Singapore Archives - The Automatic Earth

That’s it. British health workers get another 5 months to get jabbed. Any sense of urgency or emergency is gone. They won, and they know it. “..Up to 100,000 healthcare staff in England are unvaccinated..”

• Frontline Health Workers In England To Get New Vaccine Guidelines (RT)

England’s frontline NHS workers will have to be fully inoculated against Covid-19 by April 1 as a mandatory condition of their employment, Heath Secretary Sajid Javid has said, as tens of thousands of staff are still not jabbed. Speaking on Tuesday to Parliament, Javid confirmed that “all those working in the NHS and social care will have to be vaccinated.” “We must avoid preventable harm and protect patients in the NHS, protect colleagues in the NHS and of course protect the NHS itself.” The deadline set for next spring – April 1 – will give all staff enough time to complete the Covid vaccination course. Up to 100,000 healthcare staff in England are unvaccinated, according to the head of NHS Providers Chris Hopson. Javid also said there would be exemptions for people who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons, or for those not in face-to-face positions with patients.

The decision comes after consultations began in September on whether to make Covid and flu jabs mandatory for frontline NHS and care workers. The flu vaccine, however, will not be made mandatory just yet, but will be kept under review. Health Secretary Sajid Javid told Sky News last month that he was “leaning towards” mandatory vaccination for NHS staff, but Downing Street was yet to make a final decision. The prospect of mandatory vaccinations for NHS staff has raised concerns that the move could adversely impact an already overstretched health service. Hopson insisted that the government must work closely with NHS trusts to avoid a mass exodus of unvaccinated staff: “We understand why people are vaccine-hesitant. We need to win the argument with them rather than beat them around the head,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today show.

A nation of snitches. Well done. “Ther are Jews hiding in that building!”

• Whistleblowers To Play Key Role In Enforcing Biden Vaccine Rule (CBS)

To enforce President Joe Biden’s new COVID-19 vaccine regulation, the Labor Department is going to need a lot of help. Yet its Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) doesn’t have nearly enough workplace safety inspectors to do the job. The 490-page regulation will cover American businesses with at least 100 workers, or about 84 million employees in all. So the government will rely upon a corps of informers to identify violations of the order: Employees who will presumably be concerned enough to turn in their own employers if their co-workers go unvaccinated or fail to undergo weekly tests to show they’re virus-free.

What’s not known is just how many employees will be willing to accept some risk to themselves — or their job security — for blowing the whistle on their own employers. Without them, though, experts say the government would find it harder to achieve its goal of requiring tens of millions of workers at large businesses to be fully vaccinated by January 4 or be tested weekly and wear a mask on the job. “There is no army of OSHA inspectors that is going to be knocking on employers door or even calling them,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA chief of staff who is a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. “They’re going to rely on workers and their union representatives to file complaints where the company is totally flouting the law.”

Under the regulation, businesses must maintain records on workers’ vaccination statuses. But for workplaces where employees aren’t required to be vaccinated, workers will need to get weekly tests and wear masks. OSHA said it plans to check on compliance with the latter by doing spot-checks of businesses, and will also rely on complaints the agency receives about businesses that aren’t following the regulation. “We will have our staff available and responsive to complaints, which is a No. 1 way we hear about problems in a workplace,” said Jim Frederick, the acting chief of OSHA, on a conference call with reporters. He also said the agency will focus on job sites “where workers need assistance to have a safe and healthy workplace.”

Test site for bankrupting ordinary people.

• Singapore To Start Charging Covid Patients Who Are ‘Unvaccinated By Choice’ (G.)

Singapore will no longer pay the Covid-19 medical bills for people “unvaccinated by choice”, the government said, as the country grapples with a surge in cases. The government currently covers the full Covid medical costs for all Singaporeans, as well as permanent residents and long-term visa holders, unless they test positive soon after returning home from overseas. However from 8 December, the government said it will “begin charging Covid-19 patients who are unvaccinated by choice”. It said unvaccinated people “make up a sizeable majority of those who require intensive in-patient care and disproportionately contribute to the strain on our healthcare resources”. Covid-related medical bills will still be paid for people who aren’t eligible for a vaccine.

The government will also foot the bill for individuals who are partially vaccinated until 31 December, giving them time to get a second dose. Singapore has among the highest coverage rates in the world, with 85% of the eligible population fully vaccinated. Yet the city state is struggling with rising Covid infections and last month warned its healthcare system was at risk of being “overwhelmed” by surging cases. It came a day after the country expanded quarantine-free travel as part of a shift in its approach to dealing with the pandemic. The prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, previously said the global business hub could not remain closed indefinitely, and Singapore has moved from a zero-tolerance strategy with lockdowns and closed borders to living with Covid-19.

“..48 percent of agents have not registered their vaccination status, and of the 52 percent who have done that, ten percent are unvaccinated.”

• More Than Half Of Border Patrol Agents May Be Fired For Being Unvaccinated (SN)

An internal report from within the US Customs and Border Protection agency suggests that more than half the border patrol workforce remains unvaccinated, and that if vaccine mandates are implemented it could leave just 8000 officers on duty. The document, obtained by Fox News, notes that 48 percent of agents have not registered their vaccination status, and of the 52 percent who have done that, ten percent are unvaccinated. Former chief operating officer of CBP Mark Morgan, who obtained the internal report, told Fox News that Biden’s vaccine mandate is “going to take an agency that’s already gone through an unbelievable catastrophic crisis on the southwest border and deplete its resources further.”

Morgan also provided a screenshot from the report showing tables of different scenarios of depletion within the CBP. The screenshot highlights that “in the worst-case scenario, agents who have not reported their status have done so because they refuse to take the jab, and so they will be terminated (scenario 3). In that case, net attrition could exceed 11,523 agents, leaving a mere 8,013 border agents on patrol.” If this scenario unfolds, it is likely that the border patrol would lose 59 percent of its workforce. Imagine how that would affect the already rampantly out of control border crisis.

If the 10,000 or so border patrol agents who have yet to register their vaccination status do not do so this week, they will be offered counseling, then suspension, then termination, Morgan further noted, emphasising how the document “illustrates the potential impact that this mandate could have on the workforce.” “So, an agency that is dealing with 1.7 million apprehensions, 400,000 got-aways, at that very moment, the same resources are going to be pulled away and distracted to deal with this mandate nonsense,” Morgan urged, adding that the counseling involves further “critical resources,” because border patrol leadership is involved.

They have to block anything that might work. It’s in their Pfizer contract.

• Feds Seek to Block Promotion of a Nasal Spray Against COVID-19 (ET)

The leading U.S. manufacturer of xylitol-based products says the federal government is deliberately trying to conceal a nasal spray it developed that it says has been scientifically proven to be effective in treating and preventing COVID-19. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in federal court against Utah-based company Xlear on Oct. 28, saying it has deceptively advertised its nasal spray as a treatment and preventative of COVID-19. The lawsuit asks a federal court to permanently ban the company from promoting the nasal spray as a treatment for COVID-19 and also asks that monetary penalties be levied against it. COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

The DOJ filed the complaint on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, which alleges the company has violated the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Consumer Protection Act by making false claims about the benefits. The spray’s main ingredients are saline, grapefruit seed extract, and xylitol, a plant-derived sweetener commonly used in oral care products. “Companies can’t make unsupported health claims, no matter what form a product takes, or what it supposedly prevents or treats,” said Samuel Levine, director of the trade commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a press release on the lawsuit. “That’s the lesson of this case and many others like it, and it’s why people should continue to rely on medical professionals over ads.” The commission and the Justice Department declined to make any further comment.

Xlear’s attorney Robert Housman, of the Washington firm Book Hill Partners, told The Epoch Times that the commission is “flat out lying” about the company’s claims being unsupported. Housman pointed out that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—along with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services—funded clinical studies of the use of nasal sprays like Xlear’s and published findings last year that found they were an effective treatment and method of prevention for COVID-19. “When Xlear tells people about scientific studies, even ones republished by the NIH, we are somehow misleading people and making false claims. It’s nonsensical,” Housman told The Epoch Times. “Rather than embrace nasal interventions, the government is trying to eliminate their use because they don’t fit the government’s highly flawed, vaccine-only agenda.”

Have they published the victims’ numbers and accounts?

• French Health Authority Warns Men Under 30 To Avoid Moderna Jab (ZH)

The bad news for Moderna just keeps coming. In the wake of a weak earnings report that sent Moderna shares cratering last week, French health authorities have just released a new advisory recommending that people under 30 don’t get the Moderna vaccine, recommending that they choose the Pfizer-BioNTech jab instead. The decision draws on recently released data showing that the risk of heart inflammation from Pfizer’s jab “appears to be around five times lesser…compared to Modera’s spikevax jab”, per an opinion published by the HAS. Cases of myocarditis mostly manifest within 7 days of vaccination, typically after the second dose has been given.

Most patients who experience side effects are typically men under the age of 30, according to the HAS, which cited research studies. HAS acts as an advisor to the French health sector but it doesn’t have the power to ban medicines or vaccines. The recommendation will apply to first and second doses, as well as a any “booster shot” doses available while the agency awaits additional data. For French men and women aged 30 and over, however, HAS says it sees no problem with administering Moderna’s Spikevax in this group, stating that its efficacy was slightly higher than Pfizer-BioNTech’s jab. Last month saw a handful of Nordic nations place varying restrictions on Moderna’s vaccine.

Tiny Iceland, meanwhile, has banned the Moderna jab from being used across the entire population. Initially. Stockholm announced it would pause the use of Moderna for all of its population born in 1991 or after. Helsinki followed suit, but halted the jabs for young, male Finns only based on a study involving Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden which found that men under 30 had a slightly higher risk of developing heart inflammation. Oslo also suggested that young Norwegian men should consider choosing Comirnaty, the Pfizer jab, over Moderna’s or any of the other options.

A half year discussion, going nowhere.

• Naturally Immune Federal Workers Lodge Class-Action Over Vaccine Mandate (ET)

Federal workers who have recovered from COVID-19 have filed a class-action lawsuit against Dr. Anthony Fauci and other government officials over a COVID-19 vaccine mandate that still forces them to get a jab. The government not only failed to offer a carve-out exemption for naturally immune workers, or those who have recovered, but neither President Joe Biden’s executive order nor the guidance explaining it outlines why naturally acquired immunity isn’t an acceptable alternative to vaccination, the lawsuit states. “Because they already have natural immunity, there is no coherent purpose for the federal government to require them to undertake a medical procedure to be vaccinated if they choose not to, or be terminated from their employment, their careers,” Robert Henneke, general counsel at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and one of the lawyers representing the government workers, told The Epoch Times.

Plaintiffs say the mandate violates the Administrative Procedure Act, which allows courts to overturn government actions deemed “arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion.” They quoted Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner who now sits on the board of Pfizer. During recent television appearances, Gottlieb described natural immunity as “durable” and “robust” and said that government officials should start assimilating it into policy discussions. They also cited Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, an immunologist who has said it is medically unnecessary for the recovered to get vaccinated. Dozens of studies have shown that people who survived COVID-19 have strong immunity against re-infection from the virus that causes it, with some indicating the protection is similar to or higher than that provided by vaccines. Workers tried communicating concerns about the mandate but those “have completely fallen on deaf ears, which is why we’ve turned to litigation,” Henneke said.

So many things we’ve known forever, that still need to be pointed out every day.

• FDA Pfizer Doc Suggests Myocarditis From Shot Bigger Threat Than Covid (Bl.)

In Pfizer’s FDA briefing document prepared for the Oct. 25 meeting was an admission that even according to the company’s own unverified and misleading math, there is a scenario where there would be more hospitalizations among children for myocarditis — just one side effect — than from COVID. “Under Scenario 3 (lowest incidence), the model predicts more excess hospitalizations due to vaccine-related myocarditis/pericarditis compared to prevented hospitalizations due to COVID-19 in males and in both sexes combined,” states Pfizer in page 33 of the document. How in the world could there be any universe where we would approve a shot, much less promote and force it in many settings, when there is a possibility of greater harm than benefit, when the harm is man-made and the virus is left to chance?

They know quite well that this approval will eventually lead to soft and hard mandates, which have already begun in California schools. The document concludes by expressing the same callous attitude toward those raising concerns as toward all their interventions from day one. “However, in consideration of the different clinical implications of hospitalization for COVID-19 versus hospitalization for vaccine-associated myocarditis/pericarditis, and benefits related to prevention of non-hospitalized cases of COVID-19 with significant morbidity, the overall benefits of the vaccine may still outweigh the risks under this lowest incidence scenario.” In other words, sure, we have no clue what’s going to happen, but it’s always better to err on the side of shoving this on children who have a 99.9% recovery rate.

They have 60% of the people’s trust right now. But what will happen when booster 3,4,5 come along?

• Doctors Will Never Regain The Public’s Trust After Covid (Huffman)

One undeniable outcome of the pandemic is that the public’s faith in scientific and medical authorities is perhaps at its lowest point in living memory – and no objective observer can truly be surprised. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US President’s Chief Medical Adviser Dr Anthony Fauci and US Surgeon General Dr Jerome Adams told us not to wear masks, until they instructed us to wear one everywhere we went. The Covid vaccines were declared to be effective at preventing the spread of disease, until breakthrough cases around the globe proved that wasn’t so, and that effectiveness was downgraded to “against hospitalization and death.”

Both The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, two of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, have issued embarrassing retractions to widely publicized papers eventually found to have too little validity to be published. Anyone who suggested that the pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory and not a Chinese wet market was labeled a conspiracy theorist by official sources who later had to admit they were possibly correct. The same proved true for everyone who accused Fauci and the National Institutes of Health of funding gain-of-function research at the lab: they were crazy, until they were right.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists urged all pregnant women to be vaccinated, asserting that the new injections were completely safe. Now, a new review of that same data suggests that one in eight women spontaneously aborted her pregnancy after getting the jab. Even medical terms – such as ‘herd immunity’, and the word ‘vaccine’ itself – have literally been redefined over the past few months. All this has shocked a great number of informed, educated people around the world. Should it, though? In fact, a brief glance through the history of science demonstrates that scientists being completely and utterly wrong – in retrospect, often comically so – is the norm, not an aberration. It’s long past time for modern scientific researchers to discover a proper sense of humility and to step down from the pedestal of secular priesthood they’ve ascended.

Stories about an advisory panel’s recommendation to the Food and Drug Administration to approve a Moderna booster shot contained a quote that most might find truly incredible. “It’s more a gut feeling rather than based on really truly serious data,” said biochemistry professor Dr Patrick Moore. “The data itself is not strong, but it is certainly going in the direction that is supportive of this vote.” How can a scientific advisory panel make such a recommendation while admitting it’s based on feeling, not fact? In fact, it happens all the time. ‘Medical consensus’ is a term that carries an authoritative denotation, yet it simply means that a bunch of experts got together and decided amongst themselves what’s correct. The problem is that, today and in the past, those experts – in virtually every field – are so often wrong.

The jugular is Hillary and Obama. How close can he get?

• John Durham Is Getting Close to the Jugular (RCP)

The Clinton team launched this operation with professional expertise. The goal was to produce a powerful anti-Trump story, using whatever materials they could, then share it with the media (to smear Trump) and the FBI (to launch a major investigation and ensnare Trump). Ideally, the campaign’s involvement would be hidden, removed from the damning report by several layers of lawyers, opposition researchers, camp followers, and flacks. To provide that insulation, the campaign used attorney Marc Elias, then at Perkins Coie law firm in Washington (where the recently indicted Michael Sussmann was a colleague), to hire an opposition-research firm, Fusion GPS.

That firm, headed by former reporters Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, in turn hired Steele, a Brit who had formerly worked for his country’s intelligence services, to produce the damning dossier. To translate some Russian materials, Fusion GPS hired Nellie Ohr, whose husband, Bruce, learned how biased Steele was and told the FBI to treat Steele and his information warily. Bureau agents ignored that early warning and all the others. They quickly learned Steele’s material was a mirage, thanks to their interviews with Danchenko. They also confirmed that Steele’s dossier depended on Danchenko, so its claims of “Russian sourcing” were false. By interviewing Danchenko’s own sources, they learned that their third-hand statements, which were used in the dossier, were mainly rumors and “bar talk.”

The prosecutorial team assembled by Robert Mueller should have known all this, too. They had complete access to this exculpatory FBI material on day one and ignored it. A year and a half later, when Mueller himself finally testified before Congress, he didn’t even know what Fusion GPS was. By that point, Mueller seemed to have genuine difficulty remembering the details of his own investigation. His team of attorneys had no such excuse. Hired by Mueller’s top deputy, Andrew Weissmann, they were among the country’s sharpest and toughest prosecutors — and the most partisan. The more Durham uncovers, the worse the Mueller team will look.

Reviewing this evidence, Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has concluded the Steele dossier is misnamed. It should be called the “Clinton dossier,” she says, since Hillary commissioned it, paid for it, and had her aides feed it to the media, the State Department, and the FBI. It was a full-scale disinformation campaign — coherent, well-organized, and well-funded. It was rotten to the core. The question now is whether John Durham can find enough evidence to charge the ones who planned and executed it. The charging documents he filed for Danchenko and Sussmann are far more extensive than the necessary minimum. They suggest that Durham has compiled extensive evidence about a broader conspiracy. Will he settle for the capillaries now that he has the jugular in view?

“Durham clearly seems to be making a meticulous case that the Steele dossier was a political hit job orchestrated by Clinton operatives.”

• Durham Exposes New Links To Clinton Campaign in Russian Collusion (Turley)

“To my good friend … A Great Democrat.” Those words written to a Russian figure in Moscow, inside a copy of a Hillary Clinton autobiography, may be the defining line of special counsel John Durham’s investigation. The message reportedly was written by Charles Dolan, a close Clinton adviser and campaign regular whom news reports identify as the mysterious “PR-Executive 1” in the latest Durham indictment, this time of Igor Danchenko. Danchenko, 43, was a key figure in the compilation of the infamous Steele dossier that led to the now discredited investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 presidential race. But Danchenko, a Russian emigre living in the U.S., seems unlikely to be the Durham investigation’s apex defendant. In fact, Durham describes him at points more like a shill than a spy, an “investigator” who was fed what to report by Clinton operatives such as Dolan.

Durham is known as a methodical, apolitical and unrelenting prosecutor. Thus far, his work seems to betray a belief that the FBI got played by the Clinton campaign to investigate the Trump team. The question is whether Durham really wants to indict just the figurative tail if he can get the whole dog — a question that now may weigh heavily on a number of Washington figures, just as it did following Durham’s indictment in September of Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. Danchenko’s indictment on five counts of lying to the FBI serves two obvious purposes. First, these counts — with a possible five years in prison on each — are enough to concentrate the mind of any defendant about possibly flipping for the prosecution. Second, indicting Danchenko “hoists the wretch” for potential targets to see and consider that there but for the grace of God — and Durham — go they.

The background details of Durham’s three indictments so far have assembled an impressive list of “great Democrats” who contributed directly or indirectly to the creation of the Russia collusion scandal. Indeed, the collusion case increasingly is taking on a type of “Murder on the Orient Express” feel, in which all of the suspects may turn out to be culprits. While the statute of limitations may protect some, Durham has shown that he can use the crime of lying to federal investigators (18 U.S.C. 1001) as a handy alternative. Targets must admit to prior misconduct or face a new charge. Thus, Durham clearly seems to be making a meticulous case that the Steele dossier was a political hit job orchestrated by Clinton operatives. His latest indictment connects Danchenko to several intriguing figures and groups that, in turn, relate to the Clinton campaign.

Mass madness.

• ‘Out Of Control’ Pandemic Waste Spewed Into Oceans (RT)

A new report claims that 25,000 tons of masks, gloves, and other pandemic-related plastic waste has ended up in our oceans since Covid-19 first emerged. Hospitals, rather than individuals, are the chief culprit. “The recent Covid-19 pandemic has led to an increased demand for single-use plastic, intensifying pressure on this already out-of-control problem,” a team of Chinese and American researchers wrote in a paper published by the US National Academy of Sciences. “More than eight million tons of pandemic-associated plastic waste have been generated globally, with more than 25,000 tons entering the global ocean,” they added. The study is not the first to link the glut of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) produced during the pandemic to a rise in pollution.

The ubiquitous face masks that now litter beaches and high streets can take centuries to decompose, leaching harmful microplastics as they break down. With an estimated 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves used globally each month, scientists have already called for the use of more environmentally friendly materials in the production of PPE. The latest study, however, identifies the source and destinations of most of this waste. Hospitals account for nearly 90% of discarded PPE, with individuals responsible for only 7%. The majority of the waste (79%) enters the global ocean via just 10 rivers. Overall, Asian rivers are responsible for 73% of waste discharge, followed by European rivers with 11%.

Once in the ocean, most of this waste remains close to its source, with East and South Asia, South Africa, and the Caribbean identified as hotspots. 13 percent floats in the seawater, 16% sinks to the seabed, and 71% is washed up on the shore. The researchers warned that as “the pandemic will not be completely controlled in a couple of years,” a further 34,000 tons of discarded PPE will end up in the oceans, with much of it adding to huge “garbage patches” in the North and South Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Indian Ocean.

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“Mistakes”

Oct 192021

October 19, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:30 pm Finance Tagged with: aspirin, Big Pharma, HCQ, IVM, lobbyists, melatonin, mistakes, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Taiwan, Tokyo, UK, Uttar Pradesh 58 Responses »

René Magritte The song of love 1948

Just this morning, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechia, UK and New Zealand announced record or near-record numbers of positive Covid numbers and/or deaths. Yes, here we go again. Sadly, all of it is completely preventable, and all of us choose to not prevent it, because most have never been told this. Once again, an overview.

In the UK, a report came out last week about the country’s Covid approach, written by politicians, from the government’s own party nonetheless. It’s titled “Coronavirus: Lessons learned to date”, which is kind of ironic, because the one thing WE learn, at least from the press coverage of it, is that not a single lesson has been learned. BBC:

Covid: UK’s Early Response Worst Public Health Failure Ever

The 150-page document, “Coronavirus: Lessons learned to date”, is from the Health and Social Care Committee and the Science and Technology Committee, and MPs from all parties.

[..] Conservative MPs Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, who chair the committees, said the nature of the pandemic meant it was “impossible to get everything right”. “The UK has combined some big achievements with some big mistakes. It is vital to learn from both,” they said. Cabinet Office minister Stephen Barclay said scientific advice had been followed and the government had made “difficult judgements” to protect the NHS. He said the government took responsibility for everything that happened – saying the government would not shy away from any lessons to be learned at the full statutory public inquiry, expected next year.

What were those big mistakes, according to those 150 pages? These:

[..] the UK was not as open to different approaches on earlier lockdowns, border controls and test and trace as it should have been.

And the “big achievements”?

But their report highlighted successes too, including the vaccination rollout. It described the approach to vaccination – from the research and development through to the rollout of the jabs – as “one of the most effective initiatives in UK history”.

I kid you not, the biggest mistakes these politicians could come up with was that the UK should have locked down, shut its borders and start testing and tracing healthy people earlier. That’s it. But none of those come close to being the biggest mistakes. And that after 20 months they all still don’t appear to understand that is a sad, saddening and deadly “mistake” all by itself.

The real biggest mistake is the complete denial, and ignoring, of the crucial role prophylactics and early treatment could and should have played. And since neither plays such a role even today, yes, it will continue to be very deadly. The pharmaceutical industry prevents the use of -most- pharmaceuticals, and allows only the use of some of the newest and -therefore- most profitable ones. The promised “full statutory public inquiry” won’t change that.

But first, let’s look at the “big achievements”. Vaccination, “one of the most effective initiatives in UK history”, has resulted in the following picture:

“Cases” are, let’s say, “stubbornly high” again (they average about 45,000 recently, and on Monday reached almost 50,000):

Hospitalizations are high too, compared to other countries. Which is odd, since the vaccines were supposed to stop severe cases in every country, we were told. After the claims that they stop infection and transmission became untenable:

Deaths appear to have normalized a little more in the UK, but what’s worrisome in this graph is the “Other excess deaths”. What are they? Are they vaccine deaths? Hard not to think they may very well be. But also hard to know because information on this is so scarce. In any case, they appear to outnumber Covid deaths. Which is no surprise, but still “good” to see in a graph:

The UK is presently about 65% vaccinated, according to Our World In Data, after “one of the most effective initiatives in UK history”. 65%? How effective have other “initiatives” been? On the bright side, the unvaccinated 35% may well turn out to be the lucky ones.

But why were (and are) the “big mistakes” made? A clue is that lockdowns, closed borders, test and trace, and facemasks, are all non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI’s). Any and all things pharmaceutical have been ignored from the get go. And not just ignored: there have even been – and still are- extensive coordinated campaigns against ivermectin (IVM), hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), and recently even aspirin.

Never has there been any advice for people to boost their vit. C and D levels, or zinc and quercetin. Aspirin and melatonin are never mentioned. Still, it’s widely known that these substances can provide protection from Covid in their various ways. So how can it be that all those highly paid medical experts and scientists that advise their governments never seem to talk about them?

Perhaps you need to look at how the field is laid out. The pharmaceutical industry has the by far largest lobbying departments in the world (and you thought it was Big Oil). In Washington alone there are hundreds of lobbyists working for Big Pharma. Who not only support the politicians’ election campaigns, they also pay huge amounts to the same medical experts that advise the same politicians. Moreover, lobbyists often even write the laws for the politicians, who are not experts. Sort of a symbiotic relationship, if you will.

The problem that I have with this, and these people apparently don’t, is that this has cost enormous amounts of suffering and deaths. For no apparent reason at all. The UK, and any other -western- country, could have promoted vitamin D -and C-, plus zinc and quercetin, and added on ivermectin and/or HCQ, perhaps doxycycline, and only a fraction of the present victims would have died and/or been incapacitated.

And this is not a story about the past either: it continues to this day. There are no protocols for protecting people, and none for early treatment. It’s still: go home and wait till you get so sick you need a ventilator. What doctor signs up for that? Well, most of them do. Screw Hippocrates. 95% of the deaths and misery could have been prevented with cheap, available, run-of-the-mill pharmaceuticals. And your doctors refused to provide them for you.

We’ve all seen the horse dewormer campaign against ivermectin that especially outlets like CNN, and even Rolling Stone, have put so much energy in recently. But the real story of IVM is completely different. Here are a few countries and states, and their experiences with it.

Puerto Rico:

Uttar Pradesh:

Tokyo:

And Indonesia:

Indonesia ramped up ivermectin production and the government assured national distribution and fair prices. IVM is considered by the government a COVID medicine.

Good thing we didn’t take that horse dewormer. We were smart, we listened to “The Science”, and spend billions on vaccines. It’s too early to oversee the harm these substances have done and will do, and there’s a lot of pressure not to make it public, but we can get an idea from two countries that were initially spared much of what we experienced. They were genuine Covid success stories, like New Zealand was. Until they started vaccinating. Here’s Taiwan and Singapore.

Taiwan:

And here is Singapore, bit of a strange graph because the timeline is split in two, but obvious enough:

And now we’re sitting here without ivermectin, because it’s been banned in many places, but with increasing pressure to get jabbed with substances that look very suspect. And increasingly without the freedom to choose what we think is best for us and our families.

But you can still choose to boost your immune system with vitamin D, without which it can’t properly function, and vitamin C. Be careful with zinc, but do consider it; it keeps the virus out of your cells. And it works better with quercetin. And do tell your doctor that you would like a prescription for ivermectin -if only to see the reaction- or HCQ. Ask about melatonin. Get some low dose aspirin. Inform yourself.

Since I am not a doctor (I just listen to them a lot), let me close with an old favorite I haven’t used in a long time: This information is for entertainment purposes only.

PS: Oh, and no, these things are not mistakes. Mistakes are not deliberate.

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Debt Rattle June 27 2021

Jun 272021

June 27, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:34 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Big Pharma, food banks, jabs, media trust, Singapore, vaccine concerns 67 Responses »

Henri Matisse The pink studio 1911

• Vaccines: Reasons for Concern (Alex Berenson)

• European Union Reports 1.5 Million Vaccine Injuries, 15,472 Deaths (TN)

• The ‘Big Lie’ Of Jabs Comes Unglued (Denninger)

• Singapore’s Surprising New Plan To ‘Live With Covid’ (News.com.au)

• J&J To Stop Selling Opioids In US, Reaches $230 Million Settlement (MSN)

• A “Leap” toward Humanity’s Destruction (Whitney Webb)

• United States Ranks Last In Media Trust (Turley)

• US Food Banks Warn Soaring Prices Will Affect Distributions (ZH)

• Stella Moris Says She Plans To Marry Julian Assange In Belmarsh Prison (RT)

• Key Witness In Assange Case Admits To Lies In Indictment (Stundin)

McCullough: early treatment can’t be stopped

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH: There are so many different ways to treat Covid… pic.twitter.com/hI6sj0zJLg

— Husserl (@husserl79) June 27, 2021

Why is the R rate highest in the most vaccinated countries?

Part 2: Why does the CDC keep calling post-Covid vaccine heart problems in young men “rare” and “mild” when they are neither?

• Vaccines: Reasons for Concern (Alex Berenson)

At [Wednesday’s CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)] meeting, CDC scientists presented horrendous data. It showed that even without accounting for underreporting, a second dose of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could increase the risk of problems up to 200-fold in young men. But the scientists then went on to suggest the vaccines should still given – even to kids already suffering from heart problems. The CDC’s focus yesterday was on two illnesses, myocarditis and pericarditis, forms of heart inflammation that can occasionally progress to heart failure and even death. The CDC and many reporters insist on calling the cases mild. In fact 95 percent of the 300+ post-vaccination cases the CDC has reviewed have led to hospitalization.

Keep in mind cases are continuing to come in, and the agency hasn’t reviewed all the cases it has already received. This issue is part of a bigger problem, which is that the volume of side effects reports that the CDC has received on the Covid vaccines has overwhelmed its monitoring system. To give you a sense of the problem: In all of 2019, the CDC’s voluntary vaccine side effect reporting system received about 48,000 reports for ALL vaccines. So far in 2021 it has received at least seven times that many for Covid vaccines alone. Also keep in mind that heart inflammation is only ONE potential problem the vaccines may cause. The CDC and journalists generally like to compare each individual vaccine side effect to ALL the risks of Covid, a slight-of-hand that has the effect of making the vaccines seem safer. In fact, the CDC’s own data shows that for every 100,000 vaccines given to young people, more than 25,000 will have temporary side effects that prevent them from “normal activities,” 700 will require medical care and 200 will be hospitalized.

In contrast, the CDC estimates that only about 50 out of 100,000 adolescents have EVER been hospitalized for Covid-related illness.

Of course, not everyone has gotten Covid – the CDC estimates that about 1/3 of Americans have. (Most never had a positive test, and many never even knew.) Thus, if EVERYONE got Covid, it is reasonable to assume the 50 Covid hospitalizations out of 100,000 adolescents rate might be about three times as high – or 150 per 100,000. But even the 150 per 100,000 rate is LOWER than the 200 per 100,000 rate of adolescents who are hospitalized in the first week after being vaccinated. In other words, even if vaccinations stopped every case of Covid in 12-17 year olds forever, and even if they never had side effects after the first week, it is hard to see how the risk-benefit ratio supports vaccination.

That’s especially true for healthy teens. Most Covid hospitalizations occur in people with other illnesses, including diabetes or chronic lung conditions. But in its presentation Wednesday, the CDC instead claimed that the rate of hospitalization in adolescents was roughly 400 out of 14,000 cases, or close to 2,900 per 100,000 – almost 20 times what its own data shows. (Estimating three deaths out of 14,000 adolescent cases is even less credible.) And it did not look at the combined rate of all post-vaccine hospitalizations, only those related to myocarditis.

“From the total of injuries recorded, half of them (753,657) are serious injuries..”

• European Union Reports 1.5 Million Vaccine Injuries, 15,472 Deaths (TN)

A subscriber from Europe recently emailed us and reminded us that this database maintained at EudraVigilance is only for countries in Europe who are part of the European Union (EU), which comprises 27 countries. The total number of countries in Europe is much higher, almost twice as many, numbering around 50, although there are some differences of opinion as to which countries are technically part of Europe. So as high as these numbers are, they do NOT reflect all of Europe. The actual number in Europe who are reported dead or injured due to COVID-19 shots would be much higher than what we are reporting here. The EudraVigilance database reports that through June 19, 2021 there are 15,472 deaths and 1,509,266 injuries reported following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots:
COVID-19 MRNA VACCINE MODERNA (CX-024414)
COVID-19 MRNA VACCINE PFIZER-BIONTECH
COVID-19 VACCINE ASTRAZENECA (CHADOX1 NCOV-19)
COVID-19 VACCINE JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S)

From the total of injuries recorded, half of them (753,657) are serious injuries. “Seriousness provides information on the suspected undesirable effect; it can be classified as ‘serious’ if it corresponds to a medical occurrence that results in death, is life-threatening, requires inpatient hospitalisation, results in another medically important condition, or prolongation of existing hospitalisation, results in persistent or significant disability or incapacity, or is a congenital anomaly/birth defect.” A Health Impact News subscriber in Europe ran the reports for each of the four COVID-19 shots we are including here. This subscriber has volunteered to do this, and it is a lot of work to tabulate each reaction with injuries and fatalities, since there is no place on the EudraVigilance system we have found that tabulates all the results.

“Fortunately there are enough un-vaccinated people that the Marek’s Disease sort of disaster will not happen so long as enough people refuse..”

• The ‘Big Lie’ Of Jabs Comes Unglued (Denninger)

Here it is folks… “According to multiple sources, two unvaccinated NC State players tested positive for COVID-19 this week, prompting the NCAA to test the entire roster, including vaccinated players. Four positive tests came back from that round of testing, prompting the no-contest ruling. All four of the latest positive tests came from vaccinated individuals who were in the dugout for Friday’s game against Vanderbilt, per multiple sources.”

So in other words: 1. The team members originally subject to testing were only subject to testing because they refused to risk having their heart destroyed by the jabs (along with the risk of occlusive strokes and similar.) Thus the NCAA demanded they, and only they, have swabs shoved up their nose. 2. This shoving of swabs “disclosed” (such as it is, knowing the PCR false-positive and not-infectious-but-positive problems) two “infections”, neither of which were in obviously-ill people. 3. That prompted the testing of those who were coerced into taking the risk of heart failure via the jabs and when they were tested, all of whom were allegedly immune which is the claimed outcome of such jabs and the claimed reason to let someone give you them, it was disclosed they were in fact not immune at all and four of those people were also positive.

In other words the shots are worthless to prevent acquisition and propagation of the disease; their failure rate in doing so is enormous and their efficacy in that regard is nowhere near the percentages claimed by all the *******s involved, including Vanderbilt, the CDC, TNDOH and others. There are 35 players on a D1 roster by NCAA rules so at best the jabs failed to prevent acquisition and propagation of the virus more than 11% of the time and it likely is worse than that since the odds are high a third or more of the players had pre-existing immunity via prior infection, most without knowing it, before they got jabbed. This in turn means that the likely actual failure rate for sterilizing immunity is probably somewhere between 30-50% while the science thus far for infection-conferred sterilizing immunity (study out of the Cleveland Clinic) is nearly 100%.

IT IS NOW CONCLUSIVELY PROVED THE JABS DO NOT WORK TO PREVENT ACQUISITION AND PROPAGATION OF THE VIRUS SO SHUT THE **** UP SCREAMING KAREN. Of course nobody sequenced all six of these people to figure out whether one of them was the index. It would be wildly embarrassing to find out that one of the vaccinated players was in fact the index, so that will not be looked at, deliberately, because to find and report that would instantly destroy any and all argument of alleged “community protection” from said shots.

[..] This garbage continues today in that this incident proves that the shots do not provide sterilizing immunity even among immuno-competent individuals which is arguably presumptive in someone in good enough physical condition to be competitive in D1 collegiate baseball. It is always true that an immune-compromised person may not get sterilizing (or any) immunity for a vaccine because their immune system is not working properly but the lack of sterilizing immunity on a broad basis in immune-competent individuals is what produces recombination and ultimately mutation. Fortunately there are enough un-vaccinated people that the Marek’s Disease sort of disaster will not happen so long as enough people refuse, as if the mutation produced by all the idiots who took the jabs is more-virulent it still leads to shunning as soon as it finds an unvaccinated host and thus loses the genetic lottery.

Ivermectin in media lockdown

Joseph Varon MD about Ivermectin – shocking… pic.twitter.com/VLoJ02K3Kp

— Husserl (@husserl79) June 26, 2021

“The bad news is that Covid-19 may never go away. The good news is that it is possible to live normally with it in our midst..”

• Singapore’s Surprising New Plan To ‘Live With Covid’ (News.com.au)

A country that has been one of the world’s most successful at combating Covid-19 has announced it will soon fundamentally change how it manages the pandemic. The city state of Singapore has stated covid will be treated like other endemic diseases such as flu. There will be no goals of zero transmission. Quarantine will be dumped for travellers and close contact of cases will not have to isolate. It also plans to no longer announce daily case numbers. But you may need to take tests to head to the shops or go to work. Senior Singaporean ministers have said it is the “new normal” of “living with covid”.

“The bad news is that Covid-19 may never go away. The good news is that it is possible to live normally with it in our midst,” wrote Singapore’s trade Minister Gan Kim Yong, finance minister Lawrence Wong and health minister Ong Ye Kung said in an editorial in the Straits Times this week. “It means that the virus will continue to mutate, and thereby survive in our community.” Like most countries, Singapore had an initial peak of cases last year, topping out at 600 cases a day in mid-April. Following a smaller wave in August, Covid-19 hasn’t flared up since. However, the nation of 5.7 million, slightly larger than Sydney, has had a steady undercurrent of around 20-30 cases every day. The nation has recorded 35 deaths in total.

Singapore has strict border controls in place with most countries including tests on arrival, hotel quarantine and stay at home orders. It’s not dissimilar to Australia, but Singapore varies the demands on travellers depending on the risk in the location where they last visited. But all that would be eventually done away with under the plan put out by ministers Kung, Yong and Wong who make up Singapore’s Covid-19 multi-ministry task force. “Every year, many people catch the flu. The overwhelming majority recover without needing to be hospitalised, and with little or no medication. But a minority, especially the elderly and those with comorbidities, can get very ill, and some succumb.

Will pay the settlement from vaccine profits…

• J&J To Stop Selling Opioids In US, Reaches $230 Million Settlement (MSN)

Johnson & Johnson, one of the pharmaceutical giants accused of fueling the deadly US opioid crisis, has reached a settlement with the state of New York for $230 million and confirmed it will stop making or selling opioids in the United States. The agreement announced Saturday allows Johnson & Johnson to resolve litigation over its role in the epidemic, which has killed more than half a million people since 1999, according to a statement from New York attorney general Letitia James. For its part, in a separate statement J&J said the settlement allowed it to avoid a trial that was scheduled to begin Monday, and said the group had “made the business decision in 2020 to discontinue all of its prescription pain medications in the United States.”

The settlement “is not an admission of liability or wrongdoing by the company,” it said, noting that other nationwide legal proceedings are underway, including a trial in California. The prosecutor’s statement said the company would spread the payments over nine years. J&J could also pay an additional $30 million in the first year if the state enacts new legislation creating an opioid settlement fund. “The opioid epidemic has wreaked havoc on countless communities across New York state and the rest of the nation, leaving millions still addicted to dangerous and deadly opioids,” James said in the statement. “Johnson & Johnson helped fuel this fire, but today they’re committing to leaving the opioid business — not only in New York, but across the entire country,” she added.

Medical surveillance.

• A “Leap” toward Humanity’s Destruction (Whitney Webb)

The world’s richest medical research foundation, the Wellcome Trust, has teamed up with a pair of former DARPA directors who built Silicon Valley’s skunkworks to usher in an age of nightmarish surveillance, including for babies as young as three months old. Their agenda can only advance if we allow it. A UK nonprofit with ties to global corruption throughout the COVID-19 crisis as well as historical and current ties to the UK eugenics movement launched a global health-focused DARPA equivalent last year. The move went largely unnoticed by both mainstream and independent media.

The Wellcome Trust, which has arguably been second only to Bill Gates in its ability to influence events during the COVID-19 crisis and vaccination campaign, launched its own global equivalent of the Pentagon’s secretive research agency last year, officially to combat the “most pressing health challenges of our time.” Though first conceived of in 2018, this particular Wellcome Trust initiative was spun off from the Trust last May with $300 million in initial funding. It quickly attracted two former DARPA executives, who had previously served in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley, to manage and plan its portfolio of projects.

This global health DARPA, known as Wellcome Leap, seeks to achieve “breakthrough scientific and technological solutions” by or before 2030, with a focus on “complex global health challenges.” The Wellcome Trust is open about how Wellcome Leap will apply the approaches of Silicon Valley and venture capital firms to the health and life science sector. Unsurprisingly, their three current programs are poised to develop incredibly invasive tech-focused, and in some cases overtly transhumanist, medical technologies, including a program exclusively focused on using artificial intelligence (AI), mobile sensors, and wearable brain-mapping tech for children three years old and younger.

This Unlimited Hangout investigation explores not only the four current programs of Wellcome Leap but also the people behind it. The resulting picture is of an incredibly sinister project that poses not only a great threat to current society but to the future of humanity itself. An upcoming Unlimited Hangout investigation will examine the history of the Wellcome Trust along with its role in recent and current events.

“It will not publish a column from a Republican senator on protests in the United States but it will publish columns from one of the Chinese leaders crushing protests for freedom in Hong Kong.”

• United States Ranks Last In Media Trust (Turley)

For years, we have been discussing the decline of journalism values with the rise of open bias in the media. Now, a newly released report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford has found something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. The United States ranked dead last in media trust among 49 countries with just 29% saying that they trusted the media. The most tragic aspect is that it does not matter. The media has embraced the advocacy journalism and anyone questioning that trend risks instant cancellation. The result is a type of state media where journalists are bound to the government by ideology rather than law. The plunging level of trust reflects the loss of the premier news organizations to a type of woke journalism.

We have have been discussing how writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. Even journalists are leading attacks on free speech and the free press. This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. Likewise, the University of North Carolina recently offered an academic chair in Journalism to New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. While Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her writing on The 1619 Project, she has been criticized for her role in purging dissenting views from the New York Times pages and embracing absurd anti-police conspiracy theories.

Even waiting for the facts is viewed as unethical today by journalism professors who demand that reporters make political or social declarations through their coverage. One of the lowest moments came with the New York Times’ mea culpa for publishing an opinion column by a conservative senator. The New York Times was denounced by many of us for its cringing apology after publishing a column by Sen. Tom Cotton (R, Ark.). and promising not to publish future such columns. It will not publish a column from a Republican senator on protests in the United States but it will publish columns from one of the Chinese leaders crushing protests for freedom in Hong Kong. Cotton was arguing that the use of national guard troops may be necessary to quell violent riots, noting the historical use of this option in past protests. This option was used most recently after the Capitol riot.

Now add record heat in the west.

• US Food Banks Warn Soaring Prices Will Affect Distributions (ZH)

Soaring food prices aren’t just impacting financially strapped families and the working poor. They’re also affecting the mission of US food banks who are spending a lot more on food than ever before. “We’re already spending a lot more on food than we have in years past,” said Greg Trotter, a spokesman for the Greater Chicago Food Depository, a large food bank, who spoke with VOA News. “Our food purchasing budget has doubled this year.” In the coming weeks and or months, food banks across the country may experience a surge in food demand from millions of folks who are set to have their stimmy checks expire. At least 25 states are ending federal unemployment benefits.

The perfect storm of factors (soaring food costs and unemployment benefits expiring) may stress food banks even further. “The high prices are costing us more to feed a family in need,” said Alison Padget, development and outreach director at Food for Others. “We’ll have to rethink our purchasing decisions because economists say the prices are going to be high for at least a year.” In Phoenix, Arizona, Jerry Brown, director of public relations at St. Mary’s Food Bank, told VOA that food banks could face severe difficulty once federal money dries up. It seems the problem has already begun at the Community Food Bank of New Jersey, which covers a large portion of the state. Impact leader Triada Stampas said the food bank serves more people than ever because of out-of-control prices at grocery stores.

According to Father English Food Pantry officials in Paterson, New Jersey, the food bank is already experiencing financial strain. Kelly Mott, external affairs director at the Mississippi Food Network, said, “We already see the price changes will affect us soon, adding that “we are in the process of buying turkeys for the Thanksgiving holiday in November. And since they are so expensive, we won’t be able to purchase as many as we usually do, especially for the families with children who rely on us.”

“The most likely thing is that we’ll get married in the prison and then we’ll have another kind of wedding celebration with friends and family once he’s free.”

• Stella Moris Says She Plans To Marry Julian Assange In Belmarsh Prison (RT)

Stella Moris, the partner of Julian Assange, has said that she and the WikiLeaks co-founder will tie the knot while he is in Belmarsh prison, and expressed hope he will be released soon so that there can be a proper celebration. Moris, a lawyer who began her relationship with Assange during the years he spent claiming political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, told German news agency DPA that the couple has been engaged since 2016 and will press ahead with their wedding plans, even if it means getting married in the maximum-security London prison. Moris and Assange have two sons, aged four and two and a half.

She acknowledged, however, that the “bureaucratic process” to obtain permission for the ceremony would take time, and that the ceremony has been further complicated by Covid-19 restrictions. Apart from needing to obtain relevant documents from their respective home countries, there is concern that the marriage could be hampered by the fact that Assange’s UK visa has expired. It’s also unclear if any guests would be allowed to attend the prison ceremony due to the health crisis. In theory, Assange could be let out of Belmarsh for a day so that he could get married, but there is already a large backlog of delayed weddings due to the country’s lockdown. “[I]f we get married in the prison, then I don’t think that will be the only celebration,” Moris told the outlet. “The most likely thing is that we’ll get married in the prison and then we’ll have another kind of wedding celebration with friends and family once he’s free.”

Problem is, we’ve known for years that Thordarson is a convicted pedophile and a serial liar. But his “testimony” is still there.

Edward Snowden @Snowden: “This is the end of the case against Julian Assange.”

“If Biden continues to seek the extradition of a publisher under an indictment poisoned top-to-bottom with false testimony admitted by its own star witness, the damage to the United States’ reputation on press freedom would last for a generation. It’s unavoidable.”

• Key Witness In Assange Case Admits To Lies In Indictment (Stundin)

A major witness in the United States’ Department of Justice case against Julian Assange has admitted to fabricating key accusations in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. The witness, who has a documented history with sociopathy and has received several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and wide-ranging financial fraud, made the admission in a newly published interview in Stundin where he also confessed to having continued his crime spree whilst working with the Department of Justice and FBI and receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution. The man in question, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, was recruited by US authorities to build a case against Assange after misleading them to believe he was previously a close associate of his.

In fact he had volunteered on a limited basis to raise money for Wikileaks in 2010 but was found to have used that opportunity to embezzle more than $50,000 from the organization. Julian Assange was visiting Thordarson’s home country of Iceland around this time due to his work with Icelandic media and members of parliament in preparing the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a press freedom project that produced a parliamentary resolution supporting whistleblowers and investigative journalism. [..] The court documents refer to Mr Thordarson simply as “Teenager” (a reference to his youthful appearance rather than true age, he is 28 years old) and Iceland as “NATO Country 1” but make no real effort to hide the identity of either. They purport to show that Assange instructed Thordarson to commit computer intrusions or hacking in Iceland.

The aim of this addition to the indictment was apparently to shore up and support the conspiracy charge against Assange in relation to his interactions with Chelsea Manning. Those occurred around the same time he resided in Iceland and the authors of the indictment felt they could strengthen their case by alleging he was involved in illegal activity there as well. This activity was said to include attempts to hack into the computers of members of parliament and record their conversations. In fact, Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him to hack or access phone recordings of MPs. His new claim is that he had in fact received some files from a third party who claimed to have recorded MPs and had offered to share them with Assange without having any idea what they actually contained.

He claims he never checked the contents of the files or even if they contained audio recordings as his third party source suggested. He further admits the claim, that Assange had instructed or asked him to access computers in order to find any such recordings, is false. Nonetheless, the tactics employed by US officials appear to have been successful as can be gleaned from the ruling of Magistrate Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser on January 4th of this year. Although she ruled against extradition, she did so purely on humanitarian grounds relating to Assange’s health concerns, suicide risk and the conditions he would face in confinement in US prisons. With regards to the actual accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question.

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Debt Rattle February 14 2020

Feb 142020

February 14, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:58 am Finance Tagged with: Bill Barr, Bloomberg, coronavirus, Covid19, DOJ, Fed, Foxconn, gobshite, Roger Stone, Senate, Singapore, Trump, WHO 24 Responses »

Alfred Palmer Halftrack scout car brought up to Army standards of smartness. White Motor Company, Cleveland Dec 1941

• Beijing Lowers Coronavirus Deaths By 108 Due To “Double Counting” (ZH)

• Singapore’s Biggest Daily Jump In New Coronavirus Cases Takes Tally To 58 (R.)

• Foxconn Denies Reuters Reports On Factory Restart In China (ZH)

• WHO Advisor Says Coronavirus May Infect Over 5 Billion People (ZH)

• Senate Passes Iran War Powers Resolution Despite Trump’s Opposition (CNN)

• Barr Says Trump Tweets About DOJ Cases Make It ‘Impossible To Do My Job’ (CNN)

• Foreperson On Roger Stone Jury Revealed As Anti-Trump Activist (DM)

• Judge Napolitano: Roger Stone Should Get New Trial (Fox)

• Senate Attacks Judy Shelton For Sin Of Being Outside The Mainstream (Mises)

• Why Is Bloomberg’s Long History of Egregious Sexism Getting a Pass? (GQ)

• Irish MEP Calls Venezuela’s Guaido ‘Unelected Gobshite’ In EU Parliament (RT)

• UK Tells 100-Year-Old Man His Parents Must Sign For Settled Status (Ind.)

I noticed late last night my time that the COVID19 death tally went from an initial 1486 all the way back to 1380. Found that very curious, thought it was an error. But woke up this morning to find they really did it. As Tyler put it at the time: “Hubei province reports 116 new coronavirus deaths and 4,823 cases, bringing the overall official count to 1,486 deaths and 65,213 confirmed. China must feel its credibility is completely shot by now, or they’d be much more careful.

As I wrote this, the numbers are (from various sources, fluid):

• Cases: 64,443 (from yesterday’s 60,108)

• Deaths: 1,383 (from yesterday’s 1,363)

• Suspected cases 10,109

• In serious/critical condition 10,227

• Recovered 6,801

• Health workers infected 1716

• Hubei deducted 1,043 older cases and 108 deaths due to double counting

• 267 new cases and 5 new deaths outside Hubei province

• First death in Japan, 15th case in US

The “double-counted” deaths can’t have anything to do with the new accounting measures that lifted the numbers of cases yesterday. So what happened? No explanation. Something Beijing cannot afford.

• Beijing Lowers Coronavirus Deaths By 108 Due To “Double Counting” (ZH)

..while China “can now claim it wants to be more transparent (which is odd for a nation that is still refusing to admit the US CDC on the ground) and wants a more comprehensive definition of “infection” because it is suddenly so concerned about all those people it ordered to go back to work on Monday, it somehow also changed the definition of “death”, because at the same time as the explosion in new cases, which clearly indicates that the pandemic is now clearly out of control, the number of reported deaths in Hubei alone spiked by 242 to 1,310.”

One day later China appears to have realized just how flagrant this “mistake” – which exposed the lie which Chinese officials had used until now to avoid a panic, and reset the infection count to a sharply higher number – was, because even as Hubei reported an additional 4,823 cases as of Thursday (and the Chinese National Health Commission said this number was up 5,090 for all of China), there was some major confusion about what the actual number of deaths was. Here’s why. In its official daily update on the coronavirus epidemic on Thursday, Feb 13 – the day of the great surge in infections and deaths – the NHC reported that across all of China, there was an increase of 242 death cases in China, of which 216 in Wuhan to 1,367..

… which is bizarre, because one day later, in its latest update from Friday, Feb 14, the NHC said that while the number of deaths – which as of Thursday recall were 1,367 (see above) – increased by 121, the total number of declared deaths across China was just 1,380. In other words, somehow the jump from 1,367 deaths to 1,380 was an increase of 121 deaths!? But don’t take our word for it: here is JPMorgan’s official count of all related data as of this morning, showing that indeed, as of Feb 13 (so for Feb 12), there was a total of 1,367 deaths reported by the National Health Commission.

Is this just pro-forma, adjusted death math with Chinese characteristics? As it turns out no, because recall that while China may have reset the number of new cases sharply higher, it certainly did not mean to also send the number of deaths surging, as it would means that this had nothing to do with a change in the definition of infection, and everything to do with undercounting the number of infected and dead. So what did Beijing do?

Well, as the NHC “explained” in its Friday statement, that 242 increase in deaths officially reported on Thursday somehow also included 108 deaths that were “double counted.” There was no explanation how or why it was possible to “double count” a death. Which of course, it isn’t and what really happened is that China, having realized its glaring mistake which prompted us to mock its “data” yesterday, had to quickly cut by roughly half the surge in Thursday deaths to make the progression in the number of new deaths “smooth.” And sure enough, this is what the revised death chart looks like after the “double counting” revision: compare the chart up top of the number in new deaths before today’s “revision”, with what the death number looks like now, after the latest “data.”

The sign suggests wearing a mask only when you’re already sick. Someone tell 500 million Chinese.

• Singapore’s Biggest Daily Jump In New Coronavirus Cases Takes Tally To 58 (R.)

Singapore on Thursday reported its biggest daily jump in coronavirus cases, with eight newly infected patients bringing its total to 58, the health ministry said. All of the new patients were linked to previous cases, the ministry said. Of the 58 confirmed cases reported, 15 have recovered and been discharged from hospital while seven are in critical condition in intensive care, it added.

REUTERS/Feline Lim

This has been a He Said She Said all week. It gets serious if false reports make shares surge, though.

• Foxconn Denies Reuters Reports On Factory Restart In China (ZH)

Foxconn denied a report that it plans to resume over half its production by the end of February, as the Covid-19 outbreak worsens. The report via Reuters noted that 50% of Foxconn’s production would come back online by the end of the month, and the aim for full production for next month. This sent Apple shares to near record highs this week; however, Foxconn ruined the party and said Reuters was incorrect about plant resumptions. The statement by the world’s largest contract electronics maker was published via the Taipei stock exchange on Thursday, and first cited by Reuters. Foxconn is Apple’s main iPhone assembler in China and offered no timetable of when its factories would reopen. Foxconn received the go-ahead to reopen some plants in China this week. However, only about 10% of its workforce had returned to several plants in southern Shenzhen and central Zhengzhou on Monday.

Apple has also extended the shutdown of its retail stores across the country. Stores were supposed to open earlier this week but have now delayed until February 15. TrendForce Corp. said Apple could see a 10% decline in iPhone sales in 1Q, from 45.5 million to about 41 million units, due mostly because of factory shutdowns tied to the virus outbreak. We’ve noted, in the last several weeks, that if Foxconn factories cannot resume production by early February and have full production by the end of the month, shortages would develop for Apple iPhones and AirPods. The one sector with the most exposure to Greater China and the Asia Pacific is also the sector that has outperformed the most in recent months: Tech. This means that supply chain disruptions are about to cause one of the most significant shocks since the financial crisis.

Second expert to say this. The media should set the proper context: this is true if no measures to contain the disease are taken.

• WHO Advisor Says Coronavirus May Infect Over 5 Billion People (ZH)

In yet another sign of the World Health Organization’s about-face on the coronavirus outbreak, a top epidemiologist and advisor to the organization said Thursday that if the virus isn’t contained soon, it could infect 60% of the global population – or more than 5 billion people – echoing projections made by a Hong Kong scientist who was once labeled an alarmist despite his pioneering work in the fight against SARS. According to Bloomberg, that’s what WHO advisor Ira Longini said after finishing a study of the virus’s transmissibility. His estimates suggest that the virus could one day infect billions of people, far more than the ~60,000 or so cases as of earlier on Thursday.

If the virus truly has a mortality rate of 2% (around the low end of current estimates), at this rate, it would kill more than 100 million. Of course, if the virus manages to spread so widely, it will unequivocally prove that China’s draconian quarantines weren’t effective enough, and that the government effectively set itself up for failure when it hesitated to try and contain the outbreak after it first emerged in Wuhan late last year. In recent days, growing attention has been paid to the lack of reliable virus tests, not just in China, but in virtually all countries where the virus has spread. The difficulties in diagnosing the virus could mean we see another sudden surge of cases – but this time, it could be even larger than last night’s dump from officials in Hubei.

Even if we could find a way to reduce the virus’s ability to spread by half, it would could still wind up infecting more than 2 billion people. “Unless the transmissibility changes, surveillance and containment can only work so well,” Longini, co-director of the Center for Statistics and Quantitative Infectious Diseases at the University of Florida, said in an interview at WHO headquarters in Geneva. “Isolating cases and quarantining contacts is not going to stop this virus.”

Excuse me, but doesn’t this give Trump exactly what he would want, a bipartisan vote against the swamp, the War Party, without him having to do the heavy lifting?!

In taking the power away from him, you also absolve him of any responsibility. And that power, BTW, is only that involving Iran. Or course Trump puts up token resistance, but…

• Senate Passes Iran War Powers Resolution Despite Trump’s Opposition (CNN)

The Senate passed an Iran War Powers resolution on Thursday, a rare measure that was approved with bipartisan support despite the fact that it has been opposed by President Donald Trump and aims to rein in his ability to use military action against Iran without congressional approval. The vote was 55-45. Eight Republicans voted in favor of it: Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Todd Young of Indiana, Mike Lee of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Jerry Moran of Kansas. The President warned the Senate not to green-light the measure on Wednesday, tweeting that “it is very important for our country’s security that the United States Senate not vote for the Iran War Powers Resolution,” and adding, “If my hands were tied, Iran would have a field day.”

The White House has also issued a veto threat against it. Despite that, the resolution, chiefly authored by Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, won bipartisan support. Several Republican senators, including Lee, Paul and Collins, signed on as co-sponsors. Earlier on Thursday, potential problems threatened to derail the resolution ahead of an the final vote, with Senate Democrats warning that an amendment filed late Wednesday by GOP Sen. Tom Cotton – that Democrats described as a poison pill – could draw enough support to pass and possibly make it difficult for the underlying bipartisan War Powers Resolution to maintain majority support.

Ultimately, however, the Senate defeated the controversial amendment, clearing the way for final passage. The Senate voted to table — or kill — the amendment. The resolution “directs the President to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces for hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran or any part of its government or military, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force against Iran.” It includes a provision stating that no part of the resolution “shall be construed to prevent the United States from defending itself from imminent attack.”

There were calls for an investigation into Barr and Trump interfering in the Roger Stone case. Barr just reduced Trump’s role to a bunch of tweets. They’re going to investigate a bunch of tweets? And what is there about Barr to investigate when he’s just publicly put a distance between him and Trump? Or do the want to investigate the Attorney General over a decision he hasn’t even made yet?

• Barr Says Trump Tweets About DOJ Cases Make It ‘Impossible To Do My Job’ (CNN)

Attorney General William Barr on Thursday rebuked President Donald Trump for publicly commenting on sensitive investigations but insisted the Justice Department had acted appropriately after an extraordinary falling out with career prosecutors who had handled the case of Roger Stone earlier this week. In an interview with ABC News, Barr provided a robust defense of the department’s rank-and-file and said Trump’s online missives made it “impossible” to do his job. “I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me,” Barr said.

“To have public statements and tweets made about the department, about people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending in the department and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we’re doing our work with integrity,” he said. The criticism was a notable zag for Barr after days of mounting scrutiny over his role in the fraught decision to publicly disavow prosecutors who had sought a stiff punishment for Stone, a longtime friend of Trump. The President had tweeted congratulations Barr for the move, provoking protest from Democrats who demanded an investigation.

The four career attorneys who had worked on the Stone case and signed off on the original sentencing memorandum each withdrew from the case on Tuesday in an apparent protest. On Thursday, Barr said he was “a little surprised” that the prosecutors had stepped down, and told ABC News that it was “preposterous” to characterize his role in the developments this week as an intervention. He argued he had merely acted to resolve an internal department dispute. He has not spoken with the prosecutors, he added. Barr told ABC that he hoped the President would react and respect the criticism of his tweets delivered in the interview. “I hope he will react,” Barr said.

Jurors are supposed to be vetted to make sure they’re impartial. This woman may have been selected for being the opposite. She should never have been selected.

• Foreperson On Roger Stone Jury Revealed As Anti-Trump Activist (DM)

The foreperson on the jury that convicted Roger Stone has come forward, and is revealed to be a failed Democrat candidate for Congress and activist vehemently opposed to President Donald Trump. Tomeka Hart, a former Memphis City Schools Board President, came forward as the Stone jury foreperson in a Facebook post on Wednesday, voicing support for prosecutors in the case. Hart confirmed to The Daily Memphian that she wrote the Facebook post, but she declined an interview with the newspaper. Stone supporters were shocked when a review of Hart’s social media posts showed that she posted on Twitter mocking Stone’s dramatic arrest prior to being seated on the jury, and frequently denounced Trump, including calling the president and his supporters racists.

It’s unclear whether Stone’s political views and social media history were disclosed during jury selection, potentially raising questions about fairness that could impact the verdict on appeal. [..] Hart unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2012, and is an activist who has participated in anti-Trump rallies and protests. Immediately, journalists and Trump supporters began scouring Hart’s social media history, finding a trove of anti-Trump sentiment. Independent journalist Mike Cernovich was the first to report on Hart’s extensive history of anti-Trump social media posts. In January 2019, Hart also re-tweeted a post by pundit Bakari Sellers mocking Stone’s arrest, and suggesting that racism was the reason conservatives were upset about the use of force in the FBI’s armed pre-dawn raid on his home.

Months later, Hart was impaneled on Stone’s jury. On the day the jury convicted him, she posted emojis of hearts and fist pumps.

She was tweeting about the case while it was going on, and she was the lead juror. How ridiculous can it get?

• Judge Napolitano: Roger Stone Should Get New Trial (Fox)

Judge Andrew Napolitano said on Thursday that former Trump adviser Roger Stone deserves a new trial in light of resurfaced tweets that indicate partisanship and “inherent bias” from a jury member against Stone. Former Memphis City Schools Board President Tomeka Hart revealed Wednesday that she was the foreperson of the jury that convicted Stone on obstruction charges last year — and soon afterward, her history of Democratic activism and a string of her anti-Trump, left-wing social media posts came to light. “[Stone is] absolutely entitled to a new trial with a member of a jury making these types of revelations about the politics involved in the decisions to prosecute him,” Napolitano told “Fox & Friends.”

Hart even posted specifically about the Stone case before she voted to convict, as she retweeted an argument mocking those who considered Stone’s dramatic arrest in a predawn raid by a federal tactical team to be excessive force. She also suggested President Trump and his supporters are racist and praised the investigation conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which ultimately led to Stone’s prosecution. Some of Hart’s posts were written as Stone’s trial was in progress. Hart, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2012, quoted someone in an August 2017 tweet referring to Trump as a member of the KKK. In January 2019, she retweeted a post by pundit Bakari Sellers, who noted that “Roger Stone has y’all talking about reviewing use of force guidelines,” before suggesting that racism was the reason for all the attention Stone’s arrest had received from conservatives.

Napolitano said that he presided over 150 jury trials and “most were criminal.” “It is the duty of the judge to ensure that both the government and defendant get a fair trial and if the judge discovers afterward that there was a built-in inherent bias on the part of a member of a jury against the defendant, that is an automatic trigger for a new trial,” he explained.

Can the Fed deal with diversity of opinion?

• Senate Attacks Judy Shelton For Sin Of Being Outside The Mainstream (Mises)

Today the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing for President Trump’s two most recent Federal Reserve nominees. In one chair sat Christopher Waller, vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, whose dreadfully dull answers could have been the product of a bot forced to watch 1,000 hours of central bank testimony. Luckily for those watching, most of the questions were directed towards the far more intriguing – and controversial – Judy Shelton. While by no means an Austrian, Judy Shelton’s record includes public support for a modern gold standard, criticism of the Fed’s response to the financial crisis, and even compared America’s central bank to Soviet central planners.

On the topic of competing currencies, Ms. Shelton once referred to Bernard von NotHaus, a man arrested by the US government for the production of silver “Liberty Dollars”, as the “Rosa Parks of monetary policy” for his willingness to challenge the Fed. Beyond monetary policy, she cited government deposit insurance as a program that risks creating moral hazard, suggested that the US could pay off its public debts by selling off assets like the US Postal Service and Federally-held public lands, and even publicly questioned the accuracy of government inflation measures. The recounting of the Greatest Hits of Judy Shelton offered a glimpse of what it would look like to actually drain the swamp of central bankers.

Of course, all of this was sharply – and at times uncivilly – criticized by duly-elected economic midwits that sought to lecture to Ms. Shelton while desperately relying upon the prepared questions of legislative aides. Senator Richard Shelby, at one point the Chairman of the Banking Committee, was particularly appalled at the notion of nominating a Federal Reserve candidate so outside the mainstream. His grilling of Ms. Shelton included sagely pointing out that the amount of gold in the world is worth less than the American GDP, and suggested that the gold standard was a product of the days when the US was a “barter economy.” Of course, it is a reflection of the dilapidated state of modern economics that Shelby’s ignorance would make him a safer choice for the Federal Reserve than either Shelton or her friend James Grant.

All the racism and sexism he can buy for $1650 million and counting.

• Why Is Bloomberg’s Long History of Egregious Sexism Getting a Pass? (GQ)

In December 2015, employees at Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control organization funded by Mike Bloomberg, arrived at work to find a holiday gift on their desks from their employer: the former mayor’s 1997 autobiography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg. Flipping through the book, staffers found themselves uncomfortably reading their billionaire founder’s boasts about keeping “a girlfriend in every city” and other womanizing exploits as a Wall Street up-and-comer. “A few people started immediately going through it and sending the cringe-iest parts around on email chains,” one former Everytown employee told me. “Hardly the most controversial things he’s said, but it’s still a bad look.”

Indeed, Bloomberg’s casual boasts about his sex life in his own autobiography are now some of the least problematic parts of the his candidacy for president. In recent days, the former New York City mayor’s track record on race is undergoing renewed scrutiny: Bloomberg oversaw and expanded the racist and unconstitutional “stop and frisk” program, and a newly unearthed video shows him blaming the end of a racially discriminatory housing practice known as “redlining” for the 2008 economic recession.

But it takes a telling amount of gall and cluelessness to gift a book with anecdotes about your own womanizing to employees at your gun safety non-profit in the year 2015, especially for a politician with presidential ambitions who has been vigorously denying allegations of misogyny throughout his entire career—including some 40 sex discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuits brought against him and his organizations by 64 women over the past several decades. Bloomberg’s sexism, like that of fellow New York City billionaire Donald Trump, has been prolific and well-documented, but for some reason, the stories about him don’t seem to have taken hold. He is still being embraced by the Democratic establishment as a viable option for its presidential nominee. He surged to third place in several 2020 polls this week; the DNC changed its rules to allow him to participate in the next primary debate; Nancy Pelosi said his presence in the primary is a “positive one.”

Priceless how the speaker first has to wait for the translation in his earphone. Wonder what the translation was.

• Irish MEP Calls Venezuela’s Guaido ‘Unelected Gobshite’ In EU Parliament (RT)

Irish MEP Mick Wallace has been reprimanded for referring to Venezuela’s self-declared president Juan Guaido as an “unelected gobshite” during remarks at the European Parliament. Wallace, an Independents 4 Change MEP, was speaking Wednesday about Venezuela’s ongoing political crisis and the European Parliament’s recent decision to recognize Guaido as the country’s interim president, when he slipped the insult in. Dressed in a neon green t-shirt, the clearly irate MEP said the decision was “an absolute embarrassment to anyone who has to occupy this chamber” and a “disgrace on the part of the member states of Europe” that so many of them have recognized an “unelected gobshite.”

“Gobshite” is a favorite Irish term for a less-than-competent individual. The Ireland South MEP was quickly admonished by the parliament’s vice president Rainer Wieland. “Now, you did use the word ‘gobshite’ sir, and I would reprimand you over that,” he said. Wallace wasn’t in the mood for apologies, however. He later doubled down on the comment on Twitter, saying that Guaido “is” in fact a gobshite and the parliament’s recognition of him is “outrageous.” Fellow Independents 4 Change MEP Clare Daly also tweeted in support of Wallace, saying that his remark was “probably the best contribution EVER” on Guaido at the European Parliament.

Mick Wallace 'reprimanded' for calling Guaidó a gobshite pic.twitter.com/lNanH6pf7q

— Subprime (@sbprme) February 12, 2020

Just another chapter in the UK morality tale, (mal-)functioning at a 1780 AD level. Fits right in with more Jamaicans being sent back in Windrush fashion.

• UK Tells 100-Year-Old Man His Parents Must Sign For Settled Status (Ind.)

A 100-year-old Italian man was told his parents must confirm his identity if he wants to stay in the UK after Brexit. Giovanni Palmiero, who has lived in London since 1966, went to an advice centre in Islington, north London, to apply for settled status. But when a volunteer scanned his passport using the Home Office EU settled status app, it misinterpreted his birth year to be 2019 instead of 1919. An apparent glitch means the system does not recognise triple digit ages and misinterpreted the “19” in 1919 to be 2019. Since the app believed the great-grandfather was only a baby, it asked him to enter his father’s residency details to complete the application.

Mr Palmiero, who will turn 101 on 28 February, moved to London in 1966, before the UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973. He worked at a restaurant in Piccadilly and in a fish and chip shop until the age of 94. He has been married to his wife Lucia, 92, for 75 years and they have four children, eight grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren together. Their son Assuntino Palmiero said it was “like a humiliation” because his father has lived in the UK for so long. He told The Guardian: “I am not worried about him because he has got us but it’s completely unfair on old people.”

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Debt Rattle June 12 2018

Jun 122018

June 12, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:19 am Finance Tagged with: bat, buybacks, diplomacy, ECB, Kim, Lagarde, net neutrality, refugees, Rodman, Singapore, Trump 11 Responses »

Henri Matisse The pink studio 1911

• Trump And Kim Sign “Comprehensive” Letter To End Historic Summit (ZH)

• Dennis Rodman Cries As He Hails Trump-Kim Summit: ‘I’m So Happy’ (G.)

• Trump, Kim Meet, But Body Language Shows Some Nerves (R.)

• IMF’s Lagarde Says Global Economic Outlook Darkening By The Day (R.)

• If Trump Wants To Blow Up The World Order, Who Will Stop Him? (Varoufakis)

• World Wrassling Diplomacy (Jim Kunstler)

• Twelve Tips For Making Sense Of The World (CJ)

• ECB Set To Begin The Process Of Its Easy Money-Exit (CNBC)

• Corporate Executives Cash In On Stock Buybacks (CNBC)

• US Net Neutrality Rules Expire, Court Battle Looms (R.)

• Stranded Migrant Rescue Boat Unable To Make Voyage To Spain (Ind.)

• The Last Bat: The Mystery Of Britain’s Most Solitary Animal (G.)

Went exactly as expected. No big deal. But Trump’s reeled in Kim, who will now have to deliver.

• Trump And Kim Sign “Comprehensive” Letter To End Historic Summit (ZH)

Donald Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un signed what the US president described as a “very important, comprehensive” document following the conclusion of their “really fantastic” whirlwind historic summit in Singapore, the first between a US president and North Korean leader that came after decades of hostility. “The letter that we are signing is very comprehensive, and I think both sides will be very impressed with the results,” Trump said as he sat alongside the North Korean leader at a large wooden table in front of a bank of U.S. and North Korean flags to endorse the document, which however produced no new specific commitments from Pyongyang to surrender its nuclear weapons aside from broad generalities.

Speaking through an interpreter, Kim said that the two countries would “leave the past behind” in signing the “historic”agreement and that “the world will see the major change,” adding that “I would like to express gratitude to President Trump for making this meeting happen.” Trump said more information would come out “in just a little while” and did not say what the agreement entailed, but some had already managed to extract the key contents from the letter Trump held up. The letter says that the U.S. and North Korea “will join their efforts to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula,” and that North Korea “commits to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

The pair also agree to “establish new U.S.-DPRK relations, and the two leaders “have committed to cooperate for the development of new U.S.-DPRK relations and for the promotion of peace, prosperity and security of the Korean Peninsula and of the world.” Notably, the U.S. and N. Korea agree to follow-on negotiations led by Sec. of State Mike Pompeo and a DPRK counterpart. In other words this is just the first of many summits. Speaking to reporters, Trump also said the he would “absolutely” invite Kim to the White House to continue their talks, meanwhile Kim called the document “historic” and said it would lead to a new era in the U.S.-North Korea relationship. “We had a historic meeting and decided to leave the past behind, and we are about to sign a historic document,” he said through a translator. “The world will see a major change.”

Perspective is everything.

• Dennis Rodman Cries As He Hails Trump-Kim Summit: ‘I’m So Happy’ (G.)

Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump had barely exchanged pleasantries outside the Capella hotel when their mutual friend Dennis Rodman appeared on TV to provide a characteristically bizarre sideshow to the main event in Singapore. In a rambling interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo from Singapore, a highly emotional Rodman claimed credit for predicting that today’s summit – which seemed unlikely just months ago – would happen. Wearing a Make America Great Again baseball cap and a T-shirt bearing the name of his sponsor Potcoin, Rodman sobbed as he described his feelings about the summit and recalled the abuse he had received over his controversial visits to Pyongyang to meet Kim. “I said to everybody, the door will open,” he said.

“It’s amazing, it’s amazing, it’s amazing. When I said those things, when I went back home, I got so many death threats … and I believed in North Korea, and I couldn’t even go home, I couldn’t even go home, I had to hide out for 30 days, I couldn’t even go home. “But I kept my head high, brother, I knew things were going to change … I knew it, I was the only one. I never had no one to hear me, I had no one to see me. But I took all those bullets, I took all at that … but I’m still standing. Today is a great day for everybody, Singapore, Tokyo, China, everybody … it’s a great day. I’m here to see it. I’m so happy.”

The former NBA star is one of the few westerners to have met Kim, with whom he struck up an unlikely friendship over their shared love of basketball. Describing his meetings with Kim, Rodman said: “He’s more like a big kid, even though he’s small. He wants to come to America. He wants to enjoy his life.” Rodman said he had tried to pass on what he heard from Kim to Barack Obama but was “brushed off”.

Reuters has called in a body language expert. Stay tuned for Aunt Mille’s take on their astrological signs. June 14 is Trump’s 72nd birthday.

• Trump, Kim Meet, But Body Language Shows Some Nerves (R.)

In their first moments of meeting each other, U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un both sought to project a sense of command but displayed some anxiety at the start of their high-stakes summit in Singapore. Body language experts said that in the 13 seconds or so the U.S. president held on to the hand of Kim for the first time, he projected his usual dominance by reaching out first, and patting the North Korean leader’s shoulder. Not to be outdone, Kim firmly pumped Trump’s hand, looking him straight in the eye for the duration, before breaking off to face the media.

“It wasn’t a straight-out handshake,” said Allan Pease, an Australian body language expert and author of several books on the topic, including “The Definitive Guide to Body Language”. “It was up and down, there was an argy-bargy, each one was pulling the other closer. Each guy wasn’t letting the other get a dominant grip,” he told Reuters by telephone from Melbourne. Trump and Kim are meeting in Singapore for historic talks aimed at finding a way to end a nuclear standoff on the Korean peninsula. Should they succeed, it could bring lasting change to the security landscape of Northeast Asia, like the visit of former U.S. President Richard Nixon to China in 1972 led to the transformation of China.

Ahead of the meeting, Trump had said he would be able to work out within the first minute whether his North Korean counterpart was serious about making peace. Projecting authority comes easily to Trump, who as a global leader, businessman and former television personality is well-versed in using body language effectively. He also has a height advantage over Kim. While both men walked to the library where they held their first face-to-face meeting, Trump sought to ease any tension in the air by chatting to Kim, and letting him walk slightly ahead. Trump, however, maintained control over the chat by patting Kim, and using his hand to guide him, who is almost half his age, into the room. Kim also patted Trump, in an attempt to assert control. He mainly looked down, listening, as Trump spoke, but did look up at several times during the conversation.

She doesn’t really think that, but needs a stab at Trump for upsetting the order that gave her the seat she has.

• IMF’s Lagarde Says Global Economic Outlook Darkening By The Day (R.)

IMF chief Christine Lagarde led an attack by global economic organizations on U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” trade policy on Monday, warning that clouds over the global economy “are getting darker by the day”. Trump backed out of a joint communique agreed by Group of Seven leaders in Canada at the weekend that mentioned the need for “free, fair and mutually beneficial trade” and the importance of fighting protectionism. The U.S. president, who has imposed import tariffs on metals, is furious about the United States’ large trade deficit with key allies. “Fair trade is now to be called fool trade if it is not reciprocal,” he tweeted on Monday.

In response, Lagarde unleashed a thinly veiled attack on Trump’s trade policy, saying challenges to the way trade is conducted were damaging business confidence, which had soured even since the weekend G7 summit. The IMF is sticking to its forecast for global growth of 3.9% both this year and next, she said, before adding: “But the clouds on the horizon that we have signaled about six months ago are getting darker by the day, and I was going to say by the weekend.” “The biggest and darkest cloud that we see is the deterioration in confidence that is prompted by (an) attempt to challenge the way in which trade has been conducted, in which relationships have been handled and in which multilateral organizations have been operating,” Lagarde said.

[..] Earlier, Germany’s economy minister said Berlin saw no immediate solution to the trade row between the United States and other major economies but remained open to talks “among friends”, seeking to head off a full-blown global trade war. As Europe’s biggest exporter to the United States, and with more than one million German jobs at stake, Germany is desperate to avoid an EU trade war with the United States. “I believe a win-win situation is still possible,” Economy Minister Peter Altmaier, one of Merkel’s closest lieutenants, told broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. “At the moment, however, it seems that no solution is in sight, at least not in the short term.”

I thought we agreed we didn’t like the world order.

• If Trump Wants To Blow Up The World Order, Who Will Stop Him? (Varoufakis)

The Trump administration is building up a substantial economic momentum domestically. First, he passed income and corporate tax cuts that the establishment Republicans could not have imagined even in their wildest dreams a few years ago. But this was not all. Behind the scenes, Trump astonished Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat’s leader in the House of Representatives, by approving every single social program that she asked of him. As a result, the federal government is running the largest budget deficit in America’s history when the rate of unemployment is less than 4%. Whatever one thinks of this president, he is giving money away not only to the richest, who of course get the most, but also to many poor people.

With demonstrably strong employment, especially among African American workers, inflation under control and the stock market still buoyant, Donald Trump has his home front covered as he travels to foreign lands to confront friends and foes. The US anti-Trump establishment prays that markets will punish his profligacy. This is precisely what would have happened if America were any other country. With a fiscal deficit expected to reach $804bn 2018 and $981bn in 2019, and with the government expected to borrow $2.34tn in the next 18 months, the exchange rate would be crashing and interest rates would be going through the roof. Except that the US is not any other country. As its central bank, the Fed, winds down its quantitative easing program by selling off its stock of accumulated assets to the private sector, investors need dollars to buy them.

This causes the number of dollars available to investors to shrink by up to $50bn a month. Add to this the dollars German and Chinese capitalists need to buy US government bonds (in a bid to park their profits somewhere safe) and you begin to see why Trump believes he will not be punished by a run either on the dollar or on government bonds. Armed with the exorbitant privilege that owning the dollar presses affords him, Trump then takes a look at the trade flows with the rest of the G7 and comes to an inescapable conclusion: he cannot possibly lose a trade war against countries that have such high surpluses with the US (eg Germany, Italy, China), or which (like Canada) will catch pneumonia the moment the American economy catches the common cold.

“..it is hard to imagine two characters less prepared by the rigors of reality than this pair.”

• World Wrassling Diplomacy (Jim Kunstler)

I’m all for world peace, and I would like to attempt to take the Kim-Trump meeting seriously, but it is hard to imagine two characters less prepared by the rigors of reality than this pair. Each has been dwelling in a magic kingdom of his own life-long. Both exhibit behaviors typical of children: sulking, threats, bluster, and mysterious mood shifts. The supposedly serious adults around Mr. Trump must be going through the Xanax like Tic-Tacs. The military attachés around the inscrutable Kim might recall the 2016 execution of two NK ministers shot to death with anti-aircraft guns for displeasing the boss — one of them for merely falling asleep during a Kim speech. Who cleaned up that mess, I wonder.

Maybe something good can come out of this improbable set-up. I expect a kind of vaudeville act: a few moments of the two principals pretending that they understand what each is saying… a hopeful communiqué announcing the blooming of a million flowers, and a fateful blowup a few hours into the honeymoon when Kim, Trump, and all the spear-carriers on both sides realize that they had no idea what they were talking about. Then, on Thursday or thereabouts the long-awaited DOJ Inspector General’s report comes out, after a going-over by the very folks at the FBI whose conduct is the subject of that review. I expect a new layer in the mighty cake baked by the white knights of the Resistance. This one will be called Redacto-Gate.

Things that should be obvious to every 5-year old, but are not:

2. Money rewards sociopathy.

3. Wealth kills empathy.

• Twelve Tips For Making Sense Of The World (CJ)

In an environment that is saturated with mass media propaganda, it can be hard to figure out which way’s up, let alone get an accurate read on what’s going on in the world. Here are a few tips I’ve learned which have given me a lot of clarity in seeing through the haze of spin and confusion. Taken separately they don’t tell you a lot, but taken together they paint a very useful picture of the world and why it is the way it is.

1. It’s always ultimately about acquiring power.
In the quest to understand why governments move in such irrational ways, why expensive, senseless wars are fought while homeless people die of exposure on the streets, why millionaires and billionaires get richer and richer while everyone else struggles to pay rent, why we destroy the ecosystem we depend on for our survival, why one elected official tends to advance more or less the same harmful policies and agendas as his or her predecessor, people often come up with explanations which don’t really hold water.

The most common of these is probably the notion that all of these problems are due to the malignant influence of one of two mainstream political parties, and if the other party could just get in control of the situation all the problems would go away. Other explanations include the belief that humans are just intrinsically awful, blaming minorities like Jews or immigrants, blaming racism and white supremacy, or going all the way down wild and twisted rabbit holes into theories about reptilian secret societies and baby-eating pedophile cabals. But really all of mankind’s irrational behavior can be explained by the basic human impulse to amass power and influence over one’s fellow humans, combined with the fact that sociopaths tend to rise to positions of power.

Our evolutionary ancestors were pack animals, and the ability to rise in social standing in one’s pack determined crucial matters like whether one got first or last dibs on food or got to reproduce. This impulse to rise in our pack is hardwired deeply into our evolutionary heritage, but when left unchecked due to a lack of empathy, and when expanded into the globe-spanning 7.6 billion human pack we now find ourselves in due to ease of transportation and communication, it can lead to individuals who will keep amassing more and more power until they wield immense influence over entire clusters of nations.

2. Money rewards sociopathy.
The willingness to do anything to get ahead, to claw your way to the top, to betray whomever you need to, to throw anyone under the bus, to step on anyone to pass them in the rat race, will be rewarded in our current system. Being willing to underpay employees, cheat the legal system, and influence legislators will be rewarded exponentially more. People with a sense of empathy are often unwilling to do such things, whereas sociopaths and psychopaths are. About four percent of the population are sociopaths, and about one percent are psychopaths, with some five to fifteen percent falling somewhere along the borderline. The less empathy you have, the further you are willing to go, and the further up the ladder you can climb.

Don’t hold your breath.

• ECB Set To Begin The Process Of Its Easy Money-Exit (CNBC)

“We never pre-commit.” This was the rule broken last week by the European Central Bank’s Chief Economist Peter Praet, one of the more dovish members of the bank’s Governing Council, as he openly said it would start to discuss the gradual exit from of its quantitative easing (QE) program this week at its meeting in Riga, Latvia. What has changed? Recent headline inflation was stronger than expected and close to the ECB’s target, mainly due to the rise in oil prices. At the same time the situation in Italy has calmed down again. But there still are risks to the growth outlook from other issues such as the U.S.-EU trade spat.

“We think a ‘flexible tapering’ announcement is more likely than an unconditional commitment to an end date for QE,” said ECB watcher Frederik Ducrozet at Pictet Wealth Management in a note. “The ECB could say that there will be ‘no further large expansion of asset purchases’ barring an unwarranted tightening of financial conditions. The modalities of QE tapering could be decided in July.” Whether the details come in June or July, the overwhelming majority of economists polled by Reuters expect the purchases to end by the end of this year. “Irrespective of whether the exit announcement is in June or July, we expect QE to end in December after a taper in (the fourth quarter) and the first policy rate hike in June 2019,” said Mark Wall, the chief economist with Deutsche Bank, in a research note.

And it’s legal!

• Corporate Executives Cash In On Stock Buybacks (CNBC)

Corporate executives are using tax cuts and share buybacks to boost their own compensation, a top regulator said Monday. Companies have announced a record-breaking level of share buybacks since Congress passed the Republican-backed tax reduction in December. Critics of the $1.5 trillion measure had worried that it would lead to big rewards for shareholders and only limited benefit to the broader economy. Robert Jackson Jr., a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said corporate bigwigs have been selling their shares after the buyback announcements hit, cashing in from the stock price surge that often happens after a repurchase notice.

The rules exempting companies from securities law violations for the timing and pricing of buyback announcements need to change, said Jackson, who President Donald Trump appointed earlier this year to fill a designated Democratic SEC seat. Jackson pointed out that the Dodd-Frank banking reforms passed after the financial crisis included language aimed at keeping investors informed about how executives cash out their shares, but specific rules remain in limbo. “But it’s not just that the regulations haven’t been finalized. It’s that the problem itself keeps getting worse,” he said. “You see, the Trump tax bill has unleashed an unprecedented wave of buybacks, and I worry that lax SEC rules and corporate oversight are giving executives yet another chance to cash out at investor expense.”

Indeed, buybacks totaled $178 billion during the first quarter, hit a record $171.3 billion in May alone and have seen $51.1 billion announced so far in June, according to market data firm TrimTabs. At the same time, insider selling has totaled $23.6 billion. Wall Street analysts expect full-year buybacks to total as much as $800 billion, part of what UBS recently forecast to be a $2.5 trillion tsunami of cash pumped into repurchases, dividends, and mergers and acquisitions activity.

Sometimes you wonder how much longer for the internet as we know it.

• US Net Neutrality Rules Expire, Court Battle Looms (R.)

The U.S. open internet rules expired on Monday, handing sweeping new powers to internet providers to block, throttle or offer paid “fast lanes” for web traffic, but a court battle remains ahead. The Federal Communications Commission repealed the 2015 Obama administration’s landmark net neutrality rules in December by a 3-2 vote, sparking a firestorm of criticism on social media websites, opposition from internet firms like Facebook and Alphabet, and protests among Democrats in the Republican-controlled Congress. New regulations that took legal effect Monday give internet service providers (ISPs) sweeping power to slow, block or offer “paid prioritization” to some websites as long as they disclose the practices.

The 2015 order subjected internet providers to strict regulations by the FCC, arguing consumers needed protection from internet provider practices and said internet providers could engage in “just and reasonable conduct.” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said last week the rollback will ensure more investment by providers and will ensure “better, faster, and cheaper Internet access and more broadband competition to the American people.” FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat who voted against the repeal, said Monday that the decision put the FCC “on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the law, and the wrong side of the American public.”

Rescue the poor souls already.

• Stranded Migrant Rescue Boat Unable To Make Voyage To Spain (Ind.)

A rescue boat loaded with hundreds of refugees which has been stranded in the Mediterranean Sea after Italy and Malta refused to allow the boat to dock, is unable to make the journey to Spain where the government has said it can land. Bad weather in the area is forecast to get worse, making the three-to-five-day voyage dangerous, according to French humanitarian group SOS Meiterranee France. According to the organisation, 629 migrants have been taken on board the Aquarius rescue boat, including 123 unaccompanied minors and seven pregnant women. On Monday evening the group put out a message which read: “Reaching Spain would take several days. With 629 people on board and weather deteriorating, the situation could become critical.”

“Priority must remain the safety of all survivors. It is the responsibility of the Italian maritime authorities to find a safe and fast solution for the 629 people aboard the #Aquarius.” The boat was refused entry to Italian ports after Italy’s interior minister Matteo Salvini, who is also leader of far-right party Lega Nord (Northern League) said that all Italian ports were closed to the Aquarius. In a Facebook post he called on Malta to take in the vessel. [..][ the new Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, who took office just over a week ago, then said Spain would allow the rescue vessel to dock in the city of Valencia, where the rescued migrants and refugees could finally disembark. Despite the offer, it now looks unlikely the boat will attempt to reach Spain.

What was it, one in every 3 mammals is a bat?!

• The Last Bat: The Mystery Of Britain’s Most Solitary Animal (G.)

We cannot speak of its loneliness, but it must be Britain’s most solitary animal. For the last 16 years, every winter, a male greater mouse-eared bat has taken up residence 300 metres inside a disused and exceedingly damp railway tunnel in West Sussex. The greater mouse-eared bat has been all but extinct in this country for decades. This is the only remaining one we know of. The future of the species in Britain appears to rest with one long-lived and very distinctive individual. The greater mouse-eared bat is so large that observers who first discovered it in Britain likened one to a young rabbit hanging from a wall. In flight, its wings can stretch to nearly half a metre – an astonishing spectacle in a land where bats are generally closer to the size of the rodent that inspired their old name: flittermouse.

The bat has large, mouse-like ears and its feeding habits are as striking as its size. Rather than zig-zagging through darkening skies collecting flying insects, like most bats, Myotis myotis descends earthwards, flapping its wings very slowly as it covers the ground, picking up grasshoppers, crickets, dung beetles and other flightless insects as it goes. Often, it will flop on to the ground, wings outstretched to fold over its prey. The solitary individual who spends the winters in West Sussex has never been observed in flight. Where it goes each spring is not known, and what it does is not known, nor which other animals, if any, it encounters. All that is known is that each winter the bat faithfully returns to its dark tunnel, where it hangs, almost motionless, for five months.

[..] Bats have been evolving for so long, and with so many specialised attributes, from echolocation to drastically extended forelimbs, that the order of Chiroptera – “winged hands” in Latin – accounts for one in five species of mammal. They are supremely successful animals. As one expert puts it: when you have been evolving for so long, you’ve perfected the business of being a bat. That business is becoming tricker in a human-dominated world. In older times, they were feared and despised. Modern people may be more tolerant, but even beneficent parts of society – from harvesters of renewable energy to vicars – are often hostile to bats. Energy-efficient homes seal up roof spaces where bats once roosted.

New roads – and the planned route of the HS2 railway – block traditional foraging routes. LED lighting is particularly disturbing for bats. Wind farms chop them up: according to a study published in 2016, researchers using sniffer dogs to find and retrieve bat carcasses calculated that 29 onshore windfarms killed 194 dead bats per month – a kill-rate that would dispatch 80,000 bats a year across Britain, without accounting for migrating bats taken out by the rapidly expanding rows of offshore turbines.