COVID-19 notes:
Severe
acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has infected more than 35
million people globally, with more than 1 million deaths recorded by the World
Health Organization as of Oct 12, 2020. As a second wave of COVID-19 affects
Europe, and with winter approaching, we need clear communication about the
risks posed by COVID-19 and effective strategies to combat them. Here, we share
our view of the current evidence-based consensus on COVID-19.
COVID-19 and
Excess All-Cause Mortality in the US and 18 Comparison Countries.
Coronavirus:
'Long COVID' could be four syndromes affecting body at the same time - study
Symptoms include breathlessness, chronic fatigue, 'brain fog', permanent
organ damage, anxiety and stress.
Multi-organ
impairment in low-risk individuals with long COVID
In a young,
low-risk population with ongoing symptoms, almost 70% of individuals have
impairment in one or more organs four months after initial symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
What Will It Take for Masks and Face Shields to End?
According to rotavirus vaccine developer Dr. Paul Offit, people will need
to continue wearing masks and social distancing for “the next couple of years”
even after a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available. “People now see vaccines as a
magic dust that’s about to be sprinkled over this country and make this all go
away. It doesn’t work that way,” Offit told MarketWatch, September 21, 2020.
Offit, who sits on the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related
Biological Products Advisory Committee, said he’s wary of a COVID-19 vaccine
that may be rushed to market under pressure from the government. The U.S.
Health and Human Services’ Operation Warp Speed has pledged to deliver 300
million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine by 2021, if not sooner. However, developing
a safe and effective vaccine normally takes years and begins with animal
studies.
The COVID-19 vaccines are all being rushed straight into human clinical
tests, forgoing lengthy animal trials altogether. Vaccine makers are also being
shielded against liability if people are harmed by the experimental vaccines.
Early warning signs that something might be amiss have already started
emerging. As detailed in “Gates Tries to Justify Side
Effects of Fast-Tracked Vaccine,” results from Moderna’s Phase 1 human trial
revealed 100% of volunteers in the high-dose group suffered systemic side
effects. Side effects included fatigue, chills, headache and myalgia (muscle
pain); 21% suffered “one or more severe events.”
…
SARS-CoV-2 has a diameter between 0.06 and 0.14 microns. Medical N95
masks — which are considered the most effective — can filter particles as small
as 0.3 microns. Surgical masks, homemade masks, T-shirts and bandanas are even
more porous. At best, a mask may reduce the transmission of large respiratory
droplets, but it does nothing to prevent the transmission of
aerosolized particulates exhaled by asymptomatic or presymptomatic individuals
with COVID-19. Health agencies’ own research show it’s a
futile measure that only provides a false sense of security. For example, the
WHO’s June 5, 2020, guidance memo on face mask use states “there is no direct
evidence (from studies on COVID- 19 and in healthy people in the community) on
the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to
prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.”
Similarly, a May 2020 policy review paper published in the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention’s journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, concluded that
“Our systematic review found no significant effect of face masks on
transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.” This is highly relevant, as
the influenza virus is about twice the size of SARS-CoV-2. If masks cannot
prevent transmission of influenza, they certainly cannot prevent transmission
of SARS-CoV-2.
Visualizing
the Relative Size of Particles
Regular Related Fare:
Back on track? Yes?
And No
America's
true unemployment rate
A person
who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can't find
one — is unemployed. If you accept that definition, the true unemployment rate
in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1%, according to an important new dataset
If you
measure the unemployed as anybody over 16 years old who isn't earning a living
wage, the rate rises even further, to 54.6%.
Employment
gains are reversing course
Distribution of wage earners by level of net
compensation. US Wage Statistics for 2019.
67.5 percent of wage earners had net compensation less than or equal to
the $51,916.27 raw average wage.
50 percent of wage earners had net compensation less than or equal to the
median wage, which is estimated to be $34,248.45 for 2019.
The way people have been able to get by day-to-day despite low and
stagnant wages has of course been to go further into debt.
Which is hard to do when lending institutions are tightening lending standards:
IMF: Fiscal
Monitor Database of Country Fiscal Measures in Response to the COVID-19
Pandemic
Regular Fare:
US Budget
Deficit Triples To Record $3.1 Trillion In 2020 As US Spends 90% More Than It
Collects
Outside
Of Tech, There Has Been Zero EPS Growth In The Past 12 Years
Quote of the Week:
“That the
rate of interest will be lower when commerce languishes and when there is
little demand for money, than when the energies of commerce are in full play
and there is an active demand for money, is indisputable; but it is equally
beyond doubt, that every speculative mania which has run its course of folly
and disaster in this country has derived its original impulse from cheap money.” The Economist, 1858, via Hussman.
Bubble Fare:
Hussman: Herd Mentality
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Unprecedented
energy use since 1950 has transformed humanity's geologic footprint
Fifth of countries at risk of ecosystem collapse, analysis finds.
(just a fifth, eh? I guarantee that's an understatement... by far)
Natural “services” such as food, clean water and air, and flood
protection have already been damaged by human activity. More than half of
global GDP – $42tn (£32tn) – depends on high-functioning biodiversity,
according to the report, but the risk of tipping points is growing.
New
Climate Warnings in Old Permafrost: 'It’s a Little Scary Because it’s Happening
Under Our Feet.'
We
need a new definition of corporate climate leadership
Today’s
definition of corporate climate leadership centers on how companies can do less
harm. It needs to be about creating a thriving future.
Pic of the Week:
Florida Cat Goes
Viral After Bravely Staring Down Alligator Who Shows Up At Front Door
Vid of the Week:
Astronomers
capture exact moment supermassive black hole DEVOURED entire star
Observers said this star was, at one point, roughly the mass of our own
sun. The black hole that absorbed it was "a million times more
massive".
EXTRA FARE:
Socio-political Fare:
The Least
Important Election of our Lifetimes
Lots of good snippets,
starting with: “A consensus seems to have
formed on both left and right that the upcoming presidential election involves
some literally existential questions, making it THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF
OUR LIFETIMES. In fact, the opposite is true. This election is the least
important of the past 30 years and very possibly the least important ever.
Because, to put it bluntly, we’re kind of screwed either way.”
Why
Liberals Pretend They Have No Power
This tension underscores a
deeper paradox of liberalism that has arguably reached its apex in the Trump
era. Since the president’s election four years ago, the political and
intellectual leaders of America’s supposedly reform-minded opposition have
issued warnings about the existential threat that Trump poses to democracy.
Amid it all, senior Democrats have mostly maintained both the regular operation
of government and a standard of congressional etiquette that connotes normalcy
more than it does any state of exception: applauding the president’s speeches,
approving his military budgets, awarding him new domestic spying powers, and
even fast-tracking his judicial nominees. A line from one 2019 CNBC report
detailing the overwhelming House approval of Trump’s marquee NAFTA
renegotiation sums up the absurdity of this posture: “Democrats also wanted to
show they can work with Trump only a day after they voted to make him the third
president impeached in American history.” Determined opposition to Trump has
sometimes been so nonexistent that Democratic partisans have had to invent it,
as when an image of Pelosi during the 2019 State of the Union address went
viral on the entirely spurious grounds that the speaker had intended for her
clapping to look sarcastic….
The contradictory posturing
of today’s most powerful liberals is not fully attributable to the shock and
disorientation brought about by the 2016 election; its roots go back to the
Clinton era at least—the period (not incidentally) when Democratic leaders formally
abandoned their commitment to the New Deal and absorbed key parts of a
Republican agenda.
Trump’s
America Remains Stuck in the Shadow of Reagan
Trump’s most enduring
deformation of U.S. political life may derive from his slavish devotion to
unchecked corporate power and his work in further consolidating power in the
hands of a few billionaires. As Christian Lorentzen recently wrote in
Bookforum, the Republican Party under Trump should primarily be understood as
“an electoral entity that reliably obtains tax cuts for the wealthy,
deregulation for big business, increased budgets for the military, and little
of anything else for anyone else.”
Government
Of, By, and For the Elite
“I think of Michael Lind’s
book [The New Class War] talking about how populism basically fails because it
doesn’t have people to staff it. The machine—I don’t want to use the term “deep
state” because I don’t think that’s fair, but—our ruling bureaucracy embraces
free markets and austerity and all those things that drove people toward Trump.
The irony is, Trump is a politician who defines himself by what he’s against,
and he was very fortunate to have Jeb Bush as his opposition in 2016, so that
he could run against that consensus. Then the reality is, four years later, he
ends up being basically a Jeb Bush conservative in how he legislates. So if he
loses, I think that’s why: He didn’t deliver; he didn’t fight the consensus,
certainly not economically. I think that really matters. I want to keep
emphasizing this because it’s just something that it’s really hard for me to
communicate, how disinterested a lot of people are in this whole process
because they don’t really see a difference. The only difference they see is
cultural, and that’s why it’s very frustrating.”
IMF Seizes on
Pandemic to Pave Way for Privatization in 81 Countries
The enormous economic
dislocation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique opportunity to
fundamentally alter the structure of society, and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) if using the crisis to implement near-permanent austerity measures
across the world. 76 of the 91 loans the IMF has negotiated
since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic come attached with demands for
deep cuts to public services and policies that benefit corporations over
people.
Before
the Bidens ‘Did’ Ukraine, There Was Iraq – and Serbia
Lee Camp: Two Massive New
Leaks Show Dirty Underbelly of Empire
Shhhh, don’t tell Americans
about the Blue Leaks and the Syria PR Leaks. The mainstream media’s virtual
blackout must mean they aren’t supposed to know.
Imagine If MSM
Consistently Applied The Evidentiary Standards It’s Applying To Hunter Biden’s
Emails
‘The
Emails Are Russian’ Will Be The Narrative, Regardless Of Facts Or Evidence
Fight it all you want, but
there’s nothing you can do. “The emails are Russian” is going to be the
official dominant narrative in mainstream political discourse, and there’s
nothing you can do to stop it. Resistance is futile.
Like the Russian hacking
narrative, the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, the Russian bounties in
Afghanistan narrative, and any other evidence-free framing of events that
simultaneously advances pre-planned cold war agendas, is politically convenient
for the Democratic party and generates clicks and ratings, the narrative that
the New York Post publication of Hunter Biden’s emails is a Russian operation
is going to be hammered and hammered and hammered until it becomes the
mainstream consensus.
…
If the mainstream news
really existed to tell you the truth about what’s going on, everyone would know
about every questionable decision that Joe Biden has ever made, Russiagate
would never have happened, we’d all be acutely aware of the fact that powerful
forces are pushing us into increasingly aggressive confrontations with two
nuclear-armed nations, and Trump would be grilled about Yemen in every press
conference.
But the mainstream news does
not exist to tell you the truth about the world. The mainstream news exists to
advance the interests of its wealthy owners and the status quo upon which they
have built their kingdoms. That’s why it’s so very, very important that we find
ways to break away from it and share information with each other that isn’t
tainted by corrupt and powerful interests.
Pepe Escobar: POTUS Punk vs. Dem Dementia
On the financial front, that
will never be admitted publicly: but Wall Street, while projecting a mere
pro-Dem façade, is not interested in a Democrat “sweep”, because that would
tank Wall Street stocks. A contested/protracted election would go the same way
– with Goldman Sachs projecting a nightmare scenario of the S&P down to
only 3,100 points. Thus the preferred, hush hush, Wall Street scenario: a Trump
win and more juicy tax cuts – in parallel with the sentiment that Wall Street’s
priority is for the Fed to keep showering trillions of dollars in helicopter
money whatever happens. After all the only “policy” in town is that Wall Street
turned the Fed into a hedge fund.
…
The total balkanization of
culture in the U.S. into bulletproof containers of irrationality is precluding
any possibility of civilized debate. What’s left is an endless proliferation of
fake actors, paid troll armies, bots, mob outrage packaged as chocolate bars,
all out hysteria.
New
book warns of danger of Kamala Harris presidency
in just a little over 125
pages he manages to comprehensively piece together the trajectory of the
Western left from the end of WWII to what can only be described as its
“stinking corpse” today, a term once used by Rosa Luxembourg to describe the
treacherous Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) after it voted to support
the imperialist bloodbath of WWI in 1914. Maupin’s use of Harris and the
environment she grew up in as a springboard to investigate the shortcomings of
the Western left generally is a formidable exploration that is desperately
needed at a time where the American people are faced with the probability of
enduring yet another destructive administration and no authentic left to
represent it.
I have a theory about Joe Biden: He didn’t want to run for president. Not one eensy-weensy bit. He wanted a nice, quiet retirement with his fat government pension plus sundry millions that had somehow found its way into his bank account over the years. He had a fabulous $16-million gentleman’s estate to gambol upon with his beloved grandchildren. The developing brain-fog was actually a comfort, allowing him to forget the rigors of public service and all the tedious gathering of… honoraria, shall we say. But then they came for him…!
The Party called. Rather specifically, his old Kemosabe, Barack Obama, called him in for that ominous sit-down and gave him the bad news: Joe, you’ve gotta run. Bernie, Liz, and the rest of those bozos, they won’t keep a lid on it. You’re in this thing as deep as we are and it’s getting a little hairy. You’ve got to do it for the sake of the party, and all our… friends….
And so, Joe Biden was shanghaied into running for president. He was given a bodyguard of news media, including those crucial new additions, the social media, Twitter and Facebook, where, increasingly, information was hubbed for transmission among the voters. They would protect him infallibly from any damaging narratives. In fact, they would generate powerful counter-narratives to keep their adversaries off-balance. If Joe could just roll with it until November 3rd, they could lay all their… problems… to rest, bury all that annoying insinuendo about the hobgoblin Deep State (ha!), and finally breathe easy.
And so, trailing rather pathetically in the primary elections after being dubbed an old racist by his opponents, and drubbed in Iowa and New Hampshire, Joe somehow managed to sweep the table on Super Tuesday — apparently due to the single, magical endorsement of one congressman James Clyburn (SC, 6th District), a narrative that was swallowed like a May River oyster by the credulous all over the land. And thus anointed, Joe retreated to his fabled basement for the whole election season, venturing intermittently into empty parking lots and airplane hangars to offer proof-of-life while a polling disinfo campaign by his media bodyguard vouchsafed his inevitable victory. Looked like a sure thing in September… pack up all my cares and woe… and so forth….
And then, something broke. Well, some news, actually....
To the issue at hand, the
question of who elected Donald Trump in 2016, the comparative incomes approach
is reactionary in the sense that it affirms the establishment view that low
relative and / or absolute voter participation is due to personal and cultural
factors rather than political disaffection. Circumstantial evidence, such as
the steep drop in voter affiliation with the establishment parties, the
correlation of this drop with identifiable policy failures, vibrant and
enthusiastic political participation outside of official channels, and the
widespread and historic loathing of the duopoly Party scions put forward for
elected office, suggests that there is more to the story. With their
livelihoods and power tied to perpetuating the existing system, it is folly to
wait for the political leadership to understand this. They never will.
Reminder: this evil shit happens
whomever is president:
America
is Complicit, as Yemen Spirals toward Mass Starvation
Big Thoughts Fare that for some reason I don’t want to publish internally:
Anyone challenging the moral
and intellectual bad faith of entrenched corporate elite interests gets
attacked or ignored. Various otherwise quite well-known figures defending
Julian Assange against US and allied NATO country governments’ efforts to
destroy him, have experienced this, finding themselves attacked or marginalized
even more than usual. Slightly different, but ultimately just as sinister, has
been the treatment of dozens of very eminent scientists questioning received
wisdom about the current COVID-19 outbreak. In both cases, justice and freedom
of speech are important underlying motifs.
Few are surprised that
defenders of Julian Assange against the UK injustice system are misrepresented
or excluded by imperialist country governments supported by all the
disinformation outlets their countries’ oligarchs control. However, scientists
questioning public policy on COVID-19 find themselves marginalized not only by
dominant liberal opinion but also by majority progressive opinion too. Eminent
scientists like John Ioannides, Sunetra Gupta, Sucharit Bhakdi, Alexander
Kekulé, Dolores Cahill and dozens of others find themselves in effect, if not
disappeared, certainly generally excluded from public discussion.
Overall, Western liberals
and progressives have failed to engage, let alone credibly refute, the
arguments of this very significant, unquestionably well-qualified body of
scientific opinion. Nor do they engage
the savage class attack enacted as public policy on COVID-19 to impose a
corporate capitalist economic reset on the peoples of North America and
Europe. In a similar way, the West’s
disinformation lynch media have misrepresented the case against Julian Assange,
lying about the facts and unjustly smearing him at every turn while also
burying the massive attack on free speech his probable extradition to the US
represents.
In general, prescribed
untruths are propagated and imposed not just via corporate news and
entertainment media, but also by almost all the main international information
sources. These include practically all the high profile international non
governmental organizations and practically every international institution in
the United Nations system, the European Union or the Organization of American
States. Sincere witnesses to truth have little to no chance of surviving
uncompromised in these morally and intellectually corrupt organizations and
systems.
Sinister political power and
corporate money smother and suffocate efforts to challenge the cynical,
mendacious status quo. Extreme historical examples in the US include the
murders of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and the subsequent persecution of
the Black Panther movement. A great number of anti-imperialist heroes like
Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu Jamal, Ana Belen Montes or Simon Trinidad, among
many others, remain unjustly imprisoned. Among current examples of Western
information perfidy, the Assange show trial, the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons scandal and the prolonged Russiagate farce
stand out.
Everyone will have their own
experience of this reality. For example, efforts to suppress the “Planet of the
Humans” film highlighted how corporate money moulds, manipulates and corrals
opinion in favor of a phony Green New Deal which environmentalists like Cory
Morningstar have challenged for years against systematic suppression of their
arguments. Liberal and progressive environmentalists mostly exclude incisive
class-conscious analysis while celebrating pseudo-progressive, corporate-friendly
pap. Across the board, systematic disinformation deliberately negates
democratic process by denying people fair access to vitally relevant factual
appraisal and analysis. Knowledgeable people presenting well attested evidence
find themselves effectively disappeared.
For people in countries
targeted by the North American and European imperialist powers none of this is
new. In most Western foreign affairs reporting on countries from Russia and
China, to Iran and Syria, to Venezuela and Cuba, intellectual and moral honesty
are almost entirely absent. In the majority world, this experience of being
practically invisible extends to whole peoples. Most people in North America
and Europe could hardly care less about people far away in distant, usually
culturally very different countries. Very few people know enough to be able to
effectively challenge the unending deceit of most official Western accounts of
events in those countries targeted by North American and European oligarchies
and the governments they direct.
In Latin America and the
Caribbean, Haiti is perhaps the most egregious example, or maybe Honduras, or
perhaps Bolivia… Unquestionable though, is the vicious, psychopathic hatred
propagated by Western media, NGOs and institutions against Cuba, Nicaragua and
Venezuela. These are the last three revolutionary governments in Latin America
left standing after the wave of US and EU promoted coups and lawfare offensives
of the last fifteen years.
…
Being made invisible by
Western media, NGOs and academics is nothing new. It just means becoming
subsumed in the anonymous masses of the majority world whom the Western elites
have always looted, murdered and abused. Despite this reality, the overwhelming
majority of people in North America and Europe hold the irrational, ultimately
self-destructive belief that their rationality is morally superior to their
rivals’. To make sure they hold on to that demented false belief, their ruling
classes have to disappear the truth, whether it’s to do with an individual like
Julian Assange or a whole country, like Cuba, Nicaragua or Venezuela.
No
Real Change Can Come If Speech Is Restricted By Monopolistic Oligarchs
As Greenwald noted, the
internet was initially hailed as a tool of the people for democratizing the
flow of information instead of allowing that flow to be controlled entirely by
the media-owning class, and for the moment it is still far more democratic than
it was back before the public had any access to media platforms of their own.
People with an ear to the ground understood the potential political
ramifications of a new paradigm in which ordinary people can circulate ideas
and information without the permission of the establishment political/media
class.
The problem came in when the corporations which were elevated to the top
of this new paradigm began collaborating more and more brazenly with ruling
power structures, to the point where they’re now just openly working with US
government agencies to determine what information to censor. They have every incentive to do this as talk
of antitrust cases and reinterpreting Section 230 heats up; they know the odds
of their monopolies being torn apart go down the more favorable they make
themselves to the government powers that would enforce them.
This is a major, major problem for humanity as a species, because we
will never be able to make real changes to the systemic problems which are
driving us toward disaster as long as establishment power is controlling our
ability to interact with each other.
Establishment power will keep advancing its own interests at all cost,
even if it means pushing us into nuclear war or climate collapse. The only way to end their destructive rule is
for a critical mass of the public to rise up and use the power of their numbers
to force real change. People will not rise up and use the power of their
numbers to force real change as long as they are being successfully
propagandized not to by the ruling power establishment. People will continue to
be successfully propagandized as long as a critical mass are prevented from
viewing ideas and information which contradict establishment-friendly
narratives.
It really is that simple. If
internet censorship of dissident voices continues to tighten, it will lose any
potential to exist as a tool of the people which can be used to advance real
change, and will instead exist only as a tool for the powerful which enables
them to dispense propaganda narratives at a much faster rate than they
previously could. With the added bonus of sweeping surveillance powers.
COVID Fare (with ESG implications) that challenges conventional wisdom:
Willful
Blindness, Hypocrisy & Planetary Repercussions
The paper COVID-19 Pandemic
Repercussions on the Use and Management of Plastics published June 20, 2020
warns that a “monthly estimated use of
129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves globally, is resulting in
widespread environmental contamination.” [Prata, Joana & Patricio Silva,
A.L. & Walker, Tony & Duarte, Armando & Santos, Teresa. (2020).
COVID-19 Pandemic Repercussions on the Use and Management of Plastics.
Environmental Science & Technology.]
It seems like only yesterday
that a massive campaign against single-use plastic straws was trending. The
much forgotten anti-straw trend was based on astronomical numbers; a suggested
500 million straws used each day in the US alone, with more than half a billion
plastic straws being consumed and discarded, every day around the entire globe.
An estimated 8.3 billion plastic straws had come to pollute the planet’s
beautiful beaches. The backlash against the straws appeared to be drive by the
horrific impacts on the marine environment in particular.
194 billion face masks and
gloves equates to well over 6 billion face masks being consumed and discarded
each and every day.
Based on the aforementioned
paper, six months of face masks alone – equates to seven hundred seventy-four
billion while 12 months of consumption, equates to stunning one trillion five
hundred forty-eight billion face masks.
What happened to all those
who cared about our environmental crises? That of climate change, biodiversity
and ocean pollution?
…
Those who will not comply
with wearing a mask are shamed. Yet, where is our shame in producing this
amount of waste that will further harm the natural world that we allege we wish
to defend?
Quotes of the Week:
Humphrey: “Children, I'll argue, have a human right
not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas—no
matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given
licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose:
no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up
in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the
straight and narrow paths of their own faith. In short, children have a right
not to have their minds addled by nonsense.”
Taleb: “Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did
not understand; modern man is a cog in a complicated system he thinks he
understands..”
Pics of the Week:
The latest that 46C has
ever been recorded in the Northern Hemisphere
and, finally:
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