NIH Archives - The Automatic Earth

If you’re wondering whether you’re living in tyranny, ask yourself how many of his political opponents Joe Biden is sending to prison. Steve Bannon is the latest.

(2:14) Why is Congress going after Steve Bannon?
(7:28) Biden Regime Wants Complete Power
(16:03) The Future of War… pic.twitter.com/21GBKKpMbv

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 11, 2024

Vucic

Serbia's President Vucic:
“We are heading for a MAJOR CATASTROPHE and it seems that the train has already left the station and can no longer be stopped. No one in the West is talking about peace anymore – only more WAR”pic.twitter.com/KVNJUxUU8S

— أبو عمّار (@MaajidNawaz) June 10, 2024

RFK Trump
https://twitter.com/i/status/1800576436731781143

The founder of Telegram, which has nearly a billion users, planned to HQ the company in San Francisco until he got attacked walking its streets pic.twitter.com/QWBxmMewHc

— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) June 11, 2024

“..a previously-unreleased video..”

The Jan 6 committee decided to hold it back so they could promote false allegations against Trump. They must be investigated.

• Pelosi Admits Fault for the Lack of Jan 6 Security Precautions (Turley)

For years, some of us have asked why the Capitol was so poorly prepared for the January 6th riot. As part of the coverage on that day, I remarked at the start of the protests that I had never seen the Capitol so thinly protected for a major demonstration. Some paths to the Capitol were protected by a handful of bicycle officers and thin barriers. Now, a previously-unreleased video taken on Jan. 6, 2021 shows then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., admitting that she was responsible for the lack of preparedness. The video was disclosed in a posting on X by a House Republican panel. The video shows Pelosi in an exchange with Chief of Staff Terri McCullough on the evacuation.

Pelosi states: “We have responsibility, Terri. We did not have any accountability for what was going on there. And we should have. This is ridiculous. You’re going to ask me in the middle of the thing when they’ve already breached…that, should we call the Capitol Police? I mean the National Guard? Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?…They clearly didn’t know, and I take responsibility for not having them just prepared for more.” The video was never released by the J6 Committee, which was criticized for its highly choreographed and scripted hearings with little balance in the presentation of evidence. The lack of emphasis on the security issues was glaring and raised by critics throughout the hearings. While Democrats and the media dismissed the issue and claims that Trump offered to supply the national guard, it was later confirmed that those offers were made to Congress and rejected.

A report from Capitol Police Inspector General Michael Bolton also found that Capitol police were told that they could not use critical riot materials and tactics in preparation for the Jan. 6th protests. What was so curious about the lack of precautions that morning is that the Capitol had just experienced the violence outside of the White House in the Lafayette Park protests. To this day, the media and many members continue to repeat false accounts of the Lafayette Park. Many still have stories posted that claim that Lafayette Park was cleared for Trump to hold a photo op in front of a church. I discussed those accounts in testimony before Congress and in columns on the clearing of the Lafayette Park area. NPR still has a story on its website entitled “Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op.” More officers were injured in the Lafayette Park protests than on January 6th.

As previously discussed in repeated columns, the House Democratic leadership refused to hold a single hearing with key witnesses on what occurred before the riot. After using a “snap impeachment,” weeks went by without calling such witnesses before the Trump impeachment trial. Such evidence would have challenged the narrative and raised questions over decisions made by Congress that left the Capitol vulnerable to such an attack.In the Lafayette Park protests, White House officials feared that the compound could be breached by violent protesters who had injured dozens of officers and engaged in arson and attacks around the White House during that weekend. They decided to clear the area to install fencing (which Congress only ordered after the Jan. 6th riot). They also deployed the National Guard and the “heavier, less lethal weapons” that the Inspector General found were denied to the Capitol Police.

Had Pelosi and others accepted National Guard support and installed fencing as was done at the White House, it is doubtful that the riot on January 6th would have occurred or any disruption would have been far more limited in scope. The fact that the J6 Committee downplayed this major factor in the riot further undermines how the investigation was framed by the Democratic leadership. Pelosi barred the GOP members selected for the committee, hand picking two anti-Trump Republican members.

The absence of any balance on the committee was evident from the start. There was little effort to present alternative explanations or defenses to critical issues raised in hearings. No opposing witnesses were called who might contradict the narrative put forward by the Committee, including witnesses who would debunk the much-repeated, false claim that Trump wrestled with his driver to gain control of the presidential limo to drive to the Capitol. With the Speaker admitting on tape that she bore responsibility for the lack of precautions, one would think that the J6 Committee, including then Vice Chair Liz Cheney, would consider that relevant for the public to understand the underlying facts. Instead, it was buried with much other countervailing evidence.

Tucker Jan 6
https://twitter.com/i/status/1800541468051804485

“..the downward trend for Biden means that dropping out of the race is worth discussing, even though it “would be a big risk” for the Democrats..”

• Biden Campaign Claims Trump “Has Praised The Third Reich” (MN)

Biden campaign senior adviser Adrienne Elrod claimed Monday that Donald Trump has “praised the Third Reich” and intends to rule as a racist dictator. During an interview with CNN, Elrod was asked to comment on Republicans who “worship” Trump, and responded “I think that rhetoric speaks for itself.” “Donald Trump and his MAGA allies are focused on seeking revenge and retribution,” Elrod asserted, adding “They are running a negative campaign that is not focused on the American people, but is focused on themselves.” She continued, “Trump has made it very clear that if he steps back into that White House, he will rule as a dictator on day one. He will seek — he will use the White House to seek political revenge and retribution on his political enemies.” Trump actually said he won’t do that, but it doesn’t fit the Biden campaign’s narrative.

While she was at it, Elrod painted up Trump as an admirer of Hitler. “You know, he has said things that — you know, he’s praised the Third Reich. He has used, you know, racist rhetoric at every chance that he has,” she claimed. Praised the Third Reich? Presumably she is referring to this…

The desperation among the Biden campaign is palpable. His approval rating just hit a new all-time low of 37.4 percent. FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver noted that the downward trend for Biden means that dropping out of the race is worth discussing, even though it “would be a big risk” for the Democrats. “But there’s some threshold below which continuing to run is a bigger risk,” Silver commented, adding “Are we there yet? I don’t know. But it’s more than fair to ask.” “If I’d told you 10 years ago a president would seek re-election at 81 despite a supermajority of Americans having concerns about his age, and then we’d hit 8% inflation for 2 years, you wouldn’t be surprised he was an underdog for reelection. You’d be surprised it was even close!” Silver further wrote.

Lock him up. Throw away the key.

• NIH Scrambled After ZeroHedge Report On Fauci Beagle Experiments (ZH)

Last week, Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene took a detour from grilling Anthony Fauci over COVID-19, to confront him with photos of beagles who had been subjected to animal testing experiments widely reported to be funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the National Institutes of Health (NIH), following a 2021 investigation series by the group White Coat Waste Project. “We should be recommending you to be prosecuted,” Greene told Fauci. “We should be writing a criminal referral because you should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. You belong in prison,” she continued, adding “That man does not deserve to have a license. As a matter of fact, it should be revoked and he belongs in prison.” This opened up a can of worms which includes a response from White Coat Waste, and triggered the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler to do a deep dive into ‘Beaglegage’ in an effort to debunk Greene.

“When we first saw Greene hold up the photo, we figured this would be easy to debunk — another in a string of misleading attacks against Fauci, who became the public face of the government’s response to the pandemic.” -Washington Post. Only to discover that the NIH appears to have lied about funding the experiment, which involved beagles between 6 and 8 months old obtained from the kennels of the Pasteur Institute of Tunis. In the study, the beagles were sedated and then exposed to hundreds of sand flies that had been deprived of food for 24 hours. This exposure took place as part of research into zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis (ZVL), a disease carried by sand flies that can affect dogs and humans. After ZeroHedge amplified the White Coat Waste report (archived), there was a full blown panic.

In late October 2021, CNN asked Fauci to appear for an interview, and one of his staff members suggested late on Oct. 24 that Fauci pause any TV interviews “until we get a handle on this.” Early the next morning, Fauci emailed 12 officials and asked them to “tell me what grant or contract they are referring to.” Within two hours, one replied that they might have identified the grant. (Most staff members’ names are redacted.) “Let us find out for sure if it is that grant, and then let us take a look at what the experimental design is, and importantly whether it has received the appropriate ethical and animal care consideration,” Fauci replied in an email. “I want this done right away since we are getting bombarded by protests.”

Within two hours, one of the researchers involved, Abhay Satoskar, a professor of pathology and microbiology at Ohio State University, emailed to say that NIAID had been mistakenly cited as a funder of the study and that he would seek a correction from the journal. One NIAID official wrote in an email that Satoskar “stated that it was mistakenly cited because he was not clear of the true purpose of US funding acknowledgment” and that the program in question had been funded only by the Pasteur Institute. Satoskar, meanwhile asked Shaden Kamhawi, the editor of the journal, to correct the article. Kamhawi initially agreed, but noted internally that she may have a conflict of interest as a NIAID employee. She then sent an email in a panic over the ZeroHedge article potentially inviting “a lot of noise & unwanted attention for [Fauci]. They also called us an “illegitimate blog of no credibility,” which is high praise considering the source.

When the story broke in 2021, the NIH scrubbed it from its database and then fed WaPo disinformation: When The Post reported on the controversy in November 2021, the article noted: “The trapped-beagles study does not appear in a database of NIH-funded projects.” The emails show that, while it was removed before the publication of The Post article, the study had been listed in the database for months and was still listed as of the previous month, when Fauci first asked about the controversy. “We need that to be corrected too, ASAP please,” one NIH staffer wrote on Oct. 27. The anxiety level rose as officials realized it would take several days, until Nov. 1, before the project would be removed from the database — where reporters could not then find it. -WaPo.

“..Platkin’s office has announced that it is “reviewing” whether to pull the liquor licenses for Trump golf clubs since he is now convicted of felonies in New York..”:

• New Jersey Announces Investigation into Trump Liquor Licenses (Turley)

Many of us have expressed alarm at the politicization of the criminal justice system in New York by figures such as Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. It now appears that New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin is angling to get into the lawfare frenzy. The conviction of Trump on 34 felonies has either thrilled or repelled citizens. For many of us, it is a sign of the degradation of our legal system. Even the chief CNN legal analyst has acknowledged that Bragg contorted the law to bring the recent case against former President Donald Trump in an unprecedented prosecution. Yet, the use of the legal system for political purposes is clearly popular in New York where people were literally dancing in the street outside of the courthouse after the recent verdict against Trump.

Now Platkin’s office has announced that it is “reviewing” whether to pull the liquor licenses for Trump golf clubs since he is now convicted of felonies in New York. It appears that lawfare is nothing if not intoxicating for Democratic politicians. According to an article in the Hill, the New Jersey Attorney General’s Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control is “reviewing the impact of President Trump’s conviction” on his liquor licenses for the Trump National Golf Club in Colts Neck, Lamington Farm Club, and Trump National Golf Club Philadelphia in Pine Hill. The latest effort is based on a vague standard governing crimes of “moral turpitude” under New Jersey law: “No license of any class shall be issued to any person under the age of 18 years or to any person who has been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude. A beneficiary of a trust who is not otherwise disqualified to hold an interest in a license may qualify regardless of age so long as the trustee of the trust qualifies and the trustee shall hold the beneficiary’s interest in trust until the beneficiary is at least the age of majority.”

A “crime of moral turpitude” is a familiar, though dated, standard in American law. I teach the standard in torts as one of the traditional “per se” categories for slander under the common law. It was generally used to denote conduct of immorality or serious offenses to norms of society. New Jersey defines it as including “any offense that carries the possibility of one year in jail and involves acts of baseness, vileness, or depravity in the private and social duties which a man owes to his fellowmen, or to society in general. Even the New Jersey Alcoholic Beverage Control handbook notes that in “some instances, it may be unclear whether a conviction involves an element of moral turpitude.” Yet, Trump has a way to bringing clarity for his critics whenever they must chose between politics and principle.

For most of us, it is hard to see how falsifying business records would constitute “acts of baseness, vileness, or depravity in the private and social duties which a man owes to his fellowmen, or to society in general.” However, for Democrats, it seems that any act by Trump is by definition base, vile, and depraved. The piling on of investigations and charges by Democratic officials has reinforced Trump’s long narrative of a weaponization of the legal system against him and his supporters. Polling shows that most citizens view some of these cases as political prosecutions and that they are having diminishing impact on voter preferences. Yet, they remain thrilling for Democratic voters who lionize prosecutors who come up with novel or unprecedented avenues to hammer Trump or hit his businesses. It does not seem to matter that removing the liquor licenses of these clubs can endanger thousands of jobs of citizens or chill other businesses in considering investments in New York or New Jersey. In the end, the effort is hardly surprising. Lawfare is like binge drinking: the excess is the very measure of its success.

“Crooked Joe Biden’s reign over the Biden Family Criminal Empire is all coming to an end on November 5th, and never again will a Biden sell government access for personal profit..”

• ‘We Are So Proud’: Bidens React To Hunter Verdict (RT)

US President Joe Biden and his wife Jill love their son and intend to respect the judicial process, according to a statement released on Tuesday in response to a Delaware jury finding Hunter Biden guilty of federal gun crimes. Biden’s younger son was charged with three felonies based on a 2018 firearm purchase while being a crack cocaine addict and lying about it on a gun control form. Tuesday’s verdict made him the first son of a sitting president to be convicted in federal court. “Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today,” Biden said in the statement. “I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal. Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that.”

Joe Biden married Jill Jacobs in 1977, five years after losing his first wife Neilia and their daughter Naomi in a car crash. Hunter and his older brother Beau were seriously injured in the accident. Biden was sworn in as US senator in their hospital room. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015. Hunter later ended up romantically involved with Beau’s widow Hallie. It was Hallie who found the illegally purchased Colt Cobra revolver in Hunter’s truck and threw it in the trash. Believing the gun had been stolen, Hunter set the Secret Service scrambling to recover it. The entire episode was revealed thanks to Hunter Biden’s laptop, which he left in a Delaware repair shop while high on crack and subsequently forgot about it. The laptop’s contents emerged during the 2020 presidential election, but social media companies censored the New York Post for publishing the story while Biden had current and former US intelligence officials denounce it as “Russian disinformation.” The trial confirmed that the laptop and its contents were authentic.

Hunter’s verdict came as his father was scheduled to appear at a gun control event in Washington, DC. At the end of May, a New York jury convicted Biden’s main rival for the presidency, Donald Trump, on 34 counts of “falsifying business records.” The Biden campaign rushed to declare Trump a “convicted felon” and argued no one should vote for him. While some Republicans gloated at the Delaware verdict, many pointed out that Hunter was not brought up on far more serious charges involving foreign bribery or tax evasion. Trump’s campaign called the trial “nothing more than a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia and Ukraine.” “Crooked Joe Biden’s reign over the Biden Family Criminal Empire is all coming to an end on November 5th, and never again will a Biden sell government access for personal profit,” Trump campaign spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said.

“..a ‘New War of Independence’ can be held aloft before the Israeli public as the metaphysical ‘vision’ of the way ahead..”

• Israel and the Misjudgement of Reality (Alastair Crooke)

On all fronts, the Israeli internal paradigm is fracturing; and externally, the West is itself fissuring, and becoming a pariah on the global stage. The western leaderships’ explicit facilitation of a bloody cleansing of Palestinians has incised the old spectre of ‘Orientalism’ and colonialism onto the skyline. And is gyring the West towards being ‘the world’s untouchable’ (along with Israel). Overall, Israel’s government objective looks to be to converge and then channel – multiple tensions into a wide military escalation disgorgement (a big war) – that somehow would bring a restoration of deterrence. Such a course concomitantly implies that Israel would thus turn its back to western pleas that it somehow act ‘reasonably’. The West mostly defines this ‘reasonableness’ as Israel accepting the chimaera of a passage to ‘normality’ arriving through the Saudi Crown Prince bestowing it, in return for a contrite Israel undoing seven decades of Jewish supremacism (i.e. accepting a Palestinian State).

The core tension within the Western-Israeli calculus is that the U.S. and the EU are moving in one direction – back to the failed Oslo approach – whilst polling underscores Jewish electors firmly marching in the other direction. A recent survey conducted by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs shows that since 7 October, 79% of all Jewish respondents oppose the establishment of a Palestinian State on 1967 lines (68% were opposed prior to 7 Oct); 74% are opposed even in exchange for normalisation with Saudi Arabia. And reflective of the internal Israeli divide, “only 24% of left-wing voters support a [Palestinian] State without conditions”. In short, as the western institutional leadership clings to the shrinking Israeli secular liberal Left, Israelis as whole (including the young) are moving hard Right. A recent Pew poll shows that 73% of the Israeli public support the military response in Gaza – albeit a third of Israelis complained it had not gone far enough. A plurality of Israelis think Israel should govern the Gaza Strip. And Netanyahu, in the aftermath of the ICC arrest threat, is overtaking Gantz (leader of the National Union) in approval ratings.

It seems that the ‘western consensus’ prefers not to notice these uncomfortable dynamics. Additionally, a separate Israeli divide concerns the purpose of the war: Is it about restoring to Jewish citizens the sense of personal, physical security, which was lost in the wake of 7 Oct? That is to say: Is it the sense of Israel as a redoubt, safe space in a hostile world that is being restored? Or alternatively, is the present struggle one of establishing a fully Judaicised Israel on the ‘Land of Israel’ (i.e. all the land between the river and the sea) the prime objective? This constitutes a key divide. Those who see Israel primarily as the safe redoubt to which Jews could flee in the wake of European holocaust, naturally are more circumspect at the risking of a wider war (i.e. with Hizbullah) – a war that could see the civilian ‘rear’ directly attacked by Hizbullah’s vast missile arsenal. For this constituency, safety is a premium.

On the other hand, a majority of Israelis sees the risk of wider war as inevitable – indeed to be welcomed by many, if the Zionist project is to be fully established on the Land of Israel. This reality may be difficult for secular westerners to grasp, but the 7 October has re-energised the Biblical vision in Israel, rather than excite a surfeit of caution about war, or a desire for rapprochement with Arab States. The point here is that a ‘New War of Independence’ can be held aloft before the Israeli public as the metaphysical ‘vision’ of the way ahead, whilst the Israeli government attempts to pursue the more mundane path of playing the long game, leading to the full military matrix control over the land between the river and the sea, and the removal of populations that will not submit to the Smotrich dispensation of ‘acquiesce or leave’.

Sachs hostages
https://twitter.com/i/status/1800314333576196369

“..a long period of confrontation with the West, led by the US, lies ahead of us for about a generation..”

• How Russia Can Prevent WW3 (Dmitry Trenin)

We can say that a new phase in relations between the world’s nuclear powers has begun. Many of us are still psychologically somewhere in the 1970s and 1980s. That is a kind of comfort zone. Back then, relations between the USSR and the US were based on the two superpowers’ strategic and political parity. In the military-strategic sphere, Washington was forced to deal with Moscow on an equal footing. After 1991, this parity disappeared. For the US, since the 1990s, Russia has been a declining power; throwing its weight around, always reminding itself of its former greatness, snapping back, even dangerous at times – but on a downward spiral. The difficult opening phase of the Ukraine conflict gave the Americans hope that the fields of that country would be the grave of the Russian superpower. They have since sobered up a bit, but equal status between Moscow and Washington is out of the question for them.

This is the main difference between the current state of relations and the ‘golden’ period of the Cold War – the 1960s and early 1980s. And Russia has yet to prove the Americans wrong. As they say, it is always difficult to predict anything, especially the future. But today we have to assume that a long period of confrontation with the West, led by the US, lies ahead of us for about a generation. The future of our country, its position and role in the world, and to a large extent the state of the global system as a whole, will depend on the outcome of this confrontation, the main front of which is not in Ukraine, but within Russia: in the economy, in the social sphere, in science and technology, in culture and art. Internally, because the enemy realises the impossibility of defeating Moscow on the battlefield, but remembers that the Russian state has collapsed more than once as a result of internal turmoil.

This may, as in 1917, be the result of an unsuccessful war. Hence the bet on a protracted conflict in which they know they have more resources. During the Cold War there were five nuclear powers, but then the only real poles were the US and the USSR, plus China with its then small nuclear arsenal. Now Beijing is moving towards (at least) parity with America and Russia, while India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel remain independent players (unlike NATO members Britain and France). The classic Cold War notion of strategic stability – i.e. the absence of incentives for the parties to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike – is not only inadequate but sometimes inapplicable when characterising relations between the great powers today.

Look at Ukraine: Washington is increasing arms supplies to Kiev, encouraging and providing for its provocative attacks on Russia’s strategic infrastructure (early warning stations, strategic airfields), while at the same time proposing Moscow resumes dialogue on strategic stability! In the emerging world order, strategic stability will have to mean the absence of reasons for military conflict (even indirect) between the nuclear powers. This, in turn, will be possible if the powers respect each other’s interests and are ready to solve problems on the basis of equality and the indivisibility of security. Ensuring strategic stability between all nine powers will require enormous efforts and the formation of a fundamentally new world order model, but it (strategic stability in the broad, i.e. real sense of the word) is quite realistic between pairs of states (Russia-China, the US-India, etc.). For Russia, only three of the other eight nuclear powers – the US, Britain and France – remain problematic.

“.. the “collective West” is a minority whose worldview is not shared by the global majority..”

• BRICS Must Prevent New ‘Cold War’ – China (RT)

The BRICS countries should work together to promote peace and prevent the onset of a new Cold War, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has said. Speaking at the BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod on Monday, Wang stated that some major powers still harbor a “Cold War mentality.” According to the diplomat, this attitude directly contradicts UN Security Council resolutions and undermines the authority of multilateral mechanisms. China is willing to work with Russia to maintain strategic cooperation, respond to external pressures, and promote the sustained progress of bilateral relations, he said. Describing BRICS as an important platform for unity and cooperation among emerging markets and developing countries, Wang said the expanded BRICS mechanism will play a crucial role in creating a more just and reasonable global governance system.

He accused the West of the “politicization and excessive securitization” of economic issues, which has resulted in “rampant” unilateral sanctions and technological barriers for countries such as Russia and China. Wang urged the “big BRICS to “leverage” its political significance and transform the group into a new type of multilateral cooperation mechanism. The BRICS grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was joined by Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates in early 2024. “By expanding our membership, we have ushered in a new era of joint self-reliance for the Global South, with the influence and appeal of BRICS continually rising,” Wang stated.

He added that in a “contest” where some forces promote global multipolarity while others maintain a “unipolar hegemony,” the BRICS countries should “stand on the side of fairness and justice, and make the right choices.” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed last week at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that Western governments are “obsessed” with the idea of global dominance. She argued that Western leaders continue to adopt “exceptionalism” at the expense of other ethnic and cultural identities. However, the “collective West” is a minority whose worldview is not shared by the global majority, which has already embraced the concept of multipolarity, Zakharova insisted.

“..that Kubrakov’s ouster had been orchestrated by Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andrey Yermak, described as the “de facto head of state.”

• West ‘Losing Trust’ In Ukraine – FT (RT)

Vladimir Zelensky’s recent purges of government officials have damaged the confidence of Ukraine’s foreign supporters, the Financial Times has reported, citing multiple sources in Kiev.The head of the State Agency for Restoration and Infrastructure Development, Mustafa Nayyem, tendered his resignation on Monday. He was followed by officials responsible for procurement and anti-corruption policy.Their departure is the latest in a series of personnel changes “that have shaken the confidence of western partners” in Vladimir Zelensky’s government, according to the FT. “The US and other western partners want a normal, predictable relationship with their Ukrainian counterparts,” one concerned Ukrainian official told the outlet on condition of anonymity. “Right now they are losing trust in Ukraine’s government because of personnel decisions that they do not understand.”

A spree of firings, resignations, and reassignments overseen by Zelensky in recent months has “caused tension” between Kiev and the countries financing Ukraine, six Ukrainian and Western officials told the outlet on condition of anonymity. They also said they had warned the Ukrainian leader about the “disruptive and inexplicable” moves. Nayyem’s resignation letter, seen by FT, said he was leaving due to “constant opposition, resistance and the creation of artificial obstacles” by Prime Minister Denis Shmygal. According to the outlet, Nayyem spoke to two dozen USAID and other Western officials two weeks ago, telling them he expected to be fired.

He urged Kiev’s foreign backers to continue working with his replacement, but one USAID representative was perturbed by changes to “ our most important partnership,” according to an audio recording of the meeting. Last month, Zelensky dismissed Ukraine’s infrastructure minister, Alexander Kubrakov. He and Nayyem were in charge of both reconstruction and the building of defensive fortifications. Two Ukrainian officials told FT that Zelensky viewed Kubrakov as “too cozy” with the Americans. Nayyem had warned USAID to expect a government probe into Kubrakov. FT reported last week that Kubrakov’s ouster had been orchestrated by Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andrey Yermak, described as the “de facto head of state.”

“This situation is really bad for [the] perception of the Ukrainian government and Ukraine generally,” Gleb Vishlinsky, the executive director at the Center for Economic Strategy in Kiev, told FT. He added that the firing of Kubrakov and Nayyem’s resignation, “build an image of weak and unpredictable governance.” Kubrakov’s sacking in particular attracted “backlash” from the US and its allies. The US, German, French, and EU ambassadors in Kiev posted messages of support for the minister on May 9 and complained about his departure to Shmygal four days later. A meeting that was supposed to be about the dire condition of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure reportedly turned into an argument about the absence of Kubrakov and Nayyem.

” Hungary is scheduled to take over the presidency in July.”

• Eastern NATO Club May Kick Hungary Out For Dissent – FT (RT)

A club of Eastern European and Baltic NATO nations is considering forcing out Hungary, a member state, for refusing to take the same stance on Ukraine, the Financial Times has reported, citing sources. The Bucharest Nine was founded in 2015 and includes Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Senior officials from the regional group regularly meet to coordinate their foreign and security policy; a gathering of its leaders is scheduled to take place in Riga on Tuesday. Hungary, however, may be expelled from the club over its refusal to endorse joint statements of support for sending military aid to Ukraine and otherwise support Kiev in its confrontation with Moscow, insider sources told The Financial Times.

”We are likely meeting in this format for the last time,” one of the people familiar with the situation told the newspaper, calling the discussions “very serious.” All members of the Bucharest Nine were either Warsaw Pact nations or Soviet republics during the Cold War, and joined NATO during its expansion after the USSR collapsed. Hungary, however, is at odds with the other countries over the Ukraine conflict. Budapest opposes the continued arming of Kiev, saying this only prolongs the hostilities, and advocates for immediate peace talks instead. It is also highly skeptical of Western promises to eventually bring Ukraine into NATO and the EU. Supporters of Kiev have branded the government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban “pro-Russian” over the position, which he says is guided by his nation’s interests.

A similar push to ostracize Hungary is reportedly underway within the EU, where some members have called for suspending its voting rights. Belgium, which holds the rotating presidency in the European Council, believes that the future of the bloc may depend on it, Politico reported last week. ”This is a moment of truth,” Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib told the news outlet, referring to the so-called Article 7 proceedings against Hungary. “If we go all the way with this mechanism, it must work. If it doesn’t work, we have to reform it. That’s the future of the European Union.” Hungary is scheduled to take over the presidency in July.

Because they know what Russia thinks about that.

• US ‘Flirting With Neo-Nazis’ – Kremlin (RT)

Washington will stop at nothing, including the use of neo-Nazis, to damage Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday, following a US decision to lift a ban on supplying weapons to Ukraine’s Azov Brigade. The unit has notoriously welcomed into its ranks people who espouse ultranationalist and neo-Nazi ideologies, and has been described by the Western press as a magnet for such individuals from across the world. On Monday, the US Department of State cleared the brigade to receive American military assistance, stating that it found no evidence of human rights violations by the group. “This sudden change of stance by Washington proves that [US officials] would stoop to anything in their attempts to suppress Russia, using the Ukrainian people as a tool. They are even fine with flirting with neo-Nazis,” Peskov told journalists during a media briefing. Azov was founded as a volunteer battalion of Ukrainian nationalists in 2014 by white supremacist Andrey Biletsky.

People who came to power in Kiev following the Western-backed armed coup that year used Azov fighters in an attempt to violently quash a rebellion against the new government in the east. The battalion was incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard the following year. In 2018, the US Congress banned the delivery of arms to the Azov Brigade, citing its ties to neo-Nazi ideology. Since the outbreak of conflict with Russia, Ukrainian officials and Azov members worked to rebrand the unit. Its insignia, which originally paid homage to Nazi symbology, was replaced with less offensive imagery, and its messaging changed to claim that the unit had distanced itself from its roots. Some former and serving US officials, such as ex-ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, helped Azov’s efforts by organizing events for them on American soil. However, Moscow insists that the nature of the unit has not significantly changed. It remains an “ultranationalist armed group,” Peskov stated.

Not much left of Zelensky’s plan. Wonder why.

• Ukraine ‘Peace Conference’ Will Not Urge Withdrawal Of Russian Troops (RT)

A draft joint statement prepared for an upcoming ‘peace conference’ on Ukraine in Switzerland will likely fall short of demanding the withdrawal of Russian forces from all territories claimed by Kiev, NHK has reported. The document also omits any mention of restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the Japanese news organization said on Tuesday after reviewing the draft statement. The agenda will reportedly address only three out of the ten points promoted by Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, such as the safety of nuclear power plants, food security, the release of prisoners and the return of children evacuated by Russia from the conflict zone, NHK’s English-language news site said.

Zelensky’s topline demands when they were first floated in late 2022 included a complete withdrawal of Russian forces from all territories that Ukraine considers its own, that Russia pays reparations and submits its officials to war tribunals, all dismissed out of hand by Moscow. The points have been dropped from the draft joint statement because it took into account the stance of some Asian and Middle Eastern states that maintain ties with Russia, diplomatic sources told NHK. The draft also states that all parties should take part in the search for peace, and stresses the importance of Russia’s participation in future discussions, according to article. Russia has not been invited to the international gathering, due to take place on Saturday and Sunday at the Burgenstock Resort near Lucerne. Zelensky opposed the presence of a Russian delegation at the Swiss-hosted conference, saying it would enable Moscow to derail Ukraine’s diplomatic efforts.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told RT earlier that it was “absurd” to hold a meeting on settling the conflict between Russia and Ukraine without Moscow attending. “This conference is completely without prospects,” he stressed.The Russian authorities instantly rejected Zelensky’s ten-point plan as “unacceptable” when it was first presented. According to Moscow, the proposal disregards the actual situation on the ground, and is a sign of Kiev’s unwillingness to engage in negotiations.Last week, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin reiterated that Moscow is ready to seek a diplomatic solution to the crisis, but stressed that “fantasies” cannot be a basis for peace talks. “All negotiations are based on either military defeat, or military victory. Of course, we will win,” Putin said.

Biden still
https://twitter.com/i/status/1800361106520604994

Elon Xmas

The story behind Elon Musk firing 80% of Twitter's staff pic.twitter.com/50KkcDTPYx

— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) June 10, 2024

Elon AI1

"I have a concern with companies like Google, Gemini, OpenAI & Meta that they are not maximally truth seeking. Their A.I. are pandering to political correctness and are being trained to lie.

The safest thing for AI is to be maximally truth seeking even if the truth is unpopular" pic.twitter.com/XPPdMSntX9

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) June 11, 2024

Eat

They all patiently wait for their turn to eat! pic.twitter.com/SdwiZJjI6I

— B&S (@_B___S) June 11, 2024

Jaguar

Nature is awesome pic.twitter.com/gvnYVnKyY4

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) June 10, 2024

Kind

There is no bigger
Or more important lesson
To teach our children
Than to be kind. pic.twitter.com/cCVMcPKILf

— Ramblings (@ramblingsloa) June 11, 2024

Friendship
https://twitter.com/i/status/1800223297256489410

Cheetah
https://twitter.com/i/status/1800570165580669162

Blue whale

Blue Whale being chased by Orcas. pic.twitter.com/Vw1nN5M7KC

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) June 11, 2024

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Debt Rattle July 16 2022

Jul 162022

July 16, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:01 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, bad science, blackouts, CDC, Elon Musk, Geert Vanden Bossche, LNG, NIH, taco, war 27 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Guernica [Study] V 1937

• Useful European Idiots (Vilches)

• The Imaginary War (Lawrence)

• Is A US-Russia War Becoming Inevitable? (Pat Buchanan)

• The Stupendous Tale (Tarik)

• Europe’s Thirst For LNG Is Causing Blackouts In Developing Countries (OP)

• Geert Vanden Bossche: Mass Covid Vax Triggering New Pandemics (NA)

• Low Demand For Young Kids’ Covid Vaccines Is Alarming Doctors (Pol.)

• Health Experts Are Quitting The NIH and CDC In Droves (DM)

• Elon Musk Wants To Push Twitter Trial Back To 2023 (NYP)

• A Tale of the Taco (Jim Kunstler)

• Assange Fights Extradition To United States With Two Appeals (Dissenter)

Twitter board

This is hilarious for @Twitter and @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/bLp0xtVKBR

— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) July 15, 2022

NATO myths

Russia continues to spread many false myths about #NATO. So let us set the record straight pic.twitter.com/dsysMtaWLQ

— NATO (@NATO) July 13, 2022

“The US-UK cabal does not want Europe and Russia to trade, do business, relate, or grow together in any way, shape, or form.”

• Useful European Idiots (Vilches)

“ Washington and London have drawn ´useful European idiots´ into an economic war against Russia ” – said former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev – adding that “the onset of a systemic crisis in the Eurozone is beginning to come true.” He added that Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic conned EU members “like a couple of shell-game tricksters” by drawing them into an unwarranted economic war against Moscow which is actually an Anglo-Saxon project, not theirs. Paraphrasing James Carville, “it´s the Anglo-Saxons, stupid”. The US-UK cabal does not want Europe and Russia to trade, do business, relate, or grow together in any way, shape, or form. So they designed, built and forced upon Europe the current John Bolton-Ukraine war which had plan A (now failed) with Russia as target and plan B as substitute with Europe itself as the intended victim coming next.

What Dmitry Medvedev may not know though is that such ”useful European idiots” can be broken down into 3 fairly distinct categories starting with the EU “well-trained career idiots” basically focused on continuously earning salaries and perks way above their capabilities. So they know that (a) the EU system rewards them generously despite their obvious mediocrity and limitations and (b) thus do not dare to question, doubt, let alone defy the EU system or dictats. They all know and feel every day of their lives that the EU ´system´ has a very strict pecking order and what top-cock (or top-hen) says to do or say or think is to be summarily executed without questioning the mandate, even if against European best interests as is the case.

This simplifies the problem from the Washington-London perspective as by controlling a handful of EU leaders (more on that later) the rest just follow the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Furthermore, these EU-captured intellectual simpleton retards are not dumb enough to the extreme of questioning their unequivocal role (they are aware of it) and accordingly constantly strengthen their vested-interests relationship. In sum, they work hard at it. Then there is a second category of “useful European idiots” grouping the visible top EU leaders – many unelected — who can either be (a) plain corrupt as traditionally allowed for in Europe or (b) perceive themselves as God-chosen to lead Europe to a glorious yet undefined destiny no matter if actively hijacking any representational capacity and values they may have received.

“.. a Marvel Comics of a conflict with little grounding in reality..”

• The Imaginary War (Lawrence)

What were the policy cliques, “the intelligence community” and the press that serves both going to do when the kind of war in Ukraine they talked incessantly about turned out to be imaginary, a Marvel Comics of a conflict with little grounding in reality? I have wondered about this since the Russian intervention began on Feb. 24. I knew the answer would be interesting when finally we had one. Now we have one. Taking the government-supervised New York Times as a guide, the result is a variant of what we saw as the Russiagate fiasco came unglued: Those who manufacture orthodoxies as well as consent are slithering out the side door. I could tell you I don’t intend to single out the Times in this wild chicanery, except that I do.

The once-but-no-longer newspaper of record continues to be singularly wicked in its deceits and deceptions as it imposes the official but imaginary version of the war on unsuspecting readers. As Consortium News’s properly suspecting readers will recall, Vladimir Putin was clear when he told the world Russia’s intentions as it began its intervention. These were two: Russian forces went into Ukraine to “demilitarize and de–Nazify” it, a pair of limited, defined objectives. An astute reader of these commentaries pointed out in a recent comment thread that the Russian president had once again proven, whatever else one may think of him, a focused statesman with an excellent grasp of history. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Allied Control Council declared its postwar purpose in Germany as “the four D’s.” These were de–Nazification, demilitarization, democratization and decentralization.

Let’s give David Thompson, who brought this historical reference to my attention, a deserved byline here: “Putin’s reiteration of the de–Nazification and demilitarization principles established from the Potsdam Conference is not just some quaint tip of the hat to history. He was laying down a marker to the United States and the United Kingdom that the agreement reached at Potsdam in 1945 is still relevant and valid ….” The Russian president, whose entire argument with the West is that a just and stable order in Europe must serve the security interests of all sides, was simply restating objectives the trans–Atlantic alliance had once signed on to accomplish. In other words, he was pointing out said alliance’s gross hypocrisy as it arms the ideological descendants of German Nazis.

I dwell on this matter because the imaginary war began with the Biden regime’s and the press’s quite irresponsible misrepresentations of the Russian Federation’s aims in Ukraine. All else has flowed from it. You remember: Russian forces were going to “conquer” the whole of the nation, wipe out the Kiev regime, install a puppet government and then drive on to Poland, the Baltic states, Transnistria and the rest of Moldova, and who could imagine what after that. De–Nazification, we can now read, is a phony Kremlin dodge. Having lied outright on this score, the next edition of the comic went onto the market. Russia is failing to achieve its imaginary objectives. Low morale, desertions, poorly trained troops with not enough to eat, logistical failures, lousy artillery, inadequate ordnance, incompetent officers: The Russians were riding for a fall on Ukrainian soil.

The corollary here was the heroism, courage and battlefield grit of Ukrainian troops, least of all, the Azov Battalion, who were not any longer neo–Nazis. Never mind the Times, The Guardian, the BBC and various other mainstream publications and broadcasters had earlier told us about these ideological fanatics. That was then, this is now.

Not yet.

• Is A US-Russia War Becoming Inevitable? (Pat Buchanan)

At the NATO summit in Madrid, Finland was invited to join the alliance. What does this mean for Finland? If Russian President Vladimir Putin breaches the 830-mile Finnish border, the United States will rise to Helsinki’s defense and fight Russia on Finland’s side. If Putin makes a military move into Finland, the U.S. will go to war against the world’s largest nation with an arsenal of between 4,500 and 6,000 battlefield and strategic nuclear weapons. No Cold War president would have dreamed of making such a commitment — to risk the survival of our nation to defend territory of a country thousands of miles away that has never been a U.S. vital interest. To go to war with the Soviet Union over the preservation of Finnish territory would have been seen as madness during the Cold War.

Recall: Harry Truman refused to use force to break Joseph Stalin’s blockade of Berlin. Dwight Eisenhower refused to send U.S. troops to save the Hungarian freedom fighters being run down by Soviet tanks in Budapest in 1956. Lyndon B. Johnson did nothing to assist the Czech patriots crushed by Warsaw Pact armies in 1968. When Lech Walesa’s Solidarity was smashed on Moscow’s order in Poland in 1981, Ronald Reagan made brave statements and sent Xerox machines. While the U.S. issued annual declarations of support during the Cold War for the “captive nations” of Central and Eastern Europe, the liberation of these nations from Soviet control was never deemed so vital to the West as to justify a war with the USSR.

Indeed, in the 40 years of the Cold War, NATO, which had begun in 1949 with 12 member nations, added only four more — Greece, Turkey, Spain and West Germany. Yet, with the invitation to Sweden and Finland to join as the 31st and 32nd nations to receive an Article 5 war guarantee, NATO will have doubled its membership since what was thought — certainly by the Russians — to have been the end of the Cold War. All the nations once part of Moscow’s Warsaw Pact — East Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria — are now members of a U.S.-led NATO — directed against Russia. Three former republics of the USSR — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania — are now also members of NATO, a military alliance formed to corral and contain the nation to which they had belonged during the Cold War. Lithuania, with 2% of Russia’s population, has just declared a partial blockade of goods moving across its territory to Kaliningrad, Russia’s enclave on the Baltic Sea. To Putin’s protest, Vilnius has reminded Moscow that Lithuania is a member of NATO.

Stupendously long, too.

• The Stupendous Tale (Tarik)

I love Elvira. She’s my sweetheart, ma babe. Were I set to marry a central banker, she’d be the one. And if Putin is the Father of modern Russia, then Nabiullina is the fiercely protective Mother. Her handling of the Ruble attack after the Crimean intervention, was truly heroic. I can almost hear the strident cries from all her brats: the public, the business class, academia, media and the government, to lower rates and open wide the money spigot. Had she fallen under the pressure as they all do since Volker, had she not risen interest rates to 17%, the ruble would have been irrevocably broken.

The entire economy would have loaded up on unsustainable debt that would trigger the familiar hyper inflationary trend common to US$ vassals going rogue with no understanding of the money game (Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Turkey, Argentina…), and thus annihilated Putin’s achievements on all fronts. Instead, by letting inviable western focused businesses fail, financial resources could flow to local production and eastbound and southbound ventures. As a result the economy cleansed itself of obsolete dead weights, excessive unserviceable debt, and business discipline was enforced, leaving it lean and mean, ready do tackle any future rough patch.

Once the last treacherous FDI dollar and Euro left the space, the ruble stabilized, interest rates slowly normalized, dollar reserves now kept at strict minimum to cover trade requirements while overall reserves quickly recovered all losses. Sure some short term pain on certain sectors, but necessary and long term well worth it. No wonder Putin today would ask her for another term (note that he asked, she did not offer). With roughest seas ahead, he imperatively needs a proven captain that can handle any coming economic tempest. What’s funny, those accusing her of “Atlanticism” seem to have completely missed that her policies selectively strained precisely those western bent businesses, while protecting the Eurasianists and patriots. Some reproach her playing into IMF hands yet she kept the RCB free from its predatory loans, thus keeping Russia safe from the coercive influence. Go figure.

BRICS getting stronger by the day. This is why.

• Europe’s Thirst For LNG Is Causing Blackouts In Developing Countries (OP)

In June, the European Union imported more liquefied natural gas from the United States than pipeline gas from Russia for the first time ever. The unprecedented shift came as the EU scrambled to fill up its gas storage facilities ahead of the next heating season in fear Russia could turn off the gas tap at any moment. It also pushed LNG prices sky-high, making it unaffordable for developing countries. “Because of the Ukraine war, every single molecule that was available in our region has been purchased by Europe, because they’re trying to reduce their dependence on Russia,” Pakistan’s Petroleum Minister Musadik Malik said earlier this month as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

Pakistan has been suffering from blackouts because of insufficient LNG supplies that the country needs to keep its power plants going. And the reason for the insufficient supplies is that Europe can pay more for the commodity, so traders are sending their cargos there, including cargos originally destined for Pakistan and other Asian countries. According to data from Wood Mackenzie cited by the Wall Street Journal, while Europe’s LNG imports soared 49 percent from the start of the year to mid-June, Pakistan’s imports fell by 15 percent during the same period, those to India shed 16 percent, and China’s LNG imports fell by more than a fifth. “The European gas crisis is sucking the world dry of LNG,” Valery Chow, head of Asia Pacific gas and LNG research at Wood Mackenzie, told the WSJ.”Emerging markets in Asia have borne the brunt of this and there is no end in sight.”

“If the antiviral treatments are not made massively available to the vaccinated people, the highly vaccinated countries will likely experience a tsunami of hospitalizations and death..”

• Geert Vanden Bossche: Mass Covid Vax Triggering New Pandemics (NA)

In his first interview with The New American, renowned scientist Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche described why mass vaccination with non-sterilizing (“leaky”) vaccines could not lead to herd immunity, and why he expected the Covid infection and disease to aggravate in the vaccinated individuals. The New American is proud to become the first media to speak with Dr. Vanden Bossche about his latest research dedicated to the issue of Covid mass vaccination initiating a chain reaction of new pandemics and epidemics with a potentially catastrophic impact on global health. In addition to that, the doctor explained how the constant Covid reinfections trigger relapse or metastasis of certain cancers in vaccinated people.

If the antiviral treatments are not made massively available to the vaccinated people, the highly vaccinated countries will likely experience a tsunami of hospitalizations and deaths among the vaccinated, especially the elderly and those vaccinated early on, said Dr. Vanden Bossche. The doctor pleaded with the parents NOT to vaccinate their children against Covid. The vaccination would irreparably damage their innate immune system and leave them vulnerable to infection and re-infection by Covid and a range of other deadly pathogens. That would result in a massive loss of children’s lives.

They should listen to Geert.

• Low Demand For Young Kids’ Covid Vaccines Is Alarming Doctors (Pol.)

States where parents have hesitated to inoculate their children against Covid-19 are now ordering fewer doses of the vaccines for children under 5 than others, underscoring the challenge facing the Biden administration as a highly transmissible variant sweeps the nation. Experts broadly agree states shouldn’t order more doses than they think they’ll use. But they worry the low demand in states such as Alabama and Mississippi is a warning sign of the widening ambivalence among many parents about the benefits of vaccinating children against the virus and continuing politicization of health care. “Never before have we had a vaccine available for young children that has been in billions of people before it was given to a young child,” said Kawsar Talaat, a vaccine expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“The distrust in government, the distrust in public health and the distrust in science is growing and is very, very worrisome.” OLITICO contacted each state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to ask how many of the recently authorized Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines they ordered and 38 jurisdictions provided that data. Several of the states that reported placing some of the lowest orders relative to their under-5 populations also have low Covid-19 vaccination rates for 5- to 11-year-olds, an early indication that vaccinations for the youngest kids could follow a similar pattern. Since they became eligible last fall, 36.6 percent of 5- to 11-year-olds have received one Covid-19 shot and only 30 percent are fully vaccinated, compared to 69 percent of adults aged 18 to 49.

Public health experts and doctors attribute the slow uptake in part to the fact that many parents don’t believe that the vaccine is necessary, effective, or that its benefits outweigh any risks. [..] Florida — the only state to explicitly advise against Covid-19 vaccines for young children — did not pre-order any of the 5-and-under vaccines. It has now permitted practitioners and health systems to order the shots through a state portal, but is not making them available in state-run health programs.

No credibility left. Or trust.

• Health Experts Are Quitting The NIH and CDC In Droves (DM)

Two of America’s top health agencies are reportedly hemorrhaging staff as poor decision-making, described by staff as ‘bad science,’ has led to low morale. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are both suffering staff shortages, according to Dr. Marty Makary, a top public-health expert at Johns Hopkins University, writes at Common Sense, the Substack run by former New York Times columnist, Bari Weiss. Major decisions made by the agencies that hurt morale included support for masking in schools, school closures during the pandemic and the authorization of COVID-19 vaccines for children four and under.

Both agencies, along with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have been mired in controversy throughout the pandemic for inconsistent messaging and for decision-making that didn’t seem to line up with available science. ‘They have no leadership right now. Suddenly, there’s an enormous number of jobs opening up at the highest level positions,’ an anonymous NIH scientist told Common Sense. Schools became a battleground of the COVID-19 pandemic in America. When the virus stormed the world in 2020, many officials immediately shut things down – schools, retail stores, entertainment venues, restaurants – out of an fear of the unknown. Initial data showed children suffered limited risk when they contracted the virus, though, and that it was mainly the elderly and severely immunocompromised that bore the virus’s burden.

Despite the evidence, the CDC still recommended schools stay closed until the end of the 2019-2020 school year. While individual school districts were allowed to make decisions for themselves – and many Republican leaning counties did quickly reopen schools – many major metropolitan areas under Democratic control kept schools closed for extended periods of time. Earlier this year, Makary told DailyMail.com that the decision to keep schools closed was one of the worst made in the pandemic, specifically citing that minority communities who disproportionately lived in these areas were set the furthest behind academically. ‘CDC failed to balance the risks of COVID with other risks that come from closing schools,’ an anonymous CDC scientist told Common Sense.

“Human reviewers randomly sampled 100 accounts per day (less than 0.00005% of daily users)..” “That’s it. No automation, no AI, no machine learning.”

• Elon Musk Wants To Push Twitter Trial Back To 2023 (NYP)

Elon Musk told a judge Friday that he needs until next year to respond to Twitter’s “meritless” claims that the mogul tried to scuttle the $44 billion deal to buy the social media platform. Musk’s attorneys accused Twitter of fudging the figures over fake accounts and want the trial pushed back until at least Feb. 13, 2023, to gather information over the disputed bot data, according to court documents filed with the Delaware court Friday evening. “The core dispute over false and spam accounts is fundamental to Twitter’s value,” Musk’s lawyers wrote in the 14-page filing. “It is also extremely fact and expert intensive, requiring substantial time for discovery.”

Musk, who first agreed to buy the site for $44 billion in April, pulled out of the deal last week after repeatedly claiming Twitter may be lying about what percentage of its users are bots — a move that Twitter’s lawyers blasted in their suit filed Wednesday as a “bad faith” attempt to walk away from the agreement. Twitter is seeking an unusually short four-day Delaware Court of Chancery trial starting in September, which some observers have interpreted as a show of confidence in its legal case. Musk’s lawyers called Twitter’s request an unjustifiable “bid for extreme expedition,” and accused the company of “a two-month treasure hunt of delays, technical bottlenecks, evasive answers, and, ultimately, refusals,”

“In a May 6 meeting with Twitter executives, Musk was flabbergasted to learn just how meager Twitter’s process was,” Musk’s lawyers wrote in the filing. “Human reviewers randomly sampled 100 accounts per day (less than 0.00005% of daily users) and applied unidentified standards to somehow conclude every quarter for nearly three years that fewer than 5% of Twitter users were false or spam. That’s it. No automation, no AI, no machine learning.”

“Have Americans been wearing their masks over the wrong bodily orifice? Is anyone conducting a peer-reviewed study on this?”

• A Tale of the Taco (Jim Kunstler)

Has anyone noticed, by the way, that the US is under an invasion of breakfast tacos? So many of them, and so many kinds! Huevos con chorizo… Huevos y tocino… Huevos con queso! The diversity is staggering! Oddly, the US fast food industry has remained silent on the issue, despite the threat to their operations. Someone, please, send a memo to Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas: a mighty influx of breakfast tacos marches day-and-night across our border with Mexico. They are being distributed — for free! — by bus and airplane from sea to shining sea — while millions of Egg McMuffins, Sausage, Egg, and Cheese Croissan’wiches, Grand Slamwiches, Kickin’ Maple Chicken BreakFEASTs, Country Fried Steak Biscuits, Chocolate Chip/Pecan Waffles, and Texas Melts go uneaten, wilting under the infrared Glo-Ray warming bulbs of American franchise eateries.

The wonder really is: how can America even manage to eat breakfast with its head so far up its ass? Perhaps Dr. Jill Biden can address that question in an upcoming speech to the National Association of Colorectal Surgeons. Now that the mRNA vaccines have Covid-19 so well under control — ask Dr. Anthony Fauci (he knows!) — shouldn’t we be concerned with this new scourge of cranialrectosis (the next pandemic)? Have Americans been wearing their masks over the wrong bodily orifice? Is anyone conducting a peer-reviewed study on this?

“..Baraitser failed to recognize that the US government “misrepresented” facts in the case and the case was “pursued for ulterior political motives.”

• Assange Fights Extradition To United States With Two Appeals (Dissenter)

On June 23, grounds for appeal were submitted against Patel’s Home Office. They claimed Patel erred by failing to recognize that the US-UK Extradition Treaty prohibited extradition for a political offense.Edward Fitzgerald QC emphasized to the district judge that due process protections, like the Magna Carta of 1215, were enshrined in UK law for centuries. He noted the US Constitution contained protections against arbitrary detention as well. Yet as the “Don’t Extradite Assange Campaign” observed, during proceedings Baraitser acted like she could discard the Magna Carta in favor of a lesser law, which the UK Parliament passed.

Attorneys also maintained Patel erred when she accepted that “specialty arrangements” with the US government would protect Assange from the death penalty, criminal contempt proceedings, and further prosecution for “conduct outside of the extradition request.”The legal team filed long-awaited grounds of appeal against District Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s decision on June 30. They claimed the district judge erred when she determined it would not be “unjust and oppressive” to extradite him given the passage of time. On human rights grounds, the attorneys maintained the district judge was wrong to determine extradition would not deny his right to fair trial, his right to be free from inhuman and degrading treatment, his right to freedom of expression, and his right to be free from a novel and unforeseeable extension of the law.

Further grounds of appeal included a claim that Baraitser failed to recognize that the US government “misrepresented” facts in the case and the case was “pursued for ulterior political motives. “His attorneys objected to Baraitser accepting a second superseding indictment that was sprung on Assange just weeks before the extradition hearing in September 2020. They contend she should have “excised” all allegations from this indictment to uphold “procedural fairness.” Patel approved Assange’s extradition on June 17, and the Westminster Magistrates’ Court ordered his extradition on April 20 after the UK Supreme Court refused to hear a prior appeal. But Assange’s legal team did not appeal that decision. They appealed an earlier decision issued by Baraitser on January 4, 2021.

Baraitser’s decision initially determined that extradition would be “oppressive” for mental health reasons and blocked extradition, however, the UK High Court of Justice overturned the decision after the US government appealed. The rest of the district judge’s decision was troubling to Assange’s attorneys, as well as press freedom and human rights groups opposed to the prosecution. It was not appropriate for the attorneys to file an appeal until after the US government’s appeal was settled. The challenge to the district judge’s refusal to recognize Assange’s right to freedom of expression is a relief to press freedom organizations. Human rights organizations like Amnesty International will appreciate the appeal related to the risk of cruel and inhuman treatment. Assange’s legal team requested an extension for drafting their appeals, and the US government did not object. The extension was granted by the UK High Court.

Read the whole note

One of the best examples of cryptic plumage and mimicry in Australian birds is seen in the tawny frogmouth, which perch low on tree branches during the day camouflaged as part of the tree

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Debt Rattle April 4 2022

Apr 042022

April 4, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:14 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, Bucha, false flags, Fauci, food prices, Garland, Hunter Biden, Mariupol, NIH, Orban, rublegas 58 Responses »

Leonardo da Vinci Vitruvian man c1510 (see comments at link)

• Bucha (Klarenberg)

• New Witness Testimony About Mariupol Maternity Hospital ‘Airstrike’ (GZ)

• German Retailers To Increase Food Prices By 20-50% On Monday (ZH)

• ‘Rublegas:’ The World’s New Resource-based Reserve Currency (Escobar)

• Russian Ruble Relaunched, Linked To Gold & Commodities (Manly)

• 2 Pro-Putin Parties Win Avalanche Victories In European Elections (ZH)

• Russia And Serbia Are Projected To Become The Empire’s White Colonies (Antonic)

• Fauci’s United Front Is Collapsing (Tucker)

• NIH Admits it ‘Suppressed’ Wuhan Lab Data, Disputes ‘Deleted’ Label (ET)

• Joe Biden Should Be Removed Before Putin, US Poll Says (Exp.)

• Biden’s ‘Absolute’ Defense Of Hunter (Turley)

• Biden Wants Attorney General Garland to Prosecute Trump (Turley)

• From Maria’s Office … the Fashion Nazi (Zakharova)

Zelensky Grammys
https://twitter.com/i/status/1510799460372262917

This is an excerpt from the article right below, by Kit Klarenberg (MUST READ). I picked this part because the story of 100s of bodies on the streets of Bucha is everywhere today. Only, the photos used are straight from the Ukraine goverment, and nobody fact checked them. What we do know is that the day before, the bodies were nowhere to be seen.

The role of the “embedded” Associated Press is also interesting.

• Bucha (Klarenberg)

Hours before the publication of this article, on April 2nd, claims of Russia’s most hideous alleged war crime to date erupted across social media. Footage and photos of scores of dead bodies – some with their hands tied – littering the streets of Bucha, a small city near Kiev, testified to an apparent massacre of military-aged men by Russian troops, as they retreated from the battered city two days earlier. The gruesome visuals have triggered intensified calls for direct Western military confrontation with Russia. But as with the incident at the maternity ward in Mariupol and numerous other high profile events initially portrayed by Ukrainian authorities as Russian massacres, a series of details cast doubt on the official story out of Bucha.

Within hours of Russia’s withdrawal from the Bucha on March 31st, its mayor announced that his city had been liberated from “Russian orcs,” employing a dehumanizing term widely used by Azov Battalion. An accompanying article noted the Russians had “mined civilian buildings and infrastructure,” but no mention was made of any mass killing of local citizens, let alone scores of corpses left in the street, which one might reasonably expect would be top of any news outlet’s agenda when reporting on the event. On April 2, within hours of the publication of photos and videos purporting to show victims of an alleged Russian massacre, Ukrainian media reported that specialist units had begun “clearing the area of saboteurs and accomplices of Russian troops.” Nothing was said about dead bodies in the streets.

The National Police of Ukraine announced that day that they were “cleaning the territory…from the assistants of Russian troops,” publishing video that showed no corpses in the streets of Bucha and Ukrainian forces in full control of the city.

Brennan

Margaret Brennan of CBS admits that Zelensky's "team" handed her some photos/videos, and she's now going to broadcast them on TV with zero independent corroboration. Just openly purveying a foreign country's war propaganda. This is what's considered Real Journalism™ in the US pic.twitter.com/PCXZ11w2kR

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 3, 2022

Staged. An attempt to start WWII. Bucha is the next stage in that attempt. False flags everywhere.

• New Witness Testimony About Mariupol Maternity Hospital ‘Airstrike’ (GZ)

A key witness to the widely publicized incident at the Mariupol maternity hospital has punctured the official narrative of a Russian airstrike on the facility, and raised serious questions about Western media ethics. Meanwhile, news of a massacre in the city of Bucha contains suspicious elements. On March 9th, shocking news of a deliberate Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, began spreading widely via social media and news outlets. Fiery condemnation from Western officials, pundits, and journalists was immediate. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, claimed the act was proof of the “genocide” Russia was perpetrating against the civilian population, and urged European leaders to condemn the “war crime” and “strengthen sanctions” to stop the Kremlin’s “evil” deeds in the country.

NPR suggested the attack was part of Russia’s “terrible wartime tradition” of purposefully targeting health facilities and medics during conflicts, dating back to Chechnya. But newly released testimony from one of the incident’s main witnesses punctures the official narrative about a targeted Russian airstrike on the hospital. The witness account indicates the hospital had been turned into a base of operations by Ukrainian military forces and was not targeted in an airstrike, as Western media claimed. Her testimony also raised serious questions about whether at least some elements of the event were staged for propaganda purposes – and with the cooperation of the Associated Press.

The new testimony (watch below) comes on the heels of evidence strongly suggesting that the destruction of a dramatic theater in Mariupol on March 16 was staged by the Azov Battalion, and that nearly all civilians had evacuated a day before. And as we will see below, new reports of a Russian massacre of scores of civilians in the town of Bucha also contain suspicious details suggesting a pattern of information manipulation aimed at triggering Western military intervention. Mariana Vishegirskaya, a pregnant resident of Donetsk who was present at the maternity hospital during the widely reported incident, has evacuated from Mariupol and is now speaking out. Photos showing a bloodied Vishnevskaya fleeing the building with her personal belongings became a centerpiece of coverage of the attack, along with a photo of another woman being carried away pale and unconscious on a stretcher.

In the wake of the incident, Russian officials falsely claimed the pair were the same person, citing Vishegirskaya’s background as a blogger and Instagram personality as evidence she was a crisis actor and the incident a false flag. Though that assertion was not true, as we shall see, the hospital had been almost completely taken over by the Ukrainian military.

Zelensky Azov
https://twitter.com/i/status/1510573197804158980

Only part of this is due to Ukraine.

• German Retailers To Increase Food Prices By 20-50% On Monday (ZH)

Just days after Germany reported the highest inflation in generation (with February headline CPI soaring at a 7.6% annual pace and blowing away all expectations), giving locals a distinctly unpleasant deja vu feeling even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine broke what few supply chains remained and sent prices even higher into the stratosphere… … on Monday, Germany will take one step toward a return of the dreaded Weimar hyperinflation, when according to the German Retail Association (HDE), consumers should prepare for another wave of price hikes for everyday goods and groceries with Reuters reporting that prices at German retail chains will explode between 20 and 50%:

Even before the outbreak of war in Ukraine, prices had risen by about five per cent “across the product range” as a result of increased energy prices, HDE President Josef Sanktjohanser told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung on Friday. With Russia’s invasion hitting economies and the supply chain harder, yet another series of price increases is on the horizon. “The second wave of price increases is coming, and it will certainly be in double figures,” Sanktjohanser warned, cited by The Local. According to the president of the trade association, the first retail chains have already started to raise their prices in Germany – and the rest are likely to follow. “We will soon be able to see the impact of the war reflected in price labels across all the supermarkets,” said Sanktjohanser.

Recently, popular retail chains such as Aldi, Edeka and Globus announced that they would be forced to raise their prices. At Aldi, meat and butter will be “significantly more expensive” from Monday due to price hikes from its suppliers. “Since the start of the Ukraine war, there have been jumps in purchase prices that we have not experienced before,” a spokesperson for Aldi Nord announced on Friday. A fortnight ago, Aldi raised the prices of about 160 items, and a week later 20 more items became more expensive. Other supermarket brands quickly followed suit. In February, Germany’s cost of living rose at the highest level since reunification, with everyday goods increasing by an average of 7.3%. The federal statistics agency Destatis said the jump from January’s figure of 5.1 percent to February’s 7.3 percent reflected the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has sent the price of oil and gas soaring.

“..the Americans want the war to go on indefinitely, to “bog down” Moscow as if this was Afghanistan in the 1980s, and have strictly forbidden the Ukrainian Comedian in front of a green screen somewhere – certainly not Kiev – to accept any ceasefire or peace deal.”

• ‘Rublegas:’ The World’s New Resource-based Reserve Currency (Escobar)

Saddam, Gaddafi, Iran, Venezuela – they all tried but couldn’t do it. But Russia is on a different level altogether. The beauty of the game-changing, gas-for-rubles, geoeconomic jujitsu applied by Moscow is its stark simplicity. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s presidential decree on new payment terms for energy products, predictably, was misunderstood by the collective west. The Russian government is not exactly demanding straightforward payment for gas in rubles. What Moscow wants is to be paid at Gazprombank in Russia, in its currency of choice, and not at a Gazprom account in any banking institution in western capitals. That’s the essence of less-is-more sophistication. Gazprombank will sell the foreign currency – dollars or euros – deposited by their customers on the Moscow Stock Exchange and credit it to different accounts in rubles within Gazprombank.

What this means in practice is that foreign currency should be sent directly to Russia, and not accumulated in a foreign bank – where it can easily be held hostage, or frozen, for that matter. All these transactions from now on should be transferred to a Russian jurisdiction – thus eliminating the risk of payments being interrupted or outright blocked. It’s no wonder the subservient European Union (EU) apparatus – actively engaged in destroying their own national economies on behalf of Washington’s interests – is intellectually unequipped to understand the complex matter of exchanging euros into rubles. Gazprom made things easier this Friday, sending official notifications to its counterparts in the west and Japan. Putin himself was forced to explain in writing to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz how it all works.

Once again, very simple: Customers open an account with Gazprombank in Russia. Payments are made in foreign currency – dollars or euros – converted into rubles according to the current exchange rate, and transferred to different Gazprom accounts. Thus it is 100 percent guaranteed that Gazprom will be paid. That’s in stark contrast to what the United States was forcing the Europeans to do: pay for Russian gas in Gazprom accounts in Europe, which would then be instantly frozen. These accounts would only be unblocked with the end of Operation Z, Russia’s military ops in Ukraine. Yet the Americans want the war to go on indefinitely, to “bog down” Moscow as if this was Afghanistan in the 1980s, and have strictly forbidden the Ukrainian Comedian in front of a green screen somewhere – certainly not Kiev – to accept any ceasefire or peace deal.

So Gazprom accounts in Europe would continue to be frozen. As Scholz was still trying to understand the obvious, his economic minions went berserk, floating the idea of nationalizing Gazprom’s subsidiaries – Gazprom Germania and Wingas – in case Russia decides to halt the gas flow. This is ridiculous. It’s as if Berlin functionaries believe that Gazprom subsidiaries produce natural gas in centrally heated offices across Germany. The new rubles-for-gas mechanism does not in any way violate existing contracts. Yet, as Putin warned, existing contracts may indeed be stopped: “If such [ruble] payments are not made, we will consider this to be the buyers’ failure to perform commitments with all ensuing implications.”

Energy-ruble-gold.

“..if Russia begins to accept gold directly as a payment for oil, then this would be a new paradigm shift for the gold price as it would link the oil price directly to the gold price.”

• Russian Ruble Relaunched, Linked To Gold & Commodities (Manly)

By offering to buy gold from Russian banks at a fixed price of 5000 rubles per gram, the Bank of Russia has both linked the ruble to gold and, since gold trades in US dollars, set a floor price for the ruble in terms of the US dollar. We can see this linkage in action since Friday 25 March when the Bank of Russia made the fixed price announcement. The ruble was trading at around 100 to the US dollar at that time, but has since strengthened and is nearing 80 to the US dollar. Why? Because gold has been trading on international markets at about US$ 62 per gram which is equivalent to (5000 / 62) = about 80.5, and markets and arbitrage traders have now taken note, driving the RUB / USD exchange rate higher.

So the ruble now has a floor to the US dollars, in terms of gold. But gold also has a floor, so to speak, because 5000 rubles per gram is 155,500 rubles per troy ounce of gold, and with a RUB / USD floor of about 80, that’s a gold price of around $1940. And if the Western paper gold markets of LBMA / COMEX try to drive the US dollar gold price lower, they will have to try to weaken the ruble as well or else the paper manipulations will be out in the open. Additionally, with the new gold to ruble linkage, if the ruble continues to strengthen (for example due to demand created by obligatory energy payments in rubles), this will also be reflected in a stronger gold price.

What does this mean for Oil? Russia is the world’s largest natural gas exporter and the world’s third largest oil exporter. We are seeing right now that Putin is demanding that foreign buyers (importers of Russian gas) must pay for this natural gas using rubles. This immediately links the price of natural gas to rubles and (because of the fixed link to gold) to the gold price. So Russian natural gas is now linked via the ruble to gold. The same can now be done with Russian oil. If Russia begins to demand payment for oil exports with rubles, there will be an immediate indirect peg to gold (via the fixed price ruble – gold connection). Then Russia could begin accepting gold directly in payment for its oil exports. In fact, this can be applied to any commodities, not just oil and natural gas.

What does this mean for the Price of Gold? By playing both sides of the equation, i.e. linking the ruble to gold and then linking energy payments to the ruble, the Bank of Russia and the Kremlin are fundamentally altering the entire working assumptions of the global trade system while accelerating change in the global monetary system. This wall of buyers in search of physical gold to pay for real commodities could certainly torpedo and blow up the paper gold markets of the LBMA and COMEX. The fixed peg between the ruble and gold puts a floor on the RUB / USD rate but also a quasi-floor on the US dollar gold price. But beyond this, the linking of gold to energy payments is the main event. While increased demand for rubles should continue to strengthen the RUB / USD rate and show up as a higher gold price, due to the fixed ruble – gold linkage, if Russia begins to accept gold directly as a payment for oil, then this would be a new paradigm shift for the gold price as it would link the oil price directly to the gold price.

“We have such a victory it can be seen from the moon, but it’s sure that it can be seen from Brussels..”

I’d be careful about labeling them Pro-Putin. They’re just not pro-Brussels.

• 2 Pro-Putin Parties Win Avalanche Victories In European Elections (ZH)

In a one-two knockout punch for pro-Russia governments in Europe, on Sunday the government of Serbia’s pro-Russia president Aleksandar Vucic was headed for an avalanche victory in the country’s presidential election with nearly 60% of the vote, a big improvement to this 2017 election result… while Hungary’s Pro-Russia prime minister, Viktor Orban, was on track to clinch a fourth consecutive term, leveraging a message against being dragged into the war in neighboring Ukraine, to reassert himself as the European Union’s longest-serving premier. With roughly half of the vote counted, Orban’s Fidesz party led United for Hungary, a six-member opposition alliance, 57% to 32% in the party list contest, according to the National Election Office, with 63% of the votes counted. That would be sufficient for Fidesz to keep its two-thirds parliamentary majority.

Despite opinion polls forecasting a tighter race, Orban’s Fidesz party won comfortably across much of the country. Opposition leader Peter Marki-Zay even failed to win in his own district, where he had served as mayor. The far-right extremist Mi Hazank party won 6.3%, and was set to enter parliament, further diluting the power of the anti-Orban alliance. “We have such a victory it can be seen from the moon, but it’s sure that it can be seen from Brussels,” Orban said in his speech on Sunday night, making light of his government’s long-running tensions with EU leaders. “We will remember this victory until the end of our lives because we had to fight against a huge amount of opponents,” Orban said, citing a number of his political enemies including the Hungarian left, “bureaucrats” in Brussels, the international media, “and the Ukrainian president too — we never had so many opponents at the same time.”

The election campaign was dominated by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which put Orban’s lengthy association with Russian President Vladimir Putin under scrutiny. In his victory speech, Orban called Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky one of the “opponents” he had to overcome during the campaign. Orban’s unexpectedly strong victory defied polls ahead of the vote that had predicted Orban would face the toughest challenge to re-election in his 12 years in power, according to a report from the anti-Orban Bloomberg News. It almost makes one wonder why anyone – besides liberals of course – still uses polling, which obviously can’t forecast the future and also fails at mere propaganda and influencing election turnouts.

Orban

#Hungary's PM Viktor #Orbán has declared victory in the national election, claiming a mandate for a 4th term: 'The whole world has seen tonight in Budapest that Christian democratic politics, conservative civic politics & patriotic politics have won.' https://t.co/cPJv1MTBG8 pic.twitter.com/VHR6WwGR7K

— Geopolitics & Empire (@Geopolitics_Emp) April 4, 2022

History lesson: “..he would frequently refer to the Russians as redskins..”

• Russia And Serbia Are Projected To Become The Empire’s White Colonies (Antonic)

In this article I will present the various plans that Germany had with the Serbs and Russians after the expected victory in World War II. Why do I fall back to history? We frequently perceive Hitler and Nazism as an aberration in Western history. But Hitler was, in fact, just openly announcing that in Europe he will do what the West has already done elsewhere. As we’ll see, Hitler took the extermination of the Native Americans as a model for the colonization of Slavic lands, Russia in particular. “It would be best if Serbia just disappeared from the map” —as attested by Hermann Neubacher, that opinion was prevalent within the German leadership in 1941 (see here, p. 89). But we find the same opinion in The Manchester Guardian (as The Guardian was formerly called), in August 1914: “If it were physically possible for Servia to be towed out to sea and sunk there, the air of Europe would at once seem cleaner” (here; here, p. 53).

Actually, the only difference between Hitler and the English was Hitler’s brutally proclaiming to do—and he had done as much as he could—what others in the West were doing slower and more subtly, the things they didn’t yet dare to undertake or weren’t able to accomplish. Unlike the Kaiser, who wanted territorial expansion towards the Middle East and a redistribution of African and Asian colonies, Hitler’s primary goal was to colonize Slavic lands, from the Baltic to the Black Sea for starters and then onward to the Urals. In Mein Kampf he writes that the Kaiser was mistaken in pushing Germany southwards. “When in today’s Europe we speak of new soil and land”, he wrote, “we primarily mean only Russia and the peripheral countries subservient to her. It appears that destiny itself wants to show us the way. […]

The giant Empire in the East is ripe for its downfall.” (here; 44th unabridged German edition, p. 742-3; compare here, p. 118) By the way, Hitler had adopted many concepts from the West. As J. Q. Whitman revealed in Hitlerºs American Model (2017), race laws in the United States were the legal inspiration for the race laws in the Third Reich. In his book Hitler: The Definitive Biography (2014), John Toland showed how impressed Hitler had been with the system of Indian Reservations, the extermination of the indigenous peoples, the epidemics and starvation policies. According to Toland, when speaking to the German leaders, the Fuhrer frequently “extolled the efficacy of the American extermination of the ‘red savages’ by starvation and in unequal combat” (here, p. 802).

“As a passionate reader of Karl May’s novels”, writes John Pool in his book Hitler and His Secret Partners (1997), “he would frequently refer to the Russians as redskins. He saw a parallel between his own efforts to occupy and colonize Russia and the conquest of the American West” (p. 272). He used to say that in the European East the Germans “had one single purpose: Germanization by peopling with Germans and treating the locals as redskins”. He even encouraged military officers to read Karl May and learn about all kinds of combat with the natives.

“Within days, everything changed.”

• Fauci’s United Front Is Collapsing (Tucker)

Last week, medical journalist Katherine Eban posted at Vanity Fair the results of a long and detailed investigation into the lab-leak theory of the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The subject is moving ever more to the front-and-center of efforts to find out exactly what was going on at the highest levels in early 2020 that resulted in the greatest societal, political, and economic upheaval of our lives. How precisely did we move so quickly from the “germ games” of October 2019 – when the virus was already circulating in the US – to full-scale global lockdown by March? Why did Anthony Fauci, who in early February was downplaying the seriousness of the virus, flip to the other side (which we know from emails)?

It was Fauci, according to many reporters, who tapped Deborah Birx to huddle with Trump and convince him that the only way to battle the virus was to “shut down” the economy – as if anything like that was possible much less effective for controlling a respiratory virus. For two years now, and despite endless writing and reflection, this change from the top has puzzled me. Lockdowns contradicted not only a century of public-health practice but even WHO guidelines. Even on March 2, 2020, 850 scientists signed a letter to the White House warning against lockdowns, closures, and travel restrictions. Within days, everything changed. There were hints of extreme measures in the CDC pandemic planning manuals since 2006 but the idea was hardly orthodoxy in the profession.

It’s also true that there were elite scientists who longed for the chance to try out the new theory of virus suppression. But how did Fauci and Birx, to say nothing of Jared Kushner, become converts of the idea to the point that they were able to convince Trump to betray everything he believed in? This is quite probably where the lab-leak theory comes in. It’s not so much about whether the virus was an accidental or even deliberate leak that matters so much as whether Fauci, Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrrar of the UK’s Wellcome Trust believed it was possible or even likely. In that case, we have our motive. Did they deploy the chaos of lockdowns as a genuine if wildly misguided attempt to suppress the virus as a way of avoiding culpability?

Or perhaps it was deployed as a kind of smokescreen to distract from a closer examination of the Wuhan’s lab’s funding sources? Or possibly there is a third reason. We have a very long way to go before the full truth is out. But Eban’s article adds tremendous detail about the great lengths to which our Fauci-led cabal of officials worked hard to suppress dissent on the question of lab-vs-natural origin. They kept papers from being posted on preprint servers, held Zoom sessions with authors in an attempt to intimidate them, and spent tremendous energy making it clear that there would be a no-leak “united front” no matter what.

We hide it, but don’t delete.

• NIH Admits it ‘Suppressed’ Wuhan Lab Data, Disputes ‘Deleted’ Label (ET)

A National Institutes for Health (NIH) spokesperson is disputing a nonprofit watchdog group’s claim that the agency “deleted” genetic sequencing data on the CCP virus from a Chinese lab, but the same official acknowledged the data was “suppressed.” “The headline says the sequences were deleted which is inaccurate. They were not deleted. This is a really important point, and I’ve highlighted what did happen from what we provided to you earlier this week,” NIH Media Branch Chief Amanda Fine told The Epoch Times in a March 31 email. Fine was referring to a March 29 Epoch Times story headlined “NIH Deleted Info Received From Wuhan Lab on CCP Virus Genetic Sequencing, Watchdog’s FOIA Finds.” The information Fine referenced as having been provided to The Epoch Times by NIH earlier in the week was included in the published story:

“’In June 2020, in response to a request by the same [Wuhan] researcher, National Center for Biotechnology [NCBI] gave the sequence data the status of “withdrawn,” which removes sequencing data from all public means of access but does not delete them. “‘NCBI subsequently reassigned the status of the sequence data to “suppressed,” which means that sequence data are removed from the search process but can be directly found by accession number. This action to reassign the data was identified as part of NLM’s ongoing review into the matter. We are working to make more information available,’ the spokesperson said.” The biotechnology center, which is part of the institute’s National Library of Medicine (NLM), is the U.S. component of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration.

The Epoch Times story was prompted by a report published on March 29 by Empower Oversight Whistleblowers and Research (EO) that was based on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses the group received from the institute. “On June 5, 2020, a Wuhan University researcher requested that NIH retract the researcher’s submission of BioProject ID PRJNA637497 because of error. The Wuhan researcher explained ‘I’m sorry for my wrong submitting,’” Empower Oversight said in a statement (pdf) on March 29. “BioProject ID PRJNA637497 is also referred to as Submission-ID SUB7554642. Three days later, on June 8th, the NIH declined the researcher’s request, advising that it prefers to edit or replace, as opposed to delete, sequences submitted to the SRA,” EO reported. SRA refers to the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) data resource made available by NCBI, and it “stores raw sequencing data.”

“His counsellors view the Ukraine crisis as a blunt instrument that nonetheless may help the president to dig himself out of his electoral hole.”

• Joe Biden Should Be Removed Before Putin, US Poll Says (Exp.)

Just a week after the US president was accused of making a gaffe calling for regime change in Russia, an exclusive poll for the Sunday Express has revealed Americans would rather see his presidency end. Asked which would be better for America, 52 per cent chose “Biden loses power in the US” over 43 per cent for “Putin loses power in Russia”. The findings, in the poll by the Washington-based Democracy Institute, show almost two-thirds of Americans (62 per cent) believe Mr Biden will not be re-elected in 2024. They also appear to confirm an expected bid by Donald Trump in 2024 will see him sweep back to power. While Boris Johnson has seen a rise in public support for his handling of the Ukraine crisis, the error prone US president has not enjoyed a similar bounce.

Of 1,500 polled, who all identify as “likely voters”, 57 per cent disapprove of his presidency, the same as a month ago, while just 39 per cent approve of it. And 70 per cent believe the US is “heading in the wrong direction”. His handling of the war is only approved by 40 per cent while 52 per cent disapprove, and his overall foreign policy has a 55 per cent disapproval rating compared to 42 per cent approval. While a Techne poll for the Sunday Express showed almost a third of UK voters had Ukraine as their top concern, in the US just eight per cent saw it as their main issue, with the key worry being inflation. If Mr Trump does run in 2024, according to the US poll results he would beat Mr Biden by 48 per cent to 43 per cent.

Patrick Basham, Director of the Democracy Institute, said: “Biden’s foreign policy debacles, highlighted by America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, have turned off voters, who mostly disapprove of his handling of America’s global role. “Biden’s political team knows economic pain will continue to weigh down the president’s ratings. So, it puts great stock in Biden’s handling of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “His counsellors view the Ukraine crisis as a blunt instrument that nonetheless may help the president to dig himself out of his electoral hole. “Should the Ukraine crisis end on terms perceived to be favourable to the Ukrainians, and should Vladimir Putin’s Russia be put back in her box, it’s possible that Biden will receive considerable credit and his ratings will improve. If that happens, his party’s candidates may also improve their positions vis-à-vis their Republican opponents.

“While many media figures now willingly admit the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s abandoned-laptop story, they are avoiding what the emails found on that laptop actually contain.”

• Biden’s ‘Absolute’ Defense Of Hunter (Turley)

“We absolutely stand by the president’s comment.” With those words, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield reaffirmed that President Biden maintains his son Hunter Biden did “nothing [that] was unethical” and never “made money” in China. Those claims appear demonstrably false — and they make the positions of both the media and Attorney General Merrick Garland absolutely untenable. For the media, the ongoing investigation of Hunter Biden by U.S. Attorney David Weiss in Delaware has presented a growing danger of self-indictment over its prior coverage (or noncoverage). Weiss has called a long line of witnesses before a grand jury, and there is growing expectation of criminal charges against Hunter Biden. Nothing concentrates the mind as much as a looming indictment.

Thus, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other media faced the embarrassing prospect of an indictment based on a story they previously suggested was either a nonstory or Russian disinformation. Suddenly, in recent days, they all rushed to declare the story legitimate, 18 months after the New York Post reported it in October 2020. What quickly emerged, though, was a new narrative: None of this implicates President Biden. On CNN, White House correspondent John Harwood declared, “There is zero evidence that Vice President Biden, or President Biden, has done anything wrong in connection with what Hunter Biden has done.” Anchor Brianna Keilar then added for emphasis that Harwood was making “an important distinction.”

It was important, but not because it was true. While many media figures now willingly admit the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s abandoned-laptop story, they are avoiding what the emails found on that laptop actually contain. Hundreds of emails appear to detail a multimillion-dollar influence-peddling enterprise by the Biden family, including Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden. Influence peddling has long been the way Washington’s elite enriches itself. This common source of political corruption involves the relatives of powerful government figures who shake down corporations or countries for access and influence. The Bidens would seem to be standouts in this common practice, engaging in a virtual family business. James Biden has been accused of marketing his connection to his brother.

And in the emails discovered on his abandoned laptop, Hunter Biden practically sold timeshares of his father by dangling meetings and dinners for investors. The key in any influence peddling scheme is to protect the principal. People apparently were told to avoid directly referring to President Biden. In one email, Tony Bobulinski, then a business partner of Hunter’s, was instructed by Biden associate James Gilliar not to speak of the former veep’s connection to any transactions: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that but they are paranoid.” Instead, the emails apparently refer to President Biden with code names such as “Celtic” or “the big guy.” In one, “the big guy” is discussed as possibly receiving a 10 percent cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm; other emails reportedly refer to Hunter Biden paying portions of his father’s expenses and taxes.

Bobulinski

ABC must have received marching orders. Time to start the Biden take down. pic.twitter.com/MIbPmug6ww

— James Hirsen (@thejimjams) April 3, 2022

But doesn’t know what for yet.

• Biden Wants Attorney General Garland to Prosecute Trump (Turley)

President Joe Biden has declared the guilt of individuals or promised punishment before even the commencement of investigations. The latest such example is the leaking of Biden’s desire to have Attorney General Merrick Garland prosecute Trump. [..] Biden is now being widely reported as wanting Garland to prosecute Trump. His close associates made sure that the media reported that the President wants “Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6.” This leak was made after a district court judge declared that Trump likely committed a crime, an opinion that I recently criticized over its sweeping language and spotty analysis. Various Democrats are demanding that Garland prosecute Trump, telling Garland to “step up or step out.”

Two years ago, the media heralded the statements of D.C. Attorney General Racine that he was pursuing possible charges. Yet, neither Racine nor the Biden Administration have charged Trump. Why? The reason is that there is not clear evidence of a crime. The leaking of the President’s demand puts Garland in an even more difficult position. The clear intent of the leak is to let Garland know what the President expects from him. Yet, Garland has already been criticized by some of us for refusing to appoint a special counsel in the Hunter Biden scandal. What is most striking, however, is the absence of any concern from the same legal experts who denounced such statements from Trump. These are statements made to aides that were then leaked to the media to get to Garland.

That allows the media to say that Biden never said it directly to Garland, but the message was delivered by the media. For Garland to yield to such pressure would constitute a troubling departure from his predecessor, Bill Barr, who refused to do so on investigations ranging from the Mueller investigation to the election investigation to the Hunter Biden investigation. Absent new evidence of direct culpability, such a prosecution would likely result in either acquittal or an appellate reversal. That would raise concerns over the Justice Department pursuing a political rather than a legal agenda — the very danger that Garland pledged to avoid when he stressed “I am not the president’s lawyer. I am the United States’ lawyer.”

Coco Chanel. Another history lesson.

• From Maria’s Office … the Fashion Nazi (Zakharova)

A few bloggers have reported today that official Chanel brand stores abroad are refusing to sell their products to Russian nationals. Allegedly, Chanel customers must sign a form saying that they will not take the items sold by the brand to the Russian Federation, as per some internal document of the boutique chain. We are a very patient and forgiving country. We have forgiven everyone for everything, turned the page and cleared the way for the future. But if the way turns out to be a ring road, we will break the vicious circle. Seems like those running the legacy of the “great Coco” have found a way to join the Russophobic “cancel Russia” campaign. Weird, right? What’s the link between Russia’s anti-Nazi operation and the French fashion house? But the link is there. We just opened a closet to find some well-preserved 80-year-old skeletons.

During World War II, Coco Chanel herself was a collaborator and a Third Reich agent. She is widely known to have had connections to the occupation authorities in France. Baron Hans Guenther Freiherr von Dincklage, an attaché of the German government in charge of the Nazi propaganda in Paris, was among her dearest friends. Coco Chanel, also known as informer F-7124 as per Abwehr records, supported the German masters of Paris so much that she took part in the attempts to organise secret negotiations between the Reich and the United Kingdom. One should say that the Germans valued Coco and had her live in a luxurious apartment at the Ritz hotel, while ordinary Parisians struggled to make ends meet under the German occupation, while the country’s economy was under enormous strain.

Moreover, the fashion designer accepted the help of the Nazis to reach her business goals. Before the war, she sold her Chanel No. 5 production facility to Jewish manufacturers. Then, she engaged the Germans to try and reclaim the rights to the perfume sale profits. After France was liberated, she was called to answer for all of that. The fashion house does not advertise it but Coco was arrested at the end of the war. She was later released as a favour to Churchill (and here is London again) and was banned from France after the occupation was over, for years, residing in the “neutral” Switzerland. The brand’s management has always emphasised that the Chanel house traditions are as strong as ever. Well, no doubt about that now. Investigative reporter Hal Vaughan wrote about the founder of the fashion house: “The Nazis were in power, and Chanel gravitated to power.”

The brand was never bothered by such things as concentration camps, mass killings and war crimes perpetrated by the SS and Gestapo divisions. We are a very patient and forgiving country. We have forgiven everyone for everything, turned the page and cleared the way for the future. But if the way turns out to be a ring road, we will break the vicious circle. And the Chanel house can get back to square one and support Nazism, just like its founder did. But now everyone will know.

Buddy Carter

.@RepBuddyCarter calls marijuana a gateway drug, but his pharmacy was a gateway to addiction. From 2006 to 2014, Carter’s pharmacy sold 2,876,010 opioid pills. The population of Pooler, GA in 2014 was 20,646.https://t.co/UjZmJLEA17

Hat tip: @Boot60776351 @Acyn pic.twitter.com/l4oZl7ZPU5

— MJ Stock Trader (@stock_mj) April 2, 2022

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Debt Rattle March 4 2022

Mar 042022

March 4, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:56 am Finance Tagged with: Fox, Freeland, Lindsey Graham, neo nazis, NIH, nuclear plant, Pfizer, Putin, Zelensky 55 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Self portrait 1906

• Echoes of 2003 (Sam)

• Putin: Crazy Like a Fox (Scott Ritter)

• Ukraine & Nukes (Starr)

• Ukraine Has A “Nazi” Problem That NATO And USA Do Not Talk About (Jain)

• Russia, Ukraine, Nato, the EU – and a Few Good Men (Maajid Nawaz)

• “The Fascist Ukrainians Would Kill Me, They Don’t Let Us Leave The City” (GCT)

• Ban on Russian Cats (Lauria)

• Senator Lindsey Graham Calls for the Assassination of Vladimir Putin (CTH)

• Reporter Leaves After Outlet ‘Corrects’ Her Chrystia Freeland Story (PM)

• The Convoy Donor Witch Hunt Is Un-Canadian (TSun)

• Systematic Undercounting Of Deaths Within First 2 Weeks Of Vaccination (RG)

• Pfizer Feb. 2021 “Post Marketing” Vaccine Side Effects Tally Raises Alarms (NC)

• NIH Orders Sweeping Review Of Experiments On Viruses And Other Pathogens (WaPo)

• White House Wants To Waste $22.5 Billion Fighting Long Gone Pandemic (WT)

US former military
https://twitter.com/i/status/1499137628456763392

Black sea shipping

A vessel has been sunk outside of #Odessa . That ends meaningful shipping on the #BlackSea. No company will provide #Insurance.
No insurance? No port visits. Big implications for #Wheat and #oil. pic.twitter.com/R9fmZQye9A

— Peter Zeihan (@PeterZeihan) March 3, 2022

History rhymes. Expect “A congressional or UN testimony from a vaguely eastern European female child about the horrors of war.”

• Echoes of 2003 (Sam)

I’m old enough to remember the build up to the second invasion of Iraq in 2003, and those memories have been in the back of my mind all week. The powers that be (I always liked the term “board of directors” when referring to the elites) seem to have learned nothing since 2016. When beltway zealots were pulling their hair out in 2016, trying to understand how Donald Trump won the election I was not confused at all. The internet. We have an alternative to legacy media. While not a perfect window into the world and not immune from abuse, the internet has given people multiple on-ramps to begin questioning the narrative. The board of directors is yet to catch on and seem to be using the same media strategies that went out of style in the late 90’s.

They continue to use orthodox, anointed new outlets to push a selected narrative. This time around anyone straying off script is being labeled a “tankie” rather than a Baathist. Some of my favorite talk show hosts have even started sounding more like Glenn Beck circa 2003. When every news channel, newspaper, radio station, and mainstream blog is going full MOCKINGBIRD, I get worried, so here are some of my short term predictions:
• Expect some cyber attack or major homeland event that will cover for the stock market’s inevitable crash while simultaneously providing a stand in for the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
• A shift in messaging from “Ukraine is holding them back!” to “Ukraine is F’d unless we do something.”
• A congressional or UN testimony from a vaguely eastern European female child about the horrors of war.

History may not repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes.

Anne -Laure Bonnell
https://twitter.com/i/status/1499569308153880576

French truth

Woman tells truth about Ukraine live on French media. Hosts are stunned. Part 1 video pic.twitter.com/0MU0woWVEM

— futurebrain (@futurebrain1) March 1, 2022

“..the likelihood that Europe balks at a resumption of the Cold War is high..”

• Putin: Crazy Like a Fox (Scott Ritter)

Whereas Russia has had the luxury of having consistent leadership for the past two decades, and can look to another decade or more of the same, Western leadership is transient in nature. One need only reflect on the fact that Putin has, in his time in office, dealt with five U.S. presidents who, because of the alternating nature of the political parties occupying the White House, have produced policies of an inconsistent and contradictory nature. The White House is held hostage to the political constraints imposed by the reality of domestic partisan politics. “It’s the economy, stupid” resonates far more than any fact-based discussion about the relevance of post-Cold War NATO. What passes for a national discussion on the important issues of foreign and national security are, more often than not, reduced to pithy phrases.

The complexities of a balanced dialogue are replaced by a good-versus-evil simplicity more readily digested by an electorate where potholes and tax rates matter more than geopolitics. Rather than try to explain to the American people the historical roots of Putin’s concerns with an expanding NATO membership, or the impracticalities associated with any theoretical reconstitution of the former Soviet Union, the U.S. political elite instead define Putin as an autocratic dictator (he is not) possessing grandiose dreams of a Russian-led global empire (no such dreams exist). It is impossible to reason with a political counterpart whose policy formulations need to conform with ignorance-based narratives.

Russia, confronted with the reality that neither the U.S. nor NATO were willing to engage in a responsible discussion about the need for a European security framework which transcended the inherent instability of an expansive NATO seeking to encroach directly on Russia’s borders, took measures to change the framework in which such discussions would take place. Russia had been seeking to create a neutral buffer between it and NATO through agreements which would preclude NATO membership for Ukraine and distance NATO combat power from its borders by insisting the alliance’s military-technical capabilities be withdrawn behind NATO’s boundaries as they existed in 1997. The U.S. and NATO rejected the very premise of such a dialogue.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine must be evaluated within this context. By invading Ukraine, Russia is creating a new geopolitical reality which revolves around the creation of a buffer of allied Slavic states (Belarus and Ukraine) that abuts NATO in a manner like the Cold War-era frontier represented by the border separating East and West Germany. Russia has, by redeploying the 1st Guards Tank Army onto the territory of Belarus, militarized this buffer, creating the conditions for the kind of standoff that existed during the Cold War. The U.S. and NATO will have to adjust to this new reality, spending billions to resurrect a military capability that has atrophied since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Here’s the punchline — the likelihood that Europe balks at a resumption of the Cold War is high. And when it does, Russia will be able to exchange the withdrawal of its forces from Belarus and Ukraine in return for its demands regarding NATO’s return to the 1997 boundaries. Vladimir Putin may, in fact, be crazy — crazy like a fox.

Putin

Another perspective: pic.twitter.com/cBISHK4b2v

— Joost Broekers (@JoostBroekers) March 3, 2022

“In his Feb. 21 televised address, Putin said Ukraine still has the infrastructure leftover from Soviet days to build a bomb..”

• Ukraine & Nukes (Starr)

The importance of neo-Nazi Right Sektor politicians in the Ukraine government and neo-Nazi militias (such as the Azov Battalion) to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, also goes unreported in the mainstream corporate media. The Azov battalion flies Nazi flags; they have been trained by teams of U.S. military advisers and praised on Facebook these days. In 2014, Azov was incorporated in the Ukrainian National Guard under the direction of the Interior Ministry. The Nazis killed something on the order of 27 million Soviets/Russians during World War II (the U.S. lost 404,000). Russia has not forgotten and is extremely sensitive to any threats and violence coming from neo-Nazis. Americans generally do not understand what this means to Russians as the United States has never been invaded.

So, when the leader of Ukraine essentially threatens to obtain nuclear weapons, this is most certainly considered to be an existential threat to Russia. That is why Putin focused on this during his speech preceding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Sanger and The New York Times must discount a Ukrainian nuclear threat; they can get away with doing so because they have systematically omitted news pertaining to this for many years. Sanger makes a very misleading statement when he writes, “Today Ukraine does not even have the basic infrastructure to produce nuclear fuel.” Ukraine is not interested in making nuclear fuel — which Ukraine already purchases from the U.S.

Ukraine has plenty of plutonium, which is commonly used to make nuclear weapons today; eight years ago Ukraine held more than 50 tons of plutonium in its spent fuel assemblies stored at its many nuclear power plants (probably considerably more today, as the reactors have continued to run and produce spent fuel). Once plutonium is reprocessed/separated from spent nuclear fuel, it becomes weapons usable. Putin noted that Ukraine already has missiles that could carry nuclear warheads, and they certainly have scientists capable of developing reprocessing facilities and building nuclear weapons. In his Feb. 21 televised address, Putin said Ukraine still has the infrastructure leftover from Soviet days to build a bomb. He said:

“As we know, it has already been stated today that Ukraine intends to create its own nuclear weapons, and this is not just bragging. Ukraine has the nuclear technologies created back in the Soviet times and delivery vehicles for such weapons, including aircraft, as well as the Soviet-designed Tochka-U precision tactical missiles with a range of over 100 kilometers. But they can do more; it is only a matter of time. They have had the groundwork for this since the Soviet era. In other words, acquiring tactical nuclear weapons will be much easier for Ukraine than for some other states I am not going to mention here, which are conducting such research, especially if Kiev receives foreign technological support. We cannot rule this out either.

If Ukraine acquires weapons of mass destruction, the situation in the world and in Europe will drastically change, especially for us, for Russia. We cannot but react to this real danger, all the more so since let me repeat, Ukraine’s Western patrons may help it acquire these weapons to create yet another threat to our country.”

“Another North American country, Canada, is too being accused of fostering neo-Nazis and war criminals in Ukraine..”

• Ukraine Has A “Nazi” Problem That NATO And USA Do Not Talk About (Jain)

While the Ukrainian government nurtures extremist organisations like Azov Batallion, it is their European neighbours who have to bear the brunt of this neo-Nazi ideology that is rapidly spreading its claws across the globe. According to Lower Class Magazine, a leftist German publication, Azov has a semi-underground corps called the “Misanthropic Division” that draws fresh blood among the ranks of neo-Nazi youth in France, Germany and Scandinavia. The new recruits are promised training with heavy and modern weaponry, including tanks, at Ukrainian camps alongside fascist fellow inductees. Reportedly, foreign Azov volunteers are motivated by the call of the “Reconquista”—a pursuit to place the eastern European nations under the rule of a white supremacist dictatorship, drawing inspiration from the Nazi Reichskommissariat rule that controlled Ukraine at the time of World War II.

A raft of Azov volunteers in Ukraine harbour this dream of reestablishing Ukraine as a white supremacist nation that has under its control large tracts of land from neighbouring European nations. Even so, the United States government is partly to be blamed for the ominous rise of the neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine. Over the years, the cooperation between the Azov Battalion and the American Military has only grown deeper. In 2018, it was reported that Azov Battalion had received teams of American military advisors and high powered US-made weapons. In November 2017, a US military inspection team had also visited the Azov Battalion on the frontlines to deliberate on strengthening cooperation and providing logistical support in their military operations.

Recently, Democrat Senate member in the United States, Bob Menendez, introduced legislation that sought to grant Ukraine $500 million for the purchase of arms and impose what he called “mother of all sanctions” on Russia should it dare to attack. However, what was striking was the absence of any mechanism to oversee if the weapons bought from the US aid would be used by white supremacist organisations like the Azov Battalion. The US legislators had no qualms with the arms they donated to Kyiv going into the hands of anti-semitic outfits like the Azov Battalion so long as they helped them in discouraging Russia from launching an attack into eastern Ukraine.

Another North American country, Canada, is too being accused of fostering neo-Nazis and war criminals in Ukraine. Earlier last year, many Jewish groups raised concerns regarding the involvement of Canadian troops in training neo-Nazis and war criminals from Ukraine. They pointed to a video that highlighted Ukrainian paratroopers singing a song to praise Stepan Bandera, an anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator whose organisation was linked to the murder of more than 100,000 Jews and Poles during the second world war.

“Watch Yevhen Karas the leader of Ukraine's neo-nazi terror gang C14's speech from Kiev earlier this month”.. pic.twitter.com/pcfFfqcEOh

— Pelham (@Resist_05) March 4, 2022

More Azov.

• Russia, Ukraine, Nato, the EU – and a Few Good Men (Maajid Nawaz)

I should not have to repeat the following, but we are where we are in history and so I find myself having to: I have long been a critic of Putin. I have probably opposed Putin before a wider audience than most of my critics. My animas against Putin is visible online for all to see. It started because I stood firmly with the Syrian Arab uprising against the dictator Assad in Syria, who Putin supported. I stood with the Syrian people then as I stand with all of the people in Ukraine today. Our opposition to Putin in Syria by no means meant that any of us supported ISIS in Syria either. My opposition to ISIS-style extremism is too well documented even to need hyperlinked references. Most of us were able to oppose both Assad and his ally Putin, as well as oppose ISIS.

This is because most of us were able to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. This is just like in history, where most of us can see that the Soviet Union and the Third Reich were two sides of the same totalitarian coin. So why has it become so hard for most of us to condemn both Putin’s attack on Ukraine while also condemning our and our ally Ukraine’s state-funding, training and arming of the armed Nazi battalion Azov in Ukraine? Again, to be clear, this is not to deny Ukraine’s right to defend itself. This is also not to ignore Putin’s authoritarianism. This is a critique of the Ukrainian state’s decision to do so by raising and formally incorporating specifically neo-Nazi armed battalions into its armed forces. And the focus is on Ukraine here because they are our ally, we are sending them arms, and so we are culpable.

Formal, insignia raising Neo-Nazi battalions in the Ukrainian armed forces and police, surely not? Read on. The truth is far worse than that I’m afraid.

And still more. “Mariupol, in which 120,000+ ethnic Greeks live..”

• “The Fascist Ukrainians Would Kill Me, They Don’t Let Us Leave The City” (GCT)

With Russian forces besieging Mariupol, in which 120,000+ ethnic Greeks live, SKAI news spoke with a Mr Kiouranas who lives in the city and exposed that Ukrainian “fascists” are killing people for trying to leave the city. When asked by SKAI news if he planned to leave the city, Kiouranas responded “how can I leave? When you try to leave you run the risk of running into a patrol of the Ukrainian fascists, the Azov Battalion.” “They would kill me and are responsible for everything,” he added. Azov Special Operations Detachment , or Azov Battalion, is a right-wing extremist and neo-Nazi unit of the National Guard of Ukraine, based in Mariupol, in the Azov Sea coastal region.

In 2014, the regiment gained notoriety after allegations emerged of torture and war crimes, as well as neo-Nazi sympathies and usage of associated symbols by the regiment itself, as seen in their logo featuring the Wolfsangel, one of the original symbols used by the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich. In 2014, a spokesman for the regiment said around 10–20% of the unit were neo-Nazis. In 2018, a provision in an appropriations bill passed by the U.S. Congress blocked military aid to Azov on the grounds of its white supremacist ideology; in 2015, a similar ban on aid to the group was overturned by the Congress. Members of the regiment come from 22 countries and are of various backgrounds. More than half of the regiment’s members speak Russian and come from eastern Ukraine, including cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The unit’s first commander was far-right nationalist Andriy Biletsky, who led the neo-Nazi Social-National Assembly and Patriot of Ukraine. In its early days, Azov was a special police company of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, led by Volodymyr Shpara, the leader of the Vasylkiv, Kyiv, branch of Patriot of Ukraine and Right Sector. In 2018, the U.S. House of Representatives also passed a provision blocking any training of Azov members by American forces, citing its neo-Nazi connections. The House had previously passed amendments banning support of Azov between 2014 and 2017, but due to pressure from The Pentagon, the amendments were quietly lifted. This was protested by the Simon Wiesenthal Center which stated that lifting the ban highlighted the danger of Holocaust distortion in Ukraine.

“A university in Italy even tried to ban a course on Fyodor Dostoevsky, but reversed itself after an outcry.”

• Ban on Russian Cats (Lauria)

The International Federation of Felines (FIFe) on Tuesday ordered a ban on the importation of Russian-bred cats, presumably anywhere in the world. “No cat bred in Russia may be imported and registered in any FIFe pedigree book outside Russia, regardless of, which organization issued its pedigree,” the FIFe board said in a statement. The board said the ban was imposed because of events in Ukraine: “The FIFe Executive Board is shocked and horrified that the army of the Russian Federation invaded the Republic of Ukraine and started a war. Many innocent people died, many more are wounded and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are forced to flee their homes to save their lives. We can all witness the destruction and chaos caused by this unprecedented act of aggression.

On top of that our Ukrainian fellow feline fanciers are desperately trying to take care of their cats and other animals in these trying circumstances. We are extremely happy that many members of FIFe clubs bordering Ukraine, such as Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Moldova, are lending a helping hand to their Ukrainian breeder friends. The Board of FIFe feels it cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing, so it decided that as of 01.03.2022: No cat bred in Russia may be imported and registered in any FIFe pedigree book outside Russia, regardless of, which organization issued its pedigree. No cat belonging to exhibitors living in Russia may be entered at any FIFe show outside Russia, regardless of, which organization these exhibitors hold their membership in.”

So far the International Canine Association has said nothing about Russian dogs. Russian birds cannot be stopped from flying over the border. Apparently taking no public position on Ukraine — no matter one’s walk in life — is making oneself an accomplice to Russia’s actions. It demonstrate the kind of pressure felt by ordinary people to not be seen as siding with Russia, even if that means not importing Russian cats. It also highlights U.S. impunity for massive, unprovoked attacks on other nations, such as Iraq in 2003, that provoked no such public outcry in the West. On the contrary, dumping French wine and renaming French fries “Freedom Fries” was the outcry against France trying to stop that disastrous invasion.

The cat ban follows voluntary actions against Russian cultural and sporting organizations and individuals that fall outside the scope of U.S. and European sanctions. On Monday Russian orchestra conductor Valery Gergiev was fired from his job at the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. He has also been banned by orchestras in Rotterdam, Vienna and at Carnegie Hall in New York. Warner Brothers has delayed releases of its films in Russia; Spotify has closed its office in Russia; the Glasgow Film Festival has dropped two Russian films and the Venice Biennale has removed Russia’s pavilion among other cultural bans. A university in Italy even tried to ban a course on Fyodor Dostoevsky, but reversed itself after an outcry.

“We are in very tenuous place, because no one is thinking about an off ramp…. it’s full speed ahead..”

• Senator Lindsey Graham Calls for the Assassination of Vladimir Putin (CTH)

In a public tweet tonight, Senator Lindsey Graham calls for the assassination of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The propaganda push from the U.S. government is actually quite remarkable to watch unfold. I mean seriously, there’s a point when you don’t go all-in because there has to be an exit option. We are in very tenuous place, because no one is thinking about an off ramp…. it’s full speed ahead. If Lindsey Graham, Joe Biden, NATO, the EU, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Word Economic Forum and the multinational corporations in this alliance of Public/Private geopolitical partnerships, succeed in the fight against Vladimir Putin – I promise you, we are not going to like the world on the other side of their victory.

A few weeks ago, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent a clear and specific message to citizens in Canada when he sanctioned the trucker’s bank accounts. Joe Biden, NATO and EU are right now sending a clear message to the citizens of the world, as they sanction Putin’s bank accounts and the Russian economy. If you can’t see the connection, you are not thinking carefully enough about it. Everything will be different now. Reverse the scenario a little. How would Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Tim Cook or Jeff Bezos feel if another country, perhaps China, decided to confiscate their wealth and yachts or whatever else they deemed to be wealth – including their business operation inside China, or India or any nation that wanted to curry favor with China – because we invaded Iraq, or Syria, or (fill_in_blank)?

Previously, these geopolitical sanctions would target government, not people, regardless of how rich they are or who they agreed with politically. What we are seeing is a full-blown alignment of interests between globalist government and their partnered multinational corporations and financial institutions. This is not a good thing to witness regardless of the outcome in Ukraine. Think about the direct message and the implications here. Think about the world of multinational corporate compliance and how they will kneel to the dictates of political power in the aftermath of this current enterprise. If this collective group of multinationals and government interests succeed in this approach, everything will change. If you think corporations, Big Tech and Big Banks, et al, are controlling and politically motivated now? Good grief, just wait.

Freeland posing with the Bandera banner is no different from posing with a swastika. And she knows that.

• Reporter Leaves After Outlet ‘Corrects’ Her Chrystia Freeland Story (PM)

An iPolitics reporter walked off the job after the outlet corrected her story regarding Trudeau’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and photos that were taken of her holding a red and black banner associated with a far-right Ukrainian Nationalist movement linked to neo-Nazis. A now-deleted Twitter post from iPolitics originally said that the banner was connected with “far-right Ukrainian nationalists who have links to neo-Nazis.”The outlet later issued a new tweet stating: “CORRECTION: Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freehand was photographed holding up a scarf in colours associated with far-right Ukrainian nationalists,” omitting the neo-Nazi portion. The article itself was edited to soften the language originally used and to eliminate the use of “neo-Nazis”.

Despite numerous alterations, the article’s correction note read: CORRECTION: This story has been corrected to state that Freeland was pictured with a scarf, not a banner or a sign. Comments by Jars Balan on the scarf’s political context have also been clarified to better reflect his views. True North’s Candice Malcolm was first to report that Freeland posted, then deleted, the photo of her posing with the banner on her own official social media accounts. The photo also showed Toronto Mayor John Tory and said, “We stand united. We stand with Ukraine. Nous sommes unis. Nous sommes debout aux côtés de l’Ukraine. Slava Ukraini!”Malcolm later tweeted: “I hear from a source in the loop that Chrystia Freeland’s office ‘lost their s**t that this is even being reported.'”

The colors are associated with the Bandera movement. Stepan Bandera was a Nationalist Ukrainian politician during World War II and has been accused of war crimes against Jews and Poles. Bandera helped form the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (UPA) which media have called “far-right” and “Neo-Nazis.” In fact, many Bandera flags were spotted during the Toronto demonstration that Freeland participated in. Both Trudeau and Freeland had smeared the freedom protesters who participated in the Freedom Convoy demonstrations as racists and Nazis after a confederate flag and a Nazi flag were spotted in Ottawa.Following the photo, a number of outlets have attempted to debunk the photo op, questioning whether she really posed with “extremist symbols.”

In a National Post article titled: “Did Chrystia Freeland pose with extremist symbols or is it Russian disinformation?” Freeland’s office responded that the criticisms of the photo were “disinformation.”Speaking with Politico’s Ottawa Playbook, Freeland’s press secretary Adrienne Vaupshas said: “A classic KGB disinformation smear is accusing Ukrainians and Ukrainian-Canadians of being far right extremists or fascists or Nazis. Indeed, President Putin’s express goal is the ‘denazification’ of a country led by a Jewish-Ukrainian president.” The Post Millennial reached out to Emmanuel who said, “I can’t speak to specifics due to confidentiality reasons. The evidence speaks for itself.”

Well, it’s starting to feel like there’s a new Canada.

• The Convoy Donor Witch Hunt Is Un-Canadian (TSun)

The past couple of weeks we have seen a disturbing and frenzied response to the release of names of people who donated to the trucker convoy that recently entrenched itself in Ottawa. In some cases, people may even be losing their jobs. As a London Free Press article explains: “Andrew Adamyk, executive director of the Mount Hope Centre for Long-term Care, is no longer with St. Joseph’s Health Care London that runs the 394-bed facility, a spokesperson confirmed Tuesday. “The departure comes after a man named Andrew Adamyk of London, Ont., donated $100 to the so-called Freedom Convoy on Feb. 7, according to a list of donors from the hacked GiveSendGo fundraising site.”

Neither the hospital nor the individual involved responded to repeated media requests for clarification, so it’s unclear why the person is no longer in their job. But the mere possibility that someone could lose their job for donating to the convoy is troubling. There were tens of thousands of Canadians who felt inspired to donate to the convoy. Despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s attempts to smear all supporters as people with “unacceptable views”, it’s obvious that a lot of people donated for inoffensive reasons. The online comments that came with donations revealed that people were frustrated with ongoing restrictions and were upset by the societal damages caused by lockdowns.

“It wasn’t cash that funded terrorism,” a senior bureaucrat told the Commons finance committee. “These were people who supported the cause.” That’s fine if people want to disagree with donors or be strongly opposed to the polarizing convoy, but the harassment that donors have endured is unacceptable.On social media, online sleuths went out of their way to expose and attack donors. One person made a Google Map — later removed for violation of terms of service — that showed where every donor in the country lived. This was a clear provocation to encourage people to harass their neighbours. In one case, someone even posted a notice to an apartment lobby denouncing the several residents who had donated. People need to relax. This has become a witch hunt, and it’s very un-Canadian.

“..the ONS should publicly withdraw their dataset and call for the retraction of any claims made by others that are based upon it.”

• Systematic Undercounting Of Deaths Within First 2 Weeks Of Vaccination (RG)

The accuracy of any data purporting to show covid 19 vaccine effectiveness or safety is critically dependent on the accuracy of four measurements: (1) people classified as having the disease; (2) vaccination status; (3) reported deaths; and (4) the population of vaccinated and unvaccinated (the so called ‘denominators’). Errors in any of these could undermine claims of vaccine effectiveness or safety. We have previously identified anomalies in the UK Government’s ONS deaths by vaccination status data (ONS dataset)-specifically that some deaths occurring shortly after vaccination are being wrongly classified as unvaccinated deaths.

In this paper we identify a further problem that appears to explain anomalies in the ONS data: the total deaths reported by ONS are significantly lower than we would expect compared to other government datasets, even allowing for the fact that the ONS use only a subset of the population. For both non-covid and covid deaths respectively the number of deaths reported for the within 21 days of first dose vaccination category tally almost perfectly with the number of deaths that would be expected should they have occurred in the third week alone. Thus, for both covid and non-covid deaths, the two weeks of post first vaccination deaths appear to have been omitted from the ONS dataset.

This pattern is repeated in all age groups over 60. A variety of factors could have led to deaths in the first 14 days being omitted in the ONS dataset, including miscategorisation, reporting lags and data handling or transcription errors. The dataset is therefore corrupted, making any inferences about vaccine efficacy or safety that are reliant on the data, moot. Accordingly, the ONS should publicly withdraw their dataset and call for the retraction of any claims made by others that are based upon it.

Commenter IM Doc at Naked Capitalism.

• Pfizer Feb. 2021 “Post Marketing” Vaccine Side Effects Tally Raises Alarms (NC)

It is a comprehensive list of the ASE (Adverse side effects) that are especially attuned in the study. In general, it is a list of all the things that came up in the animal studies and the Phase 1-3 trials in humans. It is an index of the things that they were to keep a close eye on. In general, this list in most documents like this I have ever seen is 2-3 maybe 4 pages long – NOT 10. That is what so bowled me over this AM. I can think of 2 possible things going on here – 1) The list of ASE from the previous phases of research really are this overwhelming. 2) Pfizer knew they had lots of side effects and just wanted “to put it all out there” in an attempt to cover their ass. They may have done this because of the warp speed emergency manner in which this was done – ie – we have not had time to fully assess risk – therefore we are going to just be a sponge and take in everything.

There may be other reasons I have not thought of. Whatever the case – I have never seen anything like this in my life. But the really damning parts are these tables – where very elevated numbers of patients are having these problems. I have seen any number of CHEMOTHERAPY agents with less problems than this in my life. And we have to weigh risk and benefits even in these trials. If for example a novel CHEMO agent was saving 30% but killing 5% – it would likely be approved with LARGE BLACK BOX WARNINGS. This agent – however – is not chemotherapy. It is a vaccine to be given out to everyone. It has been screamed from the rooftops for the people to hear that it was 100% safe. Any and all discussion in the media and social media of any problems has been squelched and those stating these things called quacks. It had a benefit of an absolute risk reduction of infection of 0.2%. And here we are with all these side effects. In huge numbers. Even more concerning – is two-six months of benefit worth all of these risks? I think not.

This headline should be over 2 years old. It’s not.

• NIH Orders Sweeping Review Of Experiments On Viruses And Other Pathogens (WaPo)

On Monday, NIH convened a virtual meeting of the biosecurity advisory board, which will review two categories of experiments. One is known as “gain of function” research. Such experiments study pathogens with the potential to become more capable of infecting humans or more transmissible among people. NIH calls this “research with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens.” The advisory panel will also look at dual use research, which could provide useful knowledge but also pose a threat if misapplied. For example, an effort to understand a pathogen could be exploited to create a bioweapon. NIH in January 2020 asked the biosecurity panel to start a review of policies, but that effort was postponed because of the pandemic, when members of the advisory board were needed at their home institutions, according to the agency.

“Research involving pathogens is vital for ensuring the United States is prepared to rapidly detect, respond to, and recover from future infectious-disease threats. Such research can be inherently high risk given the possibility of biosafety lapses or deliberate misuse,” NIH acting director Lawrence A. Tabak said in a statement announcing the review. “However, not doing this type of research could impair our ability to prepare for and/or respond to future consequential biological threats.” Several scientists who study viruses and emergent diseases said they welcome the review of biosafety policies. “I think it’s really important to review this stuff and to regulate it, and make sure that it’s regulated in the right way,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.

To be fair, it’s nothing compared to what’s already been wasted before.

• White House Wants To Waste $22.5 Billion Fighting Long Gone Pandemic (WT)

The White House has requested Congress approve $22.5 billion in new funding for COVID-19, fully $5 billion of which would be sent overseas, to help other nations and other governments and other peoples fight off the coronavirus. Ain’t U.S. taxpayer dollars grand? “Without additional resources,” wrote Shalanda Young, the acting Office of Management and Budget director, in a letter to Congress reported by The Hill, “we won’t be able to secure the treatments, vaccines and tests Americans need in coming months and fight future variants. And critical COVID response efforts — such as free community testing sites and testing, treatment and vaccination coverage for uninsured individuals — will end this spring.” So? So what? The coronavirus hasn’t been much of a health threat in a very long time.

It’s got a recovery rate of nearly 99%. It doesn’t impact kids — and it doesn’t really impact those under the age of say, doddering, either. In fact, we all know who’s most at risk of catching a bad case of the coronavirus, of being hospitalized from it, of dying from it — and it ain’t the general public at-large. It’s the elderly. It’s the obese. It’s the elderly and obese and those with a handful of other health issues they’re already fighting and that already compromise their immune systems. Acknowledging this — admitting that — acknowledging and admitting that COVID-19 is not the epic danger it once was, or at least that it once presented, would go far toward moving America, moving the world, past the phase of panic and into the light of normal living. But that’s exactly why Democrats, Big Pharma, Big Government and global elites won’t acknowledge these data-backed truths: the pandemic, to these arrogant people, has become a massive and massively successful tool of control. Control — and money.

Tucker Iowa Farmer: grocery bill 1000$ a month

Grocery bill about to soar thanks to sanctions; Iowa farmer: Wait until grocery bill is 1000$ a month pic.twitter.com/HnVMRk6J7S

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2022) March 3, 2022

MK Ultra
https://twitter.com/i/status/1499460873643040792

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Debt Rattle December 19 2021

Dec 192021

December 19, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:12 am Finance Tagged with: epidemiologists, Fauci, ivermectin, lockdown, Netherlands, NIH, Omicron, Pfizer, politics, Pravda, prophylaxis 67 Responses »

Vincent van Gogh Sunflowers 1887

• It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Pravda (CTH)

• Netherlands To Enter Lockdown As Nations Across Europe Tighten Curbs (G.)

• Omicron Surge is Mostly Due to Ramping Up Testing (DS)

• Ivermectin Prophylaxis For Covid-19 Reduces Infection, Mortality Rates (RG)

• Pandemic Could Be Solved Quickly If Politics Thrown Out: Dr. Ben Carson (ET)

• Ex-FDA Officials, Medical Experts Flog Feds For Politicizing Covid (JTN)

• Pfizer Says Pandemic Could Extend Through 2023 (K.)

• Fauci, Collins Colluded To Smear Experts Who Called For End To Lockdowns (DM)

• Time To Take Away The Hall Pass We Gave Doctors And Scientists (Alexander)

• The Scientists Hunting For The Next Variant Of Concern (ZH)

• CDC Data Missed Millions Of Unvaccinated Americans (ZH)

• CNN Doctor: Wear Masks At Home And Take Tests On Christmas Morning (SN)

Funniest video in a while.

• It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Pravda (CTH)

Interesting short segment from Sky News interviewing the smiling U.K. Health Minister Gillian Keegan about the intense U.K. response to the Omicron variant and the new restrictions announced by government officials. Great Britain is preparing for hundreds-of-thousands of Omicron cases. Video prompted to 05:42 just watch for around 45 seconds. No commentary from me needed. WATCH:

No omicron to speak of, infections falling fast, but let’s ruin Christmas regardless.

• Netherlands To Enter Lockdown As Nations Across Europe Tighten Curbs (G.)

Nations across Europe moved to reimpose tougher measures to stem a new wave of Covid infections spurred by the highly transmissible Omicron variant, with the Netherlands leading the way by imposing a nationwide lockdown. All non-essential stores, bars and restaurants in the Netherlands will be closed until 14 January starting Sunday, caretaker prime minister Mark Rutte said at a hastily arranged press conference Saturday night. Schools and universities will shut until 9 January, he said. In what is surely to prove a major disappointment, the lockdown terms also rein in private holiday celebrations. Residents only will be permitted two visitors except for Christmas and New Year’s, when four will be allowed, according to Rutte.

“The Netherlands is going into lockdown again from tomorrow,” he said, adding that the move was “unavoidable because of the fifth wave caused by the Omicron variant that is bearing down on us.” It wasn’t just the Dutch seeking to slow the spread of Omicron. Alarmed ministers in France, Cyprus and Austria tightened travel restrictions. Paris canceled its New Year’s Eve fireworks. Denmark has closed theatres, concert halls, amusement parks and museums. Ireland imposed an 8 pm curfew on pubs and bars and limited attendance at indoor and outdoor events. London mayor Sadiq Khan underscored the official concern about the climbing cases and their potential to overwhelm the health care system by declaring a major incident Saturday, a move that allows local councils in Britain’s capital to coordinate work more closely with emergency services.

Irish prime minister Micheal Martin captured the sense of the continent in an address to the nation, saying the new restrictions were needed to protect lives and livelihoods from the resurgent virus. “None of this is easy,” Martin said Friday night. “We are all exhausted with Covid and the restrictions it requires. The twists and turns, the disappointments and the frustrations take a heavy toll on everyone. But it is the reality that we are dealing with.”

Trick of the trade.

• Omicron Surge is Mostly Due to Ramping Up Testing (DS)

Reported infections in the U.K. have suddenly spiked in the last three days, up from 59,610 on Tuesday to 78,610 on Wednesday, 88,376 on Thursday and 93,045 on Friday. Looking at the data regionally, the spike is currently much more pronounced in London, the South East, the East of England, the East Midlands and the North West than it is in the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, the South West and the West Midlands. It’s not clear at this point if it is going to continue to rise, though the last three days’ counts don’t appear to indicate continued sharp growth. It is also so far largely an artefact of massively increased testing, as the graph below with data for the U.K. up to December 16th shows. Similar is true for Scotland. Positive tests have spiked.

But positivity is up only a little due to the large increase in testing. How significant is it that the spike began on Monday December 13th, the day after Boris Johnson’s Sunday press conference when he warned everyone about Omicron and told them to get their booster jab? There was a huge surge in demand for booster doses starting that Monday and continuing throughout the week. Could the fact that this surge coincided with a similar surge in both testing and positive tests be more than coincidence? Perhaps people got tested before getting their booster, or just because of the dire warning of a new threat.

We would normally expect a spike in winter viral illness at this point in December, so there is nothing particularly unusual about it. In this regard, it’s worth noting that the Covid deaths trend for the U.K. is currently very similar to normal winter flu deaths at this time of year. However, the recent announcement of the Omicron variant raises the question of the role it might be playing in the surge.

Not if Twitter has any say in it…

• Ivermectin Prophylaxis For Covid-19 Reduces Infection, Mortality Rates (RG)

Background: Ivermectin has demonstrated different mechanisms of actions that could potentially protect from both COVID-19 infection and COVID-19-related comorbidities. Based on the existing literature and safety profile of ivermectin, a citywide program of prophylactic use of ivermectin for COVID-19 was implemented in Itajai, a Southern city in Brazil in the state of Santa Catarina. The objective of this analysis is to evaluate the effects of the use of ivermectin for prevention of COVID-19 infection, risk of dying and mortality, compared to non-users.

Materials and methods: This is a retrospective analysis of registry data from the medical based citywide COVID-19 prevention with ivermectin program, between July 2020 to December of 2020. The whole population of Itajaí was invited for a medical visit to compile demographic and medical parameters. In the absence of contraindications, ivermectin was offered as an optional treatment for 2 days every 15 days at a dose of 0.2mg/kg/day. Patients’ preferences and medical autonomy were preserved. Ivermectin users were compared with the comorbidity-matched population of non-users for COVID-19 by age, sex, COVID-19 infection rate, and COVID-19 mortality rate. Results in terms of mortality were adjusted for all relevant variables and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) was calculated.

Results: A total of 220,517 subjects were included in the analysis; 133,051 (60.3%) ivermectin users and 87,466 (39.7%) non-users. COVID-19 infection occurred in 4,311 (3.2%) treated subjects, and 3,034 (3.5%) non-treated subjects. This evidence showed a 7% reduction in COVID-19 infection rate with use of ivermectin: COVID-19 infection rate ratio (Risk ratio (RR) of 0.93; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.89 – 0.98; p = 0.003). A total of 62 deaths (1.4% mortality rate) occurred among users and 79 deaths (2.6% mortality rate) among non-users, showing a 48% reduction in mortality rate (RR, 0,52; 95%CI, 0.37 – 0.72; p = 0.0001). Risk of dying from COVID-19 among ivermectin users was 45% lower than non-users (RR, 0.55; 95%CI, 0.40 – 0.77; p = 0.0004).

Conclusion: Prophylactic use of ivermectin showed significantly reduced COVID-19 infection rate, mortality rate and chance of dying from COVID-19 on a calculated population-level analysis, which controlled for all relevant confounding variables.

Prophylactic ivermectin works (new study just published): "Risk of dying from COVID-19 among ivermectin users was 45% lower than non-users" https://t.co/BMIFSRIKhB

— Vaccine Truth (@VaccineTruth2) December 18, 2021

“..or we can take every little mutation and every little change and try to make it into a crisis so we can frighten people and control their lives more..”

• Pandemic Could Be Solved Quickly If Politics Thrown Out: Dr. Ben Carson (ET)

“We’ve been having tunnel vision” dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Ben Carson told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. “Let’s throw the politics out. We could solve this problem pretty quickly,” he stated in an interview that will premiere on Dec. 18 at 7 p.m. New York time. “Let’s open this thing up to all the different mechanisms,” said Carson, a renowned neurosurgeon who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the highest civilian award in the nation—in 2008 for his work. He retired in 2013 and ran for the presidency in 2016, before serving as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Trump administration.

“Let’s look around the world at things that work. Let’s look at the fact that on the western coast of Africa, there’s almost no COVID. And let’s ask ourselves, why is that? And then you see, it’s because they take antimalarials, particularly hydroxychloroquine. Let’s study that. Let’s see what’s going on there. “Let’s listen to these physician groups who’ve had incredible success with ivermectin. Let’s look at the results with monoclonal antibodies. Let’s look at all of these things. Let’s put them all in our armamentarium so that we don’t have a one-size-fits-all system.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) at one time had authorized hydroxychloroquine for treating certain COVID-19 patients but quickly revoked the emergency use authorization (EUA) in June 2020, claiming no data showed its effectiveness.

The FDA hasn’t approved or issued an EUA for ivermectin to treat COVID-19, citing the same reasons. Using hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat COVID-19 patients has been highly controversial. Some studies show, and some doctors claim, that hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin can effectively treat COVID-19 patients. A vaccine confidence insight report (pdf) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) labeled such claims as misinformation or disinformation. “COVID is a virus. Viruses mutate. That’s what they do. And they will continue to mutate,” Carson said. Carson pointed out that fortunately, most of the time, viruses become a little weaker with each mutation. “We can admit that and deal with it, or we can take every little mutation and every little change and try to make it into a crisis so we can frighten people and control their lives more,” Carson said.

But there’s only one Science.

• Ex-FDA Officials, Medical Experts Flog Feds For Politicizing Covid (JTN)

The federal agencies in charge of COVID-19 response are taking hits from former officials and high-profile medical professors for “sidelining experts,” not conducting basic research, and mischaracterizing evidence related to vaccines and masks for young people. The Biden administration is getting a pass for “extreme political pressure” that “appropriately” prompted outrage against its predecessor, two FDA alumni wrote in The Washington Post Thursday. Former Office of Vaccines Research and Review Deputy Director Philip Krause and former acting Chief Scientist Luciana Borio protested three recent actions authorizing boosters for people as young as 16.

“Before last month, the standard practice was for the agencies to convene standing outside advisory committees, whose members inspect the relevant data, debate it and vote,” they wrote. Earlier debates and votes suggest that “at least some experts would probably have voiced opposition,” and the refusal to hear them out “could hurt the credibility of these agencies.” They criticized the FDA’s “unpersuasive” explanation that authorizing boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds “does not raise questions that would benefit from additional discussion by committee members.” Exigency is “the exact circumstance when expert discussion and interpretation of the data can make the biggest difference,” the duo wrote.

Krause left the FDA in apparent protest of the White House sidestepping the agency to promise booster shots across the board. He soon joined a public letter warning “there could be risks if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently,” with implications for “vaccine acceptance.” The White House is “acting seriously reckless,” University of California San Francisco medical professor Vinay Prasad tweeted, echoing Krause’s argument. “If the last administration did this, all experts would be outraged. Principles only matter when they are inconvenient.”

Johns Hopkins University medical professor Marty Makary, who agrees boosters can harm low-risk groups, blasted the feds for too much “speculation” and too little research on the Omicron variant, just their latest pandemic failure. “In fact, most of our COVID findings have come from Israel and scientists abroad,” he wrote in a New York Post op-ed Dec. 8 decrying “turtle-speed bureaucracy.” It’s baffling that the National Institutes of Health or CDC has not “mobilize[d] any of their 7,000-plus scientists” to quickly answer how antibodies from vaccines and natural immunity respond to Omicron, said Makary, editor-in-chief of MedPage Today. There’s not even a “real-time data dashboard” on Omicron cases.

“Perhaps [Anthony] Fauci could have done fewer media interviews and university lectures … and instead personally overseen an NIH Omicron-antibody-binding experiment,” he said. Makary blasted the CDC for consistently releasing “tardy and incomplete data, missing key information on risk stratification, the role of obesity and a breakdown of child deaths by comorbidity as we imposed blanket restrictions on 72 million children.”

Who cares what Pfizer says?

• Pfizer Says Pandemic Could Extend Through 2023 (K.)

Pfizer Inc said on Friday the Covid-19 pandemic could extend through next year and announced plans to develop a three-dose vaccine regimen for children ages 2 to 16, a move that could delay its authorisation. The US pharmaceutical company made its comments as European countries geared up for further travel and social restrictions and a study warned that the rapidly spreading Omicron coronavirus variant was five times more likely to reinfect people than its predecessor, Delta. Pfizer executives said the company believed that by 2024, the disease should be endemic around the globe, meaning it would no longer be a pandemic. The company projected that “Covid will transition to an endemic state potentially by 2024.”

Prior to the Omicron variant, top US disease doctor Anthony Fauci forecast the pandemic would end in 2022 in the United States. Announcing plans to develop a three-dose regimen for ages 2 to 16, Chief Scientific Officer Mikael Dolsten told a conference call that results of three doses among people older than 16 showed that approach offered greater protection. “Therefore, we have decided to modify each of the pediatric studies to incorporate a third dose to the series and seek licensure for a three-dose series rather than a two-dose series as originally anticipated,” the company said.

Pfizer developed its Covid-19 vaccine with Germany’s BioNTech SE. The companies have been developing a version of their vaccine tailored to combat the Omicron variant, but have not decided whether it will be needed. They expect to start a clinical trial for the updated vaccine in January, the Pfizer executives said. The risk of reinfection with the Omicron variant is 5.4 times higher and it shows no sign of being milder than the Delta variant, a study by Imperial College London found, as cases soar across Europe and threaten year-end festivities. Past infection may offer as little as 19% protection against reinfection by the new variant, Imperial College said, noting that the study of hundreds of thousands of cases, including 1,846 confirmed as Omicron, had not been peer reviewed.

‘three fringe epidemiologists’

• Fauci, Collins Colluded To Smear Experts Who Called For End To Lockdowns (DM)

Dr. Anthony Fauci and the head of the National Institute of Health (NIH) colluded on a way to discredit an alternative plan to deal with COVID from a group of experts, released emails reveal. The emails, some of which were tweeted out on Saturday by Phil Magness, senior research faculty and interim research and education director at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), show Fauci and Francis Collins attempting to coordinate a ‘devastating takedown’ of the Great Barrington Declaration. AIER, a libertarian think tank, sponsored the declaration, which largely abandons lockdowns in favor of a herd immunity strategy that allows life to return to normal.

In an October 8 email from Collins to Fauci, the head of the NIH calls the GBD the work of ‘three fringe epidemiologists’ that ‘seems to be getting a lot of attention.’ Collins adds that ‘there needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet – is it underway?’ Later in the day, Fauci sends Collins a Wired op-ed that refutes the notion of herd immunity stopping the pandemic. Collins then sends Fauci an op-ed in The Nation also trashing the GBD.

A few days later, Collins emails Fauci a Washington Post op-ed he’s quoted in headlined ‘Proposal to hasten herd immunity to the coronavirus grabs White House attention but appalls top scientists.’ Collins – working under former President Donald Trump at the time – said ‘my quotes are accurate but will not be appreciated in the [White House].’ Fauci responds: ‘They are too busy with other things to worry about this. What you said was entirely correct.’ Later, Gregg Gonsalves – the writer of The Nation op-ed – sends Collins an email thanking him with a subject line that includes saying legendary AIDS activist Larry Kramer ‘would be proud.’ Collins responds with a smiley face.

The GBD – authored by previous DailyMail.com contributor Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, calls for individuals at significantly lower risk of dying from COVID-19 – as well as those at higher risk who so wish – to be allowed ‘to resume their normal lives.’ That would mean allowing people in low risk groups to go to offices, hang out in bars and restaurants and go to sporting and entertainment events. The centerpiece of the declaration, according to Dr. Bhattacharya, is a call for increased focused protection of the vulnerable older population, who are more than a thousand times more likely to die from COVID infection than the young. The declaration makes no mention of social distancing, masks, tracing, or long-term Covid cases but suggests that increased infection of those at lower risks would build herd immunity.

Dr. Paul Alexander names a few more ‘fringe epidemiologists’.

• Time To Take Away The Hall Pass We Gave Doctors And Scientists (Alexander)

Had it not been for the likes of McCullough, Fareed, Zelenko, Tenenbaum, Oskoui, Urso, Littell, Malone, Vanden Bossche, Yeadon, Ryan Cole, Kulvinder Gill, Francis Christian, Trozzi, Phillips, Palmer, Hodkinson, Bhattacharya, Heneghan, Kulldorff, Bridle, Mallard, Bernstein, Risch etc. to me, take the whole lot of the million doctors and fire them all…every one damn of them, they have caused this by being silent and being on the take…yes, I know many from CDC and NIH and even FDA who told me they cant speak out because of fear of losing their appointment and grant…yes, this be about money…grift and graft…they have all benefitted and of course the top dog Bourla of Pfizer with his buddy Fauci…imagine this grifter Bourla saying we are criminals because we question the efficacy and safety of the vaccines…this piece of untermensche s***….

The Canadian and UK and American doctor, yes Kuntsler, have shown themselves to be among the most dweeb, pusillanimous, weak, cowardly, craven, money hungry, grifters, stiff necked idiots and fools…money whores to the pharma…selling out the good populations for benefit to yourself…you sick twisted set of doctors…you dont see it yet but your gravitas id now DOA…and you did it to you. you had it all and now are worth nothing. you helped destroy your careers, your name, EBM, research, all of it…you did this…you joined a devious scheme and history will recall and remind you always of what you did. you are utterly corrupt and I tell you in your face here…corrupt untermensche.

Yes it the doctors we used to revere and admire, that have lost all credibility along with the entire research establishment, the medical publication process, the journal editors, all of them were and are on the take in some manner…their silence got them something and we will come to learn in time…fire these bastards, all of them. These losers oh I meant doctors and scientists in the US and Canada and UK etc…sucking on the teats of NIH grants and CIHR grants…losers the whole bunch of them should hang heads in shame…abject failures….it is their disastrous unscientific illogical and specious policies that have harmed populations…children hung themselves and it was this Trump was fighting against and Atlas…I know I was there. Atlas did many things to stem the tide of the massive deaths in the nursing homes and deserves big credit…I know, I was there.

Brought to you by Pfizer. Bought for you by Pfizer.

• The Scientists Hunting For The Next Variant Of Concern (ZH)

America has some of the most advanced medical research capabilities in the world. So why is it that a small group of labs in South Africa seems to be a step ahead of everybody else when it comes to sniffing out new variants? The group first gained notoriety for discovering the beta variant and alerting the world to its presence. But most people probably became familiar with Alex Sigal, Tulio de Oliveira and their work at a gene-sequencing laboratory in the South African port city of Durban when they announced the discovery of the omicron variant, the latest “variant of concern” while Americans were enjoying their Thanksgiving dinner. What is it that makes their lab so successful? Well, it looks like Bloomberg has finally found the answer in a profile of the Africa Health Research Institute, as it’s formally known.

South African scientists became experts at combating viruses almost by necessity, They have been hard at work fighting AIDS, Turburculosis and other viruses – work that has made them a magnet for the world’s best epidemiologists. Because of this, Sigal’s lab has become a kind of training ground for scientists across the continent. It was the first to test omicron against blood plasma from people who’d received two doses of the Pfizer jab. They also developed a theory claiming that immunodepressed people might be breeding grounds for mutants since they’re so vulnerable. One reason for its success with finding new variants: South Africa has set up a network of seven genomic surveillance labs with one at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases and six at academic institutions. Sigal works with Tulio de Oliveira, the Brazilian head of the gene-sequencing laboratory Krisp.

“There’s a lot of technical capacity in South Africa to do genomic sequencing of pathogens because we’ve built up that expertise over many years for HIV and TB,” said Richard Lessells, a Scottish infectious diseases specialist at Krisp. “Very early on in the pandemic, we recognized that genomic sequencing and genomic surveillance was going to be very important.” Since the discovery of omicron, many of the scientists working in the lab have been dealing with sleepless nights. “I’ve been working to get the Pfizer vaccine efficacy study ready,” said Sigal, who becomes animated when he watches a time-lapse video of the omicron variant attacking cells. “I worked through the night.” Put another way: the more variants they “discover”, the more prestige and funding they will be rewarded with.

“..CDC data show 240MM people with at least one shot – about 72.5% of the population. But it also says only 203MM have been fully vaccinated, or 61.3%..”

• CDC Data Missed Millions Of Unvaccinated Americans (ZH)

What a surprise – the CDC and states across the country have been over-counting the number of American adults who have been fully vaccinated. Here’s how Bloomberg explains this accident (because what kind of person would do this on purpose?): “in collating reams of data on vaccinations, the US has counted too many shots as first doses when they are instead second doses or booster shots.” Here’s the tell: CDC data show 240MM people with at least one shot – about 72.5% of the population. But it also says only 203MM have been fully vaccinated, or 61.3%, an 11-percentage-point difference that is far larger than in other developed countries. So, either Americans are so lazy – or perhaps don’t want to endure another series of adverse reactions – that they won’t show up to get their second dose, or there’s something wrong with these numbers.

And it might not surprise you to learn that a number of state and local officials believes it’s the latter. “State and local officials say it’s improbable that 37MM Americans got one shot without completing their inoculations. Instead, they say, the government has regularly and incorrectly counted booster shots and second doses as first doses.” Their conclusion is that both fully vaccinated and completely unvaccinated are officially undercounted. As for the precise number miscounted, that’s unknown, but revisions in data from three states – Illinois, Pennsylvania and West Virginia – found enough over-counting of first shots to suggest that there are plenty of unvaccinated people nationally who’ve mistakenly been counted as having received a dose.

One of the biggest gaps identified was in Pennsylvania, where CDC estimates of first doses for the elderly exceed the state of Pennsylvania’s estimate by about 850,000. If changes are made to the national data on the scale of Pennsylvania’s revisions, this would mean increasing the number of Americans who are unvaccinated by more than 10MM. “The truth is, we have no idea,” said Clay Marsh, West Virginia’s Covid czar.

“..Schaffner took to CNN to express his horror at Americans having fun at football games, complaining that they were “breathing too vigorously.”

• CNN Doctor: Wear Masks At Home And Take Tests On Christmas Morning (SN)

A resident doctor on CNN told viewers Thursday that they should all be wearing masks at home around other family members and everyone should wake up on Christmas morning and rather than open presents, take COVID tests. Dr. William Schaffner also said that these restrictions should apply to everyone, even those people who are double and triple vaccinated. “I recommend that we hang our stockings with care,” Schaffner stated, adding “We have to be careful because we are all going to get together, we should all be vaccinated and preferentially boosted. We should wear our masks if we are uncertain.”

“Another thing we could do is we could all get tested the morning of our getting together,” Schaffner further urged, before sharing a heartwarming story of how his own family did that for Thanksgiving. “We were all negative. It worked out just fine,” the doctor declared. Earlier in the year, Schaffner took to CNN to express his horror at Americans having fun at football games, complaining that they were “breathing too vigorously.” Schaffner declared “People are cheering and enthusiastic, exhaling with vigor; if there are people infected, they can infect people around them … Nobody was wearing a mask … I’d be very surprised if we didn’t have outbreaks.”

London Dec 18

Paris Dec 18

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Debt Rattle December 8 2021

Dec 082021

December 8, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:29 am Finance Tagged with: Apple, boosters, breakthrough, FDA, Green Pass, mandate, NIH, Omarova, Omicron, Pfizer, Ukraine, WHO 81 Responses »

Gustave Caillebotte Paris Street, Rainy Day 1884

• Judge Blocks Biden’s Vaccine Mandate For Federal Contractors Nationwide (JTN)

• South Africa Healthcare Chief Says Omicron May Signal the End of COVID-19 (SN)

• Green Pass and COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Shots in Israel (SSRN)

• Beyond Omicron: What’s Next For Covid’s Viral Evolution (Nature)

• SARS-CoV-2 Breakthrough Infections In Vaccinated Individuals (Nature)

• WHO Europe Says Covid Vaccine Mandates Should Be ‘Last Resort’ (Y!)

• Vaccine-Resistant Mutations Correlate Strongly With Vaccination Rates (NIH)

• Study Shows Omicron Variant Partially Evades Vaccine’s Protection (GR)

• FDA Wants Until at Least 2096 to Fully Release Pfizer’s Vaccine Data (Siri)

• New NIH Records Reveal Information About Research Into Coronavirus (JW)

• Controversial Biden Banking Nominee Omarova Bows Out (JTN)

• Apple Signed Secret $275 Billion Deal With Chinese Government (ZH)

• Putin To Biden: ‘Finlandize’ Ukraine, Or We Will (Pat Buchanan)

EU ministers conference: After February 1, free travel in all of EU for every citizen who’s had a booster shot within 9 months of their second shot.

BUT: people already know the Omicron shot is supposed to come in 100 days.

Yeah, the unvaxxed occupy all hospital beds… Just not in Wales?!

The judge ruled that federal contractors nationwide are no longer subject to Biden’s vaccine mandate.

This prevents a lot of misery.

• Judge Blocks Biden’s Vaccine Mandate For Federal Contractors Nationwide (JTN)

A U.S. district court judge blocked the Biden administration on Tuesday from enforcing a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on employees of government contractors across the nation. This conservative win adds to a string of losses for President Joe Biden in federal courts. Southern District of Georgia Judge R. Stan Baker ruled in favor of multiple contractors across seven states – Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia. A district judge in Kentucky last week issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting the Biden administration from enforcing their vaccine mandate on contractors, but it only applied to three states – Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. Because one of the plaintiffs in the Georgia decision, Associated Builders and Contractors, Inc., is a trade group with members across the United States, Baker’s decision applies nationwide.

Baker, a Trump appointee, wrote that the plaintiffs “will likely succeed in their claim that the President exceeded the authorization given to him by Congress” when Biden issued an executive order on Sept. 9 mandating federal contractors to receive COVID-19 vaccines. The White House announced last month that it was delaying federal contractors’ vaccine mandate deadline until January, not December as previously planned. Last week the Biden administration also pushed back its deadline requiring federal workers to be vaccinated. Federal workers now have until January to be vaccinated. A federal judge in Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction earlier this month to stop “Biden’s national vaccine mandate for healthcare workers,” Just the News reported.

“There have been zero deaths from Omicron worldwide and in countries like the UK it hasn’t even caused anyone to be hospitalized.”

• South Africa Healthcare Chief Says Omicron May Signal the End of COVID-19 (SN)

The CEO of South Africa’s largest private healthcare network says that the Omicron variant is “so mild” that it “may signal the end of COVID-19.” According to Richard Friedland, chief executive officer of Netcare Ltd., the early days of the variant suggest there is absolutely no need to panic and that it might actually be a good thing. “If in the second and third wave we’d seen these levels of positivity to tests conducted, we would have seen very significant increases in hospital admissions and we’re not seeing that. In our primary care clinics it is mainly people under 30-years-old,” he said. “So I actually think there is a silver lining here and this may signal the end of Covid-19, with it attenuating itself to such an extent that it’s highly contagious, but doesn’t cause severe disease. That’s what happened with Spanish flu.”

“We are seeing breakthrough infections of people who have been vaccinated, but the infections we’re seeing are very mild to moderate. So for health care workers who have had boosters, it’s mostly mild. I think this whole thing has been so poorly communicated and so much panic generated.” Friedland’s comments won’t be welcomed by Big Pharma, which continues to make vast profits from endless booster vaccines. Not will his remarks be amplified by the corporate media, which has enjoyed a huge boost in ratings from endless COVID fearmongering. However, the CEO’s statement correlates with what other health experts on the ground in South Africa have said about Omicron.

The doctor who first discovered the variant says the it is “mild” and hasn’t caused an uptick in hospitalizations. Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association, echoed Dr. Barry Schoub’s sentiments, noting that the patients infected with omicron had “symptoms (that) were so different and so mild from those I had treated before.” There have been zero deaths from Omicron worldwide and in countries like the UK it hasn’t even caused anyone to be hospitalized.

Twitter comments: “Notably, the new Israel booster study finds highly negative VE for the first month after booster administered and only afterwards turns positive which makes overall VE low (35% for first 3 months).”

“This says vaccines not very effective for first three months, but boosters are being recommended at 3 months intervals for some. So right when they become most effective, get another one? Maybe I’m not understanding.”

• Green Pass and COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Shots in Israel (SSRN)

The paper describes an analysis based on data published on November 1, 2021, by the Israeli Ministry of Health (MOH) on its control dashboard about returning Israelis through the national airport. The data include the respective numbers of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated individuals and the number of positive COVID-19 cases identified in each group. These reflect the modified definitions of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated status after the Pfizer booster vaccination campaign in Israel (August-October). In particular, to maintain a Vaccinated status and specifically the “Green Pass”, individuals who received the initial 2 doses more than 6 months ago were required to receive the booster vaccine.

Israel national airport is a unique setting, where the Vaccinated and Unvaccinated individuals all have to test, which allows a more objective assessment of both the booster and Green Pass efficacy in preventing infections. The analysis suggests that the positivity rate (number of cases divided by number of tests) among the Vaccinated cohort throughout August-October is only 1.54-fold smaller than the one among the Unvaccinated cohort (about 35% relative protection). More specifically, compared to the Unvaccinated group, the Vaccinated group has a significantly higher positivity rate during the month of August, then in September it shows a 3.45-fold smaller positivity rate (71% relative protection), and this protection decreases to 2.66-fold (62% protection) during October.

The analysis suggests that the relative protection of the booster shot against infection is likely to be significantly smaller than the initial estimates of 10-11-fold (over 90%) reported by the MOH, probably around 60% at best. This also implies that the absolute number of infected individuals in the Vaccinated group is likely to be at least as high as in the Unvaccinated, raising serious concerns that the new Green Pass is inefficient in preventing infection spread, and could expose high risk individuals to risk.

Two long and detailed articles from Nature. Which leave me with the impression that they’re more sophisticated sales jobs for the vaccines.

• Beyond Omicron: What’s Next For Covid’s Viral Evolution (Nature)

Delta and its descendants now account for the vast majority of COVID-19 cases worldwide. Most researchers expected these Delta lineages to eventually outcompete the last holdouts. But Omicron has undermined those predictions. “A lot of us were expecting the next weird variant to be a child of Delta, and this is a bit of a wild card,” says Aris Katzourakis, a specialist in viral evolution at the University of Oxford, UK. Teams in Botswana and South Africa identified the variant in late November — although researchers say it is unlikely to have originated in either country — and health officials have linked it to a rapidly growing outbreak centred in South Africa’s Gauteng province. The variant harbours around 30 changes to spike, many shared with the other variants of concern, and scientists worldwide are working to gauge the threat it poses.

The swift rise in cases of Omicron in South Africa suggests that the new variant has a fitness advantage over Delta, says Tom Wenseleers, an evolutionary biologist and biostatistician at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Omicron carries some of the mutations associated with Delta’s sky-high infectivity. But if increased infectivity were the sole reason for its rapid growth, it would translate to an R0 in the 30s, Wenseleers says. “That’s very implausible.” Instead, he and other researchers suspect that Omicron’s rise may be largely due to its ability to infect people who are immune to Delta through vaccination or previous infection.

Scientists’ portrait of Omicron is still blurry and it will take weeks before they can fully assess its properties. But if the variant is spreading, in part, because of its ability to evade immunity, it fits in with theoretical predictions about how SARS-CoV-2 is likely to evolve, says Sarah Cobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. As gains in SARS-CoV-2’s infectivity start to slow, the virus will have to maintain its fitness through overcoming immune responses, says Cobey. For instance, if a mutation or set of mutations halved a vaccine’s ability to block transmission, this could vastly increase the number of available hosts in a population. Cobey says it’s hard to imagine that any future gains in infectivity could provide the same boost.

That evolutionary path, towards immune evasion and away from gains in infectivity, is common among established respiratory viruses such as influenza says Adam Kucharski, a mathematical epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “The easiest way for the virus to cause new epidemics is to evade immunity over time. That’s similar to what we see with the seasonal coronaviruses.”

Oh yeah, boosters!

• SARS-CoV-2 Breakthrough Infections In Vaccinated Individuals (Nature)

Vaccines against viruses work by generating immune responses that inhibit the infection process (mainly serum antibodies that bind and/or neutralize virus particles and, for mucosally applied vaccines, also mucosal secretory IgA) and by creating immune memory in the form of antigen-specific memory B cells and T cells that are primed to produce a rapid anamnestic response when the infection reintroduces the vaccine antigen into the body. These mechanisms can prevent initial proliferation of the virus or, failing that, rapidly control it, reducing the amount of virus to which the host is ultimately exposed and the duration of the exposure. While the amount of circulating antibody present following vaccination (or any antigenic stimulus) increases rapidly, on a timescale of days to weeks, it also declines rapidly from its peak on a timescale of weeks to months, and then more slowly over a time scale of decades.

The first phase reflects antibody secreted by short-lived plasmablast populations, which expand right after antigen exposure as a first line of defense. They typically die within 1–2 weeks after antigen exposure and the antibody they secreted declines based on the specific antibody half-life (approximately 21 days for IgG). The second, usually very slow, phase of decline likely reflects the kinetics of long-lived plasma cells, which migrate to the bone marrow and from there secrete antibody into the blood, often maintaining stable titres for many years. Importantly, although peripherally injected vaccines can induce low levels of IgG and monomeric IgA antibodies at the mucosal surfaces of the upper respiratory tract (which are the main entry portal for respiratory viruses) they do not induce secretory IgA efficientl2. The small proportions of IgG and IgA that land on the mucosal surfaces of the upper respiratory tract after intramuscular vaccination disappear relatively quickly as serum antibodies wane.

Whether a breakthrough infection occurs when a vaccinated host is exposed to an infectious person depends on whether the immune response present in that person at the moment of exposure is sufficient to abort or rapidly control the infection (Fig. 1). Given the kinetics of immune responses, it is not surprising that the amount of protection offered by a vaccine against infection might decline over time, allowing more breakthrough infections as the immune response wanes over months (as observed for influenza virus vaccines) and/or as immune memory wanes over years (as observed for mumps vaccines). Likewise, protection might increase after a breakthrough infection or after a subsequent vaccine dose, which enhances the person’s immune response. It is also unsurprising that older individuals, whose neutralizing antibody responses to COVID-19 vaccines are typically lower, appear to be at greater risk of breakthrough infections at any given time following vaccination.

Covid has exposed the WHO as a failed entity.

• WHO Europe Says Covid Vaccine Mandates Should Be ‘Last Resort’ (Y!)

The World Health Organization (WHO) in Europe on Tuesday cautioned against making Covid vaccines mandatory, while urging better protection of children among whom cases are high. Europe is battling a fierce surge in the pandemic, with the WHO registering 120,000 Covid-related deaths on the continent since November 23 when it warned of up to 500,000 more deaths by March 2022. Regional director Hans Kluge said compulsory vaccines should be “an absolute last resort and only applicable when all other feasible options to improve vaccination uptake have been exhausted”. Noting that mandates have increased vaccine uptake in some cases, Kluge said these were “context specific”, and added that the effect mandates may have on “public confidence and public trust” must also be considered.

The regional health bloc also noted that the number of cases had increased “across all age groups, with the highest rates currently observed in the five to 14 years age group.” “It is not unusual today to see two to three times higher incidence among young children than in the average population,” Kluge told a press conference. “The health risks extend beyond the children themselves,” Kluge added, noting that children risk passing the infection to parents and grandparents in the home. Improved ventilation and the use of masks should be a standard at all primary schools as part of a safe learning environment, while avoiding school closures and remote learning, the regional director said. “Vaccinating children should be discussed and considered nationally,” Kluge added.

The WHO’s European region comprises 53 countries and territories, and includes several in Central Asia. The organisation also expressed concern about rising cases of the recently discovered Omicron variant of the virus, but stressed that the fight should still be focused on the currently dominant Delta variant. “The problem now is Delta and however we succeed against Delta today is a win over Omicron tomorrow, before it eventually surges,” Kluge said. Meanwhile in Norway, where 29 cases of the Omicron variant have been confirmed, health authorities warned that the new variant would likely add to the stress on health services to a “significant degree”.

Is anybody tracking this on a broad scale?

• Vaccine-Resistant Mutations Correlate Strongly With Vaccination Rates (NIH)

The importance of understanding SARS-CoV-2 evolution cannot be overlooked. Recent studies confirm that natural selection is the dominating mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 evolution, which favors mutations that strengthen viral infectivity. Here, we demonstrate that vaccine-breakthrough or antibody-resistant mutations provide a new mechanism of viral evolution. Specifically, vaccine-resistant mutation Y449S in the spike (S) protein receptor-binding domain, which occurred in co-mutations Y449S and N501Y, has reduced infectivity compared to that of the original SARS-CoV-2 but can disrupt existing antibodies that neutralize the virus.

By tracking the evolutionary trajectories of vaccine-resistant mutations in more than 2.2 million SARS-CoV-2 genomes, we reveal that the occurrence and frequency of vaccine-resistant mutations correlate strongly with the vaccination rates in Europe and America. We anticipate that as a complementary transmission pathway, vaccine-breakthrough or antibody-resistant mutations, like those in Omicron, will become a dominating mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 evolution when most of the world’s population is either vaccinated or infected. Our study sheds light on SARS-CoV-2 evolution and transmission and enables the design of the next-generation mutation-proof vaccines and antibody drugs.

Trying to confuse natural immunity and vaccine “protection”.

• Study Shows Omicron Variant Partially Evades Vaccine’s Protection (GR)

Researchers studying the effects of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine on the Omicron variant announced on Tuesday that the variant is partially capable of evading the vaccine’s protection. The team, which has been working in South Africa since the discovery of the new variant, said that those who have recovered from Covid and are fully vaccinated, as well as those who have received a booster shot, are well protected against the variant. The team conducted tests in lab dishes with samples from a dozen people who were fully vaccinated with Pfizer’s vaccine. The results indicated that Omicron is capable of escaping the vaccine’s protection– but only partially.

“There is a very large drop in neutralization of Omicron by BNT162b2 [Pfizer/BioNTech] immunity relative to ancestral virus,” said Alex Sigal, the study’s lead author, on Twitter. Sigal works for the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban. “Omicron escape from BNT162b2 neutralization is incomplete. Previous infection + vaccination still neutralizes,” Sigal said. Sigal told CNN that these results were much better than what he and his team had expected: “I thought this news was very positive. I expected worse,” Sigal said in an interview. Many experts were expecting Omicron to almost completely bypass the protection of vaccines. “This is not a variant that has completely escaped. It certainly escapes. It is certainly bad. But it looks to me like there are ways of dealing with it.”

The study analyzed human lung cells and blood to find their results. It has yet to be peer-reviewed. “Previous infection, followed by vaccination or booster, is likely to increase the neutralization level and likely confer protection from severe disease in Omicron infection,” the study read. Some of the samples had a 41-fold reduction in neutralizing antibodies deployed against the Omicron compared to the levels of antibodies present in earlier Covid-19 variants. But Sigal said that that number is fluid and subject to change with further tests and variables, including if the person had been previously infected. The news comes as evidence is mounting that Omicron may be producing less severe infections than previous Covid-19 variants, like Delta.

On Saturday, the South African Medical Research Council published a report about an Omicron-driven outbreak in the Tshwane district in South Africa’s northern Gauteng Province, one of the first areas in the world where Omicron has overtaken Delta as the dominant strain. The researchers wrote that in the last two weeks there has been an “exponential” rise in caseloads, but significantly, the surge has not corresponded to a significant uptick in hospitalizations and deaths. “The relatively low number of COVID-19 pneumonia hospitalizations in the general, high care, and ICU wards constitutes a very different picture compared to the beginning of previous waves,” the report said, examining data from the Steve Biko and Tshwane District Hospital complex.

How does “never” sound to you? Just dump Pfizer, it’s the only way out of the pandemic.

• FDA Wants Until at Least 2096 to Fully Release Pfizer’s Vaccine Data (Siri)

A prior post explained that the FDA has asked a federal judge to make the public wait until the year 2076 to disclose all of the data and information it relied upon to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Literally, a 55-year delay. My firm, on behalf of PHMPT, asked that this information be disclosed in 108 days – the same amount of time it took for the FDA to review and license Pfizer’s vaccine. The Court ordered the parties to submit briefs in support of their respective positions by December 6, 2021. The FDA’s brief, incredibly, doubles down. It now effectively asks to have until at least 2096 to produce the Pfizer documents. Not a typo. A total of at least 75 years. Other than producing an initial ~12,000 pages in around two months, the FDA thereafter only wants to commit to producing 500 pages per month. The FDA also disclosed that it actually has approximately at least 451,000 pages to produce.*

Each side gets to file response briefs on December 13, 2021, and then there is oral argument on December 14, 2021 before the Judge. If you want to read the response to the FDA’s position, a copy of the introduction in the brief my firm filed is below. And below that, a downloadable copy of each side’s full briefing is available. Enjoy. And if you find what you are reading difficult to believe – that is because it is dystopian for the government to give Pfizer billions, mandate Americans to take its product, prohibit Americans from suing for harms, but yet refuse to let Americans see the data underlying its licensure. The lesson yet again is that civil and individual rights should never be contingent upon a medical procedure.

Why is all this stuff heavily redacted? Who has the right to be kept secret, and what is that based on?

• New NIH Records Reveal Information About Research Into Coronavirus (JW)

Judicial Watch announced today that it received 221 pages of records from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which include a grant application for research involving the coronavirus that was submitted in 2018. The grant application appears to describe “gain of function” research involving RNA extractions from bats, experiments on viruses, attempts to develop a chimeric virus and efforts to genetically manipulate the full-length bat SARSr-CoV WIV1 strain molecular clone. The documents were obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for records of communications, contracts and agreements with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lawsuit specifically requests records about National Institute of Health (NIH) grants that benefitted the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

On January 27, 2020, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) official David Morens emailed Chief of Staff Greg Folkers in a heavily redacted thread, writing: “[S]ome background on our support of the Ecohealth group (Peter Daszak et al), which has for years been among the biggest players in coronavirus work, also in collaboration with Ralph Baric, Ian Lipkin and others. [Redacted]”. NIAID has been funding Peter’s group for coronavirus work in China for the past 5 years through [grant] R011R01A|110964: “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” That’s now been renewed, with a specific focus to identify cohorts of people highly exposed to bats in China, and work out if they’re getting sick from CoVs.… Collaborators include Wuhan Institute of Virology (currently working on the nCoV) and Ralph Baric.

The results of the work to date include: • [Redacted] • Discovered Swine Acute Diarrheal Syndrome Virus (SADS-CoV) killing >25,000 pigs in Guangdong Province (Published in Nature) • Found SARS-related CoVs that can bind to human cells (Published in Nature), and that cause SARS-like disease in humanized mouse models. • [Redacted] Also, prior to the above R01, Peter’s folks worked under an R01 with Eun-Park as Program Officer on viral discovery in bats, and originally identified SARS-CoV as having a likely origin in bats (published in Science). Folkers forwards the message to Anthony Fauci and others.

In a “Notice of Award” dated July 13, 2020, the NIH increased the amount of NIH money going to Peter Daszak’s firm, EcoHealth Alliance, by $369,819 with a project period that runs from June 1, 2014, through June 30, 2025, for Daszak’s project “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” EcoHealth was to receive $637,980 in each of the years 2019 through 2024 under the grant.

Did they really think they could push through Marx in the US?

• Controversial Biden Banking Nominee Omarova Bows Out (JTN)

Cornell Law Professor Saule Omarova withdrew her nomination for comptroller of the currency following Senate Republicans voicing concerns about her Marxist ties. In Omarova’s withdrawal letter posted Tuesday by the White House, she wrote that while it was an honor to be nominated by President Joe Biden, “it is no longer tenable” for her to continue as a nominee and ultimately lead the agency in charge of regulating American banks. Biden responded that he accepts Omarova’s withdrawal, and says she “was subjected to inappropriate personal attacks that were far beyond the pale.” Biden described his former nominee as “a strong advocate for consumers and a staunch defender of the safety and soundness of our financial system” who would have “brought invaluable insight and perspective to our important work on behalf of the American people.”

Republicans, moderate Democrats and banking industry officials disagreed with Biden’s nomination. Omarova, a Kazakh native educated in the USSR, was under scrutiny for a history of leftist statements, as previously reported by Just the News. In 2019, she tweeted, “Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best.'” A video surfaced earlier this year of the Moscow State University alumna cheering for oil and gas companies to go bankrupt. Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) responded by calling on Biden to withdrawal Omarova’s nomination. As recently as October of this year, a paper by Omarova was published titled, “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy.”

The professor called for “replacing commercial bank reserve accounts with universally available deposit accounts” so “all U.S. citizens and law-abiding citizens and lawful residents, local governments, nonbanking firms and nonbusiness entities” can bank at the Federal Reserve. Her proposed plan would have the Federal Reserve take money from these accounts when “it is necessary to expand the money supply in order to stimulate economic activity.” Her thesis at Moscow State University was “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital,” but she declined to provide it to the Senate Banking Committee to review.

No word on what is in the deal. Over a quarter of a trillion dollars.

• Apple Signed Secret $275 Billion Deal With Chinese Government (ZH)

Investors and journalists have been openly questioning whether Apple CEO Tim Cook, once praised for his deep-rooted connections within the CCP, has allowed his relationships in China to sour as the US has stepped up criticisms over human rights – treatment of the Uyghers in Xinjiang and elsewhere – and Taiwan. These ties have grown intensely controversial, eliciting criticism from lawmakers, rivals and even the company’s own employees. And just as the SEC prepares to boot dozens of Chinese companies off of US stock exchanges for refusing to comply with US audit standards (something the CCP has expressly forbidden under the auspices of data privacy), reporters with the Information have just published a bombshell: At some point in the not-too-distant past, Cook struck a $275 billion deal with the Chinese government while facing pressure from the CCP.

The deal emerged after a series of meetings between Cook and Chinese officials back in 2016. China is Apple’s second-biggest market after the US, and has long been targeted as a critical market for growth. Apple’s iPhones have seen growing popularity despite rising tensions with the US. This year, Apple became the second-biggest smartphone maker in China. The deal, which was forged over the span of years, represents a five-year plan, according to documents from inside Apple that have been seen by the Information. Whether talks on another five-year plan are in the works isn’t yet clear.

The fact that Apple never disclosed this deal to the US – it’s only just now being publicied – will likely trigger an angry response from lawmakers, who are bound to question Apple’s loyalty to the US, along with whether it prioritized profits and growth over respecting human rights (so much for all that climate virtue signaling). Before the deal was struck, documents show, Apple executives were scrambling to salvage their relationship with Chinese officials, who had accused Apple of not contributing enough to the local economy. Amid the government crackdown and the bad publicity that accompanied it, iPhone sales plummeted, though they have since bounced back.

Yesh, just try and put US missiles on Ukraine soil. Buchanan’s view is from the Cold War.

• Putin To Biden: ‘Finlandize’ Ukraine, Or We Will (Pat Buchanan)

Either the U.S. and NATO provide us with “legal guarantees” that Ukraine will never join NATO or become a base for weapons that can threaten Russia — or we will go in and guarantee it ourselves. This is the message Russian President Vladimir Putin is sending, backed by the 100,000 troops Russia has amassed on Ukraine’s borders. At the Kremlin last week, Putin drew his red line: “The threat on our western borders is … rising, as we have said multiple times. … In our dialogue with the United States and its allies, we will insist on developing concrete agreements prohibiting any further eastward expansion of NATO and the placement there of weapons systems in the immediate vicinity of Russian territory.” That comes close to an ultimatum. And NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg backhanded the President of Russia for issuing it:

“It’s only Ukraine and 30 NATO allies that decide when Ukraine is ready to join NATO. … Russia has no veto, Russia has no say, and Russia has no right to establish a sphere of influence trying to control their neighbors.” Yet, great powers have always established spheres of influence. Chinese President Xi Jinping claims virtually the entire South China Sea that is bordered by half a dozen nations. For 200 years, the United States has declared a Monroe Doctrine that puts our hemisphere off-limits to new colonizations. Moreover, Putin wants to speak to the real decider of the question as to whether Ukraine joins NATO or receives weapons that can threaten Russia. And the decider is not Jens Stoltenberg but President Joe Biden.

In the missile crisis of 60 years ago, the U.S., with its “quarantine” of Cuba and strategic and tactical superiority in the Caribbean, forced Nikita Khrushchev to pull his intermediate-range ballistic missiles, which could reach Washington, off of Fidel Castro’s island. If it did not do so, Moscow was led to understand, we would use our air and naval supremacy to destroy his missiles and send in the Marines to finish the job. Accepting a counteroffer for the U.S. withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey, Khrushchev complied with President John F. Kennedy’s demand. Russia’s missiles came out. And Kennedy was seen as having won a Cold War victory. Now it is we who are being told to comply with Russia’s demands in Ukraine, or Russia will go in to Ukraine and neutralize the threat itself.

When the Warsaw Pact collapsed and the USSR came apart three decades ago, Russia withdrew all of its military forces from Central and Eastern Europe. Moscow believed it had an agreed-upon understanding with the Americans. Under the deal, the two Germanys would be reunited. Russian troops would be removed from East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. And there would be no NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. If America made that commitment, it was a promise broken. For, within 20 years, NATO had brought every Warsaw Pact nation into the alliance along with the former Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Neocons and Republican hawks such as the late John McCain sought to bring Ukraine and two other ex-Soviet republics, Georgia and Moldova, into NATO.

Putin, who served in the KGB in the late Soviet era and calls the breakup of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, is now saying: Enough is enough. Translation: “Thus far and no further! Ukraine is not going to be a member of NATO or a military ally and partner of the United States, nor a base for weapons that can strike Russia in minutes. For us, that crosses a red line. And if NATO proceeds with arming Ukraine for conflict with Russia, we reserve the right to act first. Finlandize Ukraine, or we will!”

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Debt Rattle November 4 2021

Nov 042021

November 4, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:22 am Finance Tagged with: adverse events, death benefits, EcoHealth, ethics, mandatory jabs, MEPs, NIH, rare 71 Responses »

Pablo Picasso The bathers 1918

• Long List Of Athletes Who “Suddenly” Died Or Fell Seriously Ill (R24)

• 54x More Deaths Reported For Corona Vaccines Than All Others Combined (MP)

• The Most Dangerous Vaccines In Human History… By A Long Shot (Kirsch)

• EU Keeping Details Of Contracts With Vaccine Makers Secret From MEPs (RT)

• Families Could Be Denied Death Benefits For Unvaccinated Loved Ones (JTN)

• Airport Disruptions Possible As Biden Vaccine Mandate For TSA Workers Looms (ZH)

• NIH Officials Worked With EcoHealth Alliance To Evade Restrictions (IC)

• Canadian Provinces Nix Mandatory Covid Jabs For Hospital Workers (MSN)

• Do Not Give Up Your Rights ~ Dr. Julie Ponesse (BI)

Pilot
https://twitter.com/i/status/1455909385612451846

DeSantis

“A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose yours; a recovery is when Dr. Fauci loses his.” @GovRonDeSantis pic.twitter.com/79IhmjBaIA

— Jennifer Arcuri (@Jennifer_Arcuri) November 3, 2021

Google translate from German. Listing the rare events among professional sporters. Maybe a long list like this rings some bells.

• Long List Of Athletes Who “Suddenly” Died Or Fell Seriously Ill (R24)

Here is the list of horrors, starting in June 2021 – when the vaccination campaigns were in full swing and everyone who blindly trusted the system had already had their second shot. We are not claiming that all of these people fell ill and died because of the vaccination, nor that there is a proven connection in the case of vaccination. The date indicated mostly corresponds to the day of the report and does not have to coincide with the date of the event. With the links we researched, it is noticeable that the majority of them lead to articles that are hidden behind a payment barrier and can therefore be read by relatively few people. Conicidence? Feel free to inform us about further cases or errors: Redaktion@report24.news

4.6.21, Italy, 29 years
Italy: 29-year-old ex-professional Giuseppe Perrino collapses during a charity game for his dead brother and dies.

7.6.21, Germany 38 years
The table tennis professional Michael Schneider dies suddenly and unexpectedly.

12.6.21, Denmark, 29 years
The footballer Christian Eriksen collapses lifeless during a European Championship game – he can be revived, but needs a pacemaker for the rest of his life.

22.6.21, Hungary, 18 years
Footballer Viktor Marcell Hegedes died warming up for training in Hungary.

14.07.21, the Netherlands, age 31
Speed skating Olympic champion Kjelt Nuis seriously ill after vaccination, with heart problems in hospital.

07/16/21, Egypt
Footballer Imad Bayumi died during a friendly match in Egypt.

July 22nd, 21, Germany, 36 years
On July 22nd, SV Olympia Schlanstedt and Germania from Kroppenstedt met. During the game Schlanstedts player Nicky Dalibor collapsed and had to be reanimated on the field.

23.07.21, Germany, 27 years
Tim B. from SV Hamberge (Schleswig-Holstein) collapses after returning from a soccer tournament and dies.

07/24/21, Germany
A player from TuS Hoberge-Uerentrup (Bielefeld) collapses on the pitch with cardiac arrest.

31.07.21, Netherlands, age 19
The 19-year-old handball player WhitnEe Abriska died of cardiac arrest just before a flight.

02.08.21, Belgium, 18 years
Rune Coghe (18) from Eendracht Hoglede (Belgium) suffers heart attack during game

August 2nd, 21, Austria, 18 years
Chronicle: 18-year-old unnamed player in Burgenland (Austria) collapses on the field and can be saved thanks to the use of a helicopter.

08/06/21, Germany
District league player of the SpVgg. Oelde II has to be revived by his opponent.

14.08.21, Belgium, 37 years
The only 37-year-old former French professional footballer Franck Berrier died of several heart attacks while playing tennis.

08/15/21 Germany
Goalkeeping coach of SV Niederpˆring suffers heart attack after training.

08/16/21 France 24 years
Bordeaux pro Samuel Kalu collapses with cardiac arrest during a Ligue 1 game

18.08.21, Belgium, 25 years
Belgian soccer player Jente Van Genechten (25) suffers cardiac arrest in the early stages of a cup game.

21.08.21, Turkey, 31 years
Fabrice Sakala (31) from Besiktas Istanbul collapses on the field without interference from the opponent and has to be taken to the hospital

22.08.21, Italy, 29 years
Pedro Obiang from Italian first division club Sassuolo Calcio after Covid vaccination with myocarditis in hospital.

22.08.21, Venezuela, age 30
Venezuelan national marathon champion Alexaida Guedez dies of a heart attack during a 5,000 meter run.

24.08.21, Luxembourg, age 29
JosE dos Reis, a Red Black Pfaffenthal (Luxembourg) player, collapses on the field and has to be resuscitated.

08/29/21, Germany
In the C-League Dillenburg (Central Hesse) a player from Hirzenhain collapses, the game is canceled.

05.09.21, France, 16 years
Diego Ferchaud (16 years old) from ASPTT Caen suffers cardiac arrest in a U-18 league match in Saint-LU.

09/06/21, Austria
ASV Baden player (Lower Austria) collapses on the field and has to be reanimated.

06.09.21, Italy, 16 years
16-year-old unnamed soccer player in Bergamo suffers cardiac arrest

06.09.21, Belgium, 27 years
Belgian amateur footballer Jens De Smet (27) from Maldegem suffers a heart attack during the game and dies in hospital.

06.09.21, Italy, 13 years
13-year-old soccer player from the Janus Nova club from Saccolongo (Italy) collapses on the field with cardiac arrest

07.09.21, Great Britain, age 17
17 year old soccer player Dylan Rich dies of a double heart attack during a game in England.

09.09.21, Germany
Player from the Birati Club M¸nster suffers in a regional league game against FC Nordkirchen II Eriksen fate: collapse with cardiac arrest. Game is canceled

09/10/21, Germany, 24 years
Lucas Surek (24) from BFC Chemie Leipzig has myocarditis.

11.09.21, France, 49 years
Ain / France: Frederic Lartillot succumbs to a heart attack after a friendly match in the locker room

09/11/21, Italy, 45 years
Andrea Astolfi, sports director of Calcio Orsago (Italy) suffers a fulminant heart attack after returning from training and dies at the age of 45 without any previous illness

11.09.21, Denmark, 22 years
Abou Ali (22) collapses with cardiac arrest during a two-tier game in Denmark

11.09.21, Netherlands, 19 years
The ice hockey player Sebastiaan Bos passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.

09/13/21, Germany
Anil Usta from VfB Schwelm (Ennepetal) collapses on the field with heart problems

13.09.21, France 33 years
Dimitri Lienard from FC Strasbourg collapses in a Ligue 1 game with heart problems.

14.09.21, USA 37 years
Ex-NFL pro Parys Haralson dies suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 37.

09/18/21, Germany 25 years
Kingsley Coman (25) from FC Bayern Munich had an operation on the heart after an arrhythmia.

18.09.21, Canada 25 years
Canadian college football player Francis Perron passed away shortly after a match.

19.09.21, France 19 years
19-year-old soccer player from FC Nantes suffers cardiac arrest during training

09/19/21, Germany
Volleyball trainer Dirk Splisteser from SG Traktor Divitz collapses dead on the sidelines

09/21/21, Augsburg
Assistant referee of a Kreisliga Augsburg game in Emersacker, collapses with heart problems

09/21/21, Germany
At the World Cup qualifier for women between Germany and Serbia in Chemnitz, the English linesman Helen Byrne had to be carried off the pitch with heart problems

09/27/21, Germany
Game abandoned due to cardiac arrest of the referee in a game of Lauber SV (Donauworth district)

27.09.21, Italy, 20 years
Young rider suffers a heart attack at the end of a tournament.

09/28/21, Germany, 17 years
17-year-old soccer player of the JSG Hoher Hagen has to be reanimated in Hannoversch Munden during the game

28.09.21, Italy, 53 years
53-year-old football coach Antonello Campus collapses while training with his youth team in Sicily

28.09.21, USA, 16 years
Twice vaccinated teen collapses playing soccer and dies soon after.

09/29/21, Germany
Team leader Dietmar Gladow from Thalheim (Bitterfeld) suffers a fatal heart attack before the game

09/29/21, USA
A high school football player collapsed during practice and died in the hospital.

09/30/21, Germany
A player collapsed in the A 2 regional league game between SV Hoßkirch and TSV Sigmaringendorf. He suffered cardiac arrest and had to be resuscitated.

1.10.21, Germany, 15 years
Young goalkeeper Bruno Stein from FC An der Fahner Hohe in Grafentonna, Thuringia, died at the age of 15.

October 3, 21, Austria, 64 years
Ex-goalkeeper coach and most recently talent scout Ernst Scherr suddenly and unexpectedly died.

4.10.21, Germany, 42 years
Alexander Siegfried from VfB Moschendorf suddenly and unexpectedly collapsed and died.

7.10.21, Italy, 17 years
A 17-year-old athlete from Colverde breaks down with cardiac arrest while training.

8.10.21, France, 49 years
SC Massay player suffers a fatal heart attack during the game.

9.10.21, Mexico
The caddy Alberto Olguin collapses dead on the golf course after a heart attack. It is said to be the second death of its kind within a short period of time.

9.10.21, England, age 29
Shrewsbury professional striker Ryan Bowman has to be treated with a defibrillator after half an hour of play with extreme heart problems.

10.10.21, Italy, 18 years
Football player suddenly faints on the pitch, is reanimated by fellow players.

10.10.21, France, 40 years
After warming up, a Saint-James player suffers a heart attack.

10.10.21, Italy, 59 years
A long-distance runner from Biella dies of heart failure during a race.

10/10/2021, Germany
In the game between Wacker Mecklenbeck and Fortuna Freudenberg in the women’s Westphalia league, a player collapsed shortly before the end without any opposing influence.

10/12/21 Germany, 25 years
HC TuRa Bergkamen goalkeeper Lukas Bommer dies suddenly and unexpectedly.

13.10.21, Mexico, 16 years
The student Hector Manuel Mendoza dies of a heart attack while training.

14.10.21, Brazil, 18 years
The young professional footballer Fellipe de Jesus Moreira suffered a double heart attack and is fighting for his life.

14.10.21, Italy, 27 years
The multiple cycling champion Gianni Moscon has to undergo surgery because of severe cardiac arrhythmias.

14.10.21, Italy, 53 years
An AH footballer suffers a heart attack while training.

15.10.21, USA, 14 years
The 14-year-old soccer player Ava Azzopardi collapsed on the pitch and is now fighting for her life in an artificial coma.

16.10.21, France, 54 years
AH player Christophe Ramassamy died of a heart attack during a match.

17.10.21, France, 41 years
A soccer player collapsed on the pitch and died, apparently of cardiac arrest.

27.10.21, Austria, 26 years
Ghanaian Raphael Dwamena collapsed with severe heart problems. He was wearing a defibrillator before the incident.

28.10.21, Germany, 48 years
Hertha BSC co-trainer Selim Levent dies suddenly and unexpectedly while on vacation.

28.10.21, USA, 12 years
12-year-old Jayson Kidd collapsed while training basketball and later died.

30.10.21, Spain, 33 years
FC Barcelona striker Kun Aguero had to be replaced in one game due to heart problems. He is now in the hospital for examinations.

Google translate. Also from Germany.

• 54x More Deaths Reported For Corona Vaccines Than All Others Combined (MP)

More than 1,800 reported deaths that occurred in connection with COVID-19 vaccinations, including five children who have already died: That is the balance of the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) by the end of September 2021 – a good nine months after the conditional EU- Approval of the vaccine for adults and one and a half months after the vaccination recommendation of the Standing Vaccination Commission (STIKO) at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for twelve to 17 year olds. The comparison with the reporting data that the PEI lists on previous vaccinations with all vaccines indicates a largely ignored risk. In relation to the vaccinated persons, the Federal Institute received around 54 times more death reports in the course of the COVID-19 vaccine than for all other vaccines from the year 2000 to the present combined.

Vaccinations against COVID-19 have been in place in Germany since December 27, 2020. Three quarters of a year later, after almost 107.9 million vaccine doses of the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna and the vector vaccines from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, a questionable safety record emerges. This is shown by the safety report published by the PEI last week. In it, the institute lists reported illnesses and deaths in connection with the vaccinations up to September 30th. Accordingly, the total number of reported suspected cases of undesirable vaccine reactions rose by almost 16,000 to 172,188 cases since August 31. These included 21,054 severely affected people (almost 6,000 more than in the previous month) with serious complications. The reported reactions led to death in 1,802 people. The number of those who died shortly after being vaccinated against COVID-19 and who were reported to the PEI grew by 24 percent in one month.

The suspicious activity reports up to September 30th now include hundreds of cases that affect children and adolescents. For the age group of 12 to 17 year olds, the PEI lists a total of more than 1,800 suspected side effects, 405 of which it classified as serious. 98 adolescents had to be treated with a heart muscle inflammation in the hospital. According to the PEI, five of the minors affected died between two and 24 days after the vaccination. The PEI explains about these deaths in its report: “One fatality affects a 16-year-old female adolescent who died of an arrhythmia. Three male adolescents who died had serious previous illnesses. Multiple organ failure, pulmonary hemorrhage, disseminated, intravascular coagulation, septic shock and fever in one case (male, 14 years old), fever and circulatory collapse in the second case (male, 15 years old and pulmonary embolism in the third case (male, 16 years old)). ”

In addition, a twelve-year-old boy died shortly after the vaccination. However, the PEI had “very little, overall inadequate information on the course and the circumstances of death” on this case. According to the institute, the three boys who died with, according to the PEI, had serious previous illnesses “The causal connection with the vaccination cannot be assessed, but the symptoms and the course of the disease are different and have no clinical similarities.”

“They are 800X more dangerous than the smallpox vaccine with respect to death..”

• The Most Dangerous Vaccines In Human History… By A Long Shot (Kirsch)

Almost 20 years ago, 60 Minutes ran a story “The Most Dangerous Vaccine” which quoted Paul Offit: “We know if we immunize a million people, that there will be 15 people that will suffer severe, permanent adverse outcomes and one person who may die from the vaccine,” says Dr. Paul Offit, one of the country’s top infectious disease specialists, and he knows all about vaccines that prevent those diseases. In his lab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, he studies and creates new vaccines. There’s nothing new about the smallpox vaccine. The vaccine was created in 1796. The vaccine used today is essentially the same, Offit says. “We tend to think of vaccines as being very safe and every effective, which they are. But all the vaccines that we use today are the result of modern technology.

That’s not true of the smallpox vaccine. It has a side effect profile that we, we would not accept for vaccines today,” he says. According to multiple independent analyses summarized here, the death rate from the COVID vaccines used in the US is at least 400 deaths per million doses. That’s 800 deaths per million fully vaccinated. That makes the COVID vaccines the new leader by a long shot: the most dangerous vaccine ever created in history. They are 800X more dangerous than the smallpox vaccine with respect to death, and over 25X worse with respect to permanent disability (since the permanent disability rates are 10% higher than the death rate as you can see from the OpenVAERS redbox summary for US reports).

According to Offit, this rate of death and disability is unacceptable. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been calling for a halt to these vaccines since May 25, 2021 when I wrote this very long article for TrialSiteNews summarizing what I found after 3 weeks of intensive research. Fast forward to the present. Offit voted to approve these same vaccines for kids at the October 26 VRBPAC meeting because he refuses to look at the safety analysis (done using 8 different data sources). Offit thinks nobody has died or been permanently disabled by these vaccines. What does he think caused all those VAERS reports? I wish I could ask him that question. He doesn’t think there is a single death caused by the vaccine. That’s impossible. The VAERS data shows that virtually all the deaths in VAERS are excess deaths. If the vaccine didn’t cause those deaths, what did? Nobody at the FDA, CDC, or on the committees has figured out that the COVID vaccines are 800X more deadly than the former record holder. I’m pretty sure I’m the first one to figure this out.

“Pfizer takes great care to ensure that all financial responsibility for compensating citizens injured from the inoculations is that of the respective government.”

• EU Keeping Details Of Contracts With Vaccine Makers Secret From MEPs (RT)

In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism released a damning report on Pfizer, saying negotiators for the drug company had behaved in a “bullying” manner with several Latin American countries. In Argentina they demanded “additional indemnity” against civilians seeking legal compensation after suffering adverse effects from their vaccines. In the agreements, Pfizer takes great care to ensure that all financial responsibility for compensating citizens injured from the inoculations is that of the respective government. The company also enjoys the protection of non-disclosure agreements with many of its nation clients, including the European Commission and the US government. With regards to the EU, Brussels is forbidden from disclosing information that would be “material to Pfizer without the consent of Pfizer,” Public Citizen reported.

In fact, CureVac was being quite generous with the EU Commission, considering it was the only pharmaceutical company that agreed to release its contract to the light of day. Of course there wasn’t much to inspect with all of the redactions, but beggars can’t be choosers, right? In light of the steady pressure bearing down on Brussels, much of it happening behind closed doors, the European Commission has obliquely admitted – almost one year too late, and after the rights and freedoms of European citizens have been crushed underfoot – that they failed to use good judgment when ramming through these emergency vaccines.

Last week, in an overwhelmingly passed resolution (458 in favor, 149 against and 86 abstaining), the EU Parliament demanded legislation that would make “the process of researching, purchasing and distributing Covid-19 vaccines more transparent, stating: “This would enable MEPs to effectively scrutinize EU vaccine policies. At the same time, the Commission should be discussing these policies more openly with citizens.” This shocking statement by the EU Parliament shows how little respect Brussels had for democratic principles when it was negotiating with the vaccine makers, who have, incidentally, reaped a windfall from the pandemic. The parliamentarians, who are coming under fire at home, demanded that “the Commission discloses who negotiates vaccine purchases on its behalf. It should publish purchase agreements made with vaccine suppliers, including details of public investments and vaccine costs, and publicise any potential breaches of contract.”

Then, in what comes off as the understatement of the century, the MEPs are of the opinion that “more information could help counter vaccine hesitancy and disinformation, and pharmaceutical companies should also release extensive clinical trial data and reports.” Oh, you think so? .

Kicking dead bodies.

• Families Could Be Denied Death Benefits For Unvaccinated Loved Ones (JTN)

Families of unvaccinated workers may not receive death benefits if the person dies of COVID-19, says Kaiser Health News. In an article on its website, KHN said the New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority is denying $500,000 death benefits to the families of the unvaccinated subway, bus and commuter workers. “It strikes me as needlessly cruel,” lawyer Mark DeBofsky, who represents workers in benefit disputes, told CNN. Other employers are are considering the federal vaccine mandate as justification for denying potential death benefits, or insurance claims based on someone’s vaccination status. “There’s a frustration level, particularly at this point when these vaccines are fully approved,” said the president of the Council for Disability Awareness, Carol Harnett.

“You’re trying to protect yourselves and your employees, both from themselves and the general public.” According to NYMTA, approximately five workers have died as a result of COVID since June 1, when the company’s vaccine policy changed. “We are not aware they have been vaccinated,” said an MTA spokesperson. New York’s MTA is the largest company to announce its policy change concerning death and insurance benefits. The company’s policy change comes after MTA has struggled with increasing vaccination rates, which haven’t surpassed 70% among its workers. MTA’s death benefits are on top of any other life insurance policy an employee may have. The program is an extension of another death benefits program which provides a lump sum to any person who dies on the job.

“Up to 40 percent of TSA workers, who oversee airport security checkpoints, have not gotten vaccinated yet..”

• Airport Disruptions Possible As Biden Vaccine Mandate For TSA Workers Looms (ZH)

Top Republican Congress members voiced concerns of possible domestic air travel concerns due to President Joe Biden’s pending COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal employees, including Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers. Up to 40 percent of TSA workers, who oversee airport security checkpoints, have not gotten vaccinated yet, the GOP lawmakers wrote in a letter to TSA Administrator David Pekoske. They requested that Pekoske provide an update on whether a staffing shortage of TSA workers looms and if the agency has a contingency plan in place. “Unfortunately, it appears TSA is headed toward a scenario in which up to 40 percent of its workforce may not be compliant with the President’s Executive Order by the November 8 deadline.

“Such a scenario could have severe impacts on transportation security and the aviation, travel, and tourism industries,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the ranking senator on the Transportation Committee, and Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee. In mid-October, Pekoske told CNN that as many as 4 out of 10 TSA workers, including security screeners, haven’t received the vaccine yet. Pekoske added that his agency is “building contingency plans” over possible staffing shortages. Although Nov. 8 is the deadline for all federal workers to get vaccinated under an executive order signed by Biden in September, Pekoske hasn’t provided an update since his CNN interview aired.

At the time, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said that the vaccination statuses among workers are self-reported to the agency, and Pekoske’s remark doesn’t necessarily mean that 40 percent of TSA workers haven’t received the shot. The Epoch Times has contacted DHS for comment. And while the GOP lawmakers said they believe vaccines are the best way for TSA workers to protect their coworkers and others, they warned that Biden’s mandate may cause “significant disruptions” to air travel and the agency’s operations—namely, as the holiday travel season approaches. “Such a scenario could have severe impacts on transportation security and the aviation, travel, and tourism industries,” they wrote.

“A steep decline in the number of available [security officers] to screen passengers during the upcoming holiday season could have severe impacts on our economy, including small and rural communities such as the ones we represent.” The U.S. Office of Personnel Management in October issued a memo saying federal agencies should begin enforcing the administration’s vaccine mandate starting Nov. 9 for federal workers who still aren’t vaccinated.

The US National Institutes Of Health help Daszak and Fauci to hide their crimes.

• NIH Officials Worked With EcoHealth Alliance To Evade Restrictions (IC)

The National Institutes Of Health allowed a U.S. nonprofit it funds to police its own controversial research on bat coronaviruses in China, raising new concerns about insufficient oversight at the agency. Detailed notes on NIH communications obtained by The Intercept show that beginning in May 2016, agency staff had an unusual exchange with Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, about experiments his group was planning to conduct on coronaviruses under an NIH grant called “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” The notes were taken by congressional staff who transcribed the emails.

EcoHealth was entering the third year of the five-year, $3.1 million grant that included research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other partners. In a 2016 progress report, the group described to NIH its plans to carry out two planned experiments infecting humanized mice with hybrid viruses, known as “chimeras.” The plans triggered concerns at NIH. Two staff members — Jenny Greer, a grants management specialist, and Erik Stemmy, a program officer handling coronavirus research — wrote to EcoHealth Alliance to say that the experiments “appear to involve research covered under the pause,” referring to a temporary moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research that would be reasonably anticipated to make MERS and SARS viruses more pathogenic or transmissible in mammals.

Generally, gain-of-function research involves manipulating viruses to give them new attributes; it becomes of concern to the government when the altered viruses appear likely to cause more severe disease or spread more easily among humans. One of the experiments proposed by EcoHealth Alliance involved making chimeras from the MERS virus. The other experiment used chimeras developed from bat viruses related to SARS. The researchers went on to infect the genetically engineered mice with the altered viruses. Initially, NIH staff appeared intent on enforcing the funding pause. The two administrators requested additional information from EcoHealth Alliance within 15 days and noted that the next round of funding would be withheld until the information was received.

They also asked the group to provide a detailed description of changes that would allow the researchers to pursue their aims without conducting the dangerous experiments. But what happened next sets off alarm bells for biosafety advocates: Agency staff adopted language that EcoHealth Alliance crafted to govern its own work. The agency inserted several sentences into grant materials describing immediate actions the group would take if the viruses they created proved to become more transmissible or disease-causing as the result of the experiments. Although the experiments demonstrate a lack of oversight and present dangers to public health, according to several scientists contacted by The Intercept, none of the viruses involved in the work are related closely enough to SARS-CoV-2 to have sparked the pandemic.

Too much hesitancy.

• Canadian Provinces Nix Mandatory Covid Jabs For Hospital Workers (MSN)

Canada’s most populated provinces said Wednesday said they will not force health care workers to get Covid vaccines, saying mass layoffs of staff who do not get shots would devastate hospitals. Canada’s government has mandated Covid vaccines for some 300,000 bureaucrats and anyone travelling on planes or trains in the country© Ted ALJIBE Canada’s government has mandated Covid vaccines for some 300,000 bureaucrats and anyone travelling on planes or trains in the country The decisions by the governments of Ontario and Quebec — the provinces hardest hit by the pandemic — were announced separately.

Quebec had originally set a mid-October deadline for its health care workers to be fully vaccinated, but pushed it to back November 15 in hopes that more people might come around. Quebec Health Minister Christian Dube told a news conference that the relatively few holdouts — about 14,000 people or three percent of health care workers in the province — could now opt instead to get frequent Covid testing. “We have tried everything to vaccinate the last three percent,” said Dube, adding that it was “incomprehensible” to him why some doctors or nurses were still refusing to be immunized. “Unfortunately, our health network in our current situation cannot do without these people,” he said.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, meanwhile, said that after weighing the impact of “the potential departure of tens of thousands of health care workers” who refused to get immunized against the current “small number of outbreaks” in hospitals in the province, he decided he would not make vaccines mandatory. Instead, such decisions would be left up to individual hospitals, he said. At a news conference, Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott pointed to impacts of mandatory vaccines in other jurisdictions, such as British Columbia having to cancel surgeries and diagnostic tests after suspending more than 3,000 unvaccinated health care workers. Ottawa has mandated Covid vaccines for 300,000 federal bureaucrats as well as anyone travelling on planes or trains in the country, but has not said how many federal workers missed its October 30 deadline to show proof of vaccination. Since Monday, airlines Air Canada and WestJet, and Toronto’s transit agency announced suspensions without pay of more than 1,200 workers in total for failing to get jabs.

“..I was dismissed for doing exactly what I had been hired to do. I was a professor of ethics questioning what I take to be an unethical demand.”

• Do Not Give Up Your Rights ~ Dr. Julie Ponesse (BI)

Think back to a couple of years ago—fall 2019, let’s say. What were you doing then? What was your life like? What did you care about? What did you most fear? What DID YOU IMAGINE ABOUT the FUTURE? That’s the person I would like to talk to for the next 15 minutes, + I’ll begin with my own story: At the end I’ll have a FAVOUR to ask plus a little SECRET to share. In the fall of 2019, I was a professor of ethics and ancient philosophy; I taught students critical thinking + the importance of self-reflection, how to ask good questions and evaluate evidence, how to learn from the past and why democracy requires civic virtue. Fast forward to September 16, 2021 when I received a “termination with cause” letter after I questioned, and refused to comply, with my employer’s vaccine mandate.

I was dismissed for doing exactly what I had been hired to do. I was a professor of ethics questioning what I take to be an unethical demand. You don’t have to look very hard to see the irony. Canada is governed by laws which are based on ethics. You could say that ethics are the bedrock beneath our democracy. “The right to determine what shall or shall not be done with one’s own body, and to be free from non-consensual medical treatment, is a right deeply rooted in our common law.” These aren’t my words; they are the words of Justice Sydney Robins of the Ontario Court of Appeal.

With very few exceptions, each person’s body is considered inviolate in Canadian law, and this is the underlying ethos of the Nuremberg Code, a promise to humanity that we would never again endorse uninformed, non-voluntary medical decision-making, even for the patient’s own good, even for the sake of the public good. By definition, vaccine mandates are coercive immunization strategies: in the absence of coercion — the threat of a loss of employment, for example — people would voluntarily agree to do what the mandate is trying to achieve! Employers are holding our careers hostage, and removing our participation in the economy and in public life. Their justification is that “we are in a pandemic,” and we must therefore relinquish autonomy over our bodies for the sake of the public good. So, let’s talk about autonomy and the public good for a minute.

In emergencies, the Parliament and provincial legislatures have a limited power to pass laws that violate certain Charter rights for the sake of the public good. But, to justify those violations, vaccine mandates would need to meet a very high threshold: COVID-19 would, for example, need to be a highly virulent pathogen for which there is no adequate treatment, and the vaccines would need to be demonstrably effective and safe. The current state of affairs in Canada meets neither of these criteria.

Pfizer superheroes
https://twitter.com/i/status/1455851913363304450

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Debt Rattle October 24 2021

Oct 242021

October 24, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:30 am Finance Tagged with: Baldwin, beagles, Fauci, FDA, Israel, Nebraska, NIH, Pfizer, public health experiment, puppies, Steve Keen, Wuhan 38 Responses »

M. C. Escher Reptiles 1943

• Bipartisan Letter Demands Answers From Fauci On Cruel Puppy Experiments (Hill)

• NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan (VF)

• The Current Covid-19 Mass Vaccinations Are A Public Health Experiment (Geert)

• Infection Rates for Vaccinated Aged 40-79 Double the Rates in Unvaccinated (DS)

• Israeli Doctors, Scientists Tell FDA Of Severe Concerns Over Vaccine Data (AFD)

• FDA Buries Data on Seriously Injured Child in Pfizer’s Clinical Trial (Siri)

• On The Primacy Of The Physician-Patient Relationship (HCR)

• Generation Covid-19: Are The Kids Going To Be All Right? (Age)

• Lock Him Up (Denninger)

• From Economic Fantasy to Ecological Reality on Climate Change (Steve Keen)

McCullough
https://twitter.com/i/status/1451686955096420357

Science
https://twitter.com/i/status/1451818366272954375

Is it time to put a price on their heads? Run them out of town at the very least. If Congress won’t get rid of these guys, someone else will. I am sick to my stomach.

• Bipartisan Letter Demands Answers From Fauci On Cruel Puppy Experiments (Hill)

A bipartisan letter demands answers from the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s chief medical adviser. The White Coat Waste Project, the nonprofit organization that first pointed out that U.S. taxpayers were being used to fund the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology, have now turned its sights on Anthony Fauci on another animal-testing-related matter — infecting dozens of beagles with disease-causing parasites to test an experimental drug on them. House members, most of whom are Republicans, want Fauci to explain himself in response to allegations brought on by the White Coat Waste Project that involve drugging puppies. According to the White Coat Waste Project, the Food and Drug Administration does not require drugs to be tested on dogs, so the group is asking why the need for such testing.

White Coat Waste claims that 44 beagle puppies were used in a Tunisia, North Africa, laboratory, and some of the dogs had their vocal cords removed, allegedly so scientists could work without incessant barking. Leading the effort is Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), writing a letter to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) saying the cordectomies are “cruel” and a “reprehensible misuse of taxpayer funds.” “Our investigators show that Fauci’s NIH division shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive,” White Coat Waste told Changing America. “They also locked beagles alone in cages in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights to use them as bait to attract infectious sand flies.”

Vanity Fair’s take.

• NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan (VF)

“I totally resent the lie you are now propagating.” Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to be channeling the frustration of millions of Americans when he spoke those words during an invective-laden, made-for-Twitter Senate hearing on July 20. You didn’t have to be a Democrat to be fed up with all the xenophobic finger-pointing and outright disinformation, coming mainly from the right, up to and including the claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon cooked up in a lab. The immediate target of Dr. Fauci’s wrath was Senator Rand Paul, who was pressing the nation’s top doctor to say whether the National Institutes of Health had ever funded risky coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Based on new information disclosed by the National Institutes of Health, however, Paul might have been onto something.

On Wednesday, the NIH sent a letter to members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that acknowledged two facts. One was that EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit that partners with far-flung laboratories to research and prevent the outbreak of emerging diseases, did indeed enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans, which the NIH letter described as an “unexpected result” of the research it funded that was carried out in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The second was that EcoHealth Alliance violated the terms of its grant conditions stipulating that it had to report if its research increased the viral growth of a pathogen by tenfold. The NIH based these disclosures on a research progress report that EcoHealth Alliance sent to the agency in August, roughly two years after it was supposed to.

An NIH spokesperson told Vanity Fair that Dr. Fauci was “entirely truthful in his statements to Congress,” and that he did not have the progress report that detailed the controversial research at the time he testified in July. But EcoHealth Alliance appeared to contradict that claim, and said in a statement: “These data were reported as soon as we were made aware, in our year four report in April 2018.” The letter from the NIH, and an accompanying analysis, stipulated that the virus EcoHealth Alliance was researching could not have sparked the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, given the sizable genetic differences between the two. In a statement issued Wednesday, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins said that his agency “wants to set the record straight” on EcoHealth Alliance’s research, but added that any claims that it could have caused the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic are “demonstrably false.”

EcoHealth Alliance said in a statement that the science clearly proved that its research could not have led to the pandemic, and that it was “working with the NIH to promptly address what we believe to be a misconception about the grant’s reporting requirements and what the data from our research showed.” But the NIH letter—coming after months of congressional demands for more information—seemed to underscore that America’s premier science institute has been less than forthcoming about risky research it has funded and failed to properly monitor. Instead of helping to lead a search for COVID-19’s origins, with the pandemic now firmly in its 19th month, the NIH has circled the wagons, defending its grant system and scientific judgment against a rising tide of questions. “It’s just another chapter in a sad tale of inadequate oversight, disregard for risk, and insensitivity to the importance of transparency,” said Stanford microbiologist Dr. David Relman. “Given all of the sensitivity about this work, it’s difficult to understand why NIH and EcoHealth have still not explained a number of irregularities with the reporting on this grant.”

A 3-month trial to direct the rest of your life.

• The Current Covid-19 Mass Vaccinations Are A Public Health Experiment (Geert)

First, there is no precedent to the use of non-replicating viral vaccines in mass vaccination campaigns conducted during a pandemic, or even epidemic, of a highly mutable virus. The challenge of such an undertaking becomes even more difficult as more infectious antigenic variants had already been circulating by the time the first mass vaccination campaigns were initiated (i.e., Alpha, Beta, and Gamma variants). Their spread was featured by distinct temporal and geographic patterns, the underlying mechanism of which was not understood. Prior to the start of this universal vaccination program no single publication existed that came even close to suggesting that mass vaccinations using vaccines that permit transmission could be successful in extinguishing a pandemic of a highly mutable virus.

No such publication exists to this day, and the idea becomes even more preposterous when considering several infectious variants had already expanded in prevalence by the time the vaccines were rolled out. There is ample evidence from similarly highly mutable RNA viruses like Influenza virus and Enterovirus that expansion in prevalence of antigenic variants is driven by selective immune pressure on viral infectiousness exerted by antibodies, and that antigenic variation diminishes or even abolishes the protective neutralization capacity of Influenza virus or Enterovirus vaccines directed at a specific antigenic lineage (1, 2). Consequently, nonreplicating monovalent enteroviral vaccines, for example, are only used at scale in vaccination campaigns of vulnerable target groups (e.g., children) deployed to fight recurrent epidemics of life-threatening enterovirus infection (e.g., EV-A71) in the Asia Pacific region (3).

Interestingly, the US FDA did not approve these vaccines due to ‘concerns about the effectiveness against different pandemic strains, safety, and quality control of vaccine production’ (3). Mass vaccination programs previously conducted to combat viral epidemics/pandemics (e.g., smallpox, polio, measles, yellow fever) have nothing in common with the ongoing mass vaccination campaigns today as those viruses are very different in terms of their pathogenesis, transmissibility, route of infection, potential reservoirs, predominant effector mechanisms involved in antiviral immunity, susceptibility of population segments, as well as with regard to the vaccines used (all prior vaccination campaigns involved live-attenuated virus). In addition, vaccine efficacy as assessed during clinical trials is different from viral effectiveness, which reflects how well a vaccine performs in the field.

Viral effectiveness, therefore, depends on the level of infectious pressure exerted by the viral population and the level of immune selection pressure exerted by the host population (among other factors). Those can be very different from the ones prevailing during clinical trials. This particularly applies when the vaccine is used in mass vaccination campaigns rolled out in the middle of a pandemic of more infectious variants. Because of large-scale pharmaceutical (e.g., mass vaccination) and nonpharmaceutical (e.g., infection-prevention measures) human interventions, significant changes in viral infectious pressure and population-level immune pressure can suddenly take place and dramatically accelerate or slow down the evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic, especially if more infectious variants are circulating.

Whereas the final target population should have the same profile as the one enrolled in the vaccine trials, current Covid-19 (C-19) vaccines are now administered to several segments of the population that have not been part of the pivotal clinical trials that enabled their authorization for emergency use (e.g., children, elderly, pregnant women, women of childbearing age, individuals who previously recovered from Covid-19 disease). Furthermore, the follow-up of study participants in the clinical trials did not extend beyond 3 months as the WHO had declared the pandemic a health emergency of international concern. Short-term results from clinical vaccine trials that were conducted on a small subset of a specific target population during a short period of a pandemic caused by a specific SARS-CoV-2 lineage (most notably the original Wuhan strain) cannot even be considered informative for vaccine effectiveness of mass vaccination campaigns deployed globally across almost all population segments over a prolonged period of a pandemic trajectory involving several waves of infection caused by several different more infectious viral variants.

It’s the 40-49 group that comes out worst in all of the stats these days.

• Infection Rates for Vaccinated Aged 40-79 Double the Rates in Unvaccinated (DS)

Another week, another Vaccine Surveillance report (now published by the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA), the successor to Public Health England), and with it more worrying news on the vaccine front. Infection rates in the double-vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated continue to rise, meaning unadjusted vaccine effectiveness continues to decline. Infection rates are now higher in the double-vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated by 124% in those in their 40s, 103% in those in their 50s and 60s and 101% in those in their 70s, corresponding to unadjusted vaccine effectiveness estimates of minus-124%, minus-103% and minus-101% respectively. For those over 80 the unadjusted vaccine effectiveness is minus-34% while for those in their 30s it is minus-27%. For 18-29 year-olds it is 25%, so still positive but low, while for under-18s it is 90%, the only age group showing high efficacy.

Vaccine effectiveness against emergency hospital admission and death continues to hold up, though with some indication of gradual slide, particularly in older age groups. The UKHSA has continued to receive criticism for publishing this data, with claims that the figures used for the unvaccinated population are unreliable and likely too high, artificially suppressing the infection rate and vaccine effectiveness. Cambridge statistician Professor David Spiegelhalter put out a scathing tweet on these lines on Friday, but he didn’t elaborate on his claim or link to an article explaining it further. Professors Norman Fenton and Martin Neil have argued that in fact the PHE/UKHSA data may underestimate the number of unvaccinated rather than overestimate them, which would have the reverse effect.

Either way though, what wouldn’t change is the fact of the large and fast decline in effectiveness against infection. This is now generally acknowledged among many scientists (likely caused by waning over time or new variants or both), though has not had the logical impact on Government policy one might have expected and hoped for of eliminating the rationale for vaccine passports and mandates. A further point revealed for the first time in this week’s surveillance report is that the vaccines may actually hobble the body’s ability to develop the strongest immunity once infected. As noted by Alex Berenson, the report mentions (in passing) that “recent observations from U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA) surveillance data” show that “N antibody levels appear to be lower in individuals who acquire infection following two doses of vaccination”.

“In the Book of Leviticus, it is said ‘Do not stand idly by while your neighbor’s blood is shed.’”

• Israeli Doctors, Scientists Tell FDA Of Severe Concerns Over Vaccine Data (AFD)

An independent Israeli group of physicians, lawyers, scientists, and researchers called the Professional Ethics Front today advised the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding the upcoming FDA discussion on administering COVID-19 vaccines to children aged 5-11, expressing “severe concerns” regarding the reliability and legality of official Israeli COVID vaccine data. “We are aware that the state of Israel is perceived as ‘the world laboratory’ regarding the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, as reflected by statements made by Dr. Albert Bourla, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and other senior figures in leading health authorities throughout the world,” the letter reads. “It is therefore our understanding that the data and information coming from Israel play a crucial role in critical decision-making processes in regards to COVID-19 vaccination policies.

“We thus see it of utmost importance to convey a message of warning and raise our major concerns regarding potential flaws in the reliability of the Israeli data with respect to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, as well as many significant legal and ethical violations that accompany the data collection processes.” The letter elaborates: “We believe that the significant failures underlying the Israeli database, which have been brought to our attention by numerous testimonies, impair its reliability and legality to such an extent that it should not be used for making any critical decisions regarding the COVID-19 vaccines.” “This document briefly outlines the main failures that lead to this unfortunate, albeit inevitable, conclusion,” the notice reads. “We emphasize that we can expand and clarify further, as well as provide references, in relation to each of the failures described below.

[..] The Israeli Professional Ethics Front concludes its notice to the FDA: “In accordance with the accepted perception established after World War II, the findings of experiments obtained in illegal and immoral ways should not be relied upon. We believe that the same rules should apply to the findings of the current experiment in Israel, since these findings were obtained through significant legal and ethical infringements. Our conclusion is further reinforced by the significant doubts about the reliability of the data reported by Israel, as detailed above, and the consequent major concern that their use might be misleading and thus disrupt the decision-making processes pertaining to the Pfizer-BioNtech COVID-19 vaccines.

“In the Book of Leviticus, it is said ‘Do not stand idly by while your neighbor’s blood is shed.’ In the spirit of those words, we implore the committee to take into consideration our urgent warnings and adopt utmost precaution when referring to the Israeli data concerning the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNtech COVID-19 vaccines.”

Fire everyone at the FDA too. Seriously, get rid of these people.

• FDA Buries Data on Seriously Injured Child in Pfizer’s Clinical Trial (Siri)

When Stephanie and Patrick de Garay enrolled their 12-year-old child Maddie and her two brothers in Pfizer’s Covid-19 clinical trial, they believed they were doing the right thing. That decision has turned into a nightmare. Maddie, a previously healthy, energetic, full of life child, was within 24 hours of her second dose reduced to crippling, scream-inducing pain that landed her in the emergency room where she described feeling like someone was “ripping [her] heart out though [her] neck.” Over the next several months the nightmare continued, during which Maddie was hospitalized several times and suffered numerous systemic injuries, requires a tube through her nose that carries her food and medicine, and a wheelchair for assistance.

Ms. de Garay documented every detail of Maddie’s injury and reported it to the principal investigator for the Pfizer trial at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital where the vaccine clinical trial was occurring and where Maddie was treated and admitted. They first tried to treat Maddie as “a mental patient,” telling the family it was psychological and in Maddie’s imagination. Then they claimed it was unrelated to the vaccine (copy of recording with hospital below), and when that argument failed, Pfizer listed this traumatic adverse event as “functional abdominal pain” when reporting to the FDA. Ms. de Garay reported what occurred to the CDC and FDA through VAERS in June 2021 but nobody from these agencies sought additional information or followed-up with the de Garays.

Ms. de Garay also reached out to Dr. Nath, a Chief in the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, responded by stating he was “Sorry to hear of your daughter’s illness” and that “We have certainly heard of a lot of cases of neurological complications form [sic] the vaccine and will be glad to share our experience with them.” Unfortunately, other than a call arranged by Maddie’s neurologist, there was no follow-up or response from NIH or any other federal health agency. Even after Ms. de Garay did a press event on June 28, 2021 with Senator Ron Johnson, neither Pfizer nor any health agency reached out in any manner to address Maddie’s injury or obtain any additional information.

I saw the doc from the Nebraska AG when it came out, but it was a PDF made up entirely of images of the text. Not very user friendly for me.

• On The Primacy Of The Physician-Patient Relationship (HCR)

I have not written much at this site, or any site, in recent years due to being kept busy supporting litigation regarding bad healthcare information technology as an expert witness. A recent letter, however, so caught my eye regarding both current events and my past writing about bad health IT, that I decided to write about it. It is perhaps a poignant reminder of the craziness of the times in which we physicians find ourselves that a well researched letter on the primacy of the doctor-patient relationship, and the non-interference with that relationship by outside forces based on opinions of non-clinicians, half-baked ideas, overzealous government, media hysteria to garner audience share, etc. comes not from the hallowed halls of academia or a prestigious medical journal – but from a state Attorney General, namely, of Nebraska.

The letter, dated Oct. 14, 2021 and entitled “Prescription of Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine as Off-Label Medicines for the Prevention or Treatment of Covid-19”, is located at this link: https://ago.nebraska.gov/sites/ago.nebraska.gov/files/docs/opinions/21-017_0.pdf, It was requested by Dannette R. Smith, the Chief Executive Officer of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. I recommend reading it in its entirety. In this 48-page letter, arguments regarding sanctioning of Nebraska physicians for their decisions on how to treat their patients with FDA-approved drugs for off-label purposes are discussed in significant detail and with significant literature references. The letter reaches the conclusion that:

“… Based on the available data, we do not find clear and convincing evidence that a physician who first obtains informed consent and then utilizes ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 violates the UCA (Nebraska Uniform Credentialing Act). This conclusion is subject to the limits noted throughout this opinion. Foremost among them are that if physicians who prescribe ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine neglect to obtain informed consent, deceive their patients, prescribe excessively high doses, fail to check for contraindications, or engage in other misconduct, they might be subject to discipline, no less than they would be in any other context … Allowing physicians to consider these early treatments will free them to evaluate additional tools that could save lives, keep patients out of the hospital, and provide relief for our already strained healthcare system.”

No matter one’s opinion on the specifics of this particular controversy, the primacy of the physician-patient relationship – absent extreme circumstances of malfeasance/malpractice – is a principle that should not now, and should never need a 48 page letter for its justification.

No.

• Generation Covid-19: Are The Kids Going To Be All Right? (Age)

To be a young adult in late 2021 is to have come of age while COVID-19 put your life on hold. Gone were the dreams of big 18th birthday bashes and a bustling university life. Career ambitions were deferred, exotic holidays abroad with friends a distant dream. Jobs evaporated and social lives shrivelled. For this generation, unemployment reached 10.8 per cent last month, while participation rates – the number of 15 to 24-year-olds either working or looking for work – slumped to just 51.3 per cent, from 55 per cent in March last year. As Melbourne awakens from its sixth lockdown, a generation of the city’s youth are coming to terms with the loss of almost two years of their early adult lives. No other group of young people across the country has suffered quite like those in Melbourne.

Whether it be school-leavers whose gap-year plans have been scuttled, or uni students struggling to stay afloat in remote university classes, COVID-19 has irreparably changed the course of these young people’s personal and professional lives. Now taking their first steps forward in a post-lockdown city, parents and peers alike are wondering: will the kids be all right? “I’ve just turned 21, and there’s only a few more weeks left of my degree,” says Thomas, who does not want his surname published. “I’ve made an application for a postgrad in law – which was my original plan – but if I get accepted, I think I’m going to defer and take the year off. “As a student who was already struggling with chronic mental illness, these last two years have been hell. I feel like what should’ve been some of the most freeing years of my life have been robbed from me. “I need a break.”

He’s far from alone. A longitudinal study of Australia’s young people conducted by the Department of Education, Skills and Employment showed 23 per cent of 20-year-olds lived with a serious mental health illness in 2020, up from just 7 per cent in 2014. It showed young people are in insecure work at higher rates than six years ago (39 per cent were in permanent work in 2020, compared with 43 per cent in 2014) and were underemployed at higher rates (42 per cent would prefer to work more hours, compared with 32 per cent in 2014). Unsurprisingly, given these numbers, 70 per cent of surveyed 20-year-olds were living with their parents, and of those who had moved out by 19, almost a third had been forced to move back in.

“Whether Baldwin believed the weapon was loaded or not only goes to the issue of whether this is murder rather than manslaughter..”

• Lock Him Up (Denninger)

Reality is that Alec Baldwin intentionally pointed a firearm at a person and pulled the trigger. Exactly why he did so remains in question, as the slaughter did not occur during the “action” portion of filming — that is, he was not pointing it at one of the other actors in the film at the time. In fact he pointed it at cinematographer, killing her and and wounding the director behind her who the round also struck. This is, at best, voluntary manslaughter. I do not care if you’re on a movie set or otherwise; a firearm is handed to you with the action open and thus unable to discharge — always. A firearm is always loaded, even if you’re told it is not. You never point a firearm at anything you’re unwilling to destroy, even momentarily. And you never pull the trigger of a firearm until and unless you are pointing it at whatever you are willing to destroy.

That it is occasionally necessary in film production to violate one or more of these rules doesn’t change the rules. It simply means that you had damn well better make certain you’re not going to shoot someone as a result of doing so. In this particular case there is zero evidence Alec Baldwin had any valid reason within the context of the film to point that weapon, believed loaded or not, at a cinematographer. She was not an actor in the film. There is no claim that the weapon malfunctioned (e.g. was dropped) either; older guns, which would be rather common in a western, might not have the safety features of a modern firearm that prohibit them from firing if dropped or otherwise mishandled so that is not at issue in this instance. The evidence and presumption to this point is that the weapon was pointed at the cinematographer and the trigger depressed, both intentional acts.

Whether Baldwin believed the weapon was loaded or not only goes to the issue of whether this is murder rather than manslaughter; he had a duty to inspect what he was allegedly told was a “cold” weapon and verifying it was incapable of discharge if his part in the film required him to point it at, or where in the potential path of a projectile, a human is or could be. It is clear he did not do so and that, at minimum is killing by negligence, commonly known as voluntary manslaughter. If, as appears evident, he intentionally pointed the weapon at the cinematographer and pulled the trigger outside of a requirement to “shoot” at someone while filming was being rehearsed or was actually taking place (e.g. he was pissed off for some reason and that’s why he pointed the alleged “cold gun” at her and pulled the trigger) then I argue depravity is arguably present as well and that’s Murder 2. Baldwin must be arrested now. There is no reasonable means to claim this is an “accident”; Halyna was first the victim of felony assault with a deadly weapon when a firearm was pointed at her without lawful purpose and then was killed when, through an intentional act, it was discharged. I don’t give a crap how rich or famous Baldwin is

Steve has been doing a lot of climate work, and is running for office in Sydney.

• From Economic Fantasy to Ecological Reality on Climate Change (Steve Keen)

This was an invited talk to the Oxford Department of International Development “Climate Change and the Challenges of Development Lecture Series”, on my criticisms of the application of neoclassical economics to climate change. I focused on the new paper by Dietz et al. that allegedly calculates the economic costs of tipping points: Dietz, S., J. Rising, T. Stoerk and G. Wagner (2021). “Economic impacts of tipping points in the climate system.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(34): e2103081118. Upon closer examination, this papers fails to consider tipping points in any credible way, and this is obvious in its incredible claim (in the original sense of the “not credible”), that: “Tipping points reduce global consumption per capita by around 1% upon 3°C warming and by around 1.4% upon 6°C warming. This is ridiculous: the tipping points they consider are:

• Arctic summer sea ice,
• The Greenland Ice Sheet,
• The West Antarctic Ice Sheet,
• The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (“Gulf Stream”),
• The Amazon Rainforest,
• The Indian Monsoon,
• Permafrost, and
• Ocean methane hydrates.

If all 8 of these tripped–especially with a temperature 3-6°C above pre-industrial levels–we would be experiencing a climate utterly unlike anything Earth has seen for tens of millions of years. The thought that this would just reduce global consumption by just 1.4%–compared to what it would be if none of these tipping points were triggered–doesn’t pass what Nobel Laureate Robert Solow once called “the smell test”: “every proposition has to pass a smell test: Does it really make sense?”. I show why this paper stinks in Solow’s sense.

Dads on Duty

DADS ON DUTY: After a violent week of fighting at a Louisiana high school, parents knew something had to change. So, a group of dads decided to show up not just for their kids – but for the whole student body – to help maintain a positive environment. @SteveHartmanCBS has more. pic.twitter.com/Uux3qx48sd

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) October 22, 2021

Swiss

Swiss Protest against the vaccine passports pic.twitter.com/goT9scShL2

— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) October 23, 2021

Massive, powerful display of protest against vaccine passports in Bern, Switzerland. The protesters wear yokes to symbolize the desire of the ruling class to treat workers like livestock that they can drug at will.pic.twitter.com/qq9z5gVxef

— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) October 23, 2021

Milan

WATCH: Massive crowd demonstrates against vaccine passports in Milan.

pic.twitter.com/J68pwnpa58

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) October 24, 2021

Udine
https://twitter.com/i/status/1452004619459104773

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Debt Rattle October 22 2021

Oct 222021

October 22, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:52 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Celente, Civil War, DeSantis, Fauci, India, NIH, Psaki, Snowden, Wuhan 60 Responses »

M. C. Escher Still life and street 1937

• Covid Vaccines Will Keep You From Acquiring Full Immunity (Berenson)

• Vax Fight is On and Not Stopping – Gerald Celente (USAW)

• NIH Changes Story, Confirms It Funded Wuhan Gain-of-Function Experiment (JTN)

• Dr. Anthony Fauci Received Big Pay Increase To Prevent Pandemics (F.)

• India Administers A Billion Covid Jabs (F24)

• Over 300,000 Unvaxxed Australia Supermarket Workers To Lose Their Jobs (Sky)

• Striking Hospital Staff Hold Protest In Athens (K.)

• DeSantis Calls Special Session To Ban Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates (UPI)

• The Real Reasons for the Congressional 1/6 Committee (Greenwald)

• Jen Psaki Hates You (Klavan)

• Edward Snowden: ‘If You Weaken Encryption, People Will Die’ (TNW)

• Assange to Get Same Judge Who Sided with US on Appeal (Lauria)

Adverse reactions
https://twitter.com/i/status/1451159900940226564

Masks on kids

Florida's New Surgeon General Asks People To Step Away From What You Hear On TV For A Moment…

And Listen To What He Has To Say About School Mask Mandates & The Data… pic.twitter.com/5kngX0UQft

— Covid-1984 (@Spiro_Ghost) October 20, 2021

“I feel like I’m being groomed by an abusive partner.”

"I feel like I'm being groomed by an abusive partner."

GP Dr Renee Hoenderkamp says she has had enough of the Government threatening to cancel Christmas with another national lockdown.@TVKev | @DrHoenderkamp pic.twitter.com/XQiIGDAGZk

— talkRADIO (@talkRADIO) October 21, 2021

They’ll do much more than that.

• Covid Vaccines Will Keep You From Acquiring Full Immunity (Berenson)

Don’t take it from me, I don’t even get to tweet anymore. Take it from a little place I call the British government. Which admitted today, in its newest vaccine surveillance report, that: “N antibody levels appear to be lower in people who acquire infection following two doses of vaccination.” (Page 23) What’s this mean? Several things, all bad. We know the vaccines do not stop infection or transmission of the virus (in fact, the report shows elsewhere that vaccinated adults are now being infected at much HIGHER rates than the unvaccinated). What the British are saying is they are now finding the vaccine interferes with your body’s innate ability after infection to produce antibodies against not just the spike protein but other pieces of the virus.

Specifically, vaccinated people don’t seem to be producing antibodies to the nucleocapsid protein, the shell of the virus, which are a crucial part of the response in unvaccinated people. This means vaccinated people will be far more vulnerable to mutations in the spike protein EVEN AFTER THEY HAVE BEEN INFECTED AND RECOVERED ONCE (or more than once, probably). It also means the virus is likely to select for mutations that go in exactly that direction, because those will essentially give it an enormous vulnerable population to infect. And it probably is still more evidence the vaccines may interfere with the development of robust long-term immunity post-infection. Aside from that, everything is fine.

Well it looks like the “mysterious” great die off has begun. pic.twitter.com/HIT26w31oL

— Ed ☯️ The Obsolete Man…a Free Thinker (@DowdEdward) October 22, 2021

“This is the beginning of a civil war. There are going to be states seceding from the Union, and they are going to push for it..”

• Vax Fight is On and Not Stopping – Gerald Celente (USAW)

Gerald Celente, a renowned trends researcher, is back this time to talk about the unrelenting full blown “Vax Wars” he predicted many months ago. Many people are being told “no vax, no job,” and now it’s really heating up. Celente explains, “The fight is on. The people that are not going to get it are not going to get it. They’re done. The fight is on. From the very beginning, I said about the ‘Covid War,’ it’s going to be anti-vax, anti-establishment, anti-immigration parties forming. This is the beginning of a new populous movement like we have never seen before. It is just the beginning. Remember, ‘it does not take a majority to prevail, but an irate tireless minority keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the hearts and minds of men,’ said Samuel Adams. . . .

‘Vax Wars,’ this is bigger than the Vax Wars. This is a war about freedom, and it’s going to rage around the world. Look what happened in Italy last week. Looks what’s going on in France. In the United States, it’s going to happen as well. This is the beginning of a civil war. There are going to be states seceding from the Union, and they are going to push for it. What they are doing is totally unconstitutional, un-American and un-Godly.” (as in God the Father.) All of the unions that usually support Democrats are up in arms about the coerced vax mandates. Is the DNC going to lose a huge segment of its base? Celente says, “Yes, they are. They are not the Democrat Party. They are not the Republican Party. It’s a crime syndicate. These are criminals. They are murderers and thieves. How much more proof does anybody need. . . .

Yes, the unions are going to run from the Democrat Party. There are going to be new forming parties. I say by their deeds you shall know them. Hey, you are too big to fail. The banksters, the Federal Reserve pumping in $29 trillion (in 2008 and 2009 to bail out their buddies.) . . . .They are murderers and thieves, and we are going to have a new political movement. You know what’s going to have to be behind this movement? Self-sustainability, it has to be a self-sustaining U.S. without supply chain backups. Why are we buying all that crap from China? . . . Why aren’t we making things in the United States? Because lowlife Democrat and Republican pieces of crap sold us out to get the products made overseas so they could mark up the prices when they brought them back.”

On the economic front, Celente says the trend is inflation and a coming collapse. What going to set that off? Celente says, “When they raise interest rates, this thing goes down — end of story. If they can’t put that monetary methadone out there for the money junkies for free anymore, this thing goes down. Inflation is going to make them raise rates. It’s going to make them start tapering. This is not a capitalist society, it’s fascist. They are buying $120 billion a month of government and corporate bonds. They are buying corporate bonds? Oh yeah, and junk bonds too. . . . That is a merger of state and corporate powers. That’s what Mussolini called fascism.” Celente says this is going to end badly, and he’s talking about “the greatest financial crash in history.” The little guy, meaning “We the People,” should prepare, and time to do that is running short. Celente says, “Prepare for the worst. If the worst doesn’t happen and you are prepared, you lose nothing. If the worst happens and you are not prepared, be prepared to lose everything.

“Knowingly. Willfully. Brazenly.”

All of a sudden, lying to Congress is no longer a serious offence.

• NIH Changes Story, Confirms It Funded Wuhan Gain-of-Function Experiment (JTN)

Two weeks after National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins announced his retirement, his agency has complicated congressional testimony by Collins and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci about alleged gain-of-function virus research sponsored by the U.S. Both officials have denied approving grants for such research through the EcoHealth Alliance and Wuhan Institute of Virology, but a letter Wednesday from NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak to House Oversight Committee ranking Republican James Comer describes an unforeseen experimental result that calls the denials into question.

The letter shows that “NIH — and specifically, Collins, Fauci, and Tabak — lied to Congress, lied to the press, and lied to the public,” Richard Ebright, lab director at Rutgers University’s Waskman Institute of Microbiology, tweeted Wednesday night when sharing the letter. “Knowingly. Willfully. Brazenly.” The final progress report submitted by EcoHealth in August described a “limited experiment” in which a modified bat coronavirus made mice “sicker” than than original virus, Tabak told Comer. “As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do.”

NIH determined the proposed research didn’t meet the standard for “enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential” because it wasn’t shown these bat coronaviruses could infect humans. But “out of an abundance of caution” it required EcoHealth to “immediately” report “a one log increase in growth” if it happened, which would trigger a secondary review of the research by NIH. EcoHealth didn’t do that, Tabak wrote, and it now has five days to turn over “any and all unpublished data” from the research to NIH. The letter repeatedly emphasizes the viruses studied under the EcoHealth grant and “subaward” to the Wuhan lab “could not have become SARS-CoV-2” because the “sequences of the viruses are genetically very distinct.”

May 12: "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute"

May 26: "That is correct" that the NIH never funded gain of function

July 20: "I have never lied before the Congress and I do not retract my statement." pic.twitter.com/hfXQorHv1e

— X Strategies LLC (@XStrategiesLLC) October 21, 2021

How much do Pfizer, Moderna pay him?

• Dr. Anthony Fauci Received Big Pay Increase To Prevent Pandemics (F.)

In a January article published at Forbes, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that Dr. Anthony Fauci was the highest paid federal employee, earning $417,608 (2019). Dr. Fauci is still the top-paid federal employee earning $434,312 in 2020. Fauci is the Director of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and current Chief Medical Advisor to the President. Fauci out-earned the U.S. president ($400,000); four-star generals in the military ($282,000); and roughly 4.3 million other federal employees. Now, new documents released via our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from the NIH tell us a lot more. Dr. Fauci received a big pay hike for his biodefense research activities. In other words, Fauci was paid to prevent future pandemics.

The documents released to our non-profit organization OpenTheBooks.com reveal that Dr. Fauci was approved for a “permanent pay adjustment” in excess of his regular salary in December 2004, during the George W. Bush Administration. From 2004 through 2007, Fauci received a 68-percent pay increase from $200,000- to $335,000-a year. This award was permanent and carried forward through 2020. Fauci’s permanent pay raise was to “appropriately compensate him for the level of responsibility… especially as it relates to his work on biodefense research activities.” However, critics say that Fauci was funding research that was actually creating pandemic pathogens in labs that, if leaked or if fell into the wrong hands, might create the very human pandemic they were trying to prevent.

Abusing the success of ivermectin to jab more people.

• India Administers A Billion Covid Jabs (F24)

According to the government, around three-quarters of adults in the country of 1.3 billion people have had one shot and around 30 percent are fully vaccinated. However, hundreds of millions of Indians under 18 — who make up some 40 percent of the population — have not had a single shot. India suffered a huge spike in cases in April and May, reporting more than 400,000 infections and 4,000 deaths per day, with many hospitals unable to cope and crematoriums overwhelmed. Cases have since fallen sharply, with fewer than 20,000 infections per day, and most activity has returned to normal. Mumbai, one of India’s myriad teeming cities, recently reported zero deaths in a day for the first time since the pandemic began.

The government was reportedly set to celebrate the milestone with Prime Minister Narendra Modi thanking health workers, special announcements at railway stations and airports and monuments lit up in the national colours. Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya tweeted: “Congratulations India! This is the result of the visionary PM Modi’s able leadership.” Only China has administered more doses — the Chinese government says it has given more than 2.3 billion shots. India began vaccinations in January and after a slow start, it is now administering around eight million jabs per day. “During the first wave, I remember hearing people talking about whether coronavirus was real or not,” said Reham Ali, a 49-year-old taxi driver in New Delhi who said he has had one shot. “Now, people know that it is and there is less hesitancy. The second wave was an eye-opener.”

Exports of vaccines — halted earlier this year — have tentatively resumed, with officials saying the “pharmacy of the world” will be back in full swing again in 2022 Most restrictions on activity have been lifted, with crowds celebrating India’s main religious festival season — an important time for the battered economy — for the first time in two years. This has sparked concerns about a new wave of infections and a renewed push by the government to push people to get their second shots. Media reports last week said an expert panel of India’s drug regulator recommended the use of the homegrown Covaxin — one of seven Covid-19 vaccines approved in India — for under-18s. “I think it is unlikely that we will see a third wave that in any way resembles the second wave,” said Dr Gangandeep Kang, from the Christian Medical College, Vellore.

Really? Where are they going to find 300,000 others?

Better grow your own food.

• Over 300,000 Unvaxxed Australia Supermarket Workers To Lose Their Jobs (Sky)

More than 300,000 workers across Australia’s largest supermarket chains have been warned they will lose their jobs without a valid reason for not getting vaccinated. Woolworths employees in New South Wales, the ACT, the Northern Territory, Victoria and Western Australia have until January 31 next year to get vaccinated with a March 31 deadline set for workers in the remaining states. “If they don’t have a valid reason, we will engage with them, make sure they get the best possible advice and availability to vaccines,” Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci said. “But if they don’t have a valid religious or medical exemption, their employment at Woolworths will be terminated.”

“..to protest staff shortages and compulsory coronavirus vaccinations..”

The two are closely related.

• Striking Hospital Staff Hold Protest In Athens (K.)

Hundreds of state hospital workers marched Thursday through central Athens as part of a 24-hour strike to protest staff shortages and compulsory coronavirus vaccinations. About 500 protesters demonstrated in the center of the capital, heading past parliament toward the health ministry chanting slogans and holding up banners. Unions representing the doctors, nurses and other medical staff are protesting government plans they say exacerbate staffing shortages and lead to long working hours while undermining workers’ rights. Medical workers are also seeking to be included in the list of professions receiving extra hazard pay for “heavy and unhealthy” work. The unions have also objected to the suspension of unvaccinated health care workers, saying this only leads to further staff shortages.

Faced with rising infections and reluctance by many to get vaccinated, the government has introduced a series of incentives and penalties to encourage Greeks to get their anti-Covid-19 shots. Vaccinations have been made mandatory for health care workers and those working in care homes for the elderly, with those who refuse being suspended from work. Just over 60% of the country’s population of around 11 million people are fully vaccinated against Covid-19. The unions say that while they support vaccinations, individual staff members should have the right to choose. Greece has seen a spike in coronavirus infections this summer, and new daily cases stand at around 3,000. On Wednesday, the country saw 3,279 new cases and 38 new deaths, bringing the total confirmed cases to over 704,000 and the total death toll to nearly 15,500 in the country of nearly 11 million.

What was normal all through our lives is now revolutionary.

• DeSantis Calls Special Session To Ban Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates (UPI)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday called a special session of the Florida Legislature to pass legislation banning COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Speaking from the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office Hangar, he announced the special session would take place in November. He called for lawmakers to provide protections for workers whose employment is threatened by vaccine mandates. “Your right to earn a living should not be contingent upon COVID shots,” DeSantis said. “When the vaccines first came out, we worked very hard to provide it, particularly to our elderly, but we said from day one: We will make it available for all, but we will mandate it for no one because ultimately we want individuals to make the determinations about what is right for them.

“I want a state in which people are able to maintain their livelihoods, earn a living, and provide for their families. And if the federal government or big corporations are hurting people, then we have a responsibility to step up and lead.” DeSantis was joined in the press conference by Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez, Attorney General Ashley Moody and Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo. “The governor has made it clear: Florida will not stand by and allow hard working citizens to be subjected to unemployment because they are being forced to show vaccine documentation, especially those who have remained on the front lines of COVID-19 for nearly two years now,” Ladapo said. “The Department of Health will continue to protect Floridians through multi-faceted and data-driven solutions, not overreach.”

In addition to banning mandates, DeSantis called for employers to be held accountable if an employee becomes sick or injured from taking a mandatory vaccine. Ahead of the press conferences, members of DeSantis’ staff handed out signs to attendees featuring an alligator on a yellow background reading “Don’t Tread on Florida.”

“The endorphin-producing fantasies on which they fed for years [..] were way too viscerally arousing for them to simply forget that none of it happened.”

• The Real Reasons for the Congressional 1/6 Committee (Greenwald)

Underlying so much of the anger and resentment surrounding 1/6 is the complete dissonance between the narrative fed to the citizenry by Democrats and their media allies on the one hand, and the legal realities on the other. It must be infuriating and baffling to a large sector of the population to have been convinced that what happened on January 6 was an unprecedentedly dangerous insurrection perpetrated by an organized group of seditious traitors who had plotted to kidnap and murder elected officials, only for the Biden DOJ to have charged exactly nobody with any criminal charges remotely suggesting any of those melodramatic claims.

This was the same frustration and confusion that beset a large portion of liberal America when they were led to believe for years that Robert Mueller was coming to arrest all of their political enemies for treason and criminal conspiracy with Russia, only for the FBI Superman to close his investigation without charging a single American with criminal conspiracy with Russia and then issuing a report admitting that he could not find evidence to establish any such crime. How to keep the flock loyal when the doomsday prophecies continue to be unfulfilled, as the World-Ending Date comes and goes without so much as a bang, let alone an explosion?

Adam Schiff’s new book — which essentially claims that Mueller is senile and was suffering from pitiful dementia — is obviously intended to provide some solace or at least a framework of understanding for disappointed liberals to keep the faith, but deep down, they know what they were expecting. The endorphin-producing fantasies on which they fed for years — of Trump and Trump, Jr. and Jared and Bannon and Ivanka being frog-marched out of the White House by armed, strapping FBI agents — were way too viscerally arousing for them to simply forget that none of it happened.

A repeat of this disorientation and disillusionment when it comes to 1/6 could be quite dangerous for Democrats. It could be devastating to the media outlets which survive on serving the Democrats’ messaging and feeding dramatic conspiracy theories to the beleaguered liberal flock. In the days and weeks following 1/6, liberals really thought that dozens of members of Congress — from Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene — would be not just expelled from Congress but summarily imprisoned as traitors by a newly righteous Justice Department. They were led to believe that, with Bill Barr out of the way, Trump and his mafia family would finally pay for their crimes.

“Jen Psaki, sneering avatar of an aristocracy that regards working Americans as less than dirt.”

• Jen Psaki Hates You (Klavan)

Let us now praise Jennifer Rene Psaki—English major, sorority girl, mother of two. Let us praise her seemingly endless supply of monochrome crew-neck blouses and pencil skirts, the way she peels her mask off after striding to the lectern. Jen Psaki has been briefed by her 11 staffers; she has had her coffee (and her bagel, if it’s Wednesday); she is freshly armed with the latest talking points and she is not going to take any of your guff today. Jen communicates just how on top of things she is by nodding ceaselessly throughout every question, interjecting an “uh-huh” or a “yep” to show she has not been caught off guard since the last clause of the reporter’s sentence. This is a patented bobblehead technique she perfected as a commentator at CNN in between the Obama and Biden Administrations.

What she is saying or listening to is less important than what she is communicating with her demeanor at all times: that she is serious, that she is informed, that she is the adult in the room. We have all met someone who behaves like this: someone who has done the homework and wants you to know it. Someone whose politeness is so aggressive that it can only be read as a kind of challenge. Jen Psaki dares you to find her off-putting. Why would you? She is smiling. She even had a joke written down that she made at the appropriate juncture. See? It says “laughing time” right here in the schedule from 5:01 to 5:03 PM. Then laughing time is over, and it is time for the lies and the jabs and the polite little smirks. Jen Psaki is frankly disappointed that you would stoop so low as to question Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s right to paternity leave during a supply chain “crisis.”

It’s not really a crisis, anyway: “people have more money, expendable resources, more people are working than they were a year ago.” The economy is getting built back better, says Jen, and our ports runneth over. What are you, some kind of Peloton slut who can’t wait five extra months for your new treadmill? This is what Trump’s critics meant when they said we needed to restore “civility” to the White House: they meant we need the right kind of disdain for the right kinds of people, expressed in the right kinds of ways. Gone are the mean tweets, the off-color jokes, the rough pugilism. Now instead we have Jen Psaki, sneering avatar of an aristocracy that regards working Americans as less than dirt. People are straining to put food on the table and gas in their cars; they increasingly fail to see the point in going to work at all. Psaki’s response is that of the anointed class she represents: shut up and take it.

“This year alone, after the fall of the government of Afghanistan, we saw how crucial encryption is in keeping ordinary people safe.”

• Edward Snowden: ‘If You Weaken Encryption, People Will Die’ (TNW)

Our online privacy faces growing threats. Governments around the world are calling for encryption backdoors that would enable access to personal information. They argue that encryption protects criminals. But it also protects activists, dissidents, persecuted groups, and ordinary citizens. Edward Snowden is among the most prominent beneficiaries. The whistleblower’s first messages to journalists were made with encryption. They resulted in revelations that millions of Americans had been under illegal mass surveillance. “If you weaken encryption, people will die,” said Snowden in a statement. “This year alone, after the fall of the government of Afghanistan, we saw how crucial encryption is in keeping ordinary people safe.” Snowden has joined the Global Encryption Coalition to launch a campaign to protect encryption.

The group of civil society organizations and tech firms warns that undermining encryption will leave people more vulnerable to crime and surveillance. “I have seen first-hand how governments can abuse the power they have to access the personal data of innocent people in the name of national security,” said Snowden. “Weakening encryption would be a colossal mistake that could put thousands of lives at risk.” End-to-end encryption would make it harder to implement spy programs like the one Snowden exposed — which may be one reason why governments want to circumvent it. It would not be the first time that lawmakers have undermined our privacy in the name of fighting terrorism. Politicians assert — with justification — that criminal gangs and paedophiles use encryption.

But so do racial justice protestors to avoid police surveillance, LBTQ+ people in countries where their sexual orientation is criminalized, and even some of the politicians who have called for Snowden to be put in jail. Reporters also rely on encryption to protect their sources. “Now more than ever, journalists are facing digital threats to their work and safety,” said Lisa Dittmer, advocacy officer for Internet Freedom, Reporters Without Borders. “Encryption plays a critical role in protecting journalists and their sources, enabling them to share information even in the most dangerous environments. Yet as the need for encryption grows, so do the efforts to weaken it. Governments from India to Australia are calling for tech companies to build backdoors into their end-to-end encrypted systems.

In the UK, new regulation could make service providers criminally liable for the acts of users if law enforcement can’t access their encrypted data. Their proposals, however, could actually make people more vulnerable. Any encryption backdoor may be a target for criminals. The information they access could threaten both national security and individual privacy. “Encryption makes us all safer,” said Snowden. “From families protecting photographs of their kids, to personal healthcare information, encryption keeps our private information private.” We all have private conversations that we don’t want overheard. Encryption backdoors would give malicious actors another way to access them.

“Nothing in this case is proceeding as it should do.”

• Assange to Get Same Judge Who Sided with US on Appeal (Lauria)

Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde, the High Court judge who reversed an earlier court order to bar the U.S. from appealing Julian Assange’s medical issues, will preside over the substantive U.S. appeal hearing at the High Court next week. In January, lower court Judge Vanessa Baraitser refused the U.S. request to extradite the WikiLeaks publisher because of his high risk of suicide and the conditions of U.S. prisons. The U.S. applied to appeal that decision, which was granted by the High Court in July. The court allowed three of five grounds of appeal, excluding the matter of Assange’s health. The U.S. challenged that ruling and in an Aug. 11 High Court hearing, Holroyde overturned the earlier court decision, siding with the U.S. argument that Baraitser’s finding on Assange’s health could be appealed.

That will be the central argument in the two-day hearing beginning next Wednesday at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. The U.S. says Assange is not too ill to be extradited and has accused him of being a malingerer. Joining Holroyde on the High Court bench will be Dame Judith Farbey, who remained silent during the Aug. 11 hearing. It is highly unusual for a judge who has already ruled in favor of one party to continue on the bench, according to Consortium News legal analyst Alexander Mercouris. In most cases, fresh judges would be brought in who have had no part in earlier rulings for either side.

After the Aug. 11 hearing, Mercouris said Holroyde’s “comments made it clear” that he would not be part of the appeal panel. “If he does turn up on the panel then that would be an extremely serious development,” he said, adding that it would be “open to legal challenge if he did.” It is not known at this time whether Assange’s lawyers will challenge Holroyde’s appointment to the case. After learning Holroyde would indeed oversee the hearing next week, Mercouris said it was “extremely disturbing news” and “very worrying. Nothing in this case is proceeding as it should do.”

Soy Cuba

If you haven't yet seen the 'impossible' crane shot from Soy Cuba (1964), prepare to have your day made. pic.twitter.com/zbatIz2h6k

— Nick Dale (@NickDale) October 20, 2021

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

Debt Rattle September 13 2021

Sep 132021

September 13, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:46 am Finance Tagged with: eurozone, exemption, ivermectin, jabs, jobs, mandate, natural immunity, NIH, polio, unvaxxed, vaccine dystopia 40 Responses »

Pablo Picasso The actor 1904

• High Death Rate Among Vaccinated Brings Vaccine Dystopia Into View (Hirschhorn)

• Singapore 80% Double-Vaxxed But Life Is Not Returning To Normal (ABC.au)

• Laboratories in US Can’t Find COVID-19 in One of 1,500 Positive Tests (Xander)

• Grotesque Conflicts Of Interest On NIH Ivermectin Non-Recommendation (TSN)

• Damnit, Not Again (Denninger)

• One In Five Americans Say Employer Requires Vaccination (ZH)

• Unvaxxed Kentucky Health Care Workers Force Hospital to Fire Them (GP)

• Spectrum Health Workers Can Use Natural Immunity As Vaccine Mandate Exemption

• Jobs Without Jabs Australia (Sky)

• England Vaccine Passport Plans Ditched (BBC)

• The Polio Pandemic of 1949-52: No Closures, No Restrictions (Tucker)

• The Eurozone Is Going Down The Japan Way (Lacalle)

Myocarditis

Horrifying… pic.twitter.com/BEj4Fap5eD

— Osler (@osler78) September 12, 2021

Ducky

I have been searching for the immunogenic epitopes in the Spike Protein in order to understand what areas of CD8 and CD4 response could be presented in the vaccines because they are only the Spike. So here is a thread of my work in progress. https://t.co/C0vkRYCrZ8 pic.twitter.com/EbCqZF7C5E

— Ducky (@Ducky68257909) September 12, 2021

“..a death rate of .86 percent among the vaccinated and .17 percent among the unvaccinated..”

• High Death Rate Among Vaccinated Brings Vaccine Dystopia Into View (Hirschhorn)

A new report with detailed data from Public Health England provides some startling numbers. For the period of February 1 through August 2 there were COVID Delta variant cases for 47,000 people who had received 2 vaccine doses, and for 151,054 people who were unvaccinated. In the first group of vaccinated people, there were a total of 402 deaths. In the second much larger group with more than three times unvaccinated people, there were just 253 deaths. In other words, of the total COVID deaths 61 percent were in fully vaccinated people.

To get the death rate you divide the number of deaths by the total number of infection cases. That gives a death rate of .86 percent among the vaccinated and .17 percent among the unvaccinated. That is an amazing difference. The death rate among vaccinated was just over five times greater than that for the unvaccinated. Five times greater! In other words, unvaccinated people who got infected were enormously safer from death. Proving that COVID vaccines are not safe. It should also be noted that it was determined that the measured viral load in both groups was the same. So, why are vaccinated people dying more frequently than the unvaccinated? Here are some plausible explanations.

First, there is something very dangerous and unsafe in the COVID vaccines associated with spike proteins that are causing people to die at a higher rate. For example, as discussed elsewhere, all current vaccines have been associated with serious blood problems, notably both large and microscopic blood clots. Many people have died from brain bleeds and strokes, for example. There are also many, many other types of adverse side effects causing a host of medical problems. Two famous virologists warned against using the current vaccines because they are fundamentally unsafe and could be killing people. They envisioned a vaccine dystopia and loudly proclaimed that the mass vaccination program should be halted. Instead, they advocated the use of treatments using generic medicines like ivermectin, as detailed in Pandemic Blunder.

Second, it is reasonable to believe that most unvaccinated people have acquired natural immunity from some prior COVID infection. And that natural immunity is far more protective than the artificial or vaccine immunity obtained from jabs. Their natural immunity translates to fewer deaths. Yet the US like many other countries does not give credit for natural immunity on a par with vaccine immunity when it comes to COVID passports and mandates. Though a few nations do the right thing by honestly following the science. Third, vaccinated people are susceptible to breakthrough infections, which means that they are not protected against infection after they have been originally infected. Phony and dangerous COVID vaccines do not destroy the virus, nor prevent transmitting it to others. Some breakthrough infections are lethal.

[..] The new data from England involving very large numbers of people should be headline news. But the biased and dishonest big media suppress this kind of critical data. Why? Clearly, if vaccinated people die at a much higher rate than unvaccinated people, then why should people be enthusiastic about being vaccinated for initial shots or later booster ones? They should not. This is especially true for the millions of people who have natural immunity. The data from England show that people need to question CDC data because CDC has converted some vaccinated deaths to unvaccinated ones. Hospitals are often not testing vaccinated people for COVID, so breakthrough cases that can result in deaths go unreported. People should question the safety of all the COVID vaccines even if they get fully approved by FDA.

Singapore, the shining city on the hill…

“..its highest daily COVID-19 infections in more than a year..”

• Singapore 80% Double-Vaxxed But Life Is Not Returning To Normal (ABC.au)

Having passed the 80 per cent double-vaccination mark last month, the example of Singapore suggests that achieving a milestone coveted by Australia is not a guarantee of returning to anything like pre-pandemic life. The island state reluctantly delayed reopening measures and re-imposed some restrictions last week after seeing its highest daily COVID-19 infections in more than a year. On Sunday, the nation of 5.7 million people reported 555 new local COVID-19 cases, the most since August 2020. A day earlier, it recorded its 58th death, a partially vaccinated 80-year-old man with a history of diabetes, hypertension and heart problems.

Singapore’s Ministry of Health last week banned social gatherings at workplaces after recent clusters in staff canteens and pantries, believed to have been caused by employees removing their masks in common areas. With Singaporeans told to limit social gatherings to one per day, Gan Kim Yong — co-chair of the multi-ministry task force — said the “worrying” spike in infections would “probably get to 2,000 new cases a day”, describing the next two to four weeks as “crucial”. Alex Cook, an infectious diseases modelling expert at the National University of Singapore, said life had not improved “by as much as we might have hoped”, despite Singapore being one of the world’s most vaccinated countries.

Infinite vaccines

Why is this so hard for billions of people to understand? IDGI

The Guy's Absolutely Right pic.twitter.com/J4DhoNwLTd

— Red Walrus (@_RedWalrus_) September 11, 2021

“..he and colleagues from 7 universities are suing the CDC for massive fraud..”

• Laboratories in US Can’t Find COVID-19 in One of 1,500 Positive Tests (Xander)

A clinical scientist and immunologist-virologist at a southern California laboratory says he and colleagues from 7 universities are suing the CDC for massive fraud. The reason: not one of 1500 samples of people tested “positive” could find Covid-19. ALL people were simply found to have Influenza A, and to a lesser extent Influenza B. This is consistent with the previous findings of other scientists, which we have reported on several times. Dr. Derek Knauss: “When my lab team and I subjected the 1500 supposedly positive Covid-19 samples to Koch’s postulates and put them under an SEM (electron microscope), we found NO Covid in all 1500 samples. We found that all 1500 samples were primarily Influenza A, and some Influenza B, but no cases of Covid. We did not use the bulls*** PCR test.’

‘When we sent the rest of the samples to Stanford, Cornell, and a couple of the labs at the University of California, they came up with the same result: NO COVID. They found Influenza A and B. Then we all asked the CDC for viable samples of Covid. The CDC said they can’t give them, because they don’t have those samples.’ ‘So we came to the hard conclusion through all our research and lab work that Covid-19 was imaginary and fictitious. The flu was only called ‘Covid,’ and most of the 225,000 deaths were from co-morbidities such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, pulmonary emphysema, etc.. They got the flu which further weakened their immune systems, and they died.’ ‘I still need to find one viable sample with Covid-19 to work with. We who conducted the lab test with these 1500 samples at the 7 universities are now suing the CDC for Covid-19 fraud.

‘The CDC still has not sent us a viable, isolated and purified sample of Covid-19. If they can’t or won’t, then I say there is no Covid-19. It’s fictional.’ ‘The four research papers describing the genome extracts of the Covid-19 virus never managed to isolate and purify the samples. All four papers describe only small pieces of RNA that are only 37 to 40 base pairs long. That is NOT a VIRUS. A viral genome normally has 30,000 to 40,000 base pairs.’ ‘Now that Covid-19 is supposedly so bad everywhere, how come not one lab in the world has completely isolated and purified this virus? That’s because they never really found the virus. All they ever discovered were small pieces of RNA that were not identified as the virus anyway. So what we’re dealing with is just another flu strain, just like every year. Covid-19 does not exist and is fictitious.’

Merck.

• Grotesque Conflicts Of Interest On NIH Ivermectin Non-Recommendation (TSN)

The National Institutes of Health provided a non-recommendation for the use of ivermectin in COVID-19, stating that there was: “insufficient evidence … to recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19.”The process for reaching that non-recommendation, however, is opaque. The Panel members responsible for therapy recommendations are disclosed and also that: “… working groups propose updates to the Guidelines based on the latest published research findings and evolving clinical information.” However, NIH has gone to extreme efforts to avoid stating whether a vote was held to endorse the ivermectin non-recommendation. This includes fighting a Freedom of Information Act request in federal court.

A deceptive non-vote would constitute an atrocity. NIH has also been secretive about the composition of the working group that proposed the ivermectin non-recommendation. The names of those individuals were redacted by the NIH from a document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request for the agenda of a meeting considering ivermectin. However, the group responsible for the ivermectin non-recommendation has been discovered through a FOIA request to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The FOIA response shows that the working group has nine members. Three members of the working group, Adaora Adimora, Roger Bedimo, and David V. Glidden, have disclosed a financial relationship with Merck. Merck has campaigned against the use of ivermectin in COVID-19.

A fourth member, Susanna Naggie, had an extraordinary potential conflict of interest. She received a $155 million grant for the study of ivermectin following the non-recommendation. Funding for the study would have been difficult to justify if the drug was recommended for use in COVID-19. It is not known, however, if the panelist was aware of that opportunity or was planning to apply for that grant at the time of the deliberations on ivermectin. The deception and secrecy surrounding the NIH ivermectin non-recommendation should have raised serious doubts about its integrity. The grotesque conflicts of interest of Panel members should make it clear that the NIH, as the FDA with its slandering of ivermectin as a “horse dewormer,” should not be taken seriously.

“..this is so wildly improbable that I find it impossible to believe unless something really, really ugly is going on with these jabs.”

• Damnit, Not Again (Denninger)

There are times that the “F” word is absolutely appropriate. For example on August 6th, 1945, by the Mayor of Hiroshima: What the **** was that? This is one of those and so I’ll use it without reservation: ****. “A drive-by parade outside of Methodist Mansfield Medical Center last April was supposed to be Corey Ripe’s happy ending. The 47-year-old was headed home after a week on a ventilator battling COVID-19.” Ok, he got Covid, he got it bad in March/April 2020 before we knew what we were doing — but he lived. Then, January. “Three days later, they got confirmation that, in addition to pneumonia, Ripe had once again contracted the virus that had already nearly claimed his life.”

Really? What was the Ct on that test? You see, I read that linked article and it describes symptoms that don’t make a lot of sense for Covid-19. Certainly anything’s possible but the article does make sense for a whole bunch of other infections particularly if he had secondary bacterial pneumonia. What did the hospital give him? Nobody has said. There wasn’t an antibiotic in there by chance, was there? He then gets vaccinated post-recovery. Remember, the vaccine prevents severe disease and death, we’re currently told. We were previously told it prevented getting the virus (that was a lie), that it prevented symptoms (that was a lie), that it prevented giving the virus to others (that was a wild-eyed, entirely-unscientific claim with zero evidence and proved to be a crazy-faced lie as is now showing up everywhere including at all-vaccinated colleges) and now it’s “you won’t go to the hospital or die.”

OH REALLY? WHERE IS THIS GUY RIGHT NOW? “Still, Saturday night, though he’d shown no prior symptoms, Parris knew it had to be COVID-19 again when she heard the fluid in his lungs. She rushed him to the ER. And an hour later, Parris got a familiar call. Ripe was intubated and waiting for an available ICU bed.” I see. So here are my questions, since this is so wildly improbable that I find it impossible to believe unless something really, really ugly is going on with these jabs.

At his second alleged infection did the hospital check for both “S” and “N” antibodies at admission? They should have been present. You know they didn’t look. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, the first infection really was Covid (it’s entirely plausible) and not the flu with a secondary bacterial infection that got him. I’m not sold on this because H1N1 was going around at that time, I got what I presume was that in January 2020, it did get into my lungs and it flattened me for a week with serious hanging-on symptoms, notably a nasty non-productive cough, that kept hanging on for a month and material cardio impairment for several more (it was worse than Covid-19 which I got first days of August of this year.) It was bad and I thought, after Covid-19 became known to be a “thing”, I might have had it. But it was not Covid-19; I know scientifically it was not because a few months later I sourced IgG antibody tests and I was negative.

After the second alleged infection but before he got vaccinated did anyone check for both “S” and “N” antibodies? You know the answer to that one too. Of course not. “If you’re recovered you should still get vaccinated” is what every ******* in the medical and political field has said even though there is zero evidence you get any benefit from doing so and, post-infection, the data is that your protection is many times (13x or more, to be exact) better than getting jabbed. In any event being an alleged “two-time winner” of the Covid-19 sweepstakes, a statistically unlikely thing to the extreme unless one of the two wasn’t actually Covid, he takes the (bad) advice and gets vaccinated. Ok, so now he should have both “N” antibodies (from previous infection) and a bunch of “S” ones.

Now a few months later he gets hammered. Again they say “Covid-19.” Did they look at admission time for those antibodies this time? You know damn well they did not and, much worse, this time was extremely rapid onset which strongly implies that VEI may be in the game here. Yet I’ll bet $1,000 they did not pull antibody titers for both “S” and “N” proteins on admission and given the history I’ll argue that’s not only personal malpractice it’s public-health malpractice and gross negligence.

Moderna has still not been “approved”.

• One In Five Americans Say Employer Requires Vaccination (ZH)

The share of Americans who are required by their employer to get vaccinated against COVID-19 took a jump up in August to 19 percent, according to a Gallup poll. As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, the number had been as low as 9 percent in July and 6 percent in June. Over the past couple of months, many major companies and government branches have released vaccination requirements and the type of employer issuing requirements goes beyond obvious ones like healthcare providers and the military. The full approval of the Pfizer vaccine on August 23 helped make the legal footing of employer-mandated vaccinations sounder.

According to Fortune, companies that require vaccinations for employees in order to work from their premises include Bank of America, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix and Uber. Three federal departments – those for defense, veteran affairs and health and human services – also require them without alternatives for frontline workers. Six states – Colorado, Maine, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington – have released mandates for healthcare workers to get vaccinated or be terminated, while the more common mandates for state and local government employees normally leave the option of regular testing and sometimes masking for the unvaccinated.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an independent federal government agency, has said that it is legal for employers to require all employees who physically enter a workplace to be vaccinated against COVID-19, as long as the employers also comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act in order to accommodate those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.

“practical matter, this policy may result in exacerbating the severe workforce shortage problems that currently exist.”

• Unvaxxed Kentucky Health Care Workers Force Hospital to Fire Them (GP)

Health care workers at Kentucky’s Med Center in Bowling Green refused to comply with the vaccine mandate or turn in their resignation. Instead, two workers showed up and refused to leave until someone told them that they are fired. The Med Center was the target of protests last month when they became one of the largest hospitals in the country to impose a vaccine mandate on their employees. On August 18, over 100 community members and health care workers demonstrated outside the campus holding signs with slogans such as, “my body my choice” and “medical freedom.” Leadership at the hospital had until August 9 to get vaccinated and all other employees had until September 1.

A healthcare worker named Ale Minnicks posted a video of herself two days after the mandate went into effect on TikTok and Facebook. Her and a coworker, who identified herself as Ashley Rich, were refusing the jab. They arrived at work and were unable to clock in — but the hospital refused to say that they were being fired. “The Medical Center in BG, KY was trying to quietly put over 350 out of a job without resignation or termination for not getting the vaccine,” Minnicks wrote, along with the hashtag “stop the mandate.” As they were told to leave the building, Minnicks kept reiterating that “I did not quit and I was not fired.” “You’re going to have to leave. We need your badge and we need you to leave,” a woman can be heard telling Minnicks. Still, they were initially careful with their wording and did not say the women were fired.

“There was a choice, you chose not to take the vaccine,” a man, who identifies himself as head of security, is heard saying. “So then fire us,” the women demand, asking for a termination letter in exchange for her badge. Eventually, they are told that they have been fired and both agree to leave. By refusing to quit and showing up for work, the women will have more options available when it comes to potential lawsuits and unemployment. There are currently massive staff shortages at hospitals across the country, leading the American Hospital Association to express concerns about the impending federal requirement for all healthcare staff to get the COVID-19 vaccine. AHA CEO Rick Pollack said in a statement that a “practical matter, this policy may result in exacerbating the severe workforce shortage problems that currently exist.”

Natural immunity has come to mean that after having been infected. Curious.

• Spectrum Health Workers Can Use Natural Immunity As Vaccine Mandate Exemption

Spectrum Health will grant temporary exemptions from its employee vaccine mandate to individuals who can prove they have naturally acquired immunity to COVID-19. The west Michigan hospital system, which is in the process of merging with Southfield-based Beaumont Health, will grant an exemption to those who have a positive PCR or antigen test for COVID-19 plus a positive antibody test from within the past three months, the health system said in a statement Thursday. The exemption, the first for a major health system in Michigan, was developed “as new research has emerged” on natural immunity.

“While we still recommend vaccination for people with prior COVID-19 infection, according to this new research, there is increasing evidence that natural infection affords protection from COVID-19 reinfection and severe symptoms for a period of time,” the statement said. “Current studies are not clear on how long natural immunity protects from reinfection.” The policy could be updated if future evidence shows naturally acquired protection is waning or longer lasting, or if there is a validated antibody test result showing immunity, the statement said. Spectrum announced in late July that it would require the COVID-19 vaccine within eight weeks of the Food and Drug Administration approving a vaccine, but noted it would consider some exemptions.

Those exemptions include religious exemptions and medical exemptions determined by a medical exemption committee. The hospital system’s medial exemption committee recommended the health system allow for a temporary exemption for naturally acquired immunity based on available research, the statement said.

“This is a job board for employers who are in favour of informed consent with regard to medical procedures, as per our constitution..”

• Jobs Without Jabs Australia (Sky)

Social media websites have begun to see an influx of groups dedicated to opposing mandatory vaccines for work, as Australia prepares for life beyond lockdown upon meeting the government’s 80 per cent target. Those who remain sceptical of the vaccine, or reject the push for employers to be given power to dismiss them over health issues, have been encouraged to share information about their particular industry’s stance on mandatory jabs for staff. The group “Jobs Without Jabs Australia” has attracted over 20,000 members, with employers regularly posting their intention to hire workers “with or without a jab”. “Freedom of choice without medical coercion. A free Australia for all, not a two tiered society. This is a job noticeboard to connect employers and employees,” the group’s description reads.

The public group features a number of posts from young workers in food chains worried about losing their financial stability, insisting they are “definitely not going to get the vaccination”. “We’ve just received a video from the founder of our company saying that everyone that visits our restaurant will have to have the jab which means all co-workers will also have to have it by early October. I can’t afford to lose my job as I’m under a lot of financial pressure right now, but I know I’m definitely not going to get the vaccination. Thank you,” one post read. “In 3 months I will be looking for marketing, sales, IT, finance, bookkeeping, admin, customer service, hospitality, events & various construction team members! No jab welcomed with open arms. (Melbourne Based),” another post read, collecting 260 reactions and 28 comments.

Several other posts encouraged anti-vaxxers considering leaving their industry due to vaccine mandates to simply “work for themselves”. “Get an ABN, do dump runs, start a delivery service, buy /sell second hand furniture, clean, busk, make products, sell online. Do whatever you have to to make it work,” one read. The group has already braced for its potential removal, setting up an alternative Telegram group. “If you’re on Telegram, join the group there also in case this gets taken down,” the group’s administrator posted. “This is a job board for employers who are in favour of informed consent with regard to medical procedures, as per our constitution, and for employees who have elected not to be vaccinated, to be able to find employment.”

What scared them?

• England Vaccine Passport Plans Ditched (BBC)

Plans to introduce vaccine passports for access into nightclubs and large events in England will not go ahead, the health secretary has said. Sajid Javid told the BBC: “We shouldn’t be doing things for the sake of it.” It was thought the plan, which came under criticism from venues and some MPs, would be introduced at the end of this month. Just a week ago, the vaccines minister had defended the scheme as the “best way” to keep the night industry open. No 10 stressed the plan – which had been set to be introduced at the end of this month – would be kept “in reserve” should it be needed over autumn or winter. Under the scheme, people would have been required to show proof – whether of double vaccination, a negative Covid test or finishing self-isolating after a positive PCR test – in order to gain entry to clubs and other crowded events.

The Night Time Industries Association had said the plans could have crippled the industry and led to nightclubs facing discrimination cases. The industry body welcomed Sunday’s announcement, saying it hoped businesses could now plan with some certainty and start to rebuild the sector. The Music Venue Trust, which aims to protect grassroots venues, also said it was glad vaccine passports would not be going ahead, describing them as “problematic”. There had been opposition from Tory MPs on the Covid Recovery Group as well as the Liberal Democrats, whose leader Ed Davey called vaccine passports “divisive, unworkable and expensive”. Speaking on The Andrew Marr Show, Mr Javid said: “We just shouldn’t be doing things for the sake of it or because others are doing, and we should look at every possible intervention properly.”

He said he had “never liked the idea of saying to people you must show your papers” to “do what is just an everyday activity”. “We’ve looked at it properly and, whilst we should keep it in reserve as a potential option, I’m pleased to say that we will not be going ahead with plans for vaccine passports,” he added. Mr Javid denied the government was “running scared” on the policy after criticism from its own backbenchers. He said the passports were not needed because of other things in the “wall of defence” including high vaccine uptake, testing, surveillance and new treatments. The move to scrap vaccine passports appears to be a sharp U-turn by the government. On the same TV programme last week, Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi said the end of September was the right time to start the vaccine passport scheme for sites with large crowds because all over-18s would have been offered two jabs by then and it was the “best way” to keep the night industry open.

A lesson.

• The Polio Pandemic of 1949-52: No Closures, No Restrictions (Tucker)

World War II had ended four years earlier and the U.S. was trying to return to peace and prosperity. Price controls and rationing were ended. Trade was opening. People were returning to normal life. The economy started humming again. Optimism for the future was growing. Harry Truman became the symbol of a new normacy. From Depression and war, society was on the mend. As if to serve as a reminder that there were still threats to life and liberty present, an old enemy made its appearance: polio. It’s a disease with ancient origins, with its most terrifying effect, the paralysis of the lower extremities. It maimed children, killed adults, and struck enormous fear into everyone. Polio is also a paradigmatic case that targeted and localized policy mitigations have worked in the past, but society-wide lockdowns have never been used before. They weren’t even considered as an option.

Polio was not an unknown disease: its reputation for cruelty was well earned. In the 1916 outbreak, there were 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the United States, 2,000 of which were in New York City. After the war, people had living memories of this horror. People were also used to adjusting their behavior. In 1918, people left cities for resorts, movie theaters were closed for lack of customers, groups cancelled meetings, and public gatherings dwindled. Children avoided swimming pools and public water fountains, fearing that it was transmitted through water. Whatever the therapeutic merit of this, these actions required no force; it happened because people do their best to adapt to risk and be cautious.

In 1949, the new polio epidemic appeared and swept through selective population centers, leaving its most tragic sign: children with wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces, and deformed limbs. For children with polio in the late 1940s, the disease caused paralysis in 1 in 1,000 cases of children aged 5 to 9. The rest had only mild symptoms and developed immunities. In the 1952 season, of the 57,628 cases reported, 3,145 died and a shocking 21,269 experienced paralysis. So while the infection, death, and paralysis rates seem “low” by comparison to the 1918 flu, the psychological impact of this disease became its most prescient feature. The “iron lung” that became widely available in the 1930s stopped asphyxiation of polio victims, and it was a triumph of innovation; it allowed a dramatic reduction in the death rate.

Finally, by 1954, a vaccine was developed (by private labs with very little government support subsidies) and the disease was largely eradicated in the U.S. twenty years later. It became a signature achievement of the medical industry and the promise of vaccines. Throughout the country, the quarantining of the sick was deployed in a limited way as one medical response. There were some shutdowns. The CDC reports that “travel and commerce between affected cities were sometimes restricted [by local officials]. Public health officials imposed quarantines (used to separate and restrict the movement of well people who may have been exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become ill) on homes and towns where polio cases were diagnosed.”

It’s not a strategy, it’s just a very deep hole.

• The Eurozone Is Going Down The Japan Way (Lacalle)

The European Central Bank announced a tapering of the repurchase program on September the 9th. One would imagine that this is a sensible idea given the recent rise in inflation in the eurozone to the highest level in a decade and the allegedly strong recovery of the economy. However, there is a big problem. The announcement is not really tapering, but simply adjusting to a lower net supply of bonds from sovereign issuers. In fact, considering the pace announced by the central bank, the ECB will continue to purchase 100% of all net issuance from sovereigns. There are several problems in this strategy. The first one is that the ECB is unwillingly acknowledging that there is no real secondary market demand for eurozone countries’ sovereign debt at these yields. One would have to think of twice or three times the current yield for investors to accept many eurozone bonds if the ECB does not repurchase them. This is obviously a dangerous bubble.

The second problem is that the ECB acknowledges that monetary policy has gone from being a tool to help implement structural reforms to a tool to avoid them. Even with the strong GDP bounce that the ECB predicts, few governments are willing to reduce spending and curb deficits in a meaningful way. The ECB estimates show that after the massive deficit spending of 2020, eurozone government spending will rise again by 3.4% in 2021 only to fall modestly by 1.2% in 2022. This means that eurozone government spending will consolidate the covid pandemic increase with little improvement in the fiscal position of most countries. Indeed, countries like Spain and Italy have increased the structural deficit.

The third problem is that negative rates and high liquidity injections combined with elevated government spending have generated no real multiplier effect in the eurozone. We must remember that the main economies were in stagnation already in the fourth quarter of 2019, before the pandemic and despite large stimulus plans like the Juncker Plan, which mobilized hundreds of billions of euros in investments. The fourth challenge for the ECB is that it acknowledges being trapped by its own policy, it cannot stop it and normalize because governments and markets would suffer, and it cannot keep the current pace because inflation is putting even more pressure on growth.

The final challenge for the eurozone and the ECB is that they continue to implement policies that ignore demographics and structural burdens to growth. The eurozone has an aging population and monetary and fiscal policies seem to ignore the evidence of changing consumption patterns when citizens reach a certain age or retire. If we add to demographics a taxation system that increasingly hurts middle classes, businesses, and investment, we face an economy that seems to be following all the wrong policies that Japan implemented at the beginning of the 90s.

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