 2017—less than three months before Hunter Biden was pictured taking the wheel of his father’s prized vehicle—to discuss the Biden family’s Chinese business dealings.” In total, CEFC paid Hunter Biden $6 million in legal and consulting fees in 2017 and 2018. And of course, the same media which suggested the Trumps were Russian operatives based on a hoax – are virtually silent at actual risks to national security posed by the Biden family.

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“..the mice the researchers used are genetically altered to model accurately the human response to the coronavirus..”

After 4 Shots Covid Jabs Sharply Reduced Immune Function In Mice (Berenson)

Mice who received more than four Covid vaccine jabs had a collapse in their ability to fight the coronavirus, Chinese researchers have found. The damage extended past antibodies, the immune system’s front line of defense against viruses and bacteria, to the T-cells that form the crucial backup. The researchers reported the finding in a peer-reviewed paper published December 22 in the journal iScience. In surprisingly clear language, they warned: “Our findings demonstrate potential risks with the continuous use of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine boosters, providing immediate implications [emphasis added] for the global COVID-19 vaccination enhancement strategies.” Later in the paper, the researchers were even more direct:


“We found that the protective effects from the humoral immunity and cellular immunity established by the conventional immunization were both profoundly impaired during the extended vaccination course.” The finding has not been confirmed in humans. But the mice the researchers used are genetically altered to model accurately the human response to the coronavirus and have “been shown to share profound similarities with humans in response to SARS-CoV-2 infections,” as the paper explains. The scientists used a vaccine that has a different mechanism of basic action than the mRNA jabs from Pfizer and Moderna, which turn our own cells into spike protein factories. But like them, the Chinese-tested vaccine causes the immune system to focus on a specific part of the coronavirus spike protein to the near-exclusion of other responses.

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One woman wrecking crew.

Jacinda Ardern Resigns As New Zealand’s Prime Minister (PM)

Jacinda Ardern, who has served as prime minister of New Zealand since 2017, announced that she will be resigning effective February 7 at the latest. Ardern revealed her decision at the Labour Party’s annual caucus meeting on Thursday. “I’m leaving because with such a privileged role comes responsibility,” she said, according to The Guardian. “The responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also when you are not. I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple.” As Bloomberg reports, Ardern will stay on as a member of parliament until April. An election is scheduled to be held on October 14. Ardern was a controversial figure. During her time as leader, her government imposed on the people of New Zealand some of the strictest Covid-19 restrictions in the world.


At the onset of the pandemic, for example, books were deemed “non-essential” as Ardern and other officials attempted to keep people in their homes. Then in August 2021, following a six month period where no cases were recorded, Ardern sent the entire country into Level 4 lockdown for three days when one man in Auckland tested positive. Those who chose not to adhere to the draconian policies were hit with heavy penalties, including fines of up to US$8,400. Ardern was also an ardent supporter of tightening restrictions on New Zealanders’ online activity, calling for increased censorship. After years of clamping down on the freedoms of her citizens, Ardern’s popularity began to plummet. A December 2022 poll revealed that her support was down to just 33 percent. Support for the centre-right National Party sat at around 39 percent, and in the first polls of the new year, they continue to hold the lead.

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Socialism
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615409489447997440

 

 

Zuck
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615555826239823873

 

 

 

 

Snow plow
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615777776002269185

 

 


The Formosan clouded leopard was declared extinct in 2013 after no sightings since 1983. In February of 2019, it was spotted for the first time in almost 40 years.

 

 

The voice of God

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 262022
 
 January 26, 2022  Posted by at 9:24 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  88 Responses »


Johannes Vermeer The soldier and the laughing girl 1657

 

Clinical Outcomes Among Patients With Omicron In Southern California (medRxiv)
Omicron Covid Strain Evolved In Mice – Chinese Study (RT)
Ivermectin: An Uncomfortable Truth (Uncut)
FDA Prohibits Florida From Using Monoclonal Antibody Treatments (PM)
Welcome to VEI Hell? (Denninger)
Expert Panel Backs Fourth COVID Vaccine Dose for Israelis 18 and Over
Thousands Needed To Try A New Covid Antiviral Treatment (BBC)
Patient Removed From Heart Transplant List For Being Unvaccinated (DM)
in praise of lawn darts (el gato)
The Neocons’ Primary War Tactic (Greenwald)
Let’s Not Have A War (Taibbi)
Russia May Not Be Poised To Invade Ukraine – Pentagon (RT)
Biden Approval Rating Tanks To New Low (NYP)
Assange Hearing Day Oh God It Never Ends (Murray)

 

 

Julian Nobel

 

 

 

 

Nun refuses vaccine

 

 

Malone: they’re not working

 

 

A Second Opinion

On January 24, 2022 Senator Ron Johnson invited a group of world renowned doctors and medical experts to the U.S. Senate to provide a different perspective on the global pandemic response, the current state of knowledge of early and hospital treatment, vaccine efficacy and safety, what went right, what went wrong, what should be done now, and what needs to be addressed long term. This 38 minute video highlights the 5-hour discussion.

 

 

Fair sized study: “52,297 cases with SGTF (Omicron) and 16,982 cases with non-SGTF (Delta [B.1.617.2]) infections..”

Omicron: 1 death, no mechanical ventilations.
Delta: 14 deaths, 11 mechanical ventilations.

Delta is some 45x deadlier?!

Clinical Outcomes Among Patients With Omicron In Southern California (medRxiv)

We analyzed clinical and epidemiologic data from cases testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection within the Kaiser Permanente Southern California healthcare system from November 30, 2021 to January 1, 2022, using S gene target failure (SGTF) as assessed by the ThermoFisher TaqPath ComboKit assay as a proxy for Omicron infection. We fit Cox proportional hazards models to compare time to any hospital admission and hospital admissions associated with new-onset respiratory symptoms, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, mechanical ventilation, and mortality among cases with Omicron and Delta (non-SGTF) variant infections. We fit parametric competing risk models to compare lengths of hospital stay among admitted cases with Omicron and Delta variant infections.


[..] Our analyses included 52,297 cases with SGTF (Omicron) and 16,982 cases with non-SGTF (Delta [B.1.617.2]) infections, respectively. Hospital admissions occurred among 235 (0.5%) and 222 (1.3%) of cases with Omicron and Delta variant infections, respectively. Among cases first tested in outpatient settings, the adjusted hazard ratios for any subsequent hospital admission and symptomatic hospital admission associated with Omicron variant infection were 0.48 (0.36-0.64) and 0.47 (0.35-0.62), respectively. Rates of ICU admission and mortality after an outpatient positive test were 0.26 (0.10-0.73) and 0.09 (0.01-0.75) fold as high among cases with Omicron variant infection as compared to cases with Delta variant infection. Zero cases with Omicron variant infection received mechanical ventilation, as compared to 11 cases with Delta variant infections throughout the period of follow-up (two-sided p<0.001). Median duration of hospital stay was 3.4 (2.8-4.1) days shorter for hospitalized cases with Omicron variant infections as compared to hospitalized patients with Delta variant infections, reflecting a 69.6% (64.0-74.5%) reduction in hospital length of stay.

[..] Among patients with Omicron variant infections, 7 received intensive care (including 5 whose infections were first identified in outpatient settings), 1 died, and none received mechanical ventilation, as compared to 23 ICU-admitted patients, 14 deceased patients, and 11 ventilated patients among those with Delta variant infections. The observed number of patients meeting each of these endpoints was inadequate for multivariate analyses due to the absence of counts within multiple covariate strata. Unadjusted hazard ratios of ICU admission and mortality associated with Omicron variant infection were 0.26 (0.10-0.73) and 0.09 (0.01-0.75), respectively, among cases whose infections were first ascertained in outpatient settings. Additionally, the daily risk of mechanical ventilation among patients with Delta variant infections was significantly higher than among patients with Omicron variant infections (0.04 vs 0 per 1000 persondays at risk following a positive outpatient test; 2-sided p<0.001).

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Of Mice and Men.

Omicron Covid Strain Evolved In Mice – Chinese Study (RT)

The study into Omicron, published in the Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity, found that “coronavirus slowly accumulated mutations over time in mice” before the virus was then “transmitted back to humans by reverse zoonotic.” The research, led by Dr. Xu Jianguo, who works for the National Institute for Communicable Diseases Control and Prevention of China, has identified mice as the “most likely intermediate host.” Researchers established that the “mutations profile” of the strain “shows that the virus has adapted to infect the cells of mice.”


While scientists have established Omicron developed from a strain that circulated in mid-2020, they have been seeking an explanation for the lack of an intermediate version of Omicron within humans, raising the potential that it evolved within an animal. The discovery could “pose new challenges in the prevention and control of the epidemic,” as the risk of new Covid strains circulating within the animal kingdom creates added uncertainty in the fight against the virus. Proposing possible solutions to the issue of Covid strains circulating within non-human species, researchers called for greater “surveillance of animals, especially rodents,” due to their close proximity with humans.

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Tess Lawrie.

Ivermectin: An Uncomfortable Truth (Uncut)

The reported leak of United States Military documents, which appear to validate ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19, should re-ignite the debate over whether this well-established drug was buried in favour of new multi-billion-dollar experimental vaccines. The documents, authored by Marine Corps Major Joseph Murphy and obtained by the American organisation Project Veritas (projectveritas.com) contained this assessment: “Ivermectin, identified as a curative in April 2020, works throughout all phases of illness because it both inhibits viral replication and modulates the immune response.” Project Veritas claims Major Murphy’s report was for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and also included information that ivermectin and other drugs had been suppressed.


Accordingly, six Members of Congress have written to the US Secretaries of Defence and Health and Human Services stating: “Millions of Americans suffered as curatives were hidden for unknown reasons. To what extent, if any, was there any attempt to suppress potential curatives identified in Major Murphy’s report?” Watch this space. [..] These latest developments will resonate in the Georgian city of Bath, 3500 miles from Capitol Hill. It was in here, over Christmas 2020, that a highly respected scientist was confident – even elated – that a treatment for the virus had been identified. Little did Dr Tess Lawrie know that this would bring only rejection, frustration and mistrust within the science community. And in common with other leading scientists who questioned the ‘official’ Covid narrative, she received a suspension from Twitter, presumably under the blanket ‘spreading misinformation’.

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Who has what authority?

FDA Prohibits Florida From Using Monoclonal Antibody Treatments (PM)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) closed Florida’s monoclonal antibody treatment sites on Monday after the federal government abruptly removed the treatments from Emergency Use Authorizations. The Florida Department of Health released a statement on Monday evening condemning the “abrupt” decision to take away treatments that can prevent severe illness, hospitalization, and death in high-risk patients who have contracted or been exposed to COVID-19. “This evening, without any advanced notice, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revised the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA)…The revised EUAs do not allow providers to administer these treatments within the United States,” the statement reads.

“Unfortunately, as a result of this abrupt decision made by the federal government, all monoclonal antibody state sites will be closed until further notice…Florida disagrees with the decision that blocks access to any available treatments in the absence of clinical evidence.” The FDA said Monday the antibody drugs from Regeneron and Eli Lilly should no longer be used because the treatments are unlikely to be effective against the omicron variant, The Associated Press reports. Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has heavily promoted antibody drug treatments as a signature part of his administration’s COVID-19 response, setting up infusion sites and lauding them at news conferences, while also encouraging Floridians to get vaccinated.

Last September, DeSantis slammed the Biden administration for withholding monoclonal antibody treatments from the state, telling Floridians that he will fight “come hell or high water” to get those treatments for his residents. DeSantis explained that when it became apparent that the treatment was working, the Biden administration took over control of the supply of Regeneron, one of the monoclonal antibody treatments, and cut Florida’s supply.

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“If you keep trying to play for another month or two of “protection” that is followed by six months of enhanced infectivity you are eventually going to lose on that dice roll..”

Welcome to VEI Hell? (Denninger)

Note that the Federal Government has just pulled the EUAs for monoclonals. These are drugs that are, effectively, the “final product in the body” of being jabbed. They know damn well what the risk is — not just that the drugs are worthless against Omicron but could end up boosting the infection, making it worse. Since these drugs are, basically, the product of the jabs the obvious risk that the same thing has or will happen with the jabs either with Omicron or what may evolve from it should be clear to anyone with an IQ greater than their shoe size. At present we do not know. Its possible that the negative effectiveness of the jabs will wear off. That would be excellent but it will only wear off if people stop taking jabs.

If you keep trying to play for another month or two of “protection” that is followed by six months of enhanced infectivity you are eventually going to lose on that dice roll and get screwed. Of course all the pharma CEOs (who’s primary purpose in life is to make money) plus the government agencies (who’s primary purpose in life at this point is to keep you from hanging them for conning you into doing something stupid) are telling you to play for that extra couple of months. At present we do not know and there is no way to find out for an extended period of time. Anyone who tells you they know any, say much less all of these things and thus can compute this out and make a recommendation based on a reasoned evaluation is lying. The first of these conditions is bad enough and over time we will learn more about it, but by then Omicron will likely be gone, having infected damn near everyone.

Omicron and the vaccine negative effectiveness against it, which is now in full evidence, is a warning. A warning that included a wildly lucky draw from the evolutionary deck in that materially less virulence in the lungs doesn’t provide much in the way of evolutionary advantage, never mind that the curious absence of visible precursors in public data, even though everyone has been looking for the last two years, strong suggests that it wasn’t an evolutionary accident at all in the first place. Whether the risk bucket for those who can get screwed will shrink to any material degree with time is not known. Only time with no more jabs will answer that question. Since coronaviruses have animal reservoirs the odds of this virus entirely disappearing approach zero. We can’t go back and un-jab those who did it. If what happened turns out to be a permanent enhancement in infective risk and the short straw comes up in evolution there’s nothing anyone can do about it now.

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“Helps” for two weeks?

Expert Panel Backs Fourth COVID Vaccine Dose for Israelis 18 and Over (Haaretz)

The expert panel advising the Health Ministry on the coronavirus recommended Tuesday offering a fourth shot to Israelis aged 18 and above, on condition that five months have passed since they received a third shot or recovered from the disease. The recommendation, which will expand Israel’s limited fourth vaccine rollout for Israelis above 60 and at-risk adults, still awaits approval by the Health Ministry director-general before implementation. The panel cited data showing that a fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine given to people over 60 in Israel made them three times more resistant to serious illness than triple-vaccinated people in the same age group.

This figure is based on a comparison with people in the same age group who received a third dose at least four months earlier. The ministry said its analysis was based on statistics of some 400,000 people who had received a fourth shot and 600,000 who had received a third shot. Last week a study by Sheba Medical Center found that a fourth shot of the COVID-19 vaccine boosts antibodies to even higher levels than the third jab, but it likely is not enough to prevent omicron infections. The study, led by Prof. Gili Regev-Yochay, included 270 staffers who received the fourth dose and a control group of employees who were not given a second booster.

Prof. Regev-Yochay, who is not on the advisory panel which made the recent recommendation, criticized the decision and said that the number of young Israelis in “serious condition or on ECMO machines” is still low and that therefore offering a fourth shot to “young people is wrong.”

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First you licence it, then you do the trials.

Thousands Needed To Try A New Covid Antiviral Treatment (BBC)

Over-50s and younger adults with underlying health conditions are being urged to participate in a study of a life-saving treatment for Covid-19. The study is open to those who test positive for Covid and had symptoms develop in the previous five days. Volunteers will be given pills to take at home. The study will help decide how antiviral drugs will be used, Prof Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer for England, said. Health Secretary Sajid Javid asked everyone eligible to “step forward” and “help us to learn more about medicines which could save thousands of lives”.


Antivirals were “part of our approach as we learn to live with Covid, by preventing the most vulnerable from being hospitalised”, he said. The pill being used in the Panoramic trial is called Molnupiravir and is made by Merck, Sharp and Dohme (MSD). It was licensed by UK regulators in November after trials showed promising results at reducing the risk of serious illness or death. The study will give doctors an idea of the potential benefits to vaccinated patients – and help the NHS plan how the drug can be used. Launched in December, it already has 4,500 people signed up but needs 6,000 more as soon as possible.

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How does a hospital value a human life?

Patient Removed From Heart Transplant List For Being Unvaccinated (DM)

An unvaccinated and gravely ill 31-year-old father-of-two has been taken off the donor list for a heart transplant by a Boston hospital because he ‘does not believe’ in the COVID vaccine. DJ Ferguson, who has a hereditary heart condition that causes his lungs and heart to fill with blood and fluid, was denied the life-saving organ transplant by Boston Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The hospital said it removed Ferguson from the donor list because all transplant recipients need to get the vaccine in order to ‘create both the best chance for successful operation and also the patient’s survival after transplantation.’

However, Ferguson’s father, David, said getting vaccinated is ‘kind of against his basic principles’ and that his son ‘doesn’t believe in it.’ ‘I think my boy is fighting pretty damn courageously and he has integrity and principles he really believes in and that makes me respect him all the more… It’s his body. It’s his choice.’ The hospital, which has a list of protocols for transplant candidates that includes a ban on lifestyle choices like smoking and alcohol, said requiring the COVID vaccine is common at many medical center’s throughout the country. The mortality rate for transplant recipients who fall ill with COVID is more than 20 percent, according to UCHealth.

‘It’s a policy they are enforcing and so because he won’t get the shot, they took him off the list of a heart transplant,’ David told CBS Boston. ‘My son has gone to the edge of death to stick to his guns and he’s been pushed to the limit.’ Ferguson’s family is considering transferring him to another hospital, but his wife said that he may be too weak to move. ‘At this point DJ is unable to leave the hospital until he gets the heart surgery he needs. Without the surgery his lungs and heart will continue to fill up with blood and fluid (on top of everything else that’s going on),’ said Ferguson’s wife, Heather Dawson, on Facebook.

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“..every game was taught to them by someone instead of invented..”

in praise of lawn darts (el gato)

we must be free to scrawl our own designs upon the world. we must face the difficulty of doing so, the responsibility for failure, the lessons of losing, and the triumphs of getting stuff right. that is the most important lesson in all of growing up. not piano or soccer or interpretive headstand watercolor painting and certainly not indoctrination into the grievance cults of wokedom: what must be learned is how to become self-governing. and it has been stolen from our children. it has been stolen by overbearing structure and supervision. every edge has been dulled, every pointy part wrapped in 4 layers of padding, every head helmeted, every scary image and idea painted over or hidden from view while every need, no matter how performative indulged.

everyone gets a trophy. we have taken from them not just the glories of doing it yourself and winning despite difficulty, but the actual skillset prerequisite to undertake such things. and that is the true damage. every game was taught to them by someone instead of invented. it was supervised by authority figures: parents, teachers, coaches, referees. disputes were resolved by these authority figures. and THAT is a serious, serious problem. system creation and dispute resolution are skills. they need to be learned, they need to be practiced. so does resilience. it’s stuff you have to figure out and grow into. a child of the 70’s would be shunned for the dire moral sin of “tattling.” it simply was not done. you rat the other kids out to an adult, you’re done here.

being the wussie kid was as low as low status got. sure, it’s tough. it can be nasty and unfair and everyone got bullied and beat up at some point. but, consider the alternative: every kid yells “MOM!” at the first sign of trouble and mom wades in and regulates. so no one ever learns anything except how to yell for help in more compelling fashion than the other kids. no one ever toughens up or gains the skills that allow independence. instead, they cultivate helplessness and stunted dependence. they do not learn to solve their own problems, they learn to rely upon authority figures to order and regulate their lives and engage in performative behavior to curry favor with the umpires. it’s a tattle tale arms race and it lasts a lifetime. he who tattles first usually wins and that’s a rotten incentive set.

then they go off to college and mom is no longer in yelling range. so they learn to yell “DEAN!” then they graduate and learn to yell “BOSS!” or “GOVERNMENT!” what choice do they have? they never learned to do this themselves, to handle and adapt to a plurality of views, to learn compromise and respect and conflict resolution. every disagreement is a threat you cannot assess or resolve. and so, you start to drown. worse, you start to adopted ever more absurd poses and positions to gain leverage in the “battle of tattle” and get to punch first or declare “no punchbacks.” we’ve all seen how THAT is going.

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“..in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.”

The Neocons’ Primary War Tactic (Greenwald)

One of the most bizarre but important dynamics of Trump-era U.S. politics is that the most fanatical war-hungry neocons, who shaped Bush/Cheney militarism, have become the most popular pundits and thought leaders in American liberalism. They have not changed in the slightest — they are employing the same tactics they have always invoked, and for the same causes — but they have correctly perceived that their agenda is better served by migrating back to the Democratic Party which originally spawned their bloodthirsty ideology. The excuse offered by Democrats for their embrace of neocons — we did it only as a temporary coalition of convenience to oppose Trump — is false for many reasons.

This unholy alliance pre-dated Trump. In 2014 — long before anyone envisioned Trump descending down an escalator on his path to the White House — the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn wrote a New York Times op-ed entitled “The Next Act of the Neocons.” He predicted, correctly as it turned out, that “the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.” The corporate media outlets consumed most voraciously by liberals are filled to the brim with war-loving neocons. Liberals catapult their books to the top of best-seller lists, spread their viral tweets, build their credibility into contracts with CNN and NBC News or stints as columnists for The New York Times and The Washington Post, and giddily applaud their cover stories for The Atlantic and The New Yorker.

Bill Kristol’s frequent appearances on MSNBC are due to his high levels of popularity among its liberal audience. One of the most beloved hosts on that network is the former spokesperson of the Bush/Cheney White House and 2004 Bush campaign, Nicolle Wallace. The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt went from producing commercials in 2002 accusing War on Terror critics of being on the side of Al Qaeda to wallowing in “generational wealth” from gullible liberal donors giddy over their similar Trump-era ads accusing their enemies of being Kremlin agents and traitors. Two of The Washington Post’s most popular-among-liberal columnists are Jennifer Rubin and supreme war advocate (from a safe distance for him and his family) Max Boot.

Security state officials like former CIA Director John Brennan, former Bush CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden, and former National Intelligence Director James Clapper became liberal TV stars with their endless accusations that various Trump supporters were unpatriotic and treasonous. And on and on and on. But perhaps the most influential and beloved pundit in U.S. liberal political life now is former Bush White House speechwriter David Frum, now at The Atlantic and CNN. His cover stories for that magazine warning that Trump is an unprecedented evil (which has the convenient benefit of absolving him and the rest of the D.C. establishment of all their past sins) were passed around and celebrated as if they were this generation’s Dead Sea scrolls.

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“..the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses…”

Let’s Not Have A War (Taibbi)

In 2013, Ukraine was proceeding down a path of integration into the E.U. Paul Manafort client Viktor Yanukovich, always described in America as an outright puppet of Moscow, was actually a proponent of Euro-integration at this point. “Yanukovich cajoled and bullied anyone who pushed for Ukraine to have closer ties to Russia” is how Reuters correspondent Liz Piper described his attitude, quoting him as saying to those wanting to go back to Russia’s arms, “Forget about it.. forever!” But Putin’s ferocious tactics, including intense economic and military threats, pushed Yanukovich to back out of the EU deal, and take instead an economic trade package with Russia that included $15 billion and the lowering by a third the price the country paid for natural gas from Russia.

This, in turn, spurred a Western response via the “Maidan revolution,” really a U.S.-backed coup, in which Yanukovich was replaced with someone more suitable to our foreign policy geniuses. “Yats is our guy” is how our current undersecretary for political affairs Victoria Nuland put it, insisting that Arseniy Yatsenuk be Ukraine’s next leader, even though Ukrainians might have preferred former boxer Vitaly Klitschko. When apprised some of the E.U. countries were uncomfortable with a coup, Nuland famously said, “Fuck the E.U.” Forget gunboats, here was F-bomb diplomacy!

Putin responded by annexing Crimea, which in turn led to the moment when Barack Obama made his decision to drop the bluff and stop the escalation. His reasoning was simple: Ukraine was always going to matter more to Russia than to the United States, and when push came to shove, he, Obama, wasn’t going to war over it. Moreover, because the hawks in Washington would never come out and say they would, either – “If there’s somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it,” he challenged – the issue instead would keep being presented as an improper defiance of consensus:

“There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow… And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses… You are judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons.”

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Don’t tell Blinken.

Russia May Not Be Poised To Invade Ukraine – Pentagon (RT)

US officials appear to have backtracked on claims that Moscow could be on the verge of ordering an invasion of neighboring Ukraine, while warning that the risk of escalation remains high. Speaking to reporters at a press briefing on Monday, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said that “obviously we’re mindful of things that the Russians could do that would potentially give us indications of some sort of imminent incursion.” However, he went on, “we’re not there yet, but we are watching for those indicators very, very closely.” At the same time, the official reiterated Washington’s assertions that Russia is seeking to “threaten its neighbor further and potentially violate further Ukraine’s territorial integrity.”

“It’s very clear that the Russians have no intention right now of de-escalating,” Kirby went on, adding that Washington wants to deter Moscow from attacking. The Pentagon has placed around 8,500 troops on higher alert on Monday in response to the tensions in Eastern Europe, while NATO simultaneously announced that it had put more forces on standby and sent additional ships and jet fighters to the region. The US, UK, and Australian embassies in Kiev were advised to evacuate non-essential staff and family members over the weekend as NATO continues to accuse Russia of gearing up to invade its neighbor. Moscow has repeatedly denied planning to attack Ukraine, with the Kremlin insisting that it forces are no threat.

Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Alexey Danilov also appeared to downplay the risk of a larger conflict earlier this week. “As of today, we don’t see any grounds for statements about a full-scale offensive on our territory. It’s even physically impossible,” he said on Monday. Danilov added that Kiev was tracking the movement of Russian forces. “Maybe, [seeing Russian troops] is an oddity to our foreign partners who finally saw that there are Russian forces and they move a certain way,” Danilov said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky echoed a similar message in a televised address, urging the public not to panic. The comments come after US President Joe Biden warned during a press conference last week that Russian President Vladimir Putin could “move in,” adding that “he has to do something.”

Read more …

As long as Kamala polls even lower, 10% for the big guy.

Biden Approval Rating Tanks To New Low (NYP)

President Biden’s approval rating has tanked to a new low of just 39 percent as his administration contends with a number of domestic and global concerns, a new poll shows. The abysmal rating was derived from the latest Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll that was shared exclusively with The Hill. “This is a new low for President Biden as he struggles to solve a myriad of issues,” pollster Mark Penn said, according to the report. The White House is grappling with soaring inflation, the pandemic, rising crime in big cities, an inability to pass signature legislation and an escalating situation overseas with a Russian threat to invade Ukraine.


The poll began computing Biden’s approval rating in March. The newest tally is six points less than Biden’s November rating of 45 percent. Just 18 percent of the 1,815 registered voters surveyed in the latest poll said they strongly approved of Biden’s work, the report said. 53 percent of those polled indicated they somewhat or strongly disapproved of the way the president is handling the job.

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“..the Supreme Court can refuse extradition on the one point now certified by the High Court”

Assange Hearing Day Oh God It Never Ends (Murray)

Now some of the appeal points which the High Court refused to certify as arguable and of general public interest, were important. One point was that the diplomatic assurances by the United States promised not to engage in certain illegal practices amounting to torture, but made that assurance conditional on Assange’s future behaviour. Now, legally prohibited treatment of prisoners does not become lawful if the prisoner does something wrong. That ought to have been a slam-dunk argument, even without the fact that the decision on Assange’s future behaviour would be made by precisely the same authorities who plotted to kidnap or murder him. All of which was not certified as an arguable point of law of general public interest.


What is certified and going forward is the simple question of whether the diplomatic assurances were received too late… By introducing them only at the appeal stage, the United States had evaded all scrutiny of their validity… This is very important, because it may be the screen behind which the British Establishment is sidling slowly towards the exit. ...the Supreme Court can refuse extradition on the one point now certified by the High Court, and it can be presented as nothing to do with anything bad about the USA and its governance, purely a technical matter of a missed deadline. Apologies all round, never mind old chap, and let’s get to the claret at Simpson’s. Can there really be an end in sight for Julian? Is the British Establishment quietly sidling to the exit?

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Risch
https://twitter.com/i/status/1485877003727380481

Kheriaty

Berenson

 

 

 

 

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