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Debt Rattle February 10 2022

Feb 102022

February 10, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:32 am Finance Tagged with: Ambassador Bridge, conspiracy theories, DMED, Elizabeth II, Fauci, Joe Rogan, Monsanto, New Zealand, Omicron, Texas, truckers, Trudeau 92 Responses »

Giuseppe Arcimboldo Four elements – Water 1566

• VAERS Data Supports DoD Whistleblowers (UncoverDC)

• The Rise of Omicron is the Fall of Vaccines (TSN)

• COVID “Conspiracy Theories” Become “Fact-Checked” Mainstream Narrative (QTR)

• Fauci Says ‘Full-Blown’ Covid-19 Pandemic Is Almost Over In US (Fox)

• Mayor Reveals Plan To Deal With Truckers Blocking US-Canada Bridge (RT)

• Dozens Arrested As New Zealand Police & Anti-mandate Protesters Clash (RT)

• Texas Probes GoFundMe Shutdown Of Freedom Convoy Fundraiser (RT)

• What Will Gov. Abbott Do With Vax Mandate In The Texas National Guard? (Blaze)

• CVS Forecasts 80% Drop In Covid Vaccine Sales For 2022 (R.)

• Germany Electricity Prices Soar To World Record Highs (NTZ)

• Joe Rogan Mocks His Controversy In Surprise Stand-up Appearance (RT)

• Britain’s Second Elizabethan Age Has Been 70 Years Of Dismal Decline (Nuttall)

• Glyphosate’s Dirty Secrets — Are We About to Learn More? (CHD)

Blue America

NEW: Blue rhetoric toward Red America is getting more vicious than usual.

Political messages used to be crafted to appeal to people. No more. pic.twitter.com/jLWjPpMre5

— Firebrand (@FirebrandPAC) February 4, 2022

“..corrupt bureaucrats in Washington have knowingly poisoned our troops and deceived the American people about the safety and efficacy of the COVID injections.”

• VAERS Data Supports DoD Whistleblowers (UncoverDC)

Renz explained to Sen. Johnson that he received significant and damaging data from the DoD whistleblowers under the penalty of perjury. For example, DMED data shows miscarriages increased by nearly 300% over the five-year average. Likewise, data shows an almost 300% increase in cancer over the same five years. Making a point to thank Dr. Ryan Cole for his focused attention to cancer related to COVID jabs and Dr. Pierre Kory for his “stance on the [current] corruption,” Renz continued, presenting the disturbing data to Sen. Johnson, adding:

“We saw—and this one’s amazing—neurological issues, which would affect our [military] pilots, [we saw] over a thousand percent increase—82,000 per year to 863,000 in one year. Our soldiers are being experimented on, injured, and sometimes possibly killed. They know this. And Senator, when these doctors are attacked, they call me. I’m the one dealing with the medical boards. I’m the one watching the witch hunts. I’m the one fighting them off, and I’m going to keep doing that. And let me give you one last thing, Senator—the Sept. 28, 2021, Project Salus weekly report.

Project Salus is a defense department initiative where they take all this data—that [they now say] doesn’t exist, supposedly—and they give it to the CDC. They’re watching these vaccines. On and around that date, I have numerous instances where Fauci and the entire crew were saying, “it’s a crisis of the unvaccinated. It’s 99% unvaxxed in the hospital.” In the project Salus weekly report, the DOD document says specifically 71% of new cases are in the fully vaccinated and 60% of hospitalizations are in the fully vaxxed. This is corruption at the highest level. We need investigations. The secretary of defense needs to be investigated. The CDC needs to be investigated. Thank you so much, Senator, for having the courage to stand up against these special interests.”

[..] UncoverDC spoke with attorney Renz last Friday. Renz shared that he and others believe DMED data is currently “being manipulated to cover up the fact that corrupt bureaucrats in Washington have knowingly poisoned our troops and deceived the American people about the safety and efficacy of the COVID injections.” Furthermore, Renz called claims that the DMED data from 2016-2020 was incorrect “absurd.” He added that we spend millions per year on DMED and the individuals monitoring it. Renz shared that he and his team believe DMED data is currently “being manipulated to cover up the fact that corrupt bureaucrats in Washington have knowingly poisoned our troops and deceived the American people about the safety and efficacy of the COVID injections.”

“Omicron may be the death knell of the pandemic…”

• The Rise of Omicron is the Fall of Vaccines (TSN)

Unless one sells vaccines for a living, the overall numbers for the covid-19 variant Omicron will seem wildly encouraging. Take a California study of 53,000 Omicron and 17,000 Delta cases from November 30, 2021, to January 1, 2022. In every way, Omicron patients did far better—a quarter the hospitalizations of Delta, miniscule admissions to ICU, no ventilation whatever, and a death rate of less than one-tenth of one percent. The study, by researchers at UC-Berkeley and Kaiser Permanente, suggests, as do others, that Omicron may be the death knell of the pandemic. But, buried deep within its piles of data, it also calls into question the utility of the vaccines themselves.

Beyond showing that the vaccines faltered as Omicron overtook Delta in December, the study lays bare what until now was a heretical assertion. The share of unvaccinated people hospitalized for Omicron infection was a mere 24 percent—43 of 182 hospitalized patients—compared to 69 percent for Delta. Put the other way around, the vaccinated have morphed into about three-quarters of hospital admissions for the now-dominant Omicron. These figures belie the rock-solid mainstream narrative that hospitals are filled with the unvaccinated. Clearly, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”—always open to question—is no more.

“This is a huge change,” said Juan Chamie, a covid data expert who verified my conclusion from the data. “It is clearly contradicting the ‘99-percent unvaccinated in hospital’ narrative.” Dr. Mobeen Syed, a YouTube medical educator who favors vaccination of high-risk groups, agreed. The public health message on the hospitalized unvaccinated, he said, was “not up-to-date and transparent enough,” relying on data early in the pandemic when fewer were vaccinated and the variant was different. “They want to scare,” he told me. “They should have the courage to look at the data and say, ‘Hey guys, the risk (with Omicron) is reducing. Become happy, become more comfortable.’”

“..only now that millions of vaccines have been distributed and the public’s trust in the President and in his Covid response is at all time lows – she has completely and totally changed her tune.”

• COVID “Conspiracy Theories” Become “Fact-Checked” Mainstream Narrative (QTR)

I started out 2022 by predicting that capitalism and common sense would catalyze a massive pivot in how the mainstream media reports on Covid. I believed that the media would eventually start the process of pivoting from hysteria and that politicians, understanding full well that they can’t get re-elected during mid-terms this year on a platform of locking people in their homes, would follow. All I can say one month into the year is holy shit, does it look like I was right. So far in 2022, innumerable U.S. states, in addition to countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark, are lifting Covid restrictions. Connecticut and Delaware are planning on lifting school mask mandates by the end of March. Oregon officials have also announced that general mask mandates would be lifted March 31. Even New Jersey and California announced they would ease mandates in coming weeks.

And the media narrative has very quickly changed, too. Dr Leana Wen, columnist with The Washington Post and CNN medical analyst who has, in the past, gushed non-stop about following the government’s Covid guidance, has now completely changed her playbook for her appearances on CNN. On Monday of this week, she told CNN: “There was, and is, a time and place for pandemic restrictions. But when they were put in, it was always with the understanding that they would be removed as soon as we can. And, in this case, circumstances have changed. Case counts are declining. Also, the science has changed. The responsibility should shift from a government mandate imposed from the state or the local district of the school … it should shift to an individual responsibility by the family, who can still decide that their child can wear a mask if needed.”

[..] In fact, where the fuck was this woman 6 months ago? On New Years, she was urging people to mask up while heading outdoors to watch the ball drop: “Make sure that you’re vaccinated and boosted. Make sure that you’re wearing a mask even though it’s outdoors. There are lots of people packed around you, wearing a three-ply surgical mask.” In Spring of last year, she was expressing “fears” about the U.S. not being able to reach herd immunity. In Summer of last year, she was spreading the narrative that “we can’t trust the unvaccinated”. Heading into the Fall, she was writing op-eds called “Why Covid-19 Vaccines Should Be Required For All Americans”. And now – and only now that millions of vaccines have been distributed and the public’s trust in the President and in his Covid response is at all time lows – she has completely and totally changed her tune.

“..you might need a booster only every four or five years.”

• Fauci Says ‘Full-Blown’ Covid-19 Pandemic Is Almost Over In US (Fox)

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser for President Biden, said in an interview published Tuesday that the U.S. is almost past the “full-blown” pandemic phase of the coronavirus and said he hopes that all virus-related restrictions could wind down in a few months. Fauci discussed his idea of the virus’s trajectory with the Financial Times. He told the paper that the government response to the disease will eventually be handled on a local level and not federal. He did not mention a specific month or season but told the paper that these restrictions — including mask mandates — could end “soon.” The number of people in the hospital with COVID-19 across the U.S. has tumbled more than 28% over the past three weeks to about 105,000 on average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Associated Press, “What we want to see is that the omicron surge continues to decrease, that we don’t see another variant of concern emerge, that we start to come out of the other side of this.” Fauci told the paper that there is no way to eradicate the virus, but it is his hope that “we are looking at a time when we have enough people vaccinated and enough people with protection from previous infection that the Covid restrictions will soon be a thing of the past.” He also said it may not been needed for all Americans to get boosted in the future. “It will depend on who you are,” he 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.”

Well, actually, there is no plan, at least in the article. But he does sound scared.

“You have a number of people who are … part of the protest group who have openly stated … they feel such a passion for this particular cause that they are willing to die for it..”

• Mayor Reveals Plan To Deal With Truckers Blocking US-Canada Bridge (RT)

Trying to forcibly remove truckers blockading the busiest US-Canadian border crossing at the Ambassador Bridge could lead to violence and even death, the mayor of Windsor, Ontario cautioned on Wednesday, while his police chief called for a diplomatic approach. “You have a number of people who are … part of the protest group who have openly stated … they feel such a passion for this particular cause that they are willing to die for it,” Mayor Drew Dilkens told reporters on Wednesday. “If you have people who hold that sentiment, the situation can escalate and get very dangerous for police and those members of the public in very short order. It’s fair to say we don’t want to see anyone get hurt.” Dilkens added that he’s been getting calls from Windsor residents and businesses demanding the forcible removal of the truckers, but said “such action may inflame the situation and cause more folks to come and join the protest.”

The Ambassador Bridge runs between Windsor and Detroit, Michigan. It has been closed to commercial traffic since Monday, when several dozen truckers set up a blockade on the Canadian side, in solidarity with the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. Another group of truckers and farmers has been blockading a border crossing in the western province of Alberta for over a week as well. Detroit-Windsor bridge traffic accounts for about $355 million worth of goods traded between the US and Canada, more than a quarter of all commerce between the two countries. The Canadian authorities have tried to route trucks to the Blue Water Bridge in nearby Sarnia. On Wednesday, truckers and farmers parked their vehicles near that bridge as well, causing a 4.5-hour delay to enter the US, the Canada Border Services Agency said.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has refused to meet with the protesters in Ottawa, calling them a “fringe minority with unacceptable views,” and accusing them of violence, racism, bigotry, and even Nazi sympathies. Other Canadian officials have denounced the trucker protests as an “insurrection” and a “threat to our democracy.” Trudeau’s public safety minister, Marco Mendicino, called the bridge protests illegal, telling the truckers, “you are hurting Canadians and you are not above the law.” “This is an illegal economic blockade against the people of Ontario and against all Canadians,” Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said, adding that they are putting supply chains of food and manufacturer parts at risk.

Tyranny at its finest

Organiser of Freedom Convoy is expecting 1800-3000 Riot Police to enter Ottawa and begin kettling protestors. Cell phone services will be shut down throughout the city to stop videos of the operation from leaking to the public.

Democracy? pic.twitter.com/s45v2KEWpT

— ZNeveri (@ZNeveri) February 9, 2022

Ardern and Trudeau. What a couple.

• Dozens Arrested As New Zealand Police & Anti-mandate Protesters Clash (RT)

New Zealand police cracked down on protesters outside Parliament in Wellington on Thursday, arresting more than 50 people after forcibly dispersing the demonstration against Covid-19 restrictions. Shortly before the scuffles erupted, police threatened the crowd of around 150 protesters with arrest if they refused to leave the area voluntarily. Those who ignored the order were subsequently detained by law enforcement. Protesters could be seen chanting “this is not democracy” and “shame on you” as police officers moved in to clear the grounds. Footage showed police officers tearing down tents that had been erected by protesters and scuffling with the protesters unwilling to scatter on their own.

“Police continue to appeal to protestors to leave Parliament Grounds peacefully, as the area is closed to the public,” New Zealand Police said in a statement on Thursday. “We continue to acknowledge people’s rights to protest, however those who behave unlawfully will face arrest,” the statement continued. By 11:30am, New Zealand Police claimed to have arrested more than 50 protesters on charges such as trespassing and obstruction for remaining on Parliament grounds after they decreed the area closed to the public. “Wellingtonians have the right to conduct their lives and go about their business without the interference of ongoing unlawful activity,” the police declared, warning that “additional resources” would be “deployed from around the country” to crack down on protests if they continued.

“I will not stand by and allow these big tech firms to perniciously cancel or stifle speech they disagree with.”

• Texas Probes GoFundMe Shutdown Of Freedom Convoy Fundraiser (RT)

The Texas state government has opened an investigation into crowdfunding platform GoFundMe after the site shut down a campaign on behalf of Canadian truckers in the Freedom Convoy, a large anti-vaccination mandate protest staged primarily in Ottawa. The state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced the move on Wednesday, saying he would act to “protect Texas consumers” and “get to the bottom of this deceitful action” following the platform’s decision to cancel the Freedom Convoy fund drive. “GoFundMe’s response to an anti-mandate, pro-liberty movement should ring alarm bells to anyone using the donation platform and, more broadly, any American wanting to protect their constitutional rights,” he said, arguing that Texans deserve to “know where their hard-earned money is going, rather than allowing GoFundMe to divert money to another cause” without their consent.

The site halted donations after “multiple discussions with local law enforcement” and “reports of violence and other unlawful activity” at the trucker-led protest against Covid-19 vaccine mandates. Demonstrators have camped out in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, for over a week – what GoFundMe has described as an “occupation.” By the time the campaign shut down, it had raised more than $8 million. While the platform initially said it would issue refunds to donors only if they explicitly requested it – noting that it would otherwise send the money to charities approved by itself and the Freedom Convoy organizers – it has since reversed course. Earlier this week, GoFundMe issued an update, stating that, “due to donor feedback,” refunds would instead be processed automatically.

Two other states have also vowed to launch similar probes. Missouri AG Eric Schmitt told Fox News on Wednesday that his office would investigate “GoFundMe’s actions to silence the Freedom Convoy,” adding, “I will not stand by and allow these big tech firms to perniciously cancel or stifle speech they disagree with.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis previously said that his state would look into the canceled fund drive, accusing GoFundMe of “deceptive practices.”

“..they must let some of the pressure out of the balloon and ease some of the restrictions affecting the average family.”

• What Will Gov. Abbott Do With Vax Mandate In The Texas National Guard? (Blaze)

These were supposed to be part-time citizen soldiers, but so many of them have served multiple tours of duty in the Middle East. More recently, nearly all of them are at the Texas-Mexico border attempting to do the job the federal government won’t do. Now that same federal government is threatening to terminate thousands of Texas guardsmen if they fail to get a shot that quite literally is outdated, and numerous data points and testimony from military doctors raise concerns about adverse reactions. Will Texas Gov. Greg Abbott stand up for his Guard? What about other GOP governors? The Biden administration officials know that with mounting opposition to COVID mandates, they must let some of the pressure out of the balloon and ease some of the restrictions affecting the average family.

But they also understand that the military is a minority of the minority and that they can get away with illogical and illegal mandates on it for far longer. At present, it appears that no number of facts on the ground will change the minds in the Pentagon in terminating their July 1 deadline on all Army soldiers, including state guardsmen, to receive the experimental shots. While the damage has already been done in most circles of the active-duty military, there are thousands of Texas guardsmen who have not gotten the shots and are now starring down the barrel of losing their careers and all retirement benefits. Here are the most recent vaccination numbers released by the Texas Military Department obtained by the Blaze:

As you can see, just 47% of the Texas Army National Guard are fully vaccinated, and 45% — accounting for 8,750 troops – have not begun the shots. At the border, 48% of the soldiers, nearly 3,000 of them, are unvaccinated, according to my source. And from speaking to two sources on the ground in the Texas Guard, it appears that most of them will refuse to get the shots. Will Gregg Abbott allow them to be terminated? Will Republicans in the U.S. Senate vote for the upcoming budget bill that continues to fund the DOD mandate?

The obvious question everyone should be asking is why are the GOP governors not uniting at a meeting and declaring the DOD mandate null and void? Remember, while governors have no control over the active-duty military, they do control the chain of command for disciplinary actions in their respective guards, absent a “Title 10” order from the president. At a minimum, each governor should direct the adjunct general of the Guard to announce that the state plans to fight the mandates and will dismiss any officer who encourages, much less coerces, soldiers to get the shots. That is fully within the legal authority of a governor.

“CVS is not counting on booster shots boosting its business.”

• CVS Forecasts 80% Drop In Covid Vaccine Sales For 2022 (R.)

CVS on Wednesday said it expected a 70% to 80% drop in the number of COVID-19 vaccines its drugstores will administer this year and said 2022 profit would be driven by its health insurance and pharmacy benefit management businesses. Shares of the company fell more than 4% in early trading after the company left its 2022 earnings forecast unchanged despite beating profit expectations in the fourth quarter. CVS made the comments during a conference call to discuss fourth-quarter results, which exceeded Wall Street estimates for profit and sales. The company, which operates one of the largest US drugstore chains, manages pharmacy benefits for employers and health plans and owns the Aetna health insurer, also forecast a 40% to 50% fall in COVID-19 testing at its stores.

It said it expects “modest full-year volume growth” in over-the-counter test kits. CVS said it administered COVID-19 vaccine booster doses during the fourth quarter that it had previously expected to provide in 2022, helping drive a near 13% increase in sales at its retail stores. That was also a factor in not raising the 2022 forecast, it said. While some countries such as Israel have begun giving out fourth vaccine doses, CVS is not counting on booster shots boosting its business.

Three times higher than international average

• Germany Electricity Prices Soar To World Record Highs (NTZ)

Germany’s power supply, once mostly made up of a mixture of coal and nuclear power, used to be among the most stable and affordable in the world. Power outages were rare and grid interventions were infrequent. But then in the 1990s environmental activists and politicians got involved, believing they could manage and design a grid and power supply that would be technically and environmentally superior than what the leading power generation and electrical engineers and experts themselves had in place. Sun and wind were the way to go, the environmentalist Greens and SPD socialist’s declared. After all, the wind and sun don’t send electric bills and are “free for the taking”. This they somehow managed to convince the public. And so the greening of the grid began.

In 2000, the coalition government of the Socialist’s and Greens, led by Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, introduced the EEG renewable green energies feed-in act. What followed was a green energies construction frenzy with hundreds of megawatts of volatile wind and solar capacity being added to the grid every year while nuclear power was shut down. Today now comes the EED’s price shock. Wind and solar are not free after all. In fact they are outrageously expensive, and they are even more volatiles in terms of supply than the country’s Corona policies! Today German weekly news magazine FOCUS here reports how Germany’s electricity prices have now reached “record” levels: “Germany is the world champion in electricity prices – no country pays more for electricity.

According to new data from the German Association of Energy and Water Industries, German households paid an average of 36.19 cents for a kilowatt hour in January 2022.” That’s over 40 US cents per kilowatt-hour! “Never before have German consumers had to pay so much,” writes FOCUS. “Germans have to pay almost three times as much for electricity from the outlet compared to the international average. This is mainly due to unusually high taxes and eco-taxes in this country.” What’s worse, the country now teeters on power grid collapse, meaning blackouts are a real threat. Moreover, high-tech computer-controlled production machines and plants rely on a steady supply frequency to operate. As grid frequency becomes increasingly unstable due to the volatile wind and solar power input, the equipment risks costly unplanned production shutdowns.

“kind of weird, people will get really mad if you use that word and tweet about it on a phone that’s made by slaves.”

• Joe Rogan Mocks His Controversy In Surprise Stand-up Appearance (RT)

Headlining a small comedy show in Austin, Texas, Joe Rogan took to the stage to speak about the recent controversy surrounding him and his podcast on Spotify, and comment on the recently circulated video compilation of him using the n-word on his show. “I used to say it if [I was talking about] a Richard Pryor bit or something, I would say it in context,” Rogan said. “Somebody made a compilation of every time I said that word over 14 years and they put it on YouTube, and it turned out that was racist as f**k. Even to me! I’m me and I’m watching it saying, ‘Stop saying it!’ I put my cursor over the video and I’m like, ‘Four more minutes?!’” Rogan added that he hadn’t used the word in years, before saying he found it “kind of weird, people will get really mad if you use that word and tweet about it on a phone that’s made by slaves.”

The number one podcast host then addressed the other major controversy surrounding his show – the alleged Covid and vaccine misinformation. “I talk shit for a living — that’s why this is so baffling to me,” he said. “If you’re taking vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault? What dumb shit were you about to do when my stupid idea sounded better? ‘You know that dude who made people eat animal dicks on TV? How does he feel about medicine?’ If you want my advice, don’t take my advice.” After the show, Rogan held a brief Q&A with the audience, where one fan asked if he would accept the recent $100-million offer to move his show onto Rumble, but the host said he’ll stay where he is for now: “No, Spotify has hung in with me, inexplicably, let’s see what happens.”

In a recent episode with comic Akaash Singh, Rogan has decried the controversy surrounding him as “a political hit job” saying that the video of him saying the n-word had always been out there and was being used now for political reasons. “They’re taking all this stuff I’ve ever said that’s wrong and smushing it all together. It’s good because it makes me address some stuff that I really wish wasn’t out there.” Rogan also responded to criticism leveled against him by former US president Donald Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who said Rogan shouldn’t have apologized to the mob. “You should apologize if you regret something,” said Rogan, adding that “I do think you have to be careful not to apologize for nonsense.”

“Great Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role.”

• Britain’s Second Elizabethan Age Has Been 70 Years Of Dismal Decline (Nuttall)

There’s no doubt that Queen Elizabeth II is a wonderful monarch, perhaps one of the greatest Britain has ever seen. To put her long reign in perspective, she ascended to the throne only seven years after the end of the Second World War, and Winston Churchill was her first prime minister. Her commitment to duty and to her people are beyond reproach, and, as a result, her jubilee will be met with a swathe of celebratory television documentaries and news articles. But let’s not fool ourselves. Although she has been a magnificent monarch, her time on the throne has been one of steep British decline, and a far cry from the glorious first Elizabethan age in the 16th century.

This reign of Elizabeth I, from 1558 to 1603, is regarded as a ‘golden age’ for Britain, one of economic prosperity, technological advancement, and global exploration. She inherited an unstable kingdom, one divided by religion, increasing poverty, and beset with powerful foreign enemies. Under the guidance of its shrewd ‘Virgin Queen’, however, England emerged as a world power able to tackle its outward and internal foes. Her achievements included the restoration of England to Protestantism, the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Royal Navy’s defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, which laid the foundations for Britain to go on to ‘rule the waves’. Indeed, when it comes to the navy, it could be argued that the second Elizabethan period represents the undoing of the first.

When her namesake became Queen in February 1952, Britain was one of the most powerful nations on the planet; alongside the United States and the Soviet Union, it was considered one of the ‘Big Three’. Britain’s strength was augmented later that same year, when it became a nuclear power. At the time, Britain was spending 11.2 percent of GDP on its armed forces, yet this figure today has shrunk to a mere 2.3 percent. In 1952, Britain had a standing army of 871,000. This now stands at 82,000 and is due to be reduced to 72,500 by 2025. This is not really an army, but a corps. It is the same with the Royal Navy. In the 1950s, Britain had a navy worthy of policing the oceans. There were 280 active ships in 1950 and 12 aircraft carriers.

By 2020, however, the Royal Navy only had seventy active vessels, with only two aircraft carriers. Indeed, if coastal patrol vessels are excluded, the number of ships in the Royal Navy has declined by around 74 percent since the Falklands War of 1982. By any measure, this can only be construed as military decline. I am not making an argument in favour of colonialism, but the fact that Britain was prepared to abandon – or “scuttle” as Churchill put it – her empire in such a hurry only serves to highlight the country’s rapidly diminishing status. Indeed, as Dean Acheson, the former US secretary of state, said in 1962, “Great Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role.”

“Bayer AG purchased Monsanto and dumped the company name back in 2018. As if … that would be helpful. ”

• Glyphosate’s Dirty Secrets — Are We About to Learn More? (CHD)

Truth will out. Eventually, given enough time, the good, the bad and the ugly will be revealed. Such is the case with Monsanto‘s dubious herbicide glyphosate. The long-winding story on how Monsanto and its governmental enablers at the Environmental Protection Agency first registered the weedkiller Roundup under at best dubious circumstances is sickening. In March 2015 U.S District Judge for the Northern District of California allowed public release of internal Monsanto documents showing how Monsanto influenced EPA to reclassify glyphosate from a Class C carcinogen to a Class E category which paved the way for glyphosate Roundup production. It was nothing short of a cover-up that put greed ahead of public safety.

And now ironically we learn the cover-up may have included Monsanto’s own investors. Bayer AG purchased Monsanto and dumped the company name back in 2018. As if … that would be helpful. Bayer has lost a string of jury trials where glyphosate was believed to be responsible for cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Now Bayer investors are saying the German agri-giant played fast and loose with the facts, misleading them on 1) the safety of glyphosate and Roundup; 2) Bayer’s efforts at due diligence; and 3) the legal risks in the acquisition of Monsanto. Their lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California makes for some interesting reading:

“Defendants specifically downplayed the liability risks related to Monsanto’s Roundup product, emphasizing that Bayer conducted a ‘thorough analysis’ during the due diligence process and ‘undertook appropriate due diligence of litigation and regulatory issues throughout the process’ which led Bayer to finalize the Acquisition. “These and similar statements made by Defendants during the Class Period were false and misleading. In truth, Defendants knew or recklessly disregarded that the Acquisition would not result in the benefits for Bayer that Defendants had represented, due to Monsanto’s significant exposure to liability risk related to Roundup.”

Nate Hagens Energy Blind | Part 01 of 05 | The Great Simplification

Arnold

I had such a blast filming with @salmahayek for @BMWUSA! Now…GET TO THE CHARGER!! @BMW #BMWElectric #ad pic.twitter.com/o2YmKELhIL

— Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) February 9, 2022

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Debt Rattle February 3 2022

Feb 032022

February 3, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:26 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, CNN, deliberate infections, Facebook, imminent, ivermectin, Joe Rogan, New Zealand, NHS, pivot, psychosis, Putin, truckers 65 Responses »

James McNeill Whistler Arrangement in Pink, Red and Purple 1883-4

• Deliberate Infections Give Unique Covid Insight (BBC)

• Letter From NHS Clinical Scientist Who is Quitting Over the Covid Vaccines (DS)

• Has The Red Carpet Been Rolled Out For A Mainstream Pivot On Ivermectin? (QTR)

• New Zealand To End Quarantine Stays And Reopen Its Borders (Fox)

• US Truckers Got Booted Off Of Facebook (Kirsch)

• Facebook Stock In Free-fall (RT)

• Ukraine Invasion No Longer ‘Imminent’ – White House (RT)

• Russia Condemns Destructive US Troops Boost In Europe (BBC)

• America’s Putin Psychosis (Ritter)

• Don’t Blame Putin for Europe’s Energy Crisis (FP)

• Why Is Trust In Media Plummeting? Just Look At What’s Happening At CNN (G.)

• World Leaders Support Joe Rogan (RT)

• MPs Push For Julian Assange To Be Granted Political Asylum In France (EN)

PCR “We have built this crisis with this new definition of “cases”.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1488981740303572993

The 10 billion, 90%-efficacy vaccine shots have caused the noticeable trend break downwards.

Bunch of idiots

Kilmeade: We were lead by a bunch of idiots pic.twitter.com/fuIsO2nICy

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2019) February 2, 2022

ADP predicts huge job losses. Watch tomorrow.

Dave Collum: ”The job market is not tight, it’s broken.”

1/ The fact that Imperial College did such a study tells you they KNEW no-one was going to die. You can’t take that risk, even if they volunteer. 2/ It was an early version of the virus, which a/ no longer exists, and b/ was 10-100x more lethal than Omicron. And they still already knew there would be no deaths.

• Deliberate Infections Give Unique Covid Insight (BBC)

The world’s first Covid “challenge trial” – which deliberately infected people – gives a unique view on the early stages of the disease. The virus was given to 36 young, healthy and unvaccinated volunteers, at the Royal Free hospital, in London. The results show where and when the virus takes hold in the body – and that some resist the infection. Future challenge trials could help find the next generation of Covid vaccines and drugs. They allow scientists to study the earliest stages of an infection, even before symptoms develop. Each of the volunteers, aged 18-30, had an identical dose of Covid – equivalent to the amount in a single droplet propelled out of somebody’s nose during the peak of their Covid infection – squirted up their nose. But only half of them became infected.

And understanding how the others – unvaccinated and without immunity from previous infections – resisted the virus will be the focus of future research. In those that did develop an infection, the virus took off rapidly, the first symptoms and positive test results appearing within just 42 hours. The previous consensus had been it took five days from exposure to the virus to first symptoms. And while the virus takes a foothold in the throat, the greatest amount was found when it moved up to the nose, leading the researchers to stress the importance of facemasks covering both. “It’s a really unique study,” Prof Christopher Chiu, from the Institute of Infection, at Imperial College London, said.

The amount of virus peaked about five days after the infection and remained detectable up to 12 days later. Symptoms were mild but some volunteers had a prolonged loss of their sense of smell. Prof Chiu said: “Lateral flow tests correlate very well with the presence of infectious virus. “Even though in the first day or two they may be less sensitive, if you use them correctly and repeatedly, and act on them if they read positive, this will have a major impact on interrupting viral spread.” The virus used was an early variant taken from a patient at the start of the pandemic. Further studies will explore more recent versions.

The damage to healthcare will last for a long time.

“.. I know which doctors I will trust when all this is over.”

• Letter From NHS Clinical Scientist Who is Quitting Over the Covid Vaccines (DS)

“[..] a letter from an NHS Clinical Scientist of some 25 years – currently employed at an NHS University Hospital Trust but who has just resigned – to Health Secretary Sajid Javid to tell him why she is quitting over the complicity of the health service in the national scandal that is the Covid vaccine rollout.”

A core principle in healthcare is to ensure that patients are given free access to all information, to enable them to make a proper and informed choice about any treatment. As a scientist, I have been and still am gravely concerned about the Government and NHS misrepresentation of these vaccines as ‘safe and effective’ – a mantra still promoted by our Government and media, despite the overwhelming evidence demonstrating otherwise of the MHRA Yellow Card scheme and worldwide databases for reporting adverse effects. Worryingly, the great majority of GPs have not being raising awareness of this scheme, leading to significant under-reporting and, consequently, under-estimation of the actual situation.

I personally have spoken to people who, after experiencing bad reactions to the first dose, have been encouraged by doctors to continue regardless and take the second, with serious consequences for their health. They had never heard of the MHRA Yellow Card scheme and wouldn’t know how to make a report. Misinformation starts from the seniors: I have been told (in writing) by Human Resources senior staff at my hospital that that vaccines have been “licensed”, genuinely oblivious to the fact that MHRA has granted only emergency approval. I have been appalled by the NHS willingness to trample over the concept of personalised medicine in the promotion of products still in phase three trials. There has been no stratified analysis of the balance of risks and benefits.

No scientific reference to real data from the pandemic statistics nor to those of the adverse effects – deaths and life-limiting injuries – reported globally. No mention of the unavailability of medium and long term safety data, which may not be relevant for the elderly but it certainly is for the young. No information about alternative treatments. This is not the NHS I joined and embraced. Primum non nocere: first, do no harm. Equally important is the right to bodily autonomy, including the right to refuse any treatment or medication. Enshrined in law for the protection of all human beings, this core principle extends to everybody, patients and healthcare staff alike. The Government mandate, offering NHS workers the alternative between taking an experimental product against their best judgement or lose their livelihood, can hardly be portrayed as ‘free choice’.

I hope it is clear that the motivation of NHS staff across all professions in resisting this coercion is founded on ethical grounds. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, clinical scientists – we all feel that our integrity would be compromised, that the fundamental principle of trust, at the core of our unique relationship with the patients we serve, would be irreparably transgressed; and that this erosion of professional ethics would carry the inherent danger of establishing coercion as an acceptable practice in future, with NHS staff imposing procedures on patients against their will – the victim becoming the perpetrator. From a patient prospective, I know which doctors I will trust when all this is over.

“Duh, of course ivermectin works and we’ve known it all along, it just doesn’t work as well as [insert big pharma drug here]”

• Has The Red Carpet Been Rolled Out For A Mainstream Pivot On Ivermectin? (QTR)

I couldn’t help but think when this Japanese study popped up yesterday that the timing sure would be convenient now for the mainstream media to start a pivot on ivermectin. Now that Moderna has received official FDA approval for its vaccine and Pfizer is happily seeking Emergency Use Authorization to jab kids as young as 6 months – and now that major drug manufacturers have had their antiviral Covid pills approved – maybe it can finally be time to pump the brakes on the ivermectin hysteria and allow the truth and reason to nudge their way in. In other words, the fat pigs are finally finished stuffing their gluttonous faces at the trough of the FDA, stocked with newly-printed U.S. dollars.

Unable to physically consume anymore, and noticing that all but a few molecules of feed are even left, they can now reluctantly relinquish their positions at the front of the line and waddle away, leaving the rest of the animals a chance to squabble over the remains. All of the major pharmaceutical companies (and their lobbyists) finally getting the approvals that they want for all of their Covid drugs may roll out the red carpet for us to finally embrace reality and the truth, which I believe is that ivermectin has efficacy. What we’re seeing now in the media is a massive pivot regarding Covid. With the emergence of omicron and many geographic locations around the world lifting their Covid restrictions – and most notably politicians understanding they can’t win an election by locking us in our home [..] the media pivot on Covid has been pronounced since 2022 began.

And not unlike the pivot we’ve already seen on the lab leak and whether or not vaccines would end the virus, I’m expecting we see a similar pivot on ivermectin. Of course, I could be wrong. I don’t mind being wrong. I exist on the fringe, as my readers know. In the words of Peter Venkman: “If I’m wrong, nothing happens! We go to jail – peacefully, quietly. We’ll enjoy it!” But if I’m not…and the narrative on ivermectin does in fact change to wind up as “Duh, of course ivermectin works and we’ve known it all along, it just doesn’t work as well as [insert big pharma drug here]” everybody responsible for suppressing over the last 2 years needs to be held accountable for what, in my opinion, may wind up amounting to crimes against humanity.

Pointless and endless.

• New Zealand To End Quarantine Stays And Reopen Its Borders (Fox)

New Zealand’s government on Thursday said it will end its quarantine requirements for incoming travelers and reopen its borders, a change welcomed by thousands of citizens abroad who have endured long waits to return home. Since the start of the pandemic, New Zealand has enacted some of the world’s strictest border controls. Most incoming travelers need to spend 10 days in a quarantine hotel room run by the military, a requirement that has created a bottleneck at the border. The measures were initially credited with saving thousands of lives and allowed New Zealand to eliminate or control several outbreaks of the coronavirus.

But, increasingly, the border controls have been viewed as out-of-step in a world where the virus is becoming endemic, and in a country where the omicron variant is already spreading. The bottleneck forced many New Zealanders abroad to enter a lottery-style system to try and secure a spot in quarantine and passage home. The shortcomings of the system were highlighted over the past week by pregnant New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis, who was stranded in Afghanistan after New Zealand officials initially rejected her application to return home to give birth. After international publicity, officials backed down and offered her a spot in quarantine, which she has accepted.

The border changes mean that vaccinated New Zealanders returning from Australia will no longer need to go into quarantine from the end of this month, and vaccinated New Zealanders returning from the rest of the world can skip quarantine by mid-March. They will still be required to isolate at home. However, most tourists will need to wait until October before they can enter the country without a quarantine stay. And anybody who isn’t vaccinated will still be required to go through quarantine.

Why does Facebook need to get into this?

• US Truckers Got Booted Off Of Facebook (Kirsch)

I just got off the phone with Brian Brase who is organizing the US truckers. He’ll be on the VSRF call tomorrow (register at vacsafety.org). They got kicked off of Facebook because Facebook said they violated their QAnon policy. I suggested Substack and Brian said, “What’s that?” So I suggested I might be able to help them find a group of people who could run the IT for them to provide the truckers and their supporters a way to communicate. If you have both the time and expertise to do this, please volunteer using this form and we’ll get these guys re-platformed ASAP.

They lost $200 billion in market cap overnight.

• Facebook Stock In Free-fall (RT)

Shares of Facebook’s parent company Meta went into a nosedive after the markets closed on Wednesday, following an underwhelming quarterly report, the first since CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the name change. The stock stood strong at $323 a share when the markets closed at 4 pm EST, but collapsed to $249 just half an hour later, for a loss of almost 23%. In just the first eleven minutes of after-hours trading, $16 billion in Meta’s market cap had been wiped out. What triggered the sell-off was Meta’s quarterly report showing lower revenue, earnings per share, and the numbers of daily and monthly active users than expected by investors.

Whereas the investors expected around $30.15 billion, Facebook’s figures showed $27-$29 billion, CNBC reported, citing a Refinitiv survey of market analysts. According to the same source, earnings per share came in at $3.67, short of the expected $3.84. The number of daily active users (DAU) stood at 1.93 billion, less than the expected 1.95 billion, while the monthly active users (MAU) also undershot the 2.95 expectation, ending up at 2.91 billion, according to Street Account. This is the first quarterly report since Zuckerberg announced his social media behemoth would be changing its name to Meta, to better represent its focus on the upcoming “metaverse” and encompass the existing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp brands.

Awkward walk back.

• Ukraine Invasion No Longer ‘Imminent’ – White House (RT)

The US government is no longer using the word ‘imminent’ in its narrative around the alleged Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters, on Wednesday, explaining that it was sending an unintended message. “I used it once. I think others have used that once, and we stopped using it because I think it sent a message that we weren’t intending to send, which was that we knew that President Putin had made a decision,” Psaki said at a press briefing. “I would say the vast majority of times I’ve talked about it, I’ve said he could invade ‘at any time,’” she added. Psaki’s remarks come after the US envoy to the UN backtracked from the use of ‘imminent’ in an interview with NPR aired on Tuesday.

“No, I would not say that we are arguing that it’s imminent,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the broadcaster. The official transcript of Psaki’s January 25 briefing says otherwise, however. Asked whether the Russian invasion of Ukraine – which the US media and intelligence agencies have claimed since late October would happen any day now – was still “imminent,” here’s what Psaki had to say. “When we said it was imminent, it remains imminent,” she told one reporter. “Well, ‘imminent’ has a pretty intense meaning. Doesn’t it?” she said in answer to the very next question. “And it’s still the belief that it’s imminent?” was the followup, to which Psaki replied, “Correct.”

3,000 troops vs 130,000 Russia?!

• Russia Condemns Destructive US Troops Boost In Europe (BBC)

Russia has condemned a US decision to send extra troops to Europe to support its Nato allies amid continuing fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Moscow said it was a “destructive” step which heightened tension and reduced the scope for a political solution. The Pentagon said 2,000 US troops would be sent from North Carolina to Poland and Germany, and a further 1,000 already in Germany would go to Romania. Russia has some 100,000 troops near Ukraine. It denies planning to invade. The tensions come eight years after Russia annexed Ukraine’s southern Crimea peninsula and backed a bloody rebellion in the eastern Donbas region.

Moscow accuses the Ukrainian government of failing to implement the Minsk agreement – an international deal to restore peace to the east, where Russian-backed rebels control swathes of territory and at least 14,000 people have been killed since 2014. Responding to US President Joe Biden’s decision to deploy extra troops to Europe this week, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said it was a “destructive” and an “unjustified” step. Speaking on Wednesday, Mr Grushko added that it would “delight” the Ukrainian authorities, who would continue sabotaging the Minsk agreement “with impunity”. The Pentagon earlier said the American troops being deployed would not fight in Ukraine – but would ensure the defence of Washington’s allies. Their deployment is in addition to the 8,500 troops the Pentagon put on alert last month to be ready to deploy to Europe if needed.

“They said one thing, they did another,” Putin said. “As people say, they screwed us over, well they simply deceived us.”

• America’s Putin Psychosis (Ritter)

The war of words between Russia and the United States over Ukraine escalated further on Tuesday as Russian President Vladimir Putin responded for the first time to the U.S. written reply to Russia’s demands for security guarantees that were expressed in the form of a pair of draft treaties submitted by Moscow to the U.S. and NATO in December. “It is already clear…that the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored. We did not see an adequate consideration of our three key requirements,” Putin said at a press conference that followed his meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Moscow.

Putin said the U.S. had failed to give “adequate consideration of our three key demands regarding NATO expansion, the renunciation of the deployment of strike weapons systems near Russian borders, and the return of the [NATO] bloc’s military infrastructure in Europe to the state of 1997, when the Russia-NATO founding act was signed.” He detailed what he alleged was NATO’s long history of deception, re-emphasizing the 1990 verbal commitment by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would not expand “an inch” eastward. “They said one thing, they did another,” Putin said. “As people say, they screwed us over, well they simply deceived us.”

With some 130,000 Russian troops deployed in the western and southern military districts bordering Ukraine, and another 30,000 assembling in neighboring Belarus, U.S. policy makers are scrambling to figure out what Russia’s next move might be, a choice most U.S. policy makers believe boils down to diplomacy or war. Rather than examine the situation from the perspective of Russian national security interests, however, these officials have placed the fate of European peace and security in the hands of a single individual: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

“European natural gas topped $60 per million Btu, equivalent to an oil price of an astonishing $350 per barrel.”

• Don’t Blame Putin for Europe’s Energy Crisis (FP)

Europe typically depends on Russia for more than one-third of its natural gas use. Although Russia has been sending less to Europe this winter, it is fulfilling its long-term contractual commitments. The difference now is that it has all but cut off the additional supplies it usually sells on the spot market. If Russia were to cut or reduce contracted deliveries to Europe as well—which half a century of energy relations suggests is unlikely—it would be exceedingly difficult and expensive for Europe to replace lost Russian gas flows. Spot prices, already skyrocketing to unprecedented levels, would go even higher as European buyers tried to pull in LNG supplies otherwise headed for Asia, energy-intensive industries would shut down, and even household heating and electricity use would likely need to be rationed to prevent power outages.

But even if Russian gas flows continue uninterrupted, Europe still faces an energy crisis this year and, more importantly, in the years to come. By late summer of 2021, it was already evident that Europe was facing a looming energy crisis with gas storage levels unusually low. As winter set in, prices predictably soared to record levels, reaching such heights late last year that many industrial firms shut down production. In Britain, nearly 30 power utilities went bankrupt. European natural gas topped $60 per million Btu, equivalent to an oil price of an astonishing $350 per barrel. (Brent crude sells for around $90 a barrel, and the comparable U.S. gas price is around $4.) European household energy bills will rise another 50 percent this year, according to Bank of America.

Faced with public backlash and worries about the impact on the macroeconomy, governments with few other options to keep prices in check have resorted to subsidizing energy costs for people feeling the pinch. Denmark has announced it plans to send checks to households using natural gas for heating to offset the rise in prices. Norway, France, and several other European countries have done the same. Energy prices have eased in recent weeks, but only because Europe has been lucky with the weather. Winter temperatures have not been as cold as feared. The same has been true of Asia, allowing Europe to draw some cargoes of LNG that otherwise would have been needed there.

Is this the end? The MSM start eating each other, like here the Guardian devouring CNN, in the same way that CNN’s Cuomo and Zucker go after each other. Because: they have no viewers left.

CNN calls itself “the iconic network”, Brian Stelter goes after Rogan saying he’s not credible because he doesn’t have a large media corporation like CNN behind him. He does have 25x more viewers though.

NOTE: wonder if the Guardian knows it’s part of “Media” too, and losing trust.

• Why Is Trust In Media Plummeting? Just Look At What’s Happening At CNN (G.)

Media outlets are supposed to report the news not become it. On Wednesday CNN found itself coming afoul of that rule when Jeff Zucker abruptly resigned from his position as network president amid lurid circumstances. In a memo sent to colleagues, Zucker explained he was stepping down after failing to disclose a “consensual relationship” with a close colleague. While Zucker didn’t name the colleague directly, Allison Gollust, CNN’s executive vice-president and chief marketing officer, has confirmed her involvement in a memo to employees. Hang on a minute. Is a powerful man really resigning from a big job because he had a consensual relationship with a colleague? That’s not the usual way of things; many men have been accused of far worse transgressions and still managed to cling to power.

Well here’s some context: Gollust happens to be the former communications director for disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. And Zucker’s relationship with Gollust came up during an internal investigation into former anchor Chris Cuomo, who was fired from CNN in December after using his job to help his brother, Andrew, combat sexual harassment allegations (leading some commentators to dub CNN the “Cuomo Nepotism Network”.) Zucker stood by Chris Cuomo for months when his conflict-of-interest scandal first hit but eventually fired him a few days after the anchor was accused of sexual misconduct by a junior colleague at another network. Like his brother, it seems Chris holds a grudge. Two sources told Politico that it was Cuomo’s legal team, which is still negotiating his exit from the network, who flagged the relationship between Zucker and Gollust.

A reporter from media startup Puck News has also claimed that CNN received a letter from Cuomo’s lawyers asking for all communications between Zucker, Gollust and Cuomo to be preserved. While Zucker may not be having a very good week, Donald Trump (whose views on CNN are common knowledge) is having a ball. “Jeff Zucker, a world-class sleazebag who has headed ratings and real-news-challenged CNN for far too long, has been terminated for numerous reasons, but predominantly because CNN has lost its way with viewers,” Trump wrote in a statement. I hate to say it, but Trump has a point. You don’t have to be a cynic to reckon that CNN’s dismal ratings may factor into Zucker’s sudden departure: CNN had record ratings during the Trump years but has seen viewership plummet recently.

The Cuomo scandal certainly hasn’t helped the network’s credibility: during the early days of the pandemic Chris Cuomo repeatedly interviewed his brother on air and it was largely treated like hilarious banter instead of a clear conflict of interest. And that’s hardly been the only embarrassment the network has suffered: last year Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s chief legal analyst exposed himself on a Zoom call with colleagues. While the New Yorker fired Toobin from his staff writer position, CNN gave him a little tap on the wrist and put him back on the air.

Optimistic headline.

• World Leaders Support Joe Rogan (RT)

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele both came out in defense of American podcast host Joe Rogan this week after critics, including the White House, encouraged Spotify to censor his show. The campaign – which has attempted to get Rogan’s Spotify show censored after he expressed skepticism over Covid-19 vaccines for young people and hosted several vaccine-skeptic doctors – was bolstered on Tuesday after White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said there was “more that can be done” by Spotify to crack down on speech which goes against the national Covid-19 line. Psaki’s comments were condemned by free speech activists in the US, who claimed they were unconstitutional and amounted to the state pressuring a private company to censor dissidents.

The two world leaders also came out in defense of Rogan’s right to free speech. In a statement, Bolsonaro said, “I’m not sure what [Rogan] thinks about me or about my government, but it doesn’t matter.” “If freedom of speech means anything, it means that people should be free to say what they think, no matter if they agree or disagree with us. Stand your ground! Hugs from Brazil.” Bukele – who has been accused of threatening freedom of the press in his county by criticizing ‘fake news’ journalists – used Psaki’s comments to mock critics who claim free speech “is under attack in El Salvador,” and appeared to argue that the White House’s interference in the Rogan matter amounted to a more egregious attack on free speech than anything his administration is accused of doing. Following calls for Rogan to be censored, Spotify announced it would start adding a ‘content advisory’ to shows that discuss the Covid-19 pandemic. The advisories will direct listeners to allegedly ‘trusted sources’ on the coronavirus, including scientists and academics.

“WikiLeaks was formerly based in France and Assange’s children live in the country, but his lawyers admitted in 2020 that the fact that he is not on French soil would complicate the process.”

• MPs Push For Julian Assange To Be Granted Political Asylum In France (EN)

Four French MPs are pushing for Julian Assange to be offered asylum in France amid the WikiLeaks founder’s ongoing fight against extradition from the UK to the US. Jennifer De Temmerman, Jean Lassalle, Cedric Villani and Francois Ruffin are due to speak at a press conference in Paris on 1 February where they will explain why Assange — currently in prison in the UK — should be given sanctuary in France. Assange’s defence team announced in February 2020 that it would be seeking asylum for him in France, ahead of the hearing in the UK on whether the 50-year-old should be extradited to the US for trial.

Two years on, Assange continues to fight extradition to the US, where would face trial over the release of a trove of classified military documents more than a decade ago. In December 2021, Britain’s High Court overturned a ruling by a lower court that Assange could not be extradited due to concerns over his mental health. In January, Assange won the right to appeal this decision to the UK Supreme Court, further delaying his possible extradition. WikiLeaks was formerly based in France and Assange’s children live in the country, but his lawyers admitted in 2020 that the fact that he is not on French soil would complicate the process.

Cement use. 3 years vs 100 years.

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Destroy the One Ring, Frodo

Jan 232022

January 23, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 1:30 pm Finance Tagged with: accoutrements, cinema, COVID, epic, Frodo, Lord of the Rings, Mount Doom, My Precious, New Zealand, science 19 Responses »

Edward Bawden Sahara 1928

“Huskynut” in New Zealand sent me this, and introduced it by saying:

I was reality-checking with an old (used to be contrarian) friend a couple of days ago on Covid. He challenged me – “I don’t believe our politicians and medical community are evil people”, which is an excellent question. I find Mattias Desmet’s Mass Formation theory compelling, but it’s somehow not the full picture.

That thought train led me to the Lord of the Rings, which featured prominently in public consciousness until quite recently. Because of this place in public consciousness, I have a strong feeling (right or wrong), that the tale has a power to cut through in a way rational argument doesn’t.

I’ve drafted the piece below to outline the material, but because my thought process is heavily rational (rather than mythic), I suspect a writer with more affinity for that oeuvre could do it more justice. Would you give me your thoughts on how it might best be handled?

My answer to his question is publishing it. I think it’s an excellent metaphor, and he writes and explains it very well. From the actual story told in the books, and the movies, to the way they “lead” readers and viewers, he covers it all.

He perhaps says it best here: “..the epic battle scenes in Lord of the Rings contributed little to the wider plot. But they were EPIC!” And human love of epic stories is hardwired into us. Before we know it, we’re junked up on adrenaline, rooting for the hero, and hoping the movie never ends.”

And yes, The One Ring is the vaccine. If you ever want to return to the Shire, your normal life, you will have to throw it into Mount Doom. My Precious.

Huskynut: The three Lord of the Rings movies are usually recollected for their stunning NZ landscapes and epic battle scenes, but we could do well to reflect on the way aspects of the core plot mirror our current situation.

At the outset, an unexpected knock at the door draws Frodo to undertake an epic quest, for the good of Middle Earth. It takes little effort to imagine the way politicians, policy-wonks and health advisors and modellers all – consciously or unconsciously – answered the door to the Covid response and unexpectedly found themselves with oversized roles in the epic of a lifetime.

How intoxicating it must have felt to be cast as central figures in a complex plot line that has now dominated headlines for nearly two years! How noble and glorious to be on the front lines battling a constantly mutating Balrog or legions of Orcs. How majestic to dedicate one’s work life to completely vanquishing the enemy and pronouncing the joyous day of Zero Covid! All the intensity of a global war, but from the comfort of home, and with negligible personal risk.

The problem with this is twofold – firstly Covid isn’t at all like an epic army of well-armed marauding Orcs. It’s a virus. It isn’t “trying” to do anything.. not to get past our defences, let alone to attack and kill us, any more than the grass outside is trying to. On a scale of sentience, grass is vastly more complex and adaptive than Covid, though far less glamorous.

All of that excess emotion – that epic drama – led not a single step closer to understanding the nature of Covid or improving our response to it, in the same way the epic battle scenes in Lord of the Rings contributed little to the wider plot. But they were EPIC! And human love of epic stories is hardwired into us. Before we know it, we’re junked up on adrenaline, rooting for the hero, and hoping the movie never ends.

Secondly, when the mythological parts of story take hold of our psyche, any possibility of sound science disappears straight out the window. In science, there are no heroes, no villains. No-one swoops in at the last moment to save the day. No-one plots dastardly revenge. Perhaps those things take place on the periphery, amongst the humans engaged in a scientific pursuit, but not in science itself. Within science there is postulate, hypothesis, experiment, result.

Which is profoundly boring from an entertainment perspective, so the media never talk science. They talk instead of opinion, speculation, human interest or politics, and people mistake those for science. For those of us watching rather than creating the movie, there’s little input required beyond showing up and giving the screen our attention. That’s pretty much the opposite of how a participatory democracy is supposed to work, but a pretty accurate description of the way many have approached Covid. Tune into the daily podium soap-opera and FEEL.

Watching those plucky characters on the screen, entwined in the plot twists and turns, large numbers of us forgot that as citizens we ourselves are the fundamental characters in the plots of our own lives, not bit players in the primary drama or – worse – simply rubes to be milked for cash at the box office.

Back in the film, as they near Mount Doom, Frodo struggles against the spell of the One Ring, becoming increasingly distrustful and paranoid about the intentions of his loyal friend Sam. Again and again he feels compelled to wield the Ring. With every use of it he surrenders a little more of his integrity and sovereignty.

And as NZ draws closer to the end of the Covid pandemic, with the world opening up and the UK, Ireland and Czech Republic dropping most restrictions, the NZ government, their pet scientists and tame media seem increasingly paranoid about the intentions of loyal, taxpaying kiwis demanding the right to return to their lives unmolested by vaccine mandates and passes. Their finger twitches reflexively towards wielding The Ring – when Omicron hits, the Red “Traffic Light” will be invoked.

For anyone observing the character development over time, the trajectory is clear. What began as careful, nuanced and tentative statements from the NZ scientists, politicians and pundits moved to strident, dismissive and arrogant. Little of the science remains, only politics and drama. These characters move inexorably towards becoming Ring Wraiths … servants of the One Vaccine.

It’s abundantly clear that every time Jacinda and Ashley succumb to temptation and slip their finger back into the Ring – issuing a new compelling edict upon the public, they lose another sliver of humanity. Things that were once unthinkable – medical mandates throwing thousands out of work, say, or closing the borders to prevent our country’s own citizens from returning – are now routine. And there is no evidence these serious blows to NZ citizens trouble the Ring wielders for a second.

Our leaders appear to have convinced themselves of the essential need for their character’s places in the ongoing drama, because that’s precisely what power does, and particularly when the wielder is not held consistently to close account by a wise and honest friend like Sam, rather than the increasingly Gollum-like suck-ups populating the commercial media. The NZ government needs to take the One Ring of power – that body of Covid-19 legislation and operating practice they’ve been accumulating and casually toying with for two years – and fling it into a metaphorical Mount Doom before it consumes both them and us.

In watching the movie, we will Frodo to summon the strength to do what must be done in destroying the Ring. In our current political world there is no sign our politicians and bureaucrats possess the self-awareness, the wisdom or the will to do that themselves. There is even a substantial mass of people who would cry out against it.. either loath to have their passive movie-watching end and be confronted with the mundanity of their pre-Covid lives, or terrified that absent their heroic leaders the mythologised terror will rise and strike them down.

It’s time to put down the empty popcorn container and recall our place is on the relatively tepid yet real world outside the cinema. Yes, Covid is real, but the theatrical accoutrements that have come to surround it are not. We cannot afford to continue investing the colossal amounts of time and money that have been diverted to Covid at the expense of other priorities, including wider health and education.

Power corrupts. What started as naïve individuals embarking on an important quest has led to what it necessarily must – the time for those same people to reject the self-corrupting influence of power, and for both themselves and us to return to the Shire.

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An Open Letter to Friends

Dec 212021

December 21, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:00 pm Finance Tagged with: bullying, coercion, cult, Jacinda, moral compass, morality, New Zealand, tyranny 51 Responses »

Emil Nolde Zwei Schwimmer1914

This letter is from longtime Automatic Earth reader and commenter “Huskynut” in New Zealand, written for the people in his address book. It may be good therapy for everyone to put all their Covid thoughts and frustrations in writing.

Huskynut:

Hi,

I’ve never done an open letter before – never had something I felt so passionately about as the precipice on which NZ is currently balanced. We’re way beyond any realm of “adults sharing political opinions” and a long way into “a cult just took my country”. I need to send this, yet I fear it will miss the mark, in which case I will have wasted my last shot.

My parents my schooling and several mentors along the way instilled in me a strong moral compass: one that hasn’t changed over time. As a human being I’ve fallen short of the directions of that compass many times, and sometimes even wilfully ignored it, but never was it wrong in pointing due moral North. I thank everyone who has contributed to that fundamental grounding in morality.

My experience has been that genuine morality exists outside of thought and rationality. The urging of our conscience is experienced subjectively and with immediacy, though we may subsequently analyse and understand it. I can dissect and understand why it is objectively wrong to segregate kiwis into Haves and Have Nots on the basis of their vax status, but I don’t have to analyse it to feel and know it’s wrong. It’s wrong simply and immediately because it’s wrong – the justification follows later.

Ours wasn’t a particularly virtuous or political family, but I remember when for a time we took inmates from the local Linton Prison home on day parole to help them adjust to outside life. On seeing my Dad doing the dishes one night, one mentioned he’d never seen a man do the dishes before.

I remember when we came very close to fostering a 14yo girl from a poor start – presumably to also help address the one-sided gender balance of five males to one females – but lost out on the basis of my mother’s Catholic aversion to assisting her to obtain contraception. I remember when the Springbok rugby tour drove a wedge through NZ society how we discussed the evils of the South Africa apartheid regime.

Those and many similar events – from which I benefited but can take no credit – were the grounding and calibration of my moral compass, which endures. I wish I could say the same for the moral compass of our collective society, which points nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. In 2021 NZ, “Don’t discriminate” has become “Must discriminate”. “Be courageous” has become “shit bricks, hide and await further instruction from the state”. “Think for yourself” has become “STFU and Obey”.

In my youth and till recent times, it was well understood from basic first principles that it was inimical in a democracy for people’s movements to be tracked. Now with “track and trace” I watch people queuing to do it voluntarily with nary a thought or a care. It used to be that “looking someone in the eye”, or more properly said their the face was the standard to assess their truthfulness. Now covering the face in social situations is considered “normal”, and indeed mandatory.

Some anecdotes:
– A local couple I know has just placed their house on the market. Both are now unemployed due to jab mandates and they can’t pay their mortgage. Logically and intellectually, that was a foregone conclusion of introducing mandates. Now I know first hand real people, good people, that it is happening to. In 2022 it’s entirely possibly it could happen to me. My home, that I fought so hard to buy and have put much blood, sweat and tears into rehabilitating could become another small casualty on my country’s war on reason and truth.

– My neighbour’s wife suffered a botched neck operation and hasn’t worked for six months. The surgeon who could have remedied it is now unavailable. He’s been promoted to brain surgeon at Wellington hospital – the previous surgeon was forced out for being unjabbed. Scarce, highly-skilled expertise, thrown on the bonfire of vanity that is our current jabbing crusade.

Nothing about those scenarios is remotely rational, normal or proportionate. Two years ago I would’ve sworn it could not happen in the country of my birth. Except, even back then, I felt it coming. I don’t know how or why – perhaps it was having a lot of time on my hands during the initial lockdowns, when I was out of work and couldn’t buy building materials. But I read, extensively and widely, and nothing I read remotely made sense, even in those early days.

The modelling was crude and implausible, and built on that of Neil Ferguson of the UK, who had a historical record of gross exaggeration. The NZ government cabinet papers were junk – and despite my tendency to hyperbole – in this case I mean it literally and accurately – they were junk: simply not fit for the purpose of decision-making on what was to impact the entire population’s liberties, livelihoods and liability (ie government debt).

When all this is done, Jacinda will leave NZ (she can scarcely remain) and ascend to a grossly overpaid job at the UN, for demonstrating her fealty to the globalist system. Those whose lives she is currently wrecking will not be so fortunate. That she was elected to represent and serve the NZ public will matter not a jot, as politicians increasingly identify with their international cohort ahead of their own country.

That is the tragedy of modern politics, sadly, and no amount of denial or “reserved judgement” will change it. Politicians change the “facts on the ground” and move on, whilst the horn-swaggled majority are passively “waiting to see” how it all turns out. Thus was history ever written, and those who pretend to study it whilst remaining silent on the need for urgent action at the junctures and pivots are the very worst of journalists liars.

I believe I grok what it might have felt like to be an awake person in 1930’s Germany. Whilst all around people were happily supporting the Nazi party, swept up in the material benefits of cheap cars, new autobahns, workers holidays, and effusions of national unity and emotion. Yet some few were awake and cognisant of where the demonisation and scapegoating of minorities was heading. And those people were, of course, unheeded and marginalised themselves.. voices drowned in the propaganda of the day.

Mandating via authority that individuals must receive an injection is – objectively – little different than medical rape. We can clutch our pearls and equivocate over the magnitude of the relative bodily invasions (and my impertinence in using the term), but the principle of the right to bodily integrity is fundamental. Post WW2, the victors were so appalled by Nazi medical experiments they enshrined that abhorrence in the Nuremberg Code.

No-one. Should ever. Be coerced into a medical treatment against their free will. The only time that code gets a mention these days is when the press are mocking a protester who naively carried a sign drawing attention to it. In the new world, nothing even exists until the authorities acknowledge it exists.

Truly the emperor not only has no clothes, but he’s mounting a child in the public square, whist the public sip their lattes and do their crosswords, lest their gaze fall upon the sight before them, and conscience compel them to utter the feeblest of peeps. This is the NZ of 2021, and – forgive me this indiscretion – I for one am fucking appalled.

This tyranny, this idiocy, this moral wasteland, will continue for precisely as long as it’s politically tenable – so long as politicians face no discernible backlash of opinion. That means every equivocating fence-sitter isn’t – as they might imagine – a passive observer. Rather, they’re an active enabler in the same way that passive German citizens in the 1930s enabled the full fruition and flowering of the Nazi regime.

Freedom to make one’s own choices around the benefits and risks of being jabbed is the only rational and moral basis for anyone – ever – to decide on a medical treatment, except in most genuinely extraordinary circumstances, for which Covid falls at least an order of magnitude shy of achieving. We need to abandon the virtue-signalling theatrics of “saving granny” or “saving the medical system from overwhelm” or whatever manipulative coercion is next invented. Recite after me these simple and readily-verifiable medical facts:

A jab (or two, three or twenty) does not stop someone contracting Covid
A jab does not prevent that person transmitting Covid
A jab temporarily lowers the risk of having severe symptoms from Covid FOR A FEW WEEKS ONLY

Oh, yeah, whilst the jab introduces significant risk of severe side effects. So much so that (in the US at least) the Covid jabs have in less than a year produced more reported side effects than all previous vaccines in total over the previous 30 years. In our munted reality, the marketing label on that one is: “Safe and Effective”.

There is no statistical correlation between countries with high vax uptakes and good covid outcomes. None. Not between countries, or within countries, where individual states are compared with others. If the damn jabs worked, that correlation should stick out like dog’s balls by now.

But those correlations don’t exist and so what has been published in their stead is a succession of ludicrously overbaked “models” prophesying doom, none of which have remotely approached reality, but all of which have stoked mindless fear and compliance. Goebbels would genuinely have bowed to the grotesque manipulators who carry this off. This chain of bullying has to stop:

– The bullying of business by Government – threatening them with hefty fines and turning them into arms-length petty enforcers, so that politicians do not have to front the public and face no direct backlash
– The bullying of staff and customers by business owners in “check your papers” petty tyranny. I need a vaccine pass to buy takeaway sushi now? Jesus Christ spare me..
– The bullying by families and friends of their counterparts in an urgent need to know their “status” as though that were the most normal thing in the world, when the right to medical privacy used to be a bedrock standard. Do you even remember those days?

It disgusts and appalls me that we’ve spent so many years uprooting and driving out the stain of pervasive bullying that was certainly a part of kiwi culture only for a cynical government to reboot the cycle and for a huge percentage of the country to actively participate or turn a blind eye. This jab-mania has become a religious fervour and a fresh batch of innocent witches is being set afire daily.

And yes, my choice of language contains hyperbole and vitriol. Yet it is not remotely an exaggeration. Whoever thinks this tyranny will all quietly disappear with time and patience is in for a horrible wakeup. Though, again, the lesson of history and psychology is that many – like the 1930s Germans – will employ every psychological strategy available to avoid facing the enormity of the reality surrounding and ahead of us.

Leaving the cult is painful, but you will become yourselves again. Or you can remain a servant to this Dear Leader, and the next, and the next. No tyrant in history has voluntarily relinquished power, and as mandates are extended and strengthened – as goalposts are now built on wheels to assist in relocating them – it’s blindingly obvious this will certainly not be the first autocracy to dismantle itself once the crisis de jour is over (hint: it will never be over).

Or, let’s take a moment to pull on that thread of “rationality” and see how long the garment hangs together. Once you’ve submitted to mandatory tracking and mandatory jabs, where exactly do you think you’ll draw the line and say “enough!”? Decades-old safety protocols were dropped to declare these jabs “safe and effective” – what happens when they drop those standards some more? Do they even need to test at all?

Can the next Fauci simply bless the coming vaccines like a Catholic priest with the host, and the faithful will line up for their next mandatory jab? Do we even need testing before we jab kids, or can we naively trust the Science knows what it’s doing? Once you’re comfortable with your movements being tracked 24 x 7, perhaps we can add your speech as well.

Are you OK if they mandate installation of an Alexa in your home to monitor what you say in private, for the good of everyone? It’d be really convenient. Should all government departments be allowed to share all your data with each other, because the more they know about you, the better the services they can deliver, right?

The specific scenarios don’t even matter – once you’ve surrendered your right to privacy and to bodily autonomy, you can give up any and all pretense to democracy. You don’t determine the State – the State determines you. And if you’re happy to accommodate and adjust rather than raising your voice now, the probability you’ll somehow grow a pair and decide to stand up somewhere later down the track is remote.

And if you don’t demand rights and freedoms for all – right now – before this toxic barrenness becomes firmly embedded and then built upon – then what? Is the current state of affairs “good enough” for the rest of your life? For your children?

Hence this plea to morality. To try and remind people of what they’ve forgotten – of the values they used to place stock in, and of the values that we as a country used to at least pretend we believed in.

The NZ of my (distorted, aging) memory used be a country with a good set of functioning moral compasses. There was some variation in the direction they pointed – one person’s North might’ve been another’s North East, but no-one’s pointed South. We pioneered the 40 hour work week and women’s suffrage of the back of those collective moral compasses. Nobody needed a thesis, or a statement from an Expert to know that bullying was wrong, discrimination was wrong, exclusion was wrong.

As my neighbour observed yesterday, when we saw someone bullied, we didn’t always stand up to the bully, but we knew inside that was the right thing to do. So what’s changed? Now that people are been bullied all over and few are raising a voice, what gives? Is it simple cowardice? Because that can be remedied. A bunch of broken compasses cannot.

Or does cause lie in the Orwellian double-speak that permeates and underpins everything we’re told? We’re a “team of five million” until its time to throw a chunk of the team to the wolves. Nurses are “brave and on the frontlines” until they exercise their own medical choice to remain unjabbed, at which time they’re worthy of no reciprocal loyalty and can be summarily “let go”. Silence and compliance are virtues. Fear is truth.

I could go on, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past months is that facts are little more than an inconvenience to Believers, whether they’re the Jehovah’s Witness at the front door, or the Covid Cult member. I could provide dozens of links to all manner of science, from epidemiological to psychological, all driving gaping holes in the mainstream narrative.

And then, like clockwork, I watch the person’s defense to cognitive dissonance kick in and there’s a rapid retreat into their cosy Beliefs, where the government is Kind, all manner of Science is Settled and Jabs are Highly Safe and Effective.

Been there, tried that.. and yeah, I’ve been kind of a dick about it some of the time. I thought the people I’ve known for years, and who I know to be good, decent, caring folk would want to hear facts that challenged what they’d been led to believe, and it was a shock to find they didn’t. It turns out that in the contest between fact and well-financed propaganda, the latter wins every time!

The government spin doctors and the “nudge units”, the carefully crafted and paced cycles of abuse, lockdowns and partial – conditional – release affect people far more than lone voices. You have to admire the government goons – they are good at the shit they do, and when every Western country on the planet is saying and practicing some variant of the same schtick, a vast number of people just zone out and lock step.

So – my challenge to you is this. Over the Xmas period, in conversation with people you encounter, say “What’s happening in NZ isn’t right- it has to stop”. If people – being freely and fully informed – want to get jabbed, then they should have ready access to jabbers. But bullying and coercing people to get jabbed by taking away their jobs, or access to social facilities needs to stop, and immediately.

I’m not asking you to take up arms and storm the ramparts, just to find and exercise your voice. What the government is doing, they are doing in your name (and mine). Find your sense of outrage and shame that your government is dividing and crushing citizens of this country. They are doing it in your name, and ostensibly for your benefit. And if it is actually OK with you, then our moral compasses may have diverged sufficiently that we’re now heading in different directions.

I see two possible outcomes – either as a society we wake up with a helluva start to realise we’ve fallen asleep at the wheel. We pull over, get some rest, and make a firm mental note to start paying more attention in future. Or we stay asleep, and we take that Thelma and Louise ride off the precipice. It’s not yet too late, but there is not a lot of clear road left ahead either.

I get that was a bummer of a read for a XMas story. But what’s XMas even about if it’s not joining in union with the rest of our society.

I genuinely wish you all the best for the year ahead.

Love and peace,
Andrew

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Debt Rattle August 19 2021

Aug 192021

August 19, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: Afghanistan, China, Dumbkirk, early treatment, eldercare, IMF, minerals, New Zealand, Purdue, Taliban 109 Responses »

Henri Matisse View of Nôtre Dame 1914

• Early Covid-19 Therapy Significantly Improved Covid-19 Outcomes (SD)

• Up To 100 May Already Be Infected In New Zealand Covid Outbreak (G.)

• Jabbed Adults Infected With Delta ‘Can Match Virus Levels Of Unvaccinated’ (G.)

• Get Ready for a Nationwide Eldercare Shortage (CTH)

• Former Purdue Pharma Chair Denies Responsibility For US Opioid Crisis (AP)

• How Americans View Government Restriction Of False Information (Pew)

• New US Air Force Secretary Wants To “Scare” China (Antiwar)

• Fire The Military And Intelligence Bigs Who Bungled Afghanistan – Now (NYP)

• We Failed Afghanistan, Not the Other Way Around (Taibbi)

• IMF Suspends Afghanistan’s Access To Resources (Hill)

• Taliban To Reap $1 Trillion Mineral Wealth (DW)

Polysaccharides may work. I think I like the illustration.

Science Direct is an Elsevier publication. We’re getting serious. The shift is slow but real.

• Early Covid-19 Therapy Significantly Improved Covid-19 Outcomes (SD)

In a prospective observational study (pre-AndroCoV Trial), the use of nitazoxanide, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine demonstrated unexpected improvements in COVID-19 outcomes when compared to untreated patients. The apparent yet likely positive results raised ethical concerns on the employment of further full placebo controlled studies in early-stage COVID-19. The present analysis aimed to elucidate, through a comparative analysis with two control groups, whether full placebo-control randomized clinical trials (RCTs) on early-stage COVID-19 are still ethically acceptable. The Active group (AG) consisted of patients enrolled in the Pre-AndroCoV-Trial (n = 585). Control Group 1 (CG1) consisted of a retrospectively obtained group of untreated patients of the same population (n = 137), and Control Group 2 (CG2) resulted from a precise prediction of clinical outcomes based on a thorough and structured review of indexed articles and official statements.

Patients were matched for sex, age, comorbidities and disease severity at baseline. Compared to CG1 and CG2, AG showed reduction of 31.5–36.5% in viral shedding (p < 0.0001), 70–85% in disease duration (p < 0.0001), and 100% in respiratory complications, hospitalization, mechanical ventilation, deaths and post-COVID manifestations (p < 0.0001 for all). For every 1000 confirmed cases for COVID-19, at least 70 hospitalizations, 50 mechanical ventilations and five deaths were prevented. Benefits from the combination of early COVID-19 detection and early pharmacological approaches were consistent and overwhelming when compared to untreated groups, which, together with the well-established safety profile of the drug combinations tested in the Pre-AndroCoV Trial, precluded our study from continuing employing full placebo in early COVID-19.

[..] Drugs offered included azithromycin 500mg daily for five days for all patients, in association with one of the following: hydroxychloroquine 400mg daily for five days, nitazoxanide 500mg twice a day for six days, or ivermectin 0.2mg/kg/day in a single daily dose for three days, In addition, repurposed drugs, including dutasteride 0.5mg/day for 15 days and spironolactone 100mg twice a day for 15 days, were optionally offered. Vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc, apibaxan, rivaroxaban, enoxaparin and glucocorticoids were added according to clinical judgement, the risk for thrombosis and progression of the disease to the inflammatory stage. Patients that decided to adhere to any treatment were included in the AG. All patients of AG and CG1 groups were followed longitudinally for 90 days for the occurrence of a new-onset or persistence of physical or mental manifestations.

Of the 585 subjects, all patients used azithromycin. A total of 357 patients used NIT, 159 used HCQ and 110 patients used IVE, alone with azithromycin or in combination with other drugs. Of the 357 patients that used NIT, 69 used the same in combination with HCQ, 46 used in combination with IVE, 146 used in combination with SPIRO, and 27 males used in combination with DUTA. Of the 110 patients that used IVE, 22 used in combination with HCQ, 82 used in combination with NIT, 66 used in combination with SPIRO and four males used in combination with DUTA. Of the 159 patients that used HCQ, 21 used in combination with IVE, 113 used in combination with NIT, 86 used in combination with SPIRO and seven males used in combination with DUTA.

Not one word on how severe their cases are. Typical.

• Up To 100 May Already Be Infected In New Zealand Covid Outbreak (G.)

New Zealand’s coronavirus cluster has grown to 21, with a strong link discovered to a case at the border, as the country began day two of a national lockdown. On Thursday, New Zealand reported another 11 cases of the Delta variant in the community, all in Auckland. The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, also announced that children between the ages of 12-15 would now also be eligible for the vaccine, from 1 September. “My message to parents who will need to of course provide consent for the children, is that I would not have been a part of a process and approving this, unless I believed it was safe, because around that table, we are parents too, all affected by these decisions, so we take them very seriously,” she said. The first case, a 58-year-old man from Auckland, emerged on Tuesday, prompting the government to put the entire country into a level 4 lockdown – the highest level of restrictions.

Ardern said genome sequencing has linked the cluster to a returnee from Australia. A New Zealander returned from Sydney on a managed red-zone flight and tested positive for the Delta variant on 7 August before being moved to quarantine the next day. After becoming unwell, they were transferred to Middlemore hospital, on 16 August. “This is a significant development and means now we can be fairly certain how, and when, the virus entered the country, and that based on timelines, there are minimal, possibly only one, or maybe two, missing links between this returnee and cases in our current outbreak,” Ardern said. The period in which cases were in the community is relatively short, she said, adding that it was unlikely the virus was spread at the hospital because the case was transferred there just one day prior to the first positive local case being discovered.

Ardern thanked the 58-year-old man for getting tested when he did. “If it wasn’t for you getting tested when you did, this could be a much, much more difficult situation. Having said that, I know we’re all prepared for cases to get worse before they get better. There is always a pattern with these outbreaks.” The prime minister cautioned that the country would need to remain open to other possibilities, but that the new information gives officials the confidence to focus on how the virus was transmitted, with a particular focus on the isolation and quarantine facilities. “Today we believe we have uncovered the piece of the puzzle we were looking for, and that means our ability to circle the virus, lock it down and stamp it out generally has greatly improved.”

In real life, we’ve seen levels of 4-5 times higher (get me a booster!). But the Guardian brings it to you gently.

And stupidly: “But the fact that they can have high levels of virus suggests that people who aren’t yet vaccinated may not be as protected from the Delta variant as we hoped.”

• Jabbed Adults Infected With Delta ‘Can Match Virus Levels Of Unvaccinated’ (G.)

Fully vaccinated adults can harbour virus levels as high as unvaccinated people if infected with the Delta variant, according to a sweeping analysis of UK data, which supports the idea that hitting the threshold for herd immunity is unlikely. There is abundant evidence that Covid vaccines in the UK continue to offer significant protection against hospitalisations and death. But this new analysis shows that although being fully vaccinated means the risk of getting infected is lower, once infected by Delta a person can carry similar virus levels as unvaccinated people. The implications of this on transmission remain unclear, the researchers have cautioned.

“We don’t yet know how much transmission can happen from people who get Covid-19 after being vaccinated – for example, they may have high levels of virus for shorter periods of time,” said Sarah Walker, a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford. “But the fact that they can have high levels of virus suggests that people who aren’t yet vaccinated may not be as protected from the Delta variant as we hoped.” Positive tests, hospitalisations and deaths linked to Covid have been rising slowly in the UK recently. In the week to 18 August, 211,238 people had a confirmed positive test result, an increase of 7.6% compared with the previous seven days. Over the same period, there have been 655 deaths within 28 days of a positive test, a rise of 7.9% versus the previous seven days.

Hospitalisations have also risen slightly, with 5,623 going into hospital with coronavirus between 8 August 2021 and 14 August 2021, a rise of 4.3% compared with the previous seven days. The study, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, found vaccine performance has waned against Delta versus the previously dominant Alpha variant. The analysis did not directly investigate whether the lower level of vaccine protection against Delta affected jabs’ ability to prevent severe disease. However, Dr Penny Ward, a visiting professor in pharmaceutical medicine at King’s College London, noted: “The low incidence of hospitalisation seen to date suggests that in this respect at least the vaccines are protecting individuals from developing severe Covid.”

“.. as Biden Forces Mandatory Vaccines For Any Worker Paid by Medicare and Medicaid Money..”

• Get Ready for a Nationwide Eldercare Shortage (CTH)

…As predicted, and the ‘next step’ will be colleges, universities, students and anyone receiving federal education funding, loans or grants. Today, the White House occupant announced a federal regulatory requirement that all nurses and healthcare workers who work in facilities funded by Medicaid and/or Medicare will be required to be vaccinated. Ironically Joe Biden noted that nurses, those professionally trained in healthcare systems – who understand the issues of vaccination, are at a lower vaccination rate than the less trained and educated population. “Vaccination rates among nursing home staff significantly trail the rest of the country“, Biden said; while never questioning ‘why’. As pointed out recently, a large subset of the vaccine resistant population are the most educated.

[Speech Transcript] – […] “Today, I’m announcing a new step. If you work in a nursing home and serve people on Medicare or Medicaid, you will also be required to get vaccinated. More than 130,000 residents in nursing homes have sa- — have sadly, over the period of this virus, passed away. At the same time, vaccination rates among nursing home staff significantly trail the rest of the country.” The downstream consequence from this action will be a shortage of healthcare providers in nursing homes. This has already become an issue for hospitals coast to coast who require vaccinations of their staff. CTH has been warning about the Chicago network behind Biden and their objective. We have accurately predicted their moves, but what we cannot determine is how the larger American electorate will respond to these encroachments.

As go the Sacklers, so goes Pfizer.

• Former Purdue Pharma Chair Denies Responsibility For US Opioid Crisis (AP)

The former president and board chair of Purdue Pharma told a court Wednesday that he, his family and the company are not responsible for the opioid crisis in the United States. Richard Sackler, a member of the family who owns the company, was asked whether each bears responsibility during a federal bankruptcy hearing in White Plains, New York, over whether a judge should accept the OxyContin maker’s plan to settle thousands of lawsuits. For each, he gave a one-word answer: “No.” Richard Sackler’s denial of responsibility for the opioid crisis comes a day after another Sackler family member said the group wouldn’t accept a settlement without guarantees of immunity from further legal action.

The previous words of Richard Sackler, now 76, are at the heart of lawsuits accusing the Stamford, Connecticut-based company of an outsized role in sparking a nationwide opioid epidemic. In the 1996 event to launch sales of OxyContin, he told the company’s sales force that there would be “a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition”. Five years later, as it was apparent that the powerful prescription pain drug was being misused in some cases, he said in an email that Purdue would have to “hammer on the abusers in every way possible”, describing them as “the culprits and the problem”. For those reasons, the activists crusading against companies involved in selling opioids often see Richard Sackler – who was president of the company from 1999 to 2003, chair of its board from 2004 through 2007, and a board member from 1990 until 2018 – as a prime villain.

[..] Sackler, whose father was one of three brothers who nearly 70 years ago bought the company that later became Purdue Pharma, didn’t recall emails he wrote a decade or more ago; whether Purdue’s board approved certain sales strategies; whether a company owned by Sackler family members sold opioids in Argentina; or whether he paid any of his own money as part of a settlement with Oklahoma to which the Sackler family contributed $75m. Often, he answered questions with more questions, asking for precision. When Edmunds asked him if he knew how many people in the US had died from using opioids, Sackler asked him to specify over which time period. Edmunds did: 2005 to 2017. “I don’t know,” Sackler said. He said that he had looked at some data on deaths in the past, though. (The US Centers for Disease Control has tallied more than 500,000 deaths in the US to opioid overdose, including both prescription drugs and illicit ones such as heroin and illegally produced fentanyl, since 2000.)

How did that country get so scary so fast?

And how can a government or Big Tech restrict false information when they are the biggest source of it? You know, just in theory …..

• How Americans View Government Restriction Of False Information (Pew)

Amid rising concerns over misinformation online – including surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, especially vaccines – Americans are now a bit more open to the idea of the U.S. government taking steps to restrict false information online. And a majority of the public continues to favor technology companies taking such action, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Roughly half of U.S. adults (48%) now say the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it means losing some freedom to access and publish content, according to the survey of 11,178 adults conducted July 26-Aug. 8, 2021. That is up from 39% in 2018. At the same time, the share of adults who say freedom of information should be protected – even if it means some misinformation is published online – has decreased from 58% to 50%.

When it comes to whether technology companies should take steps to address misinformation online, more are in agreement. A majority of adults (59%) continue to say technology companies should take steps to restrict misinformation online, even if it puts some restrictions on Americans’ ability to access and publish content. Around four-in-ten (39%) take the opposite view that protecting freedom of information should take precedence, even if it means false claims can spread. The balance of opinion on this question has changed little since 2018. Partisan divisions on the role of government in addressing online misinformation have emerged since 2018. Three years ago, around six-in-ten in each partisan coalition – 60% of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents and 57% of Democrats and Democratic leaners – agreed that freedom of information should be prioritized over the government taking steps to restrict false information online.

Today, 70% of Republicans say those freedoms should be protected, even it if means some false information is published. Nearly as many Democrats (65%) instead say the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it means limiting freedom of information. Partisan views on whether technology companies should take such steps have also grown further apart. Roughly three-quarters of Democrats (76%) now say tech companies should take steps to restrict false information online, even at the risk of limiting information freedoms. A majority of Republicans (61%) express the opposite view – that those freedoms should be protected, even if it means false information can be published online. In 2018, the parties were closer together on this question, though most Democrats still supported action by tech firms.

Washington hasn’t processed its defeat yet.

• New US Air Force Secretary Wants To “Scare” China (Antiwar)

Researching and developing new weapons technologies is a key part of the Pentagon’s strategy to counter China. In an interview with Defense News, President Biden’s new Air Force secretary said he’d like to see the US military field the type of new technologies that “scare China.” Frank Kendall, who was sworn in as Air Force secretary on July 28th, made it clear in the interview that he is focused on China. “I’ve been obsessed, if you will, with China for quite a long time now — and its military modernization, what that implies for the US and for security,” he said. Hyping up the threat of China’s military serves the Pentagon to justify more spending, and Kendall hinted that he believes the Air Force doesn’t have a sufficient budget. “The Air Force has been overly constrained,” he said.

“I think we’ve not been allowed to do things we really need to do to free up resources for things that are higher priority. We’ve had a very hard time getting the Congress to allow us to retire older aircraft.” One project that Kendall discussed is the B-21 bomber, which is currently being developed. “I think that’s going to be something that will be intimidating, it’s going to be very capable. And there are a few others like that that are coming down the pipeline. … But I think we have to be continuously thinking about other things that will be intimidating to our future enemies.” The Pentagon budget requested by President Biden prioritized spending on new weapons technology. The budget request asked for over $112 billion for research, development, testing, and evaluation, known as RDT&E. Besides new long-range bombers, US military leaders are calling for investment in technology like artificial intelligence, robotics, space and cyber capabilities, and hypersonic missiles.

And then you will have what?

• Fire The Military And Intelligence Bigs Who Bungled Afghanistan – Now (NYP)

This is the biggest foreign failure in most Americans’ lifetimes, and there needs to be an accounting. The normal course of business after government bungling nowadays is that everyone involved tut-tuts a bit, then gets a raise and a promotion, while the government goes back to business as usual. But in a sane nation, failure would be punished. To begin with, Milley must resign or be fired. And the same for our triple-masking defense secretary, Lloyd Austin. This was a failure that happened on their watch, and it happened through bad management. We could have pulled out without nearly the level of chaos, confusion and terror.

But Milley and Austin weren’t on top of their jobs. They may feel that firing is unfair, but they’d be getting off light by the standards of military history: In the 18th century, the British executed an admiral, John Byng, for failing to “do his utmost” in combat. It was harsh, but the Royal Navy became more aggressive. Likewise, the intel agencies and officers who provided the bad, er, intelligence need to go. Many others who failed, from contractors to lower-level officers and bureaucrats, need to go, too. You punish a bureaucracy by shrinking its staff and cutting its budget. That needs to happen here. The brass and agencies will complain that it was Biden who ultimately made the call. Indeed, they are already furiously leaking to that effect to the press.

Maybe they’re right. But it’s up to voters to fire the president at the ballot box. If they thought what Biden planned was disastrous, they should have resigned in protest. But they didn’t. Meanwhile, we also need a probe, with independent investigators with strong powers. That should be followed by deep structural changes in a military that hasn’t really won a war since well before I was born. Bottom line: Our military must be disciplined to win wars, rather than promote gender ideology and postmodern race theories (at home or abroad). None of this will transpire, of course. Our society is run by a technocratic-managerial class that never pays a price for failure. Democracy is a glossy finish over an unelected administrative state that isn’t really accountable to anyone and measures success or failure in terms of budgets, p.r. and power, not results.

$300 million per day for 20 years.

• We Failed Afghanistan, Not the Other Way Around (Taibbi)

On MSNBC the other night, Rachel Maddow told a story about visiting Afghanistan a decade ago. She described being taken on a tour of a new neighborhood in Kabul of “narco-palaces,” what she called, “big garish, gigantic, rococo, strange-looking places” that hadn’t existed before the Americans arrived. This was said to be symbolic of the “fantastically corrupt elites” among the Afghan political class who put themselves into position to siphon off big chunks of the “billions of dollars per month” we sent into the country. Noting that, “the U.S. effort and expenditure in that country did build some stuff, roads and waterways and schools,” Maddow decried the fact that “so much of what we put in by the boatload was shoveled off by a fantastically corrupt elite.”

She showed video of Taliban conquerors lounging around in the tackily furnished homes of former Afghan officials in Kabul, pointing out that, “dictator chic is the same the world over.” In a not-so-subtle dig at Donald Trump, she added, “And they really like gold fixtures.” From Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, the pattern of American officials showering questionable political allies abroad with armfuls of cash is a long-established practice. However, the idea that this is the reason the “missions” fail in such places is just a continuation of the original propaganda lines that get us into these messes. It’s a way of saying the subject populations are to blame for undermining our noble efforts, when the missions themselves are often preposterous and, moreover, the lion’s share of the looting is usually done by our own marauding contracting community.

It’s bad enough that Maddow/MSNBC played a big part in delaying the withdrawal last year with hype of the bogus Bountygate story, which gave one last (false) dying breath to the war rationale. This latest criticism of theirs ignores the massive amounts of corruption that were endemic to the American side of the mission. Contractors made fortunes monstrously overcharging the taxpayer for everything from private security, to dysfunctional or unnecessary construction projects, to social programs that either had no chance for success, or for which metrics for measuring success didn’t exist. The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) some years ago identified “$15.5 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse… in our published reports and closed investigations between SIGAR’s inception in 2008 and December 31, 2017,” and added an additional $3.4 billion in a subsequent review.

All told, “SIGAR reviewed approximately $63 billion and concluded that a total of approximately $19 billion or 30 percent of the amount reviewed was lost to waste, fraud, and abuse.” Thirty percent! If the overall cost of the war was, as reported, $2 trillion (about $300 million per day for 20 years), a crude back of the envelope calculation for the amount lost to fraud during the entire period might be $600 billion, an awesome sum. It could even be worse than that. SIGAR for instance also looked at a $7.8 billion sum spent on buildings and vehicles from 2008 on, and reported that of that, only $343.2 million worth “were maintained in good condition.” They added that just $1.2 billion of the original expenditure was used as intended. By that metric, the majority of the monies spent in Afghanistan might simply have gone up in smoke in bogus or ineffectual contracting schemes.

Either the IMF distances itself from the US, or it becomes irrelevant.

• IMF Suspends Afghanistan’s Access To Resources (Hill)

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Wednesday announced it was suspending Afghanistan’s access to its resources due to what it called a “lack of clarity” surrounding the recognition of the country’s government after the Taliban took control of the capital city of Kabul. “As is always the case, the IMF is guided by the views of the international community,” a spokesperson for the IMF said in a statement, according to Reuters. “There is currently a lack of clarity within the international community regarding recognition of a government in Afghanistan, as a consequence of which the country cannot access SDRs or other IMF resources.” This move by the IMF comes after the Biden administration reportedly froze Afghan government reserves held in U.S. banks, blocking the Taliban from accessing billions in funds.

“Any Central Bank assets the Afghan government have in the United States will not be made available to the Taliban,” one administration official told The Washington Post. It is currently unclear whether the Taliban will be recognized by the international community, though China has indicated that it is open to establishing formal relations, being one of the few countries that did not evacuate its embassy when the Afghan government fell. Shortly after the Taliban entered Kabul on Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if the U.S. would ever recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government. “A future Afghan government that upholds the basic rights of its people and that doesn’t harbor terrorists is a government we can work with and recognize,” Blinken said.

“Conversely, a government that doesn’t do that, that doesn’t uphold the basic rights of its people, including women and girls, that harbors terrorist groups that have designs on the United States, our allies and partners, certainly, that’s not going to happen,” he added.

No boycott possible. There will always be customers.

• Taliban To Reap $1 Trillion Mineral Wealth (DW)

The Taliban have been handed a huge financial and geopolitical edge in relations with the world’s biggest powers as the militant group seizes control of Afghanistan for a second time. In 2010, a report by US military experts and geologists estimated that Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries, was sitting on nearly $1 trillion (€850 billion) in mineral wealth, thanks to huge iron, copper, lithium, cobalt and rare-earth deposits. In the subsequent decade, most of those resources remained untouched due to ongoing violence in the country. Meanwhile, the value of many of those minerals has skyrocketed, sparked by the global transition to green energy. A follow-up report by the Afghan government in 2017 estimated that Kabul’s new mineral wealth may be as high as $3 trillion, including fossil fuels.

Lithium, which is used in batteries for electric cars, smartphones and laptops, is facing unprecedented demand, with annual growth of 20% compared to just 5-6% a few years ago. The Pentagon memo called Afghanistan the Saudi Arabia of lithium and projected that the country’s lithium deposits could equal Bolivia’s — one of the world’s largest. Copper, too, is benefiting from the post-COVID global economic recovery — up 43% over the past year. More than a quarter of Afghanistan’s future mineral wealth could be realized by expanding copper mining activities. While the West has threatened not to work with the Taliban after it effectively seized control of Kabul over the weekend, China, Russia and Pakistan are lining up to do business with the militant group — further adding to the US and Europe’s humiliation over the fall of the country.

As the manufacturer of almost half of the world’s industrial goods, China is stoking much of the global demand for commodities. Beijing — already Afghanistan’s largest foreign investor — is seen as likely to lead the race to help the country build an efficient mining system to meet its insatiable needs for minerals. “Taliban control comes at a time when there is a supply crunch for these minerals for the foreseeable future and China needs them,” Michael Tanchum, a senior fellow at the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy, told DW. “China is already in position in Afghanistan to mine these minerals.”

One of the Asian powerhouse’s mining giants, the Metallurgical Corporation of China (MCC), already has a 30-year lease to mine copper in Afghanistan’s barren Logar province. Some analysts, however, question whether the Taliban have the competence and willingness to exploit the country’s natural resources given the income they generate from the drug trade. “These resources were in the ground in the 90s too and they [the Taliban] weren’t able to extract them,” Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director at the Counter Extremism Project, told DW. “One has to remain very skeptical of their ability to grow the Afghan economy or even their interest in doing so.”

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Debt Rattle August 18 2021

Aug 182021

August 18, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:05 am Finance Tagged with: Afghanistan, Biden, Kamala, leaky, mandate, New Zealand, vaccines, variants 137 Responses »

Salvador Dali Meditative rose 1958

• Leaky Vaccines, Super-spreads, And Variant Acceleration (Gato Malo)

• A Grim Warning From Israel: Vaccination Blunts, But Does Not Defeat Delta (SM)

• Delta Spike P681R Mutation Enhances SARS-CoV-2 Fitness Over Alpha Variant (Bx)

• Here’s Your (Dead) Canary (Denninger)

• Malaysia’s Prime Minister Resigns Amid Skyrocketing COVID-19 Cases

• The Authoritarian Takeover of Australia (Spiked)

• Growing New Zealand Covid Cluster Linked To Sydney Delta Outbreak (G.)

• Vaccine Mandate Protest Letter (Barnes Law)

• One Of The Most Dangerous, Unpredictable Times In Modern History (BDW)

• My Heart Is Broken by Biden’s Afghanistan Failure (Michael Flynn)

• Biden’s Polling Takes Massive Hit Following Collapse Of Afghanistan (JTN)

• Kamala Harris Is The Most Unpopular Vice President In 50 Years (DW)

• Biden To Increase Food Stamp Benefits By 25%, Largest Hike In History (ZH)

• US Gov’t Tells Americans In Afghanistan It ‘Can’t Guarantee’ Their Safety (DW)

• Every American Stuck In Afghanistan To Receive A Mail-In Ballot (BBee)

DATA SHOWS COVID VARIANTS BEGAN AFTER VACCINATIONS STARTED

“..you keep its host alive with a vaccine, then it can transmit and spread in the world. So it’s got an evolutionary future, which it didn’t have before.”

• Leaky Vaccines, Super-spreads, And Variant Acceleration (Gato Malo)

The rule of evolution is simple: make a copy of me and pass it on. Any species still around to notice is very, very good at this. That’s the test and it’s as simple as it is daunting. This evolutionary selector creates pressures and these pressures shape evolution. Useful traits are conserved, traits that work against replication and propagation are selected against. This creates a simple evolutionary gradient for viruses: become more contagious, spread further, infect more hosts. Many viruses and bacteria are incredibly good at this. The good news is that harming the host is maladaptive. It’s like burning down your own house and your car with it. You soon have nowhere to live and no way to move around easily. So the selection process drives viruses away from being deadly. Ebola is a fearsome virus, but poorly evolved. It kills too quickly and spreads too slowly. That’s why outbreaks are small, rare, and (relatively) easy to manage.

People who feel sick stay home, they stop mingling and carrying the virus to where others are. It’s a built in societal and species level trait to mitigate pandemic. But what if you could break that trait? What if you could prevent a carrier from realizing it was infected? Well, then you’d spread virus far more effectively, wouldn’t you? You could do a lot of damage and the natural brake on the spread, harm, and lethality of a viral evolutionary vector would be removed. You’d supercharge a pandemic. This is a long discussed and hypothesized problem with “leaky” vaccines. A leaky vaccine is one that lacks sterilizing immunity. It prevents severe infection and perhaps death, but it does not stop infection and colonization by virus. So, the vaccinated become a carrier but remain unaware of it. This is a massive accelerator of disease spread and possibly/probably of overall fatality rates. You can see discussion here: (from 2015)

This is another example of “science we tossed out the window this year” and is exactly the sort of thing the fda should have been laser focused on from day one. “But a chicken virus that represents one of the deadliest germs in history breaks from this conventional wisdom, thanks to an inadvertent effect from a vaccine. Chickens vaccinated against Marek’s disease rarely get sick. But the vaccine does not prevent them from spreading Marek’s to unvaccinated birds. “With the hottest strains, every unvaccinated bird dies within 10 days. There is no human virus that is that hot. Ebola, for example, doesn’t kill everything in 10 days. In fact, rather than stop fowl from spreading the virus, the vaccine allows the disease to spread faster and longer than it normally would, a new study finds. The scientists now believe that this vaccine has helped this chicken virus become uniquely virulent.”

Stop for a minute and absorb what this means. By turning the vaccinated into essentially perfect carriers of virus, it transformed them into a set of plague rats to infect the rest. A disease so deadly it would burn itself out rapidly becomes one capable of endemic spread so long at there are more vaccinated carriers around. ““Previously, a hot strain was so nasty, it wiped itself out. Now, you keep its host alive with a vaccine, then it can transmit and spread in the world,” Read said. “So it’s got an evolutionary future, which it didn’t have before.”

Even Science Mag. joins in.

“There are so many breakthrough infections that they dominate and most of the hospitalized patients are actually vaccinated..”

• A Grim Warning From Israel: Vaccination Blunts, But Does Not Defeat Delta (SM)

Israel is being closely watched now because it was one of the first countries out of the gate with vaccinations in December 2020 and quickly achieved a degree of population coverage that was the envy of other nations— for a time. The nation of 9.3 million also has a robust public health infrastructure and a population wholly enrolled in HMOs that track them closely, allowing it to produce high-quality, real-world data on how well vaccines are working.

Israel’s HMOs, led by CHS and Maccabi Healthcare Services (MHS), track demographics, comorbidities, and a trove of coronavirus metrics on infections, illnesses, and deaths. “We have rich individual-level data that allows us to provide real-world evidence in near–real time,” Balicer says. [..] Now, the effects of waning immunity may be beginning to show in Israelis vaccinated in early winter; a preprint published last month by scientists at MHS found that protection from COVID-19 infection during June and July dropped in proportion to the length of time since an individual was vaccinated. People vaccinated in January had a 2.26 times greater risk for a breakthrough infection than those vaccinated in April. (Potential confounders include the fact that the very oldest Israelis, with the weakest immune systems, were vaccinated first.)

At the same time, cases in the country, which were scarcely registering at the start of summer, have been doubling every week to 10 days since then, with the Delta variant responsible for most of them. They have now soared to their highest level since mid-February, with hospitalizations and intensive care unit admissions beginning to follow. How much of the current surge is due to waning immunity versus the power of the Delta variant to spread like wildfire is uncertain. What is clear is that “breakthrough” cases are not the rare events the term implies. As of 15 August, 514 Israelis were hospitalized with severe or critical COVID-19, a 31% increase from just 4 days earlier. Of the 514, 59% were fully vaccinated. Of the vaccinated, 87% were 60 or older.

“There are so many breakthrough infections that they dominate and most of the hospitalized patients are actually vaccinated,” says Uri Shalit, a bioinformatician at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) who has consulted on COVID-19 for the government. “One of the big stories from Israel [is]: ‘Vaccines work, but not well enough.’” “The most frightening thing to the government and the Ministry of Health is the burden on hospitals,” says Dror Mevorach, who cares for COVID-19 patients at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem and advises the government. At his hospital, he is lining up anesthesiologists and surgeons to spell his medical staff in case they become overwhelmed by a wave like January’s, when COVID-19 patients filled 200 beds. “The staff is exhausted,” he says, and he has restarted a weekly support group for them “to avoid some kind of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] effect.”

The picture is getting painfully clear.

• Delta Spike P681R Mutation Enhances SARS-CoV-2 Fitness Over Alpha Variant (Bx)

SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant has rapidly replaced the Alpha variant around the world. The mechanism that drives this global replacement has not been defined. Here we report that Delta spike mutation P681R plays a key role in the Alpha-to-Delta variant replacement. In a replication competition assay, Delta SARS-CoV-2 efficiently outcompeted the Alpha variant in human lung epithelial cells and primary human airway tissues. Delta SARS-CoV-2 bearing the Alpha-spike glycoprotein replicated less efficiently than the wild-type Delta variant, suggesting the importance of Delta spike in enhancing viral replication. The Delta spike has accumulated mutation P681R located at a furin cleavage site that separates the spike 1 (S1) and S2 subunits.

Reverting the P681R mutation to wild-type P681 significantly reduced the replication of Delta variant, to a level lower than the Alpha variant. Mechanistically, the Delta P681R mutation enhanced the cleavage of the full-length spike to S1 and S2, leading to increased infection via cell surface entry. In contrast, the Alpha spike also has a mutation at the same amino acid (P681H), but the spike cleavage from purified Alpha virions was reduced compared to the Delta spike. Collectively, our results indicate P681R as a key mutation in enhancing Delta variant replication via increased S1/S2 cleavage. Spike mutations that potentially affect furin cleavage efficiency must be closely monitored for future variant surveillance.

Saw the article Karl talks about, on an outlet called Wesh(?!). But “Not available in your region”.

• Here’s Your (Dead) Canary (Denninger)

She said, up until two weeks ago, she was able to successfully treat every patient who contracted COVID-19. But, since then, she said seven fully vaccinated patients died from complications, such as pneumonia or stroke, caused by the virus. “They were all fully vaccinated, which was disturbing… For one, I got to the hospital, the initial report, he was doing well. 2 liters of oxygen, sitting up, good saturation rate, crashed in 72 hours and died,” Seemann said. This sort of ridiculous acceleration of disease progression is a screaming safety signal. It strongly implies, but does not prove, that the vaccine turned on the recipient and when later exposed made the progression of disease worse.

This was repeatedly demonstrated in animal testing with the original SARS virus when vaccine development was attempted. It was believed the cause of it was evaded by the current vaccines developed for Covid-19 but the only way to know for sure was to take years of testing to make certain that the ordinary mutational patterns that all viruses undergo did not result in such an outcome down the road. This is one of the many reasons it takes 10+ years to qualify a vaccine; you can’t un-take the shot, and if something like this happens and then you get infected you’re ****ed. She said the vaccine isn’t 100 percent effective and there is a 4 percent chance of failure, but she still recommends it.

She has no evidence to support that these patients had an actual failure to build an effective antibody response. None. Zero. Determining that would require a fairly significant amount of lab and pathology work, which simply can’t be done that fast. These people need to be autopsied and exactly what happened determined. It won’t be done because if it is, and it turns out that they had circulating titers of binding antibodies for Covid in their system then it will be scientifically-irrefutable evidence that there are millions of Americans walking around with ticking bombs in their veins and there is nothing that can be done about it. The reason you don’t short-time vaccine studies, ever, is that THE VIRUS ALWAYS BATS LAST.

“..despite a seven-month state of emergency and a lockdown since June to tackle the crisis..”

• Malaysia’s Prime Minister Resigns Amid Skyrocketing COVID-19 Cases

Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin resigned less than 18 months into his tenure Monday, becoming the country’s shortest-ruling leader after conceding that he lost majority support to govern. Science Minister Khairy Jamaluddin wrote on Instagram that “the Cabinet has tendered our resignation” to the king, shortly after Muhyiddin left the palace after meeting the monarch. Deputy Sports Minister Wan Ahmad Fayhsal Wan Ahmad Kamal also thanked Muhyiddin for his service and leadership in a Facebook message. Muhyidddin’s departure will plunge the country into a fresh crisis amid a worsening COVID-19 pandemic. Political leaders have already begun to jostle for the top post, with his deputy Ismail Sabri rallying support to succeed Muhyiddin and keep the government intact.

His resignation comes on the back of mounting public anger over what was widely perceived as his government’s poor handling of the pandemic. Malaysia has one of the world’s highest infection rates and deaths per capita, with daily cases breaching 20,000 this month despite a seven-month state of emergency and a lockdown since June to tackle the crisis. Local media said the national police chief, the Election Commission chairman and the attorney-general were also summoned to the palace Monday before Muhyiddin arrived. Muhyiddin, who chaired a Cabinet meeting at his office earlier Monday, waved at reporters at the palace gate and left 40 minutes later.

“Some of us thought: who the bloody hell is this sheila? Not only had I never heard of her, I hadn’t listened to anything anyone like her had said since I’d been kicked out of high school.”

• The Authoritarian Takeover of Australia (Spiked)

People who once thought they’d won the lottery of life by being born in Australia now wake in fright every day to the sudden realisation that they are living in a 21st-century penal colony. The country they once loved has been replaced by something they barely recognise. The restrictions imposed in response to the pandemic are just the start of it. People have been confined to their houses, prevented from going to school or work, denied the freedom to cross state borders even to see a dying relative, and coerced to take a vaccine in order hopefully to regain the freedoms that were once their birthright. Worse, these restrictions are being imposed by authoritarians who have seemingly come from nowhere and now dominate all of Australia’s positions of power, from the government to big business.

These people are unlike any ruling elite Australia has ever known. There were, to be sure, harsh authoritarians in middle levels of power during the nation’s initial 19th-century incarnation as a penal colony, especially at Port Arthur and Norfolk Island. But they never actually ran Australia. [..] Australians have, like the original settlers, never felt the need to explain the ideas on which their nation was founded. They have simply believed their version of Enlightenment truths to be self-evident in the standard of living they enjoyed and the audacious disrespect they showed for other, older cultures. I grew up in a country where such confidence was ubiquitous. A lack of academic achievement was never an impediment as long as you worked hard. Obstacles that were insurmountable to people from other countries were mere challenges to us. And we approached it all with a fatalistic humour that seemed all our own.

New South Wales chief health officer Kerry Chant became world famous recently when a video of her went viral. In it, she said, in the patronising tone of a school matron: ‘It is human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly. Unfortunately, this is not the time to do that. So even if you run into your nextdoor neighbour, in the shopping centre, at Coles, Woolworths or Aldi or any other grocery shop, don’t start up a conversation.’ Some of us thought: who the bloody hell is this sheila? Not only had I never heard of her, I hadn’t listened to anything anyone like her had said since I’d been kicked out of high school. My robust upbringing among ratbags and larrikins in the Australian suburbs had instilled in me an instinctive and entirely rational distrust of anyone who, like her, placed an undue significance on obedience above personal freedom and responsibility. My life has been, and continues to be, all the better for it.

New South Wales residents were surprised to learn they had been paying Chant’s wages since she joined the public service in 1991. Like many of her fellow neo-authoritarians, she had spent her entire career cloistered away from the freely enterprising general population, biding her time until the opportunity arose to exercise the powers none of us knew she had. Now she and her type are all around us, telling us what to do every minute of the day. She is emblematic of Australia’s new elite, from the cops who told me to ‘move on’ when I was enjoying the sunshine by myself at Bondi Beach recently, to prime minister Scott Morrison, who peppers his updates on the latest panicking policies with reminders that ‘we are all in this together’. No, we’re not.

Weirdest thing is they stopped vaccinations. Don’t really believe in those, I guess?

But also, what is the idea here? That they can have zero cases? And then? Lock the door?

• Growing New Zealand Covid Cluster Linked To Sydney Delta Outbreak (G.)

New Zealand’s coronavirus cluster has grown to 10, with genomic sequencing linking it to the Delta outbreak that began in Sydney, as the country woke up to day one of a snap lockdown stemming from just one case. The prime minister’s office confirmed three new cases on Wednesday evening. The Covid-19 response minister, Chris Hipkins, told broadcaster RNZ “we’re seeing more cases coming through, I don’t have details of those cases. But yes, I can confirm that we have further positive test results since the press conference today.” He expected more cases to emerge overnight. The country went into a snap level four lockdown – the highest level of restrictions – on Tuesday night, after detecting one case with no obvious links to the border.

New Zealand has not had a level four lockdown in more than a year, and the case is the country’s first instance of Delta transmission in the community. The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, warned on Wednesday that there would be more cases given the activity of those infected and that a link to the border had yet to be established, adding “there is more to be done to help piece together this puzzle”. “Our ability to narrow down that this is a case that is linked to New South Wales outbreak, gives us a lot of leads to chase down as quickly as we can,” she said. The seven community cases are all linked to the 58-year-old man who tested positive on Tuesday. One person is a fully vaccinated nurse at Auckland city hospital and another is a teacher at an Auckland high school.

[..] The vaccine rollout will also continue from Thursday morning, after momentarily being paused. The country’s Covid-19 vaccine rollout has faced scrutiny. As of Monday, 22.9% of the population had been fully vaccinated, with 40% having had at least one dose. The numbers are lower for fully vaccinated Maori (14%) and Pasifika (20%) populations, and New Zealand has the lowest vaccination rate in the OECD, according to the World Health Organization.

Attorney f @barnes_law i has put together a warning letter for people to use (free of charge) when their employers force them into getting the jab.

• Vaccine Mandate Protest Letter (Barnes Law)

No authorship claim or copyright asserted…this letter just came to me in a bottle, and I have no idea who might have penned it, nor can I possibly vouch for it, and what you fine folks do with it is entirely in your own hands, as the Gentlemen of the Bar remind me I can proffer no general legal advice in the matter, and must officially disclaim proffering any such advice here…edit and excise as you see fit, amend and append as you desire, and claim authorship or anonymity as may best befit you…as always, as you wish…

Dear Boss,

Compelling any employee to take any current Covid-19 vaccine violates federal and state law, and subjects the employer to substantial liability risk, including liability for any injury the employee may suffer from the vaccine. Many employers have reconsidered issuing such a mandate after more fruitful review with legal counsel, insurance providers, and public opinio n advisors of the desires of employees and the consuming public. Even the Kaiser Foundation warned of the legal risk in this respect. (https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/key-questions-about-covid-19-vaccine-mandates/)

Three key concerns: first, while the vaccine remains unapproved by the FDA and authorized only for emergency use, federal law forbids mandating it, in accordance with the Nuremberg Code of 1947; second, the Americans with Disabilities Act proscribes, punishes and penalizes employers who invasively inquire into their employees’ medical status and then treat those employees differently based on their medical status, as the many AIDS related cases of decades ago fully attest; and third, international law, Constitutional law, specific statutes and the common law of torts all forbid conditioning access to employment upon coerced, invasive medical examinations and treatment, unless the employer can fully provide objective, scientifically validated evidence of the threat from the employee and how no practicable alternative could possible suffice to mitigate such supposed public health threat and still perform the necessary essentials of employment.

At the outset, consider the “problem” being “solved” by vaccination mandates. The previously infected are better protected than the vaccinated, so why aren’t they exempted? Equally, the symptomatic can be self-isolated. Hence, requiring vaccinations only addresses one risk: dangerous or deadly transmission, by the asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic employee, in the employment setting. Yet even government official Mr. Fauci admits, as scientific studies affirm, asymptomatic transmission is exceedingly and “very rare.” Indeed, initial data suggests the vaccinated are just as, or even much more, likely to transmit the virus as the asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic. Hence, the vaccine solves nothing.

Twitter thread. Bryan Dean Wright is a former CIA Ops. officer.

• One Of The Most Dangerous, Unpredictable Times In Modern History (BDW)

Former US intelligence colleagues are angry and deeply worried at what has happened in Afghanistan. Here’s what I’m hearing, and why there’s nearly universal belief that America and the world are in for one of the most dangerous, unpredictable times in modern history. Afghanistan has shown the world — enemies & allies alike — that our military & intel assets are largely irrelevant because we can’t deploy them successfully. The blame lays at the feet of multiple Presidents. The Generals. The Spies. The Congress. America’s Elites are trash. China knows it. They will become emboldened, covertly & overtly. War over Taiwan and contested islands in the S. China Sea and E. China Sea is now more likely. Russia will consider similar covert & overt moves, focused on Crimea, & former Soviet satellites. The fear is that China & Russia will act in concert.

Why? America was whipped by a tiny rebel force and couldn’t even retreat properly. Meanwhile, the American people are angry, COVID weary, & divided. If there were ever a time to push American hegemony aside, this is it. If Cold War III grows hot, America will need to quickly build up & work with foreign counterparts. But who will trust America after Afghanistan? Who believes we have the leadership to use our military might well? Who will trust us when we say “We Will Stand With You”? Beyond China/Russia, others will take gambles too. Terror orgs like al-Qa’ida & ISIS are degraded but not dead. Their ideology is very much alive. Iran’s Hizballah — with terror cells throughout the US — may see an opening to create chaos too. Meanwhile, the disaster inside Afghanistan is only just beginning.

The Taliban will launch a terror campaign against American collaborators. The pictures will shock the conscience of the world, further degrading American moral authority. Biden & Co will struggle to respond. There’s also the nightmare of tactical weaponry now awash in Afghanistan, in the hands of the Taliban and — soon — on the global black market. These arms will fuel chaos around the world for decades. The Pentagon has no idea where this stuff is and no plans to destroy it. Finally, if Afghani refugees pour into the US, there are profound implications for security, culture, the economy, & politics. Are they properly vetted? Do they hold Western / tolerant values re: women, gays? Do they bring skills / education? Which party will they support?

The existential problem is that America needs good leadership to right its ship but there is none. Our federal bench is weak. Biden is a corrupt old man. Impeachment is a long shot; VP Harris is an unpopular paperweight. The Legislature is a feckless cabal of empty suits. Leadership could come from a state Governor, it’s true, but not soon enough. The above threats by China, Russia, & Co will metastasize well before the 2024 elections, and even a heroic new President will need years to clean things up. Again, our enemies and allies know this. Upshot: There is fear and outrage streaming through former intel officers over the Afghanistan debacle. America is rudderless. And the world now knows it. Grave dangers lie ahead, some predictable, others unimaginable. Keep your loved ones tight. Pray. And vote for change.

The military comes to resent Biden, because he squandered all their efforts, and also to avoid being thrown under the bus.

• My Heart Is Broken by Biden’s Afghanistan Failure (Michael Flynn)

My heart breaks as I see the Afghan people flood the Kabul airport in the hope of escaping the Taliban. President Biden’s assurances — supposedly based on what he was told by his intelligence community — that the Afghan Armed Forces were fully able to defeat the Taliban proved to be colossally wrong. Americans want to know whether President Biden and Defense Secretary Austin’s military-wide “stand-down” order to root out insufficiently woke “extremists” in the armed forces has caused our Defense Department to ignore what is unfolding in Afghanistan, as well as other real threats to our nation. After Afghanistan, I believe we can no longer rely on neocon senior military leaders, talking heads and politicians.

We have allowed military and civilian lawyers (read: rules of engagement restrictions) to become all-powerful, and many of our generals have been so indecisive and risk-averse that they are acting as little more than career-seeking politicians. We have been trained at participating in wars but untrained at winning wars since WWII. Afganistan is a tragic situation, much like the Kurds in Iraq, but at least President Trump drove up our respect internationally, which proves that being tough and smart is better than being tough and stupid. Today I don’t believe America is respected the way we were only a few short months ago. More countries visit China these days than come to the U.S., and China is prepped to recognize the Taliban once they declare the Islamic State — if only to embarrass us.

Seeing our defeat, my sense is Taiwan is having some incredibly uncomfortable internal discussions — as are a lot of U.S. allies in Europe. I also believe China is doing a lot of wargaming of costs and benefits with respect to future moves in the South China Sea and Europe. America is now in a fully engaged information war. Soon it may be worse. I pray our senior military leadership is intensely planning all options; the best plan offers the most options at the last possible moment. Trust me, our enemies are not waiting. They plan and they don’t care about stupid mask policies or fake insurrection show trials. Our enemies will be working on the next three vulnerabilities we haven’t even thought about. I believe Russia and China have a clear-eyed understanding of our corrupt political leadership that they and many other nations no longer respect or fear. America will come back soon, but it will come at a cost.

46% approve? Of what?

• Biden’s Polling Takes Massive Hit Following Collapse Of Afghanistan (JTN)

According to several new polls, President Biden is in trouble following the collapse of the Afghan government as U.S. and western troops withdrew from the troubled country after 20 years. A Rasmussen Reports poll illustrates the president’s approval index is currently 17 points down from where he started in January – the lowest it’s been since he took office. A total of 46% of Americans approve of Biden’s performance while 53% disapprove – also the highest that number has been. A new report from Convention of States Action in conjunction with the Trafalgar group shows that 69.3% of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of military operations – a supermajority of the population. Just 23.1% approve, and 7.5% have no opinion.

Even among Democrats, 48.2% disapprove, compared to just 39.8% who approve of Biden’s Afghan strategy. Among GOP voters a stunning majority at 88.8% disapprove, while just 7.1% of Biden’s actions. Numbers for political independents tilt closer to GOP figures, with a total of 74.8% disapproving of the handling of military operations, and 19.8% giving a nod of approval. Democrats in Congress are speaking out against the actions of the president, and though National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is set to brief the press corp today alongside Jen Psaki, none of Biden’s military leaders appeared alongside the Commander-in-Chief yesterday, as he deflected blame for the Afghan collapse during a brief speech.

I had to look this up, but sure, maybe Spiro Agnew was at one point less popular than Kamala. Close call no doubt.

• Kamala Harris Is The Most Unpopular Vice President In 50 Years (DW)

Vice President Kamala Harris has only been in office for six months, but she is already the most unpopular vice president since at least the 1970s, according to recent polls. The Los Angeles Times on Monday reported that as of July 27, “45% of registered voters had a favorable opinion of Harris and 48% had an unfavorable opinion — a net rating of -3 percentage points, according to a Times average.” The most recent YouGov tracking poll shows that Harris’ unfavorability rating has hit 49%, while her favorability rating sits at just 45%. Harris’ unpopularity is worse than former Vice President Mike Pence’s was six months into his tenure, according to The Telegraph.

The outlet reported that around this same time in 2017, Pence’s unfavorability rating sat at 41.9%, while his favorability rating was 42.1%. Pence may have been helped by a massive media focus on then-President Donald Trump and false accusations that he was a Russian agent who colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. During the Biden administration, much more focus has been on Harris since she’s the first black female vice president. President Joe Biden, however, has put her in charge of some nearly impossible tasks, including handling the situation on the southern border. As the Times reported, Harris’ approval ratings started to decline after she was assigned the task, though Biden also received a small decline in job approval.

Buying votes.

• Biden To Increase Food Stamp Benefits By 25%, Largest Hike In History (ZH)

Having solved domestic problems like inflation and foreign problems like the complete and total collapse of Afghanistan in minutes after the U.S. withdrew from the country, President Biden is now focused on offering the largest long-term increase in food stamp benefits in the program’s history. The program adds “billions of dollars in costs” to the government, Bloomberg noted in a writeup this weekend. But, in Biden’s defense, what are dollars anymore, after all? Benefits are set to rise more than 25% from pre-pandemic levels for some 42 million people enrolled in the program. Average monthly benefits will rise $36 per person, from $121, according to the report.

Yet despite the rise, there are still “anti-hunger advocates” that believe it isn’t enough. The Agriculture Department is responsible for the hike in benefits – which can be done without congressional approval – but adjusting the estimated costs of food. The USDA makes a “shopping list” to determine benefits which, when updated, can adjust the amount of benefits issued to recipients. The basket of food items used for the list was started in 1961 and then updated in 1975. Its latest review was in 2006. Benefits were set to drop prior to the planned update as a result of a September 30 expiration of a 15% boost in pandemic relief. Even with the boost, the USDA budget for a family of four amounts to about $22 in food per day. As Bloomberg notes, food stamps used to be bipartisan common ground, but have since “evolved into a partisan flashpoint”. Biden’s plans stand at odds with how President Trump attempted to limit eligibility for the aid. Trump’s attempts were overturned by courts.

“The Air Force will conduct a daring airdrop at night to deliver hundreds of pallets of paper ballots..”

• Every American Stuck In Afghanistan To Receive A Mail-In Ballot (BBee)

Congress passed emergency legislation today to address the thousands of U.S. citizens still trapped in Afghanistan. The new legislation will mobilize the Air Force to drop much-needed absentee ballots for Americans eager to vote in the 2022 election. “Our heart goes out to the helpless Americans still stuck in Taliban-controlled Kabul,” said Senator Chuck Schumer. “We know they are eager to vote for us in the upcoming elections, and we will not rest until they receive the ballots they deserve. To our American friends overseas, help—in the form of easy-to-fill-out ballots—is on the way!” The Air Force will conduct a daring airdrop at night to deliver hundreds of pallets of paper ballots into the waiting hands of American citizens, eager to vote for their favorite Democrat politicians. To make things easy, Democrats have ensured all the ballots will be pre-marked for Democrats.

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Debt Rattle August 17 2021

Aug 172021

August 17, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:24 am Finance Tagged with: Afghanistan, Biden, CIA, Kabul, lockdown, New Zealand, opium, poppies, Sydney, Taiwan, Uttar Pradesh 145 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Family of Saltimbanques 1905

• New Zealand To Enter Nationwide Lockdown After 1 Local Covid Case (Axios)

• Uttar Pradesh Logs Lowest Ever Daily Covid Figure at 17 (N18)

• NSW Police Fine 600 People On First Day Of Covid Crackdown Blitz (AAP)

• Lockdowns Widen In China As Locals Doubt Official COVID-19 Data (ET)

• Association of Vaccine Type and Prior SARS-CoV-2 Infection (JAMA)

• Harvard Med Professor Censored For Contrarian Covid Posts (JTN)

• Afghans Fleeing Taliban Need Negative PCR Test For Now-suspended Flights (RT)

• Tsitsipas Refuses To Take Vaccine Unless It Becomes Mandatory On Tour (R.)

• Afghan Abandonment A Lesson For Taiwan (Global Times)

• Kabul Has Fallen – But Don’t Blame Joe Biden (Ron Paul)

• Afghanistan: We Never Learn (Taibbi)

• When The Penny Drops It’s You And Your Portfolio On That Kabul Tarmac (Every)

• Strange Days Ahead (Kunstler)

Biden condensed

Joe Biden's Afghanistan 'Press Conference,' Condensed pic.twitter.com/wcwkYojuW0

— JD Rucker (@JDRucker) August 16, 2021

The CIA gets a large part of its off the books funding from poppies.

The Taliban banned poppy growing. The CIA moved its poppy farms to Colombia. Over the past years, much has been moved back.

Afghanistan GDP is $20 billion; the UNODC estimated the country’s overall illicit opiate economy in 2017 at $6.6 billion.

Will the CIA make a deal with the Taliban this time?

Shut you entire country down for one case, after 20 months, and people call you a success story.

• New Zealand To Enter Nationwide Lockdown After 1 Local Covid Case (Axios)

New Zealand will enter a snap nationwide lockdown at its highest level on Tuesday night after a 58-year-old man from Auckland tested positive for COVID-19, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced. This is the first coronavirus case detected in NZ’s community for 170 days and officials are concerned the man may have the highly contagious Delta variant. New Zealand has only experienced a level 4 nationwide lockdown once before. This is only the second lockdown for communities outside Auckland, NZ’s most populous city, since the pandemic began. Ardern noted at a news conference Tuesday that although it was unknown what strain of the virus the man had, most of the infections in managed hotel quarantine had the Delta variant.

The level 4 national lockdown will last for three days, from 11:59 p.m. Tuesday. Auckland and the Coromandel Peninsula, which the recently man visited, will likely experience this for seven days. New Zealand has largely contained COVID-19 cases to managed hotel quarantine facilities. Under alert level 4 restrictions, schools move to remote classes and non-essential businesses close — including food delivery services. Only essential travel is permitted, and water activities like swimming are banned. People must remain at home unless they’re exercising outdoors and locally and within their household “bubbles.” The country has paused vaccinations for the duration of the lockdown.

This is the real success story.

• Uttar Pradesh Logs Lowest Ever Daily Covid Figure at 17 (N18)

Uttar Pradesh on Monday witnessed the steepest decline in the number of fresh cases as the state limited the infections to just 17, making it the lowest ever daily-case count. Uttar Pradesh has restricted the daily-case count below 100 for over 5 weeks now. The downward trajectory of the virus has continued for the consecutive 14th week. In another significant achievement, the state registered a drop in the daily Covid test positivity rate (TPR) — the number of positive cases against the total tests done — to 0.01 percent. This rate was at its highest at 16.84 percent on April 24 and now remains even lower than the lowest post the first wave of Covid-19. The active caseload in the most populous state now stands at 419, from its peak at 3,10,783 cases on April 30.

On the contrary, sparsely populated states like Kerala, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu account for a heavy active caseload of 1,78,640, 64,219 and 20,458, respectively. In another major relief, none of the 75 districts reported fresh infections in double-digits, indicating signs that the pandemic is receding. Uttar Pradesh is rapidly moving towards being coronavirus-free as active and fresh cases in as many as 17 districts have declined to zero. In its bid to become self-reliant in terms of producing life-saving medication, as many as 317 of the 556 oxygen plants have already been established and are functional, while work on the remaining plants is going on in Uttar Pradesh.

From inside the jail.

• NSW Police Fine 600 People On First Day Of Covid Crackdown Blitz (AAP)

New South Wales police issued nearly 600 infringement notices to people flouting tough new health orders on the first day of a three-week crackdown designed to get the state’s escalating Covid crisis under control. The deputy commissioner, Mal Lanyon, said some people were still not complying even after a 5km travel rule came into effect for greater Sydney and the state reported a record 478 new local Covid-19 cases and eight deaths on Monday – the state’s worst day of the pandemic. “Yesterday we issued 579 infringement notices which is disappointing. It shows that people are still not complying. Thirty-four people received court attendant notices,” he told the Nine Network on Tuesday. Police also conducted 3,800 welfare checks to see if people were following stay-at-home orders.

Seven weeks of lockdown in Sydney (NSW)

One Covid-positive man from the hotspot of Fairfield in Sydney’s south-west wasn’t home when police arrived and was later unable to provide an excuse for his actions, Lanyon said. The entire state is now locked down and a 21-day police blitz came into effect on Monday to enforce new regulations, with almost 18,000 police officers supported by 800 members of the Australian defence force. Tougher noncompliance fines of up to $5,000 are in place with people in greater Sydney confined to within 5km of their homes. Police commissioner Mick Fuller warned that officers have been told to adopt “a no-nonsense approach” to people deliberately flouting laws.

OzStudents

Breaking: Australia will vaccinate 24,000+ students without parents present and they will not be allowed to be there. Parents are writing me completely outraged at what is happening to their children and what is happening to society and this entire planet! pic.twitter.com/27gPuOr4II

— Erin Elizabeth Health Nut News (@unhealthytruth) August 16, 2021

“All of us have been fully vaccinated (with two doses),” “All of us have been tested for COVID this week. And all of us have to take the second test tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,”

• Lockdowns Widen In China As Locals Doubt Official COVID-19 Data (ET)

A spokesperson for the Chinese National Health Commission Mi Feng said at a press conference on Friday: “As of now, the diagnosed local [COVID-19] cases have risen for 19 consecutive days, and involved 16 provinces.” On Saturday and Sunday, the regime announced more infections but many people interviewed by the Chinese-language Epoch Times said they didn’t believe the numbers because of the regime’s past underreporting on COVID-19. The regime has reported relatively small-scale local outbreaks this year until July 20, when Nanjing in eastern Jiangsu Province announced airport workers were diagnosed with COVID-19. Since then, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus, has spread to dozens of cities across the country.

In its counting of COVID-19 cases the Chinese regime doesn’t include infected people not showing obvious symptoms. The regime also claims that anyone found to have COVID-19 who travelled overseas in the past month must have contracted the CCP virus when they were out of China, and count them as imported cases. Local cases end up being those who haven’t visited other countries in the past months and have symptoms. In Zhengyang County in central Henan Province, the regime only announced one person diagnosed with COVID-19 in recent weeks, but have locked down residential compounds and villages. The regime even planned to test all residents in the county again on Friday, although it didn’t report any infections in a first round of tests carried out two days earlier.

As of around midday Monday local time, Zhengyang County government had only announced that it had found one case that tested positive on Aug. 9 and another that was counted as an individual showing symptoms on Thursday. However, the county has strictly controlled people’s movements. On Saturday, local residents in the county said lockdown measures meant they couldn’t leave home and many believed the real infection figure must be larger than what the authorities are admitting. “All of us have been fully vaccinated (with two doses),” Wang, a staff member of Zhengyang train station, said in a phone interview on Saturday. “All of us have been tested for COVID this week. And all of us have to take the second test tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,” Wang said. “The outbreak is very severe here.”

The Zhengyang City government announced that no private or business vehicles were allowed on roads from Saturday. Only ambulances, garbage trucks, and other emergency vehicles were allowed to use the roads. A Zhengyang farmer told the Chinese-language Epoch Times on Saturday that even farmers aren’t allowed to leave their homes or work their fields. “If there’s only one infection [in Zhengyang], the regime shouldn’t be so nervous, and shouldn’t ask us to test at night. They said we will be tested again,” the farmer said. “They [the regime] don’t allow us to farm our lands, don’t allow us to visit the city, don’t allow us to visit our friends and relatives. All schools and after-school classes were closed,” she said.

Berenson: “New @JAMA_current paper says @moderna_Tx caused 2.3x the number of “significant” symptoms compared to @pfizer in a sample of 950 people.

Moderna also produced more antibodies. Raising the question of what a third dose, which produces still MORE, will do.”

• Association of Vaccine Type and Prior SARS-CoV-2 Infection (JAMA)

In June 2020, HWs in the Johns Hopkins Health System provided oral informed consent to participate in a longitudinal study of S1 spike antibodies in which serum samples and survey responses were collected every 3 to 4 months. Ethical approval was obtained from the Johns Hopkins University Institutional Review Board. The HWs who participated for a study visit between March 10 and April 8, 2021, were included in this analysis if their serum sample was collected 14 or more days after receiving dose 2 of either mRNA vaccine. Using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (Euroimmun), IgG antibody measurements were determined based on optical density ratios with an upper threshold of 11 based on assay saturation.

Prior SARS-CoV-2 infection was defined as having (1) a positive SARS-CoV-2 polymerase chain reaction test result prior to 14 days after dose 2 or (2) S1 spike IgG measurement greater than 1.23 prior to vaccination.5 Participants self-reported symptoms following vaccination as none, mild (injection site pain, mild fatigue, headache), or clinically significant (fatigue, fever, chills). Logistic regression models were used to explore the association of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccine type with symptoms following each dose, adjusting for sex and age. A linear regression model was used to explore the association between magnitude of antibody response (log-transformed) and age, sex, prior infection, vaccine type, symptoms, and time after 2 doses of vaccine. Analyses were performed in R, version 4.0.2 (R Foundation).

Results
A questionnaire and serum sample were collected 14 or more days following dose 2 for 954 HWs. Clinically significant symptoms were reported by 52 of the 954 (5%) after dose 1 and 407 (43%) after dose 2. After adjusting for prior SARS-CoV-2 infection, age, and sex, the odds of clinically significant symptoms following either dose were higher among participants who received the Moderna vs the Pfizer vaccine (dose 1: odds ratio [OR], 1.83; 95% CI, 0.96-3.50; dose 2: OR, 2.43; 95% CI, 1.73-3.40) (Table). Prior SARS-CoV-2 exposure was associated with increased odds of clinically significant symptoms following dose 1 (OR, 4.38; 95% CI, 2.25-8.55) but not dose 2 (OR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.36-0.99), after controlling for vaccine type, age, and sex.

Regardless of symptoms, the vast majority of participants (953 of 954, greater than 99.9%) developed spike IgG antibodies 14 or more days following dose 2; 1 participant who was taking immunosuppressant medication did not develop IgG antibodies. Reporting clinically significant symptoms, age younger than 60 years, female sex, receipt of Moderna vaccine, and prior SARS-CoV-2 exposure were independently associated with higher median IgG measurements, after adjusting for time after dose 2.

Kulldorff is next.

• Harvard Med Professor Censored For Contrarian Covid Posts (JTN)

Martin Kulldorff started relying on LinkedIn to share news and views on COVID-19 policy after Twitter suspended the Harvard Medical School professor for a month for questioning the protective power of masks. Now the Microsoft-owned professional social network is scrutinizing his posts, going so far as to remove two for violating its misinformation policy. It’s at least the second action LinkedIn has taken this summer against a vaccine scientist who questioned COVID-19 orthodoxy. It suspended Robert Malone, who credits himself as the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, for alleging dangers from the “spike protein” in mRNA vaccines, citing heart-inflammation reports in some vaccinated young people and highlighting Big Tech censorship and conflicts of interest. A LinkedIn “senior executive” personally apologized to him for wrongful removal, Malone said.

Kulldorff made a similar cost-benefit argument against mandatory COVID vaccinations for young people in a June op-ed. He directed Twitter followers to find the op-ed on his LinkedIn page because “Twitter does not allow vaccine scientists to freely discuss vaccines.” Now he’s directing Linkedin followers to find him on Twitter, though the scientist confirmed to Just the News that he is concerned about further censorship there, “so I self-censor on Twitter.” One of Kulldorff’s Harvard Med colleagues spoke against LinkedIn for the censorship. “The point is not whether a minority viewpoint is right,” bioethics professor Jonathan Darrow, who cowrote a journal article with Kulldorff last year, wrote in an email. If such views are silenced, “public health options may be closed off prematurely, matters may be erroneously believed to be settled, and needed research may never be conducted.”

[..] COVID-19 orthodoxy has “unjustifiably tarnished” the reputations of scientists such as Stanford University’s John Ioannidis, “one of the most well-respected luminaries” in evidence-based medicine, Darrow said. Ioannidis lost that respect “because he publicly presented data about COVID’s infection fatality rate that were politically unpopular.” Censorship is also “communicable,” according to Darrow, “potentially tipping the scales of public judgment one way or the other and leading to a downward spiral of intolerance in which minority views are increasingly suppressed.”

When one insanity meets the other.

• Afghans Fleeing Taliban Need Negative PCR Test For Now-suspended Flights (RT)

The suspension of flights leaving Kabul has left countless civilians at the mercy of the Taliban. But even if flights resume, Afghans fleeing the country will still need to test negative for Covid, according to a baffling report. Soon after the Taliban seized the Afghan capital on Sunday, hundreds of civilians began to pour into Kabul’s international airport in hopes of being airlifted to safety. But by Monday morning, commercial airlines had halted operations in the Afghan capital due to gunfire around the air hub – caused at least in part by US soldiers firing warning shots at civilians gathering on the tarmac. But the suspension of regular outbound flights is just one of several hurdles facing Afghans seeking a one-way ticket out of the country: airlines operating in the Afghan capital ask for passengers to provide a negative coronavirus test.

The arguably ill-timed flight requirement was spotted at the end of an Atlantic article chronicling the frustrating story of an Afghan interpreter, Khan, and his family as they try to secure safe passage out of the country. “Today, Sunday, the Taliban are in Kabul… The neighborhood where Khan was renting a room has become dangerous, and he and his family have fled, walking six miles to another hiding place. He needs to find a facility that will administer the Covid-19 tests required by the airlines. He needs to get his family to the airport. He needs two more days,” reads the last paragraph of the article.

Bubbles.

• Tsitsipas Refuses To Take Vaccine Unless It Becomes Mandatory On Tour (R.)

World number three Stefanos Tsitsipas said he would only get the Covid-19 vaccine if it became mandatory to compete in tennis. While the men’s ATP Tour has publicly encouraged players to get vaccinated, the 23-year-old Greek is among those who still have reservations. “No one has told me anything. No one has made it a mandatory thing to be vaccinated,” he told reporters, when asked if he would seek a vaccine while competing in the US. “At some point I will have to, I’m pretty sure about it, but so far it hasn’t been mandatory to compete, so I haven’t done it, no,” added Tsitsipas, who received a first-round bye in the Masters 1000 tournament in Cincinnati.

He reached the French Open final in June but suffered a shock, first-round exit at Wimbledon, where he told reporters he found it challenging to live and compete in the Covid-19 “bubble.” The Covid-19 vaccine has divided opinion within tennis. World number one Novak Djokovic said in April he hoped the Covid-19 vaccine would not become mandatory for players to compete and has declined to answer questions regarding his own vaccination status. However, fellow 20-time Grand Slam winners Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal feel athletes need to play their part to get life back to some form of normality.

Federer said in May that he received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, while Nadal said: “The only way out of this nightmare is vaccination. Our responsibility as human beings is to accept it. “I know there is a percentage of people who will suffer from side effects, but the effects of the virus are worse.” Spectators will not be allowed to attend qualifying rounds at this month’s U.S. Open due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) said last week. The USTA previously said it would allow full fan capacity for the main part of the tournament.

China knows.

• Afghan Abandonment A Lesson For Taiwan (Global Times)

The geopolitical value of Afghanistan is no less than that of Taiwan island. Around Afghanistan, there are the US’ three biggest geopolitical rivals – China, Russia and Iran. In addition, Afghanistan is a bastion of anti-US ideology. The withdrawal of US troops from there is not because Afghanistan is unimportant. It’s because it has become too costly for Washington to have a presence in the country. Now the US wants to find a better way to use its resources to maintain its hegemony in the world. Taiwan is probably the US’ most cost-effective ally in East Asia. There is no US military presence on the island of Taiwan. The way the US maintains the alliance with Taiwan is simple: It sells arms to Taiwan while encouraging the DPP authorities to implement anti-mainland policies through political support and manipulation.

As a result, it has caused a certain degree of depletion between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits. And what Washington has to do is only to send warships and aircraft near the Straits from time to time. In general, the US does not have to spend a penny on Taiwan. Instead, it makes money through arms sales and forced pork and beef sales to the island. This is totally a profitable geopolitical deal for Washington. Once a cross-Straits war breaks out while the mainland seizes the island with forces, the US would have to have a much greater determination than it had for Afghanistan, Syria, and Vietnam if it wants to interfere. A military intervention of the US will be a move to change the status quo in the Taiwan Straits, and this will make Washington pay a huge price rather than earn profit.

Some people on the island of Taiwan hype that the island is different from Afghanistan, and that the US wouldn’t leave them alone. Indeed, the island is different from Afghanistan. But the difference is the deeper hopelessness of a US victory if it gets itself involved in a cross-Straits war. Such a war would mean unthinkable costs for the US, in front of which the so-called special importance of Taiwan is nothing but wishful thinking of the DPP authorities and secessionist forces on the island.

Afghans have no confidence in the US and US-supported regimes. I believe their distrust reflects the fact that the entire world has lost confidence in the US: Editor-in-Chief Hu Xijin #HuSays pic.twitter.com/yrcLPPxAwf

— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) August 16, 2021

“Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke.”

• Kabul Has Fallen – But Don’t Blame Joe Biden (Ron Paul)

This weekend the US experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan. After a 20 year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted away. The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the “experts” doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to blame. Politicians and pundits who played cheerleader for this war for two decades are now rushing to blame President Biden for finally getting the US out. Where were they when succeeding presidents continued to add troops and expand the mission in Afghanistan?

The US war on Afghanistan was not lost yesterday in Kabul. It was lost the moment it shifted from a limited mission to apprehend those who planned the attack on 9/11 to an exercise in regime change and nation-building. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks I proposed that we issue letters of marque and reprisal to bring those responsible to justice. But such a limited and targeted response to the attack was ridiculed at the time. How could the US war machine and all its allied profiteers make their billions if we didn’t put on a massive war? So who is to blame for the scenes from Afghanistan this weekend? There is plenty to go around. Congress has kicked the can down the road for 20 years, continuing to fund the Afghan war long after even they understood that there was no point to the US occupation.

There were some efforts by some Members to end the war, but most, on a bipartisan basis, just went along to get along. The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke. The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots.

[..] Political control in Afghanistan has returned to the people who fought against those they viewed as occupiers and for what they viewed as their homeland. That is the real lesson, but don’t expect it to be understood in Washington. War is too profitable and political leaders are too cowardly to go against the tide. But the lesson is clear for anyone wishing to see it: the US global military empire is a grave threat to the United States and its future.

Vet

This Afghanistan vet just blew up MSNBC’s entire Biden-simping Afghanistan narrative LIVE ON AIR.

What a glorious takedown. Watch this. pic.twitter.com/6mR2RlPN7I

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) August 17, 2021

Well, we have to make some money, c’mon!

• Afghanistan: We Never Learn (Taibbi)

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, when asked months ago about the possibility that there might be a “significant deterioration” of the security picture in Afghanistan once the United States withdrew its forces, said, “I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday.” Blinken’s Nostradamus moment was somehow one-upped by that of his boss, Joe Biden, who on July 8th had the following exchange with press: “Q: Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse. BIDEN: That is not true, they did not reach that conclusion… There is going to be no circumstance where you see people lifted off the roof of an embassy… The likelihood that you’re going to see the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

[..] The pattern is always the same. We go to places we’re not welcome, tell the public a confounding political problem can be solved militarily, and lie about our motives in occupying the country to boot. Then we pick a local civilian political authority to back that inevitably proves to be corrupt and repressive, increasing local antagonism toward the American presence. In response to those increasing levels of antagonism, we then ramp up our financial, political, and military commitment to the mission, which in turn heightens the level of resistance, leading to greater losses in lives and treasure. As the cycle worsens, the government systematically accelerates the lies to the public about our level of “progress.”

Throughout, we make false assurances of security that are believed by significant numbers of local civilians, guaranteeing they will later either become refugees or targets for retribution as collaborators. Meanwhile, financial incentives for contractors, along with political disincentives to admission of failure, prolong the mission. This all goes on for so long that the lies become institutionalized, believed not only by press contracted to deliver the propaganda (CBS’s David Martin this weekend saying with a straight face, “Everybody is surprised by the speed of this collapse” was typical), but even by the bureaucrats who concocted the deceptions in the first place.

The look of genuine shock on the face of Tony Blinken this weekend as he jousted with Jake Tapper about Biden’s comments from July should tell people around the world something important about the United States: in addition to all the other things about us that are dangerous, we lack self-knowledge. Even deep inside the machine of American power, where everyone paying even a modicum of attention over the last twenty years should have known Kabul would fall in a heartbeat, they still believe their own legends. Which means this will happen again, and probably sooner rather than later.

“..if you don’t see this US policy debacle increases the risks of ‘red-line’ incidents in the Asia/Indo-Pacific, perhaps you should look for a desk job at the CIA.”

• When The Penny Drops It’s You And Your Portfolio On That Kabul Tarmac (Every)

The US Beltway experts who six weeks ago said the Taliban could not establish an Islamic Emirate for at least a year, and then suddenly revised that down to six weeks, and then to 72 hours, still got it wrong: it happened on Sunday evening. The Afghan president has fled, along with his artificial $88bn “army”, but the actual weapons are now in the hands of the Taliban. Crowds of desperate Afghans are flooding the runway of Kabul airport –requisitioned by the US Army because it surrendered Bagram airbase without warning weeks ago, and the Taliban now control it– in scenes that look like Saigon in 1975. Or, tragically, like the Khmer Rouge entering Phnom Penh in ‘The Killing Fields’ (in Cambodia, a few years later); and there seems a very real risk the comparison won’t stop there.

Yes, markets will try to brush this geopolitical earthquake off: It’s just Afghanistan; It’s a long way away; We never wanted to go on holiday there anyway; They don’t even buy much cheese. There will probably be attempts to talk of a ‘New Taliban’, as we did with New Labour in the UK, brushing over the fact that the latter ‘New’ was vs. 1970’s socialism, and the former is vs. 7th century fundamentalism. Indeed, the Taliban seem to now realize which Western memes make it look more palatable, and are promising to be “inclusive”. They may only need to throw in “diverse”, “equity”, “green”, and “sustainability” for Wall Street to perk up and ask “Are you in favour of free trade and QE?”, and for EU foreign policy representatives to sit next to them.

But what to do? Michael Bloomberg has already penned an editorial that says “The US Can’t Walk Away From Afghanistan”, which is correct: the US *ran* away in the eyes of Afghans. He then Bloombergs that: “Words are easy. Solutions are hard,” and suggests the US continue to fund the Afghan government and army as long as viable (too late!), help people to flee (where?), and use airstrikes and special forces to keep terrorism at bay, which will involve “Cajoling neighbouring countries for intelligence support and basing rights.” (Neighbours like China; Turkmenistan; Tajikistan; Uzbekistan; Iran; and Pakistan.) Hey, words *are* easy! And solutions hard. Yet Bloomberg is right in that this geopolitical nightmare is almost certainly only just beginning.

As noted here on Friday, if you don’t see this US policy debacle increases the risks of ‘red-line’ incidents in the Asia/Indo-Pacific, perhaps you should look for a desk job at the CIA. The US now looks like it is flailing around like a social-media influencer discovering not just a micro-aggression, or that life contains people who don’t agree with you, but that there are people who aren’t even on Twitter that can punch you in the face and break your nose and teeth (and far, far worse). Geopolitically, opportunists of all stripes may now be considering if they may not be able to earn theirs, so to speak, by kicking the US while it is down. And yet the US is clearly swinging most of what is still the world’s most formidable military muscle squarely towards the Asia/Indo-Pacific region, and will almost certainly not want to be seen to ‘do a Kabul’ in that jurisdiction too. Or a Nord-Stream 2. Or an Iran.

“Floundering. Friendless. Broke. Broken!”

• Strange Days Ahead (Kunstler)

Well, we’ve become an ossified, administrative nomenklatura of Deep State flunkies as the Soviets were, and lately we’re just as lawless as they used to be, constitution-wise — e.g., the abolition of property rights via the CDC’s rent moratorium… the prolonged jailing in solitary confinement of January 6 political prisoners… the introduction of internal “passports.” The USA is running on fumes economically as the Soviets were. Our dominant party leadership has aged into an embarrassing gerontocracy. Is it our turn to collapse? Kind of looks like it. The days ahead are liable to be a rough ride. Surely China has taken the measure of our Woke military and is weighing the seizure of Taiwan in our moment of signal weakness.

No more computer chips for you, Uncle Sam! Do we come to Taiwan’s defense with guns blazing, or perhaps nukes? And what if that doesn’t work out so well? I’ll tell you what: a major geopolitical reordering of things, leaving us… where? Unable to enforce our will around the world as has been the case for eighty years. Floundering. Friendless. Broke. Broken! Of course, the domestic situation in our land has not been so fraught and overwrought since 1861. Everything is politicized, which is to say: used as a truncheon to beat-up adversaries and, let’s face it, mostly in the sense of Left against Right. This is especially true for the Covid-19 soap opera, which more and more pits the sanctimoniously vaccinated “progressives” against the recalcitrant conservative no-vax free-choicers — that is, coercive government trying to force supposedly free citizens to accept a pretty dubious experimental medical treatment.

Since when did the American Left become so pro-tyranny, and how’d that even happen? I have friends and relatives — I’m sure you do, too — who knocked themselves out in the 1960s protesting against the war, the government, the FBI, and the CIA… who fought in the streets for free speech and raged against official propaganda — and today they can’t get enough of coercing, punishing, brain-washing, and cancelling their fellow citizens. They’re going so far now as to engineer their vicious narrative to brand their opponents as “domestic terrorists.” Think that’s going to work?

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Debt Rattle September 17 2020

Sep 172020

September 17, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:19 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, CDC, Covid19, critical race theory, Fauci, Hunter Biden, Lisa Page, Mueller, New Zealand, Pelosi, Redfield, subpoenas, Tide pods 11 Responses »

René Magritte Sixteenth of September 1956

• CDC: US Should Have Enough Vaccine To Return To Regular Life By Q3 2021 (CNBC)

• Trump Admin Shuts Down CDC Training Based On Critical Race Theory (Fox)

• President Trump’s Ban on Critical Race Theory, Explained (FEE)

• Subpoenas Coming For Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Halper Et Al (ZH)

• Mueller Team Had Lisa Page’s Phone It Claimed Was Lost (ET)

• Treasury Flagged Foreign Money Flowing To Hunter Biden-Tied Firms (JTN)

• Senator Kennedy: There Are Times When I Think Pelosi Has Eaten Tide Pods (ZH)

• The Democrat Ticket Is Puzzling (Paul Craig Roberts)

• 60% of US Business Closures Due To The Pandemic Are Now Permanent (CNBC)

• New Zealand In Recession After Worst Quarterly GDP Fall On Record (G.)

• Julian Assange Interrupts Extradition Hearing Again (SMH)

• Claims Assange ‘Endangered Lives’ Rubbished In Extradition Hearing (Haddad)

We passed 30 million total global cases overnight. That is a lot of people. And at 300,000 new cases a day, 9 million will be added each month.

India hasn’t breached the 100,000 number in one day so far.

You can think what you want about performances like this one by CDC head Robert Redfield, but the problem with the CDC, as well as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Fauci, should be obvious. The same will go for similar bureaus in other countries. That is, they basically go unchallenged for decades (I know, there was SARS), which inevitably makes them lazy and riddled with inertia.

This is best exemplified by the fact that Fauci has been heading his institute since 1984. Plenty of time to get all chummy with the Big Pharma people he sees on a regular basis, and one thing leads to another. And then when an emergeny occurs, we find out that they have no way left to deal with an emergency, because they’re all rusty and dusty. Which of course they will vehemently deny.

Meanwhile, Fauci has said may different, even contradictory things, and Redfield does no better. First, there is no vaccine, so this is pure hypothesis. And even then it will take another year?! Great message. Which the CDC itself walked back within hours to boot. And the way he’s flopping that piece of cloth around, saying it’s better than a vaccine, is just horrible. He’s had 9 months to drown the US in N95 masks, and be effective. So where are they?

• CDC: US Should Have Enough Vaccine To Return To Regular Life By Q3 2021 (CNBC)

The U.S. should have enough Covid-19 vaccine doses for Americans to return to “regular life” by the third quarter of next year, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield told a Senate panel he expects vaccinations to begin in November or December, but in limited quantities with those most in need getting the first doses, such as health-care workers. He said it will take about “six to nine months” to get the entire American public vaccinated. “If you’re asking me when is it going to be generally available to the American public so we can begin to take advantage of vaccine to get back to our regular life, I think we’re probably looking at third … late second quarter, third quarter 2021,” he told the U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee on labor, health and human services, education, and related agencies.

The CDC later walked back Redfield’s testimony after President Donald Trump criticized him at a White House press conference. The CDC said Redfield’s timeline referred to when all Americans will complete their immunizations. “He was not referring to the time period when COVID-19 vaccine doses would be made available to all Americans,” CDC spokesman Paul Fulton Jr. said in an email to CNBC. At the hearing, Redfield said the Trump administration’s Covid-19 vaccine program Operation Warp Speed was unprecedented. He told lawmakers that a vaccine usually takes four to six years. There are no approved vaccines for the coronavirus. Three drugmakers are currently in late-stage testing for potential vaccines and expect to know if they work by the end of the year.

Public health experts have previously said that most Americans likely won’t get immunized with a coronavirus vaccine until the middle of next year. Whichever vaccine is authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, it will likely be in short supply once it’s cleared for public distribution, medical experts warn. The vaccine will likely require two doses at varying intervals, and states still face logistical challenges such as setting up distribution sites and acquiring enough needles, syringes and bottles needed for immunizations.

Redfield

NEW: CDC Director Redfield to US Senate cmte.:

“These facemasks are the important, powerful public health tool we have … I might even go so far as to say that this facemask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine.” pic.twitter.com/7LJZ3U9xi1

— NBC News (@NBCNews) September 16, 2020

“..It’s unclear why the CDC proceeded with the training..”

• Trump Admin Shuts Down CDC Training Based On Critical Race Theory (Fox)

President Trump’s administration canceled another critical race theory training that was set to occur through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) despite the president’s recent executive order banning those types of events, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said Tuesday. OMB Director Russ Vought announced the decision just a day after Discovery Institute researcher Chris Rufo reported on the training, underscoring the administration’s recent responsiveness to news on this issue. “Glad to report, per @POTUS’s directive, this training is being cancelled immediately,” Vought tweeted, alongside Rufo’s post about the issue. Rufo’s revelations appeared to prompt Trump’s executive order earlier this month.

Rufo noted on Monday that the CDC was hosting a training focused on “systems of structured inequality,” blaming systemic racism for deaths from COVID-19 and at the hands of police. It admonishes the “myth of meritocracy” and “myth of american exceptionalism,” among other objectives that Rufo said represented “textbook critical race theory.” It’s unclear why the CDC proceeded with the training, which appeared to take place on Thursday. Rufo responded to Vought’s announcement by demanding accountability and threatening to release names of those involved if the CDC didn’t take action on its own.

A senior administration official told Fox News that all agencies are supposed to adhere to the president’s order, and that the president’s team is attempting to stop trainings that are continuing despite the cease and desist order. In Vought’s initial letter on the issue, he denounced the trainings as un-American. “According to press reports, in some cases these training have further claimed that there is racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job,” he said. “These types of ‘trainings’ not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our nation has stood since its inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the federal workforce,” he said.

Vought also directed agencies to identify ways to sever government contracts that supported those trainings. Last week, Rufo flagged a training through an Education Department contractor, which purportedly pushed for radical changes to education and doing “away with prison,” among other things. One document stated that “schools are built to manage racism” and that “we all” seem to abide by a racial contract that says it’s ok for white people to kill [B]lacks with immunity.”

“Just as Marxism demonized capitalists, CRT vilifies white people..”

• President Trump’s Ban on Critical Race Theory, Explained (FEE)

Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory, which began as an academic movement in the 1930s. Critical Theory emphasizes the “critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures,” as Wikipedia states. Critical Race Theory does the same, with a focus on racial power structures, especially white supremacy and the oppression of people of color. The “power structure” prism stems largely from Critical Theory’s own roots in Marxism—Critical Theory was developed by members of the Marxist “Frankfurt School.” Traditional Marxism emphasized economic power structures, especially the supremacy of capital over labor under capitalism. Marxism interpreted most of human history as a zero-sum class war for economic power.

“According to the Marxian view,” wrote the economist Ludwig von Mises, “human society is organized into classes whose interests stand in irreconcilable opposition.” Mises called this view a “conflict doctrine,” which opposed the “harmony doctrine” of classical liberalism. According to the classical liberals, in a free market economy, capitalists and workers were natural allies, not enemies. Indeed, in a free society all rights-respecting individuals were natural allies. Critical Race Theory arose as a distinct movement in law schools in the late 1980s. CRT inherited many of its premises and perspectives from its Marxist ancestry. The pre-CRT Civil Rights Movement had emphasized equal rights and treating people as individuals, as opposed to as members of a racial collective.

“I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Martin Luther King famously said. In contrast, CRT dwells on inequalities of outcome, which it generally attributes to racial power structures. And, as we’ve seen from the government training curricula, modern CRT forthrightly judges white people by the color of their skin, prejudging them as racist by virtue of their race. This race-based “pre-trial guilty verdict” of racism is itself, by definition, racist. The classical liberal “harmony doctrine” was deeply influential in the movements to abolish all forms of inequality under the law: from feudal serfdom, to race-based slavery, to Jim Crow.

But, with the rise of Critical Race Theory, the cause of racial justice became more influenced by the fixations on conflict, discord, and domination that CRT inherited from Marxism. Social life was predominantly cast as a zero-sum struggle between collectives: capital vs. labor for Marxism, whites vs. people of color for CRT. A huge portion of society’s ills were attributed to one particular collective’s diabolical domination: capitalist hegemony for Marxism, white supremacy for CRT. Just as Marxism demonized capitalists, CRT vilifies white people. Both try to foment resentment, envy, and a victimhood complex among the oppressed class it claims to champion.

Critical Race Theory
https://twitter.com/i/status/1306000528757923848

The Senate Homeland Security Committee appears to be getting restless about the Durham probe.

• Subpoenas Coming For Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Halper Et Al (ZH)

The Senate Homeland Security Committee voted on Wednesday to authorize subpoenas for dozens of Obama-era officials involved in ‘spygate,’ including former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, former DNI James Clapper — and longtime US intelligence operative Stephen Halper, who the Obama administration paid nearly half-a-million dollars to help the FBI spy on the 2016 Trump campaign. The committee authorized chairman Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) to issue notices for taking depositions, subpoenas, records requests, and testimony related to the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation – along with the DOJ Inspector General’s review of said investigation, as well as the “unmasking” of individuals connected to the Trump campaign, transition team, and administration, according to Fox News.

“The committee also authorized subpoenas for Sidney Blumenthal, former Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough, former FBI counsel Lisa Page, former FBI agent Joe Pientka, former ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, former FBI director of counterintelligence Bill Priestap, former White House national security adviser Susan Rice, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith – who pleaded guilty to making a false statement in the first criminal case arising from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s review of the investigation into links between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign – among others.”

As part of the authorization, Johnson may subpoena “the production of all records” related to the FBI’s initial Russia probe, as well as unmasking requests for “James Baker, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, DOJ official Bruce Ohr, FBI case agent Steven Somma, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Teftt, former deputy assistant attorney general Tashina Gauhar.” Halper, meanwhile, is a former government official and longtime spook for the CIA and FBI, who was outed as the FBI informant who infiltrated the Trump campaign after the Washington Post and the New York Times ran reports that corroborated a March report by the Daily Caller detailing Halper’s outreach to several low-level aides to the Trump campaign, including Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

These contacts are notable, as Halper’s infiltration of the Trump campaign corresponds with the two of the four targets of the FBI’s Operation Crossfire Hurricane – in which the agency sent counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and others to a London meeting in the Summer of 2016 with former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer – who says Papadopoulos drunkenly admitted to knowing that the Russians had Hillary Clinton’s emails. The 74-year-old Halper who split his time between his Virginia farm and teaching at Cambridge, approached several Trump campaign aides during the 2016 US election for purposes of espionage – on behalf of the FBI, headed at the time by the recently very quiet James Comey. Halper continued to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page well after the election, and now we find that he was trying to infiltrate the Trump administration.

Does anyone except the principals actors think these things should NOT be investigated?

• Mueller Team Had Lisa Page’s Phone It Claimed Was Lost (ET)

An official who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation wrote in a recently released email that he or she was in possession of an iPhone belonging to Lisa Page three days after the former FBI lawyer’s last day on the job and at a time when the device was thought to have been lost. The special counsel’s office (SCO) and the Justice Department previously claimed to have no documents to show who handled Page’s iPhone after she turned it in on July 14, 2017, or who improperly wiped it two weeks later, before it could be checked for records, in violation of SCO policy. But documents released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sept. 11 tell a different story, with three officials certifying that Page turned over her phone and one claiming to have been in possession of it.

“I have her phone and laptop,” an administrative officer with the initials LFW wrote in a July 17, 2017, email to Christopher Greer, an assistant director at the DOJ Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO). Beth McGarry, the executive officer at the special counsel’s office, told Greer in an email sent earlier in the day that Page “returned her mobile phone and laptop.” On the same day, a property custodian officer, whose name is redacted in the documents, signed a form on which Page certified that she turned in her phone and the officer certified that “all government property has been returned or otherwise properly accounted for.” The July 17 timing of the two statements and the signature is significant. The DOJ Office of Inspector General (OIG) previously concluded that there were no records of who had the phone after July 14. The records about Page’s phone are part of a DOJ disclosure that revealed that members of the Mueller team improperly wiped at least 22 iPhones before they could be checked for records.

[..] Mueller’s team used a total of 92 iPhones, according to the documents. Four of the phones appear in the inventory logs, but not on the records officer’s log, suggesting they were either recorded without their unique asset tag or evaded the officer entirely. One of the four phones belonged to deputy special counsel Aaron Zebley. Another belonged to Zainab Ahmad, a special counsel attorney. One phone was partially wiped. Four phones were improperly handed over to the OCIO and wiped before the records officer’s review. As many as seven phones with no asset tags noted by the records officer were either reassigned or wiped before the officer could assess the device for records.

The pattern of questionable deletions has drawn the attention of lawmakers. Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chairmen of the finance and oversight committees, respectively, sent a letter to the DOJ and the FBI last week asking for more information about what happened with the phones. “It appears that Special Counsel Mueller’s team may have deleted federal records that could be key to better understanding their decision-making process as they pursued their investigation and wrote their report,” Grassley wrote. “Indeed, many officials apparently deleted the records after the DOJ Inspector General began his inquiry into how the Department mishandled Crossfire Hurricane.”

His dad is running for president. Which is when in America the family is dragged in. But where is Hunter? Too much of a liability? The press can’t ask Joe, because all questions are pre-scripted.

• Treasury Flagged Foreign Money Flowing To Hunter Biden-Tied Firms (JTN)

A Treasury Department agency that polices financial threats such as money laundering flagged several foreign transactions to Hunter Biden-connected businesses as “suspicious” during the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump administration. The concerns from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) were highlighted in Suspicious Activity Reports turned over to Senate committees over the last year in conjunction with investigations into the Russia and Ukraine scandals, according to several officials familiar with the evidence. As those Senate investigations wind toward the issuance of their first official report later this month, an essential question has emerged:

Did U.S. law enforcement or intelligence agencies do anything to determine if the money flowing to Vice President Joe Biden’s son posed any criminal or intelligence threats? [..] Senate Democrats first called attention to the existence of the SARs in a little-noticed letter late last year and are now bracing for the flagged financial transactions to be a major revelation in a joint report they expect to be published by the GOP-led Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the Senate Finance Committees as early as next week. “The Republicans have had this in their back pocket for some time to make headlines as the election drew closer,” one Democratic source told Just the News.

[..] The SAR reports were requested as Senate investigators dug into a labyrinth of global businesses that Hunter Biden and his business partners became involved with in Russia, China, Ukraine and elsewhere while his father Joe Biden served as the vice president and Obama administration foreign policy point person. That includes Hunter Biden’s controversial addition in spring 2014 to the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas firm with a long record of corruption allegations. SARs are one of the law enforcement community’s most powerful and secretive tools in the war against money laundering, drug cartels and terrorist threats, providing real-time warnings from financial institutions to FinCEN that certain transactions have characteristics that make them suspicious.

Treasury typically receives or generates one million to two million Suspicious Activity Reports a year. So a SAR report in and of itself is not evidence of wrongdoing, but it is usually a starting point for investigation, experts say. The question that remains is whether FBI or ODNI did anything to investigate these suspicious reports after they were alerted by FinCEN. [..] Hunter Biden’s globe-trotting business activities have long generated controversy because they often occurred in the shadows of his father’s foreign policy portfolio. Hunter Biden, for instance, traveled aboard Air Force Two in December 2013 with the vice president to Beijing, walking away soon after with a stake in an investment fund that received funding from the state-owned Bank of China. As his father’s administration took several actions favorable to Beijing, such as opening U.S. capital markets to Chinese companies, Hunter Biden closed deals in China.

“Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi aren’t going to agree to anything until we agree to spend a trillion dollars bailing out New York and California and that’s not going to happen in your or my natural life..”

• Senator Kennedy: There Are Times When I Think Pelosi Has Eaten Tide Pods (ZH)

GOP Senator John Kennedy used a startling cultural reference to portray his belief that believes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is crazy, saying that he often thinks she has ‘is one of those people who tried Tide Pods’ laundry detergent. Appearing with Sean Hannity, Kennedy was addressing Pelosi’s obsession with the $3.4 trillion coronavirus bill. “Sean, with respect, there are times, particularly recently, when I think Speaker Pelosi is one of those people who tried Tide pods,” Kennedy hilariously stated. “I want you to think about what she proposed today, this is what the speaker is threatening to do,” he continued, adding “She is threatening to keep the House Democrats in session and prevent them from going home and running for reelection unless the Senate Republicans agree to the speaker’s $3.4 trillion coronavirus bill.”

“On the one hand we can vote for Pelosi’s $3.4 trillion bill or we can agree to allow her to put the House Democratic majority into jeopardy. That’s just bone deep down to the marrow foolish,” Kennedy urged. Kennedy further emphasised that Nothing is going to get done while the Democrats refuse to back down over something that is never going to come to fruition. “Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi aren’t going to agree to anything until we agree to spend a trillion dollars bailing out New York and California and that’s not going to happen in your or my natural life,” Kennedy added.

PCR worked at the Reagan White House.

• The Democrat Ticket Is Puzzling (Paul Craig Roberts)

Those of you old enough to remember President Reagan will remember all the presstitute insinuations about Reagan being senile and falling asleep at cabinet meetings. Of course, the presstitutes were never at cabinet meetings. Reagan successfully confronted the two major problems of his time—stagflation and the nuclear armageddon that could result from misunderstood intentions or a warning system error. Reagan’s supply-side policy deep-sixed stagflation—the simultaneous rise of inflation and unemployment—and his negotiations with Soviet President Gorbachev ended the Cold War.

The Establishment has buried both achievements, and today Reagan is understood as the president who made Americans feel good while he cut taxes for the rich and poured money into the Pentagon and defense contractors. Reagan’s “star wars” was more illusion than real. It’s purpose was to convince the Soviets to end the Cold War. This was also the purpose of his military interventions against leftish takeovers in the US “sphere of influence.” The reason for these interventions was to give the message to Moscow that there would be no further territorial gains for communism. Americans today, especially the youth, know nothing about how the Reagan administration gave us two decades of economic growth without having to pay for it with rising inflation, and they do not know that Reagan ended the Cold War.

Today the rightwing and Russians themselves believe that Reagan won the Cold War. That was not Reagan’s goal. President Reagan told those of us involved that the purpose was “to end, not win, the Cold War,” and that we must never act or speak in any way that implied that we had prevailed over the Soviets. Wikipedia, a disinformation website, opens its account of Reagan’s foreign policy with a blatant lie: “The foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration was the foreign policy of the United States from 1981 to 1989. The main goal was winning the Cold War.” The ignorance of whoever wrote this is extraordinary.

The Soviets never would have agreed to losing the Cold War. President Reagan understood this, which is why he emphasized that our purpose was to end, not win, the Cold War.

And counting.

• 60% of US Business Closures Due To The Pandemic Are Now Permanent (CNBC)

Yelp on Wednesday released its latest Economic Impact Report, revealing business closures across the U.S. are increasing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic’s economic toll. As of Aug, 31, 163,735 businesses have indicated on Yelp that they have closed. That’s down from the 180,000 that closed at the very beginning of the pandemic. However, it actually shows a 23% increase in the number of closures since mid-July. In addition to monitoring closed businesses, Yelp also takes into account the businesses whose closures have become permanent. That number has steadily increased throughout the past six months, now reaching 97,966, representing 60% of closed businesses that won’t be reopening.

“Overall, Yelp’s data shows that business closures have continued to rise with a 34% increase in permanent closures since our last report in mid-July,” Justin Norman, vice president of data science at Yelp, told CNBC. Yelp’s September report marks six months since March 1, the date that the company considers to be the beginning of the business crisis. In order to gather closure data, Yelp monitors changes in business hours or descriptions on its app, offering an immediate, localized view of the impact the pandemic has had on small businesses. “Despite the hard hit small businesses have certainly taken, we’ve seen that home, local, professional and automotive services have been able to withstand the effects of the pandemic better than other industries,” Norman noted.

The data supports the trend that most consumers are choosing to stay home over patronizing establishments physically, as home and professional services such as landscapers, contractors and lawyers, see a much lower closure rate than clothing stores and even home decor businesses. Auto and towing services also reported a relatively low closure rate. “Consumers still need these services,” Norman said. “Through the rise of virtual consultations, and contactless or socially distanced services, these businesses have been particularly resilient during this time.” Throughout the past six months, restaurants, bars and nightlife venues have been hit the hardest by the restrictions brought by the pandemic: 32,109 restaurants have closed, as of Aug. 31. The number of restaurants forced to permanently close is slightly above Yelp’s total average, at 61%.

New Zealand has spin doctors too: “Robertson said economic analysts were predicting the September quarter to show “a record jump back to growth in the economy..”

• New Zealand In Recession After Worst Quarterly GDP Fall On Record (G.)

New Zealand has entered a recession with the economy contracting 12.2% in the June quarter – the largest drop since such records began in 1987. Paul Pascoe at Stats NZ said the GDP fall was “by far the largest on record in New Zealand” and reflected months spent in lockdown. Industries such as retail, accommodation, restaurants and transport saw significant declines; as did construction and manufacturing at 25.8% and 13% respectively. Household domestic spending dropped by 12%. Annually, GDP fell by 2% – the first annual decline since the March 2010 quarter. New Zealand’s economic retraction is higher than Australia’s 7% and Canada at 11.5%, but much less than in India, Singapore and the UK.

The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, placed New Zealand in a strict one-month lockdown on 26 March. No one was allowed to leave their home unless buying groceries, medicines, or taking an hour of exercise in their neighbourhood. At the time Ardern said the lockdown was necessary to control the spread of the virus and her priority was saving lives at any cost. Fewer than 2,000 people have become infected with the virus in New Zealand while 25 have died. The country’s efforts at containing the disease have been widely praised by epidemiologists around the world. The finance minister, Grant Robertson, said Thursday’s figures were “expected” and the result of the government’s “go hard, go early” response to the pandemic.

“This result was better than the treasury forecast of 16% and at the lower end of other commentators’ expectations,” Robertson said. “The June quarter includes almost the entire time New Zealand was in alert level 4 which we moved into on March 26 so this result is not surprising.” Robertson said economic analysts were predicting the September quarter to show “a record jump back to growth in the economy”.

“This must be corrected. “The damage to me will be irreparable if the media reports that I harmed people, when it is not true,” he said.”

• Julian Assange Interrupts Extradition Hearing Again (SMH)

Julian Assange has again interrupted his extradition hearing, claiming that he never put informants lives at risk, when he published hundreds of thousands of State Department documents on his WikiLeaks website. The 49-year-old intervened in his extradition hearing for the second time since it’s resumption at the Old Bailey in London last week, earning him another stern reprimand from the judge hearing his case. Assange cried out from the dock after lunchtime during evidence being given by former military analyst Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the classified Pentagon Papers that revealed the US government knew it would not win the Vietnam War based on existing resources.

Ellsberg was pursed under the Espionage Act as is Assange. All charges against him were eventually dropped and he has become a vocal supporter of Assange as well as Chelsea Manning, who leaked to Assange the hacked files. Ellsberg also supports Edward Snowden who leaked classified documents he had access to as a CIA subcontractor. The United States government has asked Britain to extradite Assange to face 18 counts of violating the Espionage Act with most charges relating to computer hacking. However, the US government is pursuing Assange over the publication of unredacted documents which exposed the names of informants. The distinction the US government is repeatedly trying to make separates Assange from the press which also published information revealed by WikiLeaks but without naming journalists, human rights advocates and dissidents who were informing on their governments and repressive regimes.

Ellsberg confirmed that when he leaked his cache of documents, he withheld four volumes of documents. But he said that the only withheld these because they related to negotiations which he did not want to jeopardise. Assange’s outburst came as the QC representing the US government, James Lewis, was cross-examining Ellsberg. Lewis cited an Ethiopian journalist who fled the country after being interrogated and threatened once he was outed as having been a source for the United States. Lewis also read out media reporting of a Chinese national named in the WikiLeaks cables reported being harrassed by non-state groups. The Chinese national fled to the United States.

Ellsberg claimed to have never seen evidence that an informant exposed by WikiLeaks was harmed or killed in retaliation. “I find the government highly cynical … am I right in believing not one of them who was subject to threats or interrogation by these brutal and ruthless regimes actually suffered physical harm? “Were any of the threats carried out? Even one? Isn’t the answer no?” Ellsberg said. “The rules are you don’t get to ask questions, I do,” said Lewis. Assange also rejected the claims that he put lives at risk. “Through his rhetorical sleight of hand he is suggesting that I put lives at risk,” Assange said from the dock. “This must be corrected. “The damage to me will be irreparable if the media reports that I harmed people, when it is not true,” he said. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser reprimanded Assange, for the second time in as many weeks. “I have warned you about this before, you are not entitled to interfere like this,” she said.

We all know this. Why does the US base its entire case now on this nonsense?

• Claims Assange ‘Endangered Lives’ Rubbished In Extradition Hearing (Haddad)

A senior investigative journalist who worked on the release of thousands of military and diplomatic cables with WikiLeaks has rubbished prosecution claims that Julian Assange and his organisation put the lives of U.S. service members and informants at risk. John Goetz, an investigations editor with the German public broadcaster NDR, had been a reporter with Der Spiegel at the time of the releases between 2010 and 2011. That included the Afghan and Iraq war diaries, in addition to the release of U.S. diplomatic cables that came to be known as Cablegate. James Lewis QC, on behalf of the U.S. government, told the Old Bailey last week that Assange is not being prosecuted for receiving the documents, but because he risked lives with “reckless publication”.

Goetz told the court on Wednesday (September 16) that Assange and WikiLeaks in fact had a “very rigorous redaction process” – on occasion more censorious than the Pentagon when the same documents were released by Freedom of Information Act requests. As the lead investigative journalist for Der Spiegel, Goetz was among a handful of journalists to be invited to the Guardian’s “bunker” in London where they, alongside WikiLeaks and New York Times staff, worked on removing sensitive names from documents. Goetz said that redaction and what Assange called the “harm-minimisation process” was central from the very beginning of his involvement in June 2010 and how Eric Schmitt of The New York Times was tasked with contacting the White House prior to publication due to the newspaper’s location and existing relationship.

As a result of that early communication, WikiLeaks and the partner publications withheld 15,000 documents from the Afghan War Logs “to protect innocents being harmed,” he said. “It was communicated to the White House that 15,000 documents would not be published because of the harm minimisation process and that is what happened.” While media partners worked on redacting specific documents, Assange was concerned with a technological solution that could aid the process due to the high volume of documents that were being evaluated, it was added. The same redaction process continued during the later publication of the Iraq War Diary and the U.S. State Department cables, Goetz said, but that communication with the State Department was later ceased when the department realised they were in fact helping journalists find the most damaging stories by requesting which files were to be redacted.

Goetz said: “There was a conference call with State Department officials such as PJ Crowley and others and they expressed in the phone call the numbers of the documents they were concerned about. “We were writing the document numbers down and it was easy to look at the documents where there were sensitive names to see if there was any significant names that had to be redacted. “We were very happy to receive these names and in many ways it was quite interesting to know which documents they were concerned about, but there was a pause in the conversation and then they – [the State Department] – stopped talking to us because it was clear that they were giving us an index of the most interesting stories.”

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Debt Rattle August 17 2020

Aug 172020

August 17, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:01 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, coronavirus, Covid19, critical theory, Japan, New Zealand, poll, rapid test, Schiff, USPS, Vote by Mail, Weissmann, woke 27 Responses »

Claude Monet The Wooden Bridge 1872

• One-Second Coronavirus Test Achieves 95% Success Rate (JP)

• Biden and Trump Matchup Tightens As Enthusiasm Hits New High (CNN)

• Mueller Aide Weissmann Tells DOJ Attorneys Not To Help Investigators (Turley)

• The Manufactured Hysteria Over Mail Delivery (PJM)

• A Reality-Based Look At Trump And The Post Office (York)

• Washington’s Successful Vote-by-Mail System Wasn’t Built Overnight (CC)

• Adam Schiff’s Inaccurate Russia Tweets Raise Double-Standard Question (JTN)

• Japan’s Economy Shrinks At Record -27.8% Annual Rate (AP)

• UK Housing Market Has Busiest Month In More Than 10 Years (G.)

• New Zealand Delays General Election By A Month Amid COVID19 Outbreak (G.)

• The Roots Of Wokeness (Sullivan)

What do you think about the post office narrative? Which side is trying to use it to influence the election?

How about the CNN poll that says all of a sudden Trump has closed the double digit gap to Biden? Is that the Kamala effect, or did CNN wake up to the realization that those huge gaps make people less likely to vote?

How about CNN’s -implied- claim that Biden voters are mpre enthusiastic than Trump voters? Does that ring true?

Can we move new global cases under 200,000? US new cases at the lowest since June 23. US deaths at “just” 522, but that complies with a weekend pattern.

Can anyone at all explain why these tests are not used all over the world? There are many rapid tests with comparable success rates. What are we waiting for? Does anyone understand why these tests are much more useful than the standard CPR ones? This is presented as a breakthrough, but it isn’t, really.

• One-Second Coronavirus Test Achieves 95% Success Rate (JP)

An initial clinical trial of a coronavirus-testing technology that is believed to detect viruses in a fluid sample in less than a second has achieved a 95% success rate, according to data released last week from the trial performed at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer. The test was designed by Newsight Imaging, a Ness Ziona-based start-up firm, and centers on a device that is about the size of a computer mouse, which can identify and classify evidence of a virus in the body in less than a second, using a sample of fluid – blood serum or saliva – inserted into a disposable test cuvette. In spectroscopy, a sample is tested with a broadband light source, Newsight CEO Eli Assoolin told The Jerusalem Post last month when it first received Sheba Medical Center’s IRB Ethics (“Helsinki”) Committee approval to conduct a pilot program for rapid COVID-19 detection tests.

The light that returns from the sample is analyzed to determine its wavelength content. “We collect the spectral signature after the light is absorbed in the sample, and then we can analyze the content of it,” he said, noting that spectral-analysis technology has already been used to identify certain human diseases and abnormalities. “Basically, on one side, you have the source of light, and on the other side, you have the sensor chip – a sensitive and fast camera that can see different wavelengths. In the middle, you put the sample,” Assoolin said. Prof. Eli Schwartz of the Center for Geographic Medicine and Tropical Diseases at Sheba said that under laboratory conditions, the research team was clearly able to differentiate between COVID-19 samples that were positive and those that were negative, with a 95% accuracy rate. “For a new AI-based technology such as this, the results are quite encouraging,” Schwartz said.

As the virtual Dem convention starts, CNN is in a bit of a bind. They’ve been reporting on various polls that all show Biden leading Trump by double-digit margins, but even their viewers haven’t forgotten how they predicted Hillary had a 95% chance of winning in 2016. And of course the problem with those wide margins is they make people wonder why they should vote, if the outcome is so clear.

So now there’s a poll that shows Trump is fast catching up (the Kamala effect?) , but not without adding the rather curious notion that “Among the 72% of voters who say they are either extremely or very enthusiastic about voting this fall, Biden’s advantage over Trump widens to 53% to 46%.”

Is there anyone who believes that Biden voters are more enthusiastic than Trump voters? Doesn’t that contradict everything we’ve seen?

• Biden and Trump Matchup Tightens As Enthusiasm Hits New High (CNN)

Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump among registered voters has significantly narrowed since June, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, even as the former vice president maintains an advantage over the President on several top issues and his choice of California Sen. Kamala Harris as a running mate earns largely positive reviews. And on the eve of the party conventions, a majority of voters (53%) are “extremely enthusiastic” about voting in this year’s election, a new high in CNN polling in presidential election cycles back to 2003. Overall, 50% of registered voters back the Biden-Harris ticket, while 46% say they support Trump and Pence, right at the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Among the 72% of voters who say they are either extremely or very enthusiastic about voting this fall, Biden’s advantage over Trump widens to 53% to 46%. It is narrower, however, among those voters who live in the states that will have the most impact on the electoral college this fall. Across 15 battleground states, the survey finds Biden has the backing of 49% of registered voters, while Trump lands at 48%. The pool of battleground states in this poll includes more that Trump carried in 2016 (10) than were won by Hillary Clinton (5), reflecting the reality that the President’s campaign is more on defense than offense across the states. Taken together, though, they represent a more Republican-leaning playing field than the nation as a whole.

The movement in the poll among voters nationwide since June is concentrated among men (they split about evenly in June, but now 56% back Trump, 40% Biden), those between the ages of 35 and 64 (they tilt toward Trump now, but were Biden-leaning in June) and independents (in June, Biden held a 52% to 41% lead, but now it’s a near even 46% Biden to 45% Trump divide). Trump has also solidified his partisans since June. While 8% of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents in June said they would back Biden, that figure now stands at just 4%. And the President has boosted his backing among conservatives from 76% to 85%.

Weissmann likely doesn’t know what Clinesmith agreed to tell Durham in his guilty plea.

Weissmann’s your typical dirty cop/dirty lawyer. Rumor has it he was in charge of the Mueller probe, not Mueller himself. And yes, he has strong links to the Dems and Hillary.

• Mueller Aide Weissmann Tells DOJ Attorneys Not To Help Investigators (Turley)

I recently wrote a column discussing how Democratic leaders, including Vice President Joe Biden, have argued against continuing the investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham despite growing evidence of misconduct by Justice Department officials and now the first guilty plea by former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. Now, Andrew Weissmann, one of the top prosecutors with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has derided the Clinesmith plea while actually calling on Justice Department attorneys to refuse to help on ongoing investigations that could implicate aspects of his own prior work. I was among those who expressed concern when Mueller selected Weissmann due to his history of controversial prosecutorial decisions, including a pattern of prosecutorial overreach in the Enron litigation.

Weissmann’s recent statements (made before the release of his new book on the Russian investigation) have only served to reaffirm those concerns. Recently, Weissmann wrote an extraordinary and disturbing New York Times op-ed (with former Defense Department special counsel Ryan Goodman). In the column, he appeared to call on Justice Department lawyers to undermine the Durham investigation as well as the investigation by U.S. Attorney John Bash’s investigation into the “unmasking” requests by Obama administration officials. They wrote “Justice Department employees in meeting their ethical and legal obligations, should be well advised not to participate in any such effort.”

Consider that line for a moment. Weissmann is openly calling on attorneys to refuse to help on investigations that could raise questions about his own decisions. Durham is looking at a pattern of errors, false statements, bias, and now criminal conduct in the Russian investigation. There is obviously overlap with the Mueller investigation which discussed many of the same underlying documents and relied on work by some of the same individuals. The failure to address misconduct, bias, or criminal conduct by such individuals would be embarrassing to both Weissmann and Mueller. Despite that obvious conflict of interest, Weissmann is calling on attorneys to stand down. It is the same troubling position that was once taken by Sally Yates, who told an entire federal agency not to assist the President in his travel ban.

[..] I believe that the public needs to have a full and transparent account of what happened in the Russian investigation on both sides. Like many, Weissmann would like transparency on only one side and to shutdown the Durham investigation despite Horowitz referring matters for criminal investigation and finding a host of false statements, errs, and professional misconduct. Even the addition of a criminal plea has not stopped Weissmann from denouncing this investigation. For years, I have criticized Weissmann’s record of dubious prosecutorial judgment, bias, and overreach. However, that case against Weissmann is not nearly as powerful as the case he is making against himself.

What a crazy story.

• The Manufactured Hysteria Over Mail Delivery (PJM)

That dastardly Donald Trump is at it again. He is either the evilest man ever to hold the office of president or the dumbest. He is either a Machiavellian genius manipulating the media and his hypnotized followers or a bumbling know-nothing idiot. Trump is being accused of sabotaging the November elections because he won’t give the postal unions and incompetent managers in the postal service $25 billion to play with. The money will stave off catastrophe for about a year at the rate the USPS is burning through cash. Without that money, we’re informed by those in the know, thousands — no, tens of thousands — no, millions of voters who wait until the last minute to mail in an absentee ballot might not have their votes counted because, well, Trump.

The procrastinators in America are up in arms and plan a demonstration to show their outrage. But it probably won’t happen until after the election since that’s when they’ll eventually get around to it. The “crisis” in postal delivery presupposes that, prior to Trump’s shenanigans, the USPS was doing fine — nothing that a few tens of billions of taxpayer dollars couldn’t fix. In fact, that’s what the postal unions are saying. In a statement released on Saturday, the letter carriers and postal workers’ unions assure the public that even without the money, they can do the job. [..] So what’s all the hubbub about? The letter carriers say they can deliver the ballots on time. The postal employees claim they don’t need the extra cash. Where, pray tell, is there a “crisis”?

Nancy Pelosi knows. In fact, she’s about to call the members of the House of Representatives off the campaign trail and back to Washington to deal with the “crisis.” Politico: “Pelosi and other top Democrats, including House Majority Leader Steny Democrats are looking to address organizational issues at the Postal Service in the coming weeks, not to provide additional funding at this time, according to sources familiar with the discussion.” Nothing says “crisis” in Washington quite like pulling politicians away from their campaigns for a political stunt like holding an “emergency” session of Congress.

The USPS has been a mess for decades. Nothing to do with Trump. But yes, he does think the issue risks being used against him.

• A Reality-Based Look At Trump And The Post Office (York)

The idea that the Postal Service will not be able to handle the volume of mail in the election, or not be able to handle it within normal Postal Service time guidelines, does not make much sense. According to its most recent annual report, last year, in fiscal year 2019, the Postal Service handled 142.5 billion pieces of mail. “On a typical day, our 633,000 employees physically process and deliver 471 million mailpieces to nearly 160 delivery points,” the report says. This year, that number is higher, given the Postal Service’s delivery of census forms and stimulus checks. Those alone added about 450 million additional pieces of mail.

In 2016, about 136 million Americans voted in the presidential election. The number will probably be a bit higher this year. If officials sent ballots to every single American registered to vote — about 158 million people — and then 140 million people returned ballots, the roughly 298 million pieces of mail handled over the course of several weeks would be well within the Postal Service’s ability to handle. Of course, officials will not send a ballot to every American registered to vote, and not every voter will vote by mail. Whatever the final number is, the ballots that are cast by mail will not cripple a system that delivers 471 million pieces of mail every day.

There are, of course, compelling examples of election dysfunction, most notably the mess New York made of some of its congressional primaries this summer. But rather than representing a Postal Service problem, that was because some states are unprepared for a dramatic increase of voting by mail. The states have to prepare the ballots, address them, and process and count them when the Postal Service delivers them. That is the focus of the entirely legitimate fears of a possible vote-counting disaster this year. But it’s not the Postal Service.

[..] The Postal Service is not funded by a regular appropriation. It is, instead, an “independent agency” and is expected to support itself, beyond a yearly appropriation of about $55 million to cover the costs of mail for the blind and overseas balloting in elections. The Postal Service has lost money for a very long time. In fiscal year 2019, it had operating revenues of $71.1 billion and operating expenses of $79.9 billion, leaving it with a deficit of $8.8 billion. At the moment, Postal Service officials have told Congress, it has about $14 billion in cash on hand, putting it on the road to fiscal insolvency (without further aid) in late 2021. In the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, the $2 trillion relief measure passed in March, Congress gave the Postal Service a $10 billion borrowing authority. After the bill became law, there were negotiations between the Postal Service and the Treasury Department on the terms of the borrowing; a deal was announced in July.

The ability to borrow $10 billion, the postmaster general said, would “delay the approaching liquidity crisis.” [..] The House HEROES Act would give $25 billion to the Postal Service in what is essentially a bailout. The bill mentions nothing about helping the Postal Service handle the upcoming election or any other election. Indeed, the only stipulation at all placed on the $25 billion is that the Postal Service, “during the coronavirus emergency, shall prioritize the purchase of, and make available to all Postal Service employees and facilities, personal protective equipment, including gloves, masks, and sanitizers, and shall conduct additional cleaning and sanitizing of Postal Service facilities and delivery vehicles.” If the House Democrats who wrote and passed the bill intended the money to be spent specifically for elections, they did not say so in the text of the legislation.

Jie Boden

I went to the #PostOffice this morning and it was closed! What has @realDonaldTrump done? This is criminal! pic.twitter.com/VTmjvl8d3L

— Jie Boden (@JieBoden) August 16, 2020

From April, but highly appropriate. We’ve discussed this in the Comments, and I keep thinking that one, or a few, states having a working model doesn’t mean it’s endlessly scalable.

• Washington’s Successful Vote-by-Mail System Wasn’t Built Overnight (CC)

State officials across the nation are turning to Washington state for advice on how to set up a vote-by-mail system before the November presidential election, but officials say that question is just the first of many they should be asking. Secretary of State Kim Wyman, who is in charge of Washington’s election system, and King County Elections Director Julie Wise, who runs elections in the county where more than a third of Washington voters fill out a ballot, said the list of questions other states need to answer in order to effectively implement vote-by-mail is long and complicated. And mid-April may be too late to start making the switch from a mostly in-person system to a vote-at-home configuration, said Wise, who worked on in-person voting for a decade before moving, along with the state of Washington, to vote-by-mail elections in 2011.

“We’ve been at it for a decade. It’s not an easy lift to make that transition,” said Wise, between meetings to plan for a November election that could change dramatically — even in one of the nation’s five vote-by-mail states — because of the ongoing threat of the coronavirus. “You’re cutting it very short,” was her response to recent inquiries from other states and counties, in addition to sharing a packet of information about how King County votes by mail, from the technology to the people. Among the questions other states and municipalities should be asking, according to Wyman and Wise:

• Do we need to buy new equipment to count the votes? • Do we have current addresses of our voters? Have we tried to mail them anything recently? • How recent are the signature cards from voters? Do we need to ask millions of people to fill out new ones? • Do we have a place to count votes that can accommodate the people needed to verify ballots and count them, while allowing for social distancing? • What state laws would we need to change in order to allow for most votes to be cast by mail? • Will we provide free postage? • How much will that cost? • Will we provide drop boxes and, if so, how many? • Do we need to set up some in-person sites for people to vote or register and how can you do that while accounting for social distancing? • How much will this transition cost? Where will the money come from? And that’s just the beginning of the list.

It’s not just his tweets. Schiff and the Dems have been getting away for so long with utter falsehoods they themselves may not even recognize them as such anymore. And who’s going to call them on it now? The MSM have been getting away with the exact same thing. But what use is it to go for a soft touch approach like this from John Solomon? Just say Schiff’s a blatant liar. Because he is. And opther people, like a journalist, may claim innocence, but the chair of the House Intelligence Committee can definitely not.

• Adam Schiff’s Inaccurate Russia Tweets Raise Double-Standard Question (JTN)

Twitter has on more than one occasion appended or flagged President Trump’s tweets as misleading. But so far, it has not done the same with several posts by House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff that are demonstrably false or misleading, raising questions of a double standard. For instance, Schiff tweeted in July 2018 that “the release of the Carter Page FISA application makes clear, once again, the FBI acted lawfully and appropriately” in reference to the surveillance warrant the bureau used to spy on the Trump adviser during the Russia collusion probe. In fact, the FISA application that Schiff referred to in the tweet contained 51 statements that were inaccurate, misleading or undocumented, and included 17 violations of FBI rules ranging from false and unverified information to omissions of exculpatory evidence of innocence, the Justice Department inspector general reported last December.

Likewise, DOJ officials withdrew two of the four Page FISA applications, and the chief judge of the FISA court ruled in March that the FBI has misled the court. “There is thus little doubt that the government breached its duty of candor to the Court with respect to those applications,” U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said. And last week, an ex-FBI lawyer agreed to plead guilty to a felony and admitted he falsified a document to deceive the court. In other words, the FBI acted unlawfully and inappropriately in the Page FISA debacle. And to date, Twitter hasn’t flagged or appended Schiff’s tweet even though he has enormous influence on the platform with 2.4 million followers.

Just the News identified more than a dozen tweets that Schiff has posted since 2017 that are inaccurate or misleading based on the declassified information that has been made public over the last year by the Justice Department, FBI, and intelligence community. Earlier this month, for instance, Schiff tweeted out a claim that Trump had not taken action to stop Russia from interfering in elections. “Donald Trump has never deterred Russia from interfering in U.S. elections. Far from it. The sum total of Trump’s words and actions has only encouraged Russian meddling in our elections,” Schiff wrote.

[..] Several times, Schiff has tweeted claims that there is evidence Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to hijack the 2016 election. For instance, the California Democrat posted a tweet in April 2018 accusing Republicans of ignoring “when in plain sight — evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.” Multiple investigations ranging from the Senate Intelligence Committee to Special Counsel Robert Mueller have concluded there is no evidence any Trump campaign official – or any other American – colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election. “The investigation did not establish that members of the trump campaign conspired to coordinate it with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” Mueller wrote, saying extensive contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russians did not amount to a conspiracy.

Then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr last year came to a similar conclusion. “We don’t have anything that would suggest there was collusion by the Trump campaign and Russia,” he announced.

Again, it’s not the lockdowns:

“Private consumption dipped at an annual rate of nearly 29% as shoppers stayed home, leaving malls and restaurants nearly empty of customers. That was without any full shutdown of businesses to contain coronavirus outbreaks [..]”

• Japan’s Economy Shrinks At Record -27.8% Annual Rate (AP)

Japan’s economy shrank at annual rate of 27.8% in April-June, the worst contraction on record, as the coronavirus pandemic slammed consumption and trade, according to government data released Monday. The Cabinet Office reported that Japan’s preliminary seasonally adjusted real GDP, the sum of a nation’s goods and services, fell 7.8% quarter on quarter. The annual rate shows what the number would have been if continued for a year. Japanese media reported the latest drop was the worst since World War II. But the Cabinet Office said comparable records began in 1980. The previous worst contraction, a 17.8% drop, was in the first quarter of 2009, during the global financial crisis.

The world’s third largest economy was already limping along when the virus outbreak struck in China late last year. It has weakened as the pandemic gained ground, leading to social distancing restrictions and prompting many people to stay home when they can. “In April, May, a state of emergency was issued, it was a situation where the economy was artificially stopped so to speak, and the impact was severe,” said Yasutoshi Nishimura, minister Economic and Fiscal Policy. “These are tough numbers but they bottomed out in April and May, we would like to put all our efforts into returning to a growth trajectory,” Nishimura told reporters.

[..] The economy shrank 0.6% in the January-March period, and contracted 1.8% in the October-December period last year, meaning that Japan slipped into recession in the first quarter of this year. Recession is generally defined as two consecutive quarters of contraction. [..] Japanese economic growth was flat in July-September. Growth was minimal the quarter before that. [..] For the April-June period, Japan’s exports dropped at a whopping annual rate of 56%. Private consumption dipped at an annual rate of nearly 29% as shoppers stayed home, leaving malls and restaurants nearly empty of customers. That was without any full shutdown of businesses to contain coronavirus outbreaks [..]

In a bit of a dip? No panic, let’s blow another housing bubble. The instrument this time is a stamp duty holiday.

• UK Housing Market Has Busiest Month In More Than 10 Years (G.)

The housing market has had its busiest month in more than 10 years in July, with the traditional summer lull replaced by a flurry of activity from buyers and sellers, according to the property website Rightmove. The site, which typically lists about 95% of homes for sale in the UK, said the “rulebook has been rewritten”, with the boom fuelled by pent-up demand during lockdown accelerating as the summer has progressed. It said the number of monthly sales agreed in Britain had been the highest since it started tracking the figure a decade ago, up by 38% on the same period last year and worth a combined total of more than £37bn. Would-be sellers were also active, with more properties coming on to the market than in any month since 2008.

Asking prices have fallen by an average of 0.2% across mainland Britain, but this has been driven by a 2% drop in London, where the number of homes coming on to the market is up by 69% year-on-year. In seven regions, asking prices hit record highs as sellers sought to make the most of the demand. The housing market was closed in lockdown and reopened in mid-May, sparking a flurry of activity. July brought a stamp duty holiday on homes costing up to £500,000 in England and £250,000 in Wales and Scotland, which further fuelled activity.

Last week figures from the UK’s largest estate agency firm, Countrywide, showed that demand for homes costing between £500,000 and £750,000 had soared since the tax break was announced, and Rightmove’s figures suggest a similar effect for other agents. The number of sales agreed for large homes was up by 59% annually, while for first-time properties the rise was 29% and on homes with three or four bedrooms, excluding four-bed detached properties, it was 38%.

She didn’t want to do it.

• New Zealand Delays General Election By A Month Amid COVID19 Outbreak (G.)

New Zealand is to delay its general election by a month due to the outbreak of Covid-19 in Auckland, the country’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has said. Calls had been growing from opposition parties for the election to be moved, with opposition leaders saying it wasn’t “just and fair” to hold an election while an outbreak was underway and level 3 restrictions were in place in the country’s largest city, prohibiting campaigning. Ardern said after consulting with every political party in parliament, as well as the electoral commission, she had decided to move the general election from 19 September to 17 October. She said her first suggestion of moving it by two weeks had been rejected by the Electoral Commission as not enough time to prepare logistics such as venues.

“The Electoral Commission, via the Ministry of Justice, has advised me that a safe and accessible election is achievable on this date,” Ardern said. “Moving the date by four weeks also gives all parties a fair shot to campaign and delivers New Zealanders certainty without unnecessarily long delays.” Ardern said Covid-19 would be with the world “for some time to come” and repeatedly pushing the election date would not lessen the risk of disruption to voters and parties. “This is why the Electoral Commission has planned for the possibility of holding an election where the country is at level 2, and with some parts at level 3. I will not change the election date again.” New Zealand is in the midst of its first outbreak since eliminating the disease in June, with dozens of people infected and held in quarantine in Auckland, a city of 1.5 million.

On Monday nine news cases of Covid-19 were reported, bringing the total number of cases related to the south Auckland cluster to 58. Maori and Pasifika people have been disproportionately infected by the latest outbreak. Five people were in hospital being treated for the disease, and the source of the outbreak remained a mystery, the ministry of health said. “We still don’t have any particular clues as to the origin of the outbreak,” director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said.

Must read for today. How do new words enter our lexicon? To what extent are they propagated, and by whom, and for which purposes? Ever heard of critical theory?

In my view, this typifies the institutionalization of education and knowledge. Which claims that the only things that you can learn that are of any value are to be found in schools. Say that often enough and nothing of value can be found there anymore. Knowledge as a monopoly doesn’t work.

• The Roots Of Wokeness (Sullivan)

In the mid-2010s, a curious new vocabulary began to unspool itself in our media. A data site, storywrangling.org, which measures the frequency of words in news stories, revealed some remarkable shifts. Terms that had previously been almost entirely obscure suddenly became ubiquitous—and an analysis of the New York Times, using these tools, is a useful example. Looking at stories from 1970 to 2018, several terms came out of nowhere in the past few years to reach sudden new heights of repetition and frequency. Here’s a list of the most successful neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining. And here are a few that were rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years: triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes.

Language changes, and we shouldn’t worry about that. Maybe some of these terms will stick around. But the linguistic changes have occurred so rapidly, and touched so many topics, that it has all the appearance of a top-down re-ordering of language, rather than a slow, organic evolution from below. While the New York Times once had a reputation for being a bit stodgy on linguistic matters, pedantic, precise and slow-to-change, as any paper of record might be, in the last few years, its pages have been flushed with so many neologisms that a reader from, say, a decade ago would have a hard time understanding large swathes of it. And for many of us regular readers, we’ve just gotten used to brand new words popping up suddenly to re-describe something we thought we knew already. We notice a new word, make a brief mental check, and move on with our lives.

But we need to do more than that. We need to understand that all these words have one thing in common: they are products of an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education in the past few decades, and appears to have reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s. Most normal people have never heard of this theory—or rather an interlocking web of theories—that is nonetheless changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy. What we have long needed is an intelligible, intelligent description of this theory which most people can grasp. And we’ve just gotten one: “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity,” by former math prof James Lindsay and British academic, Helen Pluckrose. It’s as deep a dive into this often impenetrable philosophy as anyone would want to attempt. But it’s well worth grappling with.

What the book helps the layperson to understand is the evolution of postmodern thought since the 1960s until it became the doctrine of Social Justice today. Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning—from Christianity to Marxism—postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture. The entire concept of reason—whether the Enlightenment version or even the ancient Socratic understanding—is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power, and therefore deserves to be undermined and “problematized” whenever possible. Postmodern theory does so mischievously and irreverently—even as it leaves nothing in reason’s place. The idea of objective truth—even if it is viewed as always somewhat beyond our reach—is abandoned. All we have are narratives, stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional, and can in turn be subverted or problematized.

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Debt Rattle June 18 2020

Jun 182020

June 18, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:37 am Finance Tagged with: Abe, Beijing, Bolton, Chrome, coronavirus, Covid19, economy, Fauci, Flynn, Gleeson, HCQ, herd immunity, New Zealand, Sidney Powell, spying, Tulsa, Vitamin D 27 Responses »

NPC Grand Palace shoe shining parlor, Washington DC 1921

• Vitamin D New Hope In The War On Corona (DM)

• Doctors Can Still Prescribe HCQ to Patients – US Health Secretary (N18)

• New Zealand Reports Fresh Corona Case, More Quarantine Breaches Emerge (G.)

• Beijing COVID19 Cluster May Have Begun A Month Earlier – Health Official (G.)

• China Reports 28 New Coronavirus Cases In Mainland (R.)

• Sweden Says Herd Immunity “Surprisingly Slow” To Develop (ZH)

• Dr. Fauci, Health Officials Flag Coronavirus Risk Of Trump’s Tulsa Rally (CNBC)

• Coronavirus Is Killing Our Economy Because It Was Already Sick (Levitz)

• Massive Spying On Users Of Google’s Chrome Shows New Security Weakness (R.)

• Arrest Of Former Japanese Minister Could Hasten PM Abe’s Departure (R.)

• Sidney Powell Files Motion Against Gleeson: A ‘Wrap-Up Smear’ of Flynn (SAC)

• Bolton Says Trump Asked China To Help Him Get Reelected (AP)

It was a long travel day yesterday, with an empty train and two almost deserted airports. Amsterdam Airport was running at maybe 20% of capacity, if that. Athens was empty in the evening.

But in between there was a full plane, with both the Dutch government and the airline bragging about the pathogen-killing capacities of the (Boeing 737, not MAX) plane’s air-circulation systems.

Once arrived in Athens, demands were much less stringent than announced in advance. There was no one night mandatory quarantine demand, it appeared to be a voluntary one. Write down your address (hotel) in Athens, and your phone #, get tested, we may or may not call you the next day, and off I was in a cab to the apartment I always stay in here.

It all seems a little risky, but the people at the airport also seemed a little overwhelmed, and they will soon have to deal with much larger crowds. We can only hope that it will work out alright.

I’m not sure I’m quite back yet (late in getting up, and lost an hour due to the timezone), but I did pick up a few stories.

Hoping the change of scenery, and meeting with my friends here, will do me good. 3 months of near total isolation is a lot.

I’m sure you didn’t miss that while I was missing, global daily new cases set a whole new whopper of a record. And it came as we were all hoping the trend was turning downward.

After all, June 15 was 124,600. But then June 16 was 142.557.

As global daily new deaths almost doubled from one day to the next (they came back down to 5,264 yesterday):

But that was largely due to a “correction” in India:

Forward to today, June 18. Worldometer reports new cases for June 17 (midnight to midnight GMT+0) at + 141,872.

New cases past 24 hours in:

• US + 26,073
• Brazil + 31,475
• Russia + 7,790
• India + 13,802

• Cases 8,425,191 (+ 283,802 from June 16’s 8,141,389)

• Deaths 451,808 (+ 12,103 from June 16’s 439,705)

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-:

From Worldometer:

From COVID19Info.live:

Close to 45 million people in the European Union are under some form of jobless subsidy.

Despite massive temporary jobless schemes, unemployment is soaring. pic.twitter.com/iDRaJtORc1

— Daniel Lacalle (@dlacalle_IA) June 18, 2020

Nothing new here for Automatic Earth readers. Try get vit. D while you can, if you haven’t stored up yet. Get the tablets, not just the sun and fish. Especially if you’re not pale white.

• Vitamin D New Hope In The War On Corona (DM)

Nearly 99 per cent of Covid-19 patients who are vitamin D deficient die, according to a terrifying study that adds to mounting evidence that the ‘sunshine’ nutrient could be a coronavirus life-saver. Scientists in Indonesia analysed hospital records of 780 people who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. Results revealed 98.9 per cent of infected patients defined as vitamin D deficient — below 20ng/ml — died. Yet this fell to just 4.1 per cent for patients who had enough of the nuResearchers warned the study was not definitive, however, because the patients with high vitamin D levels were healthier and younger. It comes as health chiefs are urgently reviewing the use of vitamin D as a coronavirus lifesaver, with several studies suggesting that Covid-19 patients are far more likely to die if they have a deficiency.

One investigation – carried out by Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge – found European countries with lower vitamin D levels have had significantly more pandemic casualties. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence is conducting a ‘rapid evidence review’ of the issue – and publication is expected as early as next week. One in five British adults and one in six children is lacking in vitamin D, thanks to poor diets, indoor lifestyles and lack of sunshine. Experts fear that the lockdown and months of indoor living have cut levels even further. Some ethnic groups tend to be at higher risk because their skin is less able to make the vitamin in response to sunlight. And older people are also in danger because the body gets less efficient at producing the vitamin with age.

[..] Data in a Public Health England report showed that the mortality rate – the number of people dying with the coronavirus out of each 100,000 people – was considerably higher for black men than other group. The risk for black women, people of Asian ethnicity, and mixed race people was also higher than for white people of either sex. People with non-white skin are also at a higher risk of vitamin D deficiency because it takes them longer to make it from sunlight [..]

And this story keeps just going on. But Automatic Earth resident GP John Day can at least continue to do what he thinks is best.

• Doctors Can Still Prescribe HCQ to Patients – US Health Secretary (N18)

Doctors can still prescribe anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to patients, US Health Secretary Alex Azar said, hours after the FDA withdrew the emergency use authorisation of chloroquine and HCQ in the treatment of COVID 19 patients. The US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision came on Monday after it concluded that the anti-malarial drugs may not be effective to cure the virus infections and lead to greater risks than any potential benefits. “At this point, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and chloroquine are just like any other approved drug in the United States. They may be used in hospital, they may be used in out-patient, they may be used at home, all subject to a doctor’s prescription,” Azar said.

“In fact, the FDA’s removal of the Emergency Use Authorization takes away what had been a significant misunderstanding by many that had made people think that somehow it could only be used in a hospital setting, and we’ve tried to make that clear throughout,” he said in response to a question. During a White House media appearance with President Donald Trump, Azar asserted that HCQ was approved in the United States. “If a doctor wishes to prescribe it, working with a patient, they may prescribe it for any purpose that they wish to do so. And, this (FDA’s decision) actually removes a potential barrier to them,” the health secretary said.

It’s not easy being green.

• New Zealand Reports Fresh Corona Case, More Quarantine Breaches Emerge (G.)

A fresh coronavirus case has been reported in New Zealand as officials scramble to contain the fallout from Tuesday’s embarrassing quarantine breach and reports emerge of people disappearing after leaving isolation early. Thursday’s case – the third to emerge this week after a 24-day streak of no cases – was a man in his 60s who arrived in Auckland from Pakistan on 13 June on Flight NZ124, transiting through Doha and Melbourne. Officials were contacting all passengers on the flight and have alerted overseas counterparts for the other flights, said Dr Ashley Bloomfield, the director general of health. The man was wearing a mask on all flights and was now in a quarantine facility in Auckland, Bloomfield said.

It came as police said six people absconded from managed isolation after being granted compassionate leave from Covid-19 quarantine to attend a funeral in Hamilton. And TVNZ reported that a birthday party for a girl in isolation brought people together who should not have been mingling. Bloomfield was forced to apologise on Thursday after initially claiming the sisters behind Tuesday’s new cases had not contacted anyone during their road trip from Wellington to Auckland. It was revealed late on Wednesday that they came into contact with at least two friends who helped them after they got lost on a motorway.

[..] On Tuesday, New Zealand recorded its first new cases of the virus for 24 days after the two New Zealanders, sisters returning after travelling to the UK, were found to be infected. The pair, who were permitted to leave their managed isolation early to visit a dying parent, had not been tested. Since then more reports have emerged. A Christchurch funeral director told Stuff that about 10 people had been let out of quarantine early to attend one of the funerals it had arranged on Tuesday. Steve Parkyn, chief executive of funeral directors Lamb and Hayward, said he refused to let them attend the service after being contacted by health authorities, but they joined mourners at the burial, accompanied by a health official. Around 200 people attended the funeral.

I said on Tuesday that: “Given how fast it spread in the past 2-3 days, it’s obvious the disease had been present for a 1 or 2 weeks.”

• Beijing COVID19 Cluster May Have Begun A Month Earlier – Health Official (G.)

Beijing’s cluster of new cases may have begun a month earlier than first thought, partly due to asymptomatic infections, according to the director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Amid tight restrictions to stop the spread of the capital’s cluster, which now numbers more than 150 cases, Gao Fu said the outbreak probably did not occur in early June or late May, but probably a month earlier, according to state media. Gao said the volume of asymptomatic cases detected in the outbreak may be partially responsible, but that further investigation was needed. “A lot of asymptomatic or mild cases were detected in this outbreak and that is why the environment has such amount of virus,” said Gao at a seminar in Shanghai on Tuesday.

On Thursday, Beijing reported 21 new cases of Covid-19, down slightly from the 31 reported on Wednesday. There were two additional cases in Hebei province that were also linked to the Beijing cluster. The city on Thursday ordered all hotels be shut down, as well as restaurants in high-risk areas. Officials said Beijing was not under lockdown but urged all residents not to travel or gather unnecessarily, and pledged to ensure continued food supply. “We are now at a critical time for the prevention and control of the epidemic,” an official said of the outbreak, which centred on a Xinfadi wholesale food market A further five residential compounds were designated at higher risk on Thursday, bringing the total number to 32, including one high risk and 31 medium risk.

More than 356,000 people have been tested in a five-day period, with entire neighbourhoods walled in or under entry monitoring. Schools have been closed flights cancelled, and travel in and out of the city restricted. On Wednesday the emergency response level was raised from level three to level two.

They’ve allowed it to spread for a few weeks. I love the assertion that salmon imported from Europe was the culprit. I tried my smell test on that, and it failed spectacularly.

• China Reports 28 New Coronavirus Cases In Mainland (R.)

China reported 28 new coronavirus cases in the mainland as of end-June 17, 21 of which were in the capital of Beijing, the country’s health commission said on Thursday. The National Health Commission said four of the 28 cases were so-called imported ones involving travellers from overseas, and that there were 8 new asymptomatic coronavirus cases. A day earlier, the commission reported 44 confirmed cases, 11 of which were imported, and 11 asymptomatic cases. The total number of confirmed cases stands at 83,293. The death toll remains unchanged at 4,634. China does not count asymptomatic patients – those who are infected with the coronavirus but have no symptoms – as confirmed coronavirus cases.

1,200 new cases yesterday in Sweden, 100 new deaths. And the guy responsible remains popular. Propaganda works.

• Sweden Says Herd Immunity “Surprisingly Slow” To Develop (ZH)

Despite allowing its economy and schools to remain open during the coronavirus outbreak, Sweden is finding that the incidence of COVID-19 antibodies among its population is still surprisingly uncommon, suggesting that the country hasn’t yet reached the point of “herd immunity”, unlike other European countries which embraced much more drastic measures to stop the spread and the deaths. Speaking to the nation during an interview on a Swedish radio station, Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s government epidemiologist and architect of its coronavirus containment strategy (a model that Goldman analysts claim wouldn’t work elsewhere in Europe or in the US), noted that the development of herd immunity is taking much longer than expected. Per Tegnell: “the trends in immunity have been surprisingly slow.” He also says “it’s difficult to explain why this is so.”

To be sure, Tegnell noted, there is “always a lag in all such measurements,” and the percentage of the population with detectable COVID antibodies is likely higher today than it was a few weeks ago, when a surveillance test carried out by a private Swedish company found that only 14% of Swedes have antibodies, compared to more than 50% of Italians in some of the hardest-hit parts of Northern Italy. Critics of Sweden’s strategy have been more vocal lately now that the country’s death toll has surpassed the 5,000 mark, leaving Sweden with a mortality rate well above its Nordic neighbors. As the country’s mortality rate has climbed in recent weeks, polls have reflected a growing dissatisfaction among Swedes with the government’s handling of the virus, though Tegnell’s approach remains broadly popular.

To be sure, Tegnell has acknowledged that some mistakes were made, and has said if he could do it over, he would have done some things differently, including directing more resources toward protecting the most vulnerable. But he never disavowed his approach, as some English-language media outlets have twisted his words. For those who don’t understand the concept of ‘herd immunity’, Bloomberg created a helpful illustration. Even readers who think they understand how it works should probably take a look.

After the mass protests, this has zero value. I can only guess at the reason to do it indoors, but better control might be it, in view of the protests.

• Dr. Fauci, Health Officials Flag Coronavirus Risk Of Trump’s Tulsa Rally (CNBC)

White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci as well as other health officials are raising concerns that President Donald Trump’s upcoming campaign rally in Tulsa will become a hotbed for coronavirus infections. The rally, Trump’s first since the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the U.S. over three months ago, is slated to take place Saturday in a 20,000-person indoor arena. Asked whether he would attend the rally, Fauci said in an interview published late Tuesday by the Daily Beast, “of course not,” adding that when it comes to mass gatherings, “outside is better than inside, no crowd is better than crowd” and “crowd is better than big crowd.”

Studies have shown that the virus spreads more easily in crowded, poorly ventilated, indoor spaces than it does outside. Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb echoed Fauci’s concerns Wednesday in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “Personally, I wouldn’t attend a large gathering right now, especially one indoors. Certainly things held indoors are less safe than things held outdoors,” Gottlieb said. “But all these large gatherings are going to lead to spread. There’s just no question about it.”

I guess it’s an OK piece.

• Coronavirus Is Killing Our Economy Because It Was Already Sick (Levitz)

Channeling investment into genuinely productive projects gets harder once you’ve picked the low-hanging industrial fruit. And this challenge is all the greater in a context where the purchasing power of ordinary people has been systematically depressed: Simply put, when the vast majority of workers have little discretionary income, profitable business ideas are harder to find (businesses need paying customers, after all). Thus, at a certain point, wage suppression stops aiding growth and starts inhibiting it. In their (excellent) new book, Peking University economist Michael Pettis and Barron’s columnist Matthew Klein argue that China’s iteration of the invest-led development model has been obsolete for more than a decade.

Unwilling or incapable of enacting reforms that would increase wages — and thus, consumption — Beijing has sustained employment and GDP growth by financing useless capital investments. Instead of giving ordinary Chinese people the financial means to assert their material wants and needs — and then enabling investment to flow into enterprises that fulfill those mass desires — China is building housing developments in cities without people. In the U.S., the supply-side model has produced similar (if less egregious) imbalances. Before the coronavirus pandemic, record-high corporate profits coincided with aberrantly low business investment. As Republican Senator Marco Rubio lamented last year, America’s “nonfinancial corporate business sector routinely spends more on buying financial assets than on capital development.”

Many factors have contributed to this outcome. But the fact that America’s ultrarich have commandeered the bulk of the past four decades of income growth is surely one. [This] was a choice. With strong labor rights, high minimum wages, and more post-tax redistribution, the bottom 90 percent of U.S. households could have seen their incomes rise steadily over the past half-century. In that world, the typical American family would have less debt and more disposable income. And that mass purchasing power would allow the economy to support a wider array of businesses and services.= We opted for a different path. The U.S. slashed taxes on the wealthy, undermined unions, and left its social safety net remaining exceptionally threadbare.

As a result, America’s economic elites ended up with more income than they could spend or profitably invest in productive enterprises. So, they bid up the price of urban real estate, and bankrolled the development of socially useless financial innovation. Instead of directing the gains of growth toward better meeting the wants and needs of ordinary Americans, we built 1,000-foot towers full of perpetually empty luxury apartments that Russian criminals could use for money laundering.

There should be huge penalties for things like this, but there never will be, because the CIA and its ilk find it far too valuable.

• Massive Spying On Users Of Google’s Chrome Shows New Security Weakness (R.)

A newly discovered spyware effort attacked users through 32 million downloads of extensions to Google’s market-leading Chrome web browser, researchers at Awake Security told Reuters, highlighting the tech industry’s failure to protect browsers as they are used more for email, payroll and other sensitive functions. Alphabet Inc’s Google said it removed more than 70 of the malicious add-ons from its official Chrome Web Store after being alerted by the researchers last month. “When we are alerted of extensions in the Web Store that violate our policies, we take action and use those incidents as training material to improve our automated and manual analyses,” Google spokesman Scott Westover told Reuters.

Most of the free extensions purported to warn users about questionable websites or convert files from one format to another. Instead, they siphoned off browsing history and data that provided credentials for access to internal business tools. Based on the number of downloads, it was the most far-reaching malicious Chrome store campaign to date, according to Awake co-founder and chief scientist Gary Golomb. Google declined to discuss how the latest spyware compared with prior campaigns, the breadth of the damage, or why it did not detect and remove the bad extensions on its own despite past promises to supervise offerings more closely.

“Abe cannot last,” said an LDP lawmaker who, like other politicians interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity. “He probably cannot last until the year-end.”

• Arrest Of Former Japanese Minister Could Hasten PM Abe’s Departure (R.)

The arrest of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s former justice minister could be a devastating blow for the Japanese leader whose support is near record lows, raising the possibility of his departure before the end of his term next year. Some in Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) are speaking of an early exit and rivals have stepped up manoeuvring to succeed him, party sources said. While Abe has rebounded from low ratings before, Japan’s longest-ruling prime minister now appears to be losing more internal support. Prosecutors on Thursday arrested former justice minister Katsuyuki Kawai, a one-time foreign policy adviser close to Abe, and Kawai’s wife, Anri, on suspicion of vote-buying in a 2019 upper-house election.

Tokyo prosecutors said in a statement that the couple paid 1.7 million yen ($15,904) to five people to get her elected. Separately, Katsuyuki Kawai gave a total of about 24 million yen to about 90 people. At the time, Anri Kawai’s campaign received 150 million yen ($1.4 million) in funds from LDP headquarters. The size of the contribution, although not illegal, raised questions about whether Abe approved it. Abe has declined to comment on the Kawais, but has said lawmakers had the responsibility to explain their actions. “Abe cannot last,” said an LDP lawmaker who, like other politicians interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity. “He probably cannot last until the year-end.”

Almost entirely out of view of the mainstream media, the Flynn story churns on. I predict it will explode in their faces.

• Sidney Powell Files Motion Against Gleeson: A ‘Wrap-Up Smear’ of Flynn (SAC)

Sidney Powell, the defense attorney for Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, filed a scathing response in the court Wednesday against federal Judge John Gleeson’s amicus brief, which asked the court to reject the Justice Department’s request to drop all charges against Flynn. Powell’s motion is powerful and contains a lengthy time-line revealing the stunning evidence discovered by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, as well as, the litany of new evidence uncovered by U.S. Attorney Jeffery Jensen, who was appointed by the Justice Department to conduct an independent review of Flynn’s case. Powell argues in her brief that the “irony and sheer duplicity” of Gleeson’s accusations “against the Justice Department now—which is finally exposing the truth—is stunning.”

Gleeson submitted his lengthy brief on July 10, on behalf of D.C. Federal Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who appointed him as the amicus and is refusing to drop the case against Flynn. He is doing all this despite the fact that both the Justice Department and defense agree the charges should be dropped against President Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor. Powell also pointed out in her motion of opposition Wednesday that Gleeson’s amicus filing on behalf of Sullivan is a “wrap-up smear” against Flynn.

“It demonstrates the difference between a Department of Prosecutions and a Department of Justice,” Powell argues in her conclusion regarding Gleeson’s amicus. “It shows how the Department of Justice, as the government’s representative in every federal criminal case, has the power to walk into courtrooms and ask judges to remedy injustices. For these reasons and those stated in our other briefs, the only lawful action this court can take is to dismiss the case with prejudice on the Government’s motion and vacate the plea.”

Further Powell states in her motion, that Gleeson’s “Amicus elides the reality of the egregious government misconduct of the FBI Agents—particularly that of [former FBI Director James] Comey, {Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe, [former Special Agent Peter] Strzok, [Former FBI Attorney Lisa] Page, [FBI Special Agent] Joe Pientka, [former FBI Assistant of Counterintelligence Bill] Priestap and others who met repeatedly to pursue the targeted “take-out” of General Flynn for their political reasons and those of the “entirety lame duck usic.” Much of this has been revealed in the December 19, 2019, IG Report, the 86 pages of newly produced exonerating material produced by U.S. Attorney Jensen, filed in the Government’s Motion to Dismiss (ECF No. 198), and hundreds of the texts between Strzok and Page demonstrating abject bias.”

“Amicus is lost down the rabbit hole on the other side of the looking glass— where “nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would,” argues Powell. Last week, Powell argued before the U.S. District Court of Appeals D.C. Circuit against Sullivan’s decision to appoint Gleeson. She noted that the government submitted an extensive and thoroughly documented motion to dismiss this prosecution based on the discovery of “extraordinary exculpatory evidence that came to light from an independent review… It can not go on any longer.”

Look, we know in advance how the MSM will spiel this. And those are all the same people who for years, as it fit their goals, presented Bolton to you as the most dangerous man in America. Now Bolton is your friend. Because he says something negative about Trump, and that’s something half the nation can’t get enough of. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it dumps Trump.

Still, to rehash the failed impeachment probe and state that Trump was impeached, well, maybe that’s another level.

As for the claim that Trump asked Xi to help him in elections, that doesn’t pass my personal smell test. It makes no sense at all. It likely only does for those who still believe Trump asked Putin the same, and choose to fully disregard Mueller’s report to get there. But sure, I know I will be accused-again- of being biased for saying this.

A “journalist” named Eli Lake tweeted: “According to Bolton, Trump privately told China’s tyrant that he should keep building concentration camps for Uighurs. That is an obscenity. He deserves to lose every state in November.” I’m sorry, but if you believe that, you need to get professional help as much as Bolton and Eli Lake do.

• Bolton Says Trump Asked China To Help Him Get Reelected (AP)

President Donald Trump “pleaded” with China’s Xi Jinping during a 2019 summit to help his reelection prospects, according to a scathing new book by former Trump adviser John Bolton that accuses the president of being driven by political calculations when making national security decisions. The White House worked furiously to block the book, asking a federal court for an emergency temporary restraining order Wednesday against its release. Bolton’s allegations that Trump solicited Chinese help for his reelection effort carried echoes of Trump’s attempt to get political help from Ukraine, which led to his impeachment.

“I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations,” Bolton wrote. The 577-page book paints an unvarnished portrait of Trump and his administration, amounting to the most vivid, first-person account yet of how Trump conducts himself in office. Several other former officials have written books, but most have been flattering about the president. Other former officials have indicated they were saving their accounts of their time working for Trump until after he left office in order to speak more candidly. The Associated Press obtained a copy of Bolton’s book in advance of its release next week.

Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser for a 17-month period, called Trump’s attempt to shift the June 2019 conversation with Xi to the U.S. election a stunning move, and wrote that it was among innumerable conversations that he found concerning. He added that Congress should have expanded the scope of its impeachment inquiry to these other incidents. [..] Trump was asked about the book Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity.” He turned to personal insults, calling Bolton a “washed-up guy. I gave him a chance.” He also took issue with copies of the book being released. “He broke the law. Very simple. I mean, as much as it’s going to be broken.” Trump said. “It’s highly classified information and he did not have approval.”

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