COVID-19 notes:
Neurological issues during COVID-19: An Overview
While the pulmonary complications have received the
most attention, it is the neurological manifestations that are disabling,
persistent and common in patients infected with SARS-CoV-2. The entire
neuro-axis can be involved resulting in a wide variety of manifestations. While
the pathophysiology is not well understood, many of the clinical manifestations
seem to be immune mediated. The socio-economic consequences of these
complications are dire.
Regular Related Fare:
Nathan Tankus:
What the Hell is Going On With CARES Act “Funds”?
Regular Fare:
Inside Janet
Yellen’s head is an enormous dove
From a recent speech by Janet Yellen, incoming US Treasury Secretary:
Extreme economic events have often challenged
existing views of how the economy works and exposed shortcomings in the
collective knowledge of economists. To give two well-known examples, both the
Great Depression and the stagflation of the 1970s motivated new ways of
thinking about economic phenomena. More recently, the financial crisis and its
aftermath might well prove to be a similar sort of turning point. Today I would
like to reflect on some ways in which the events of the past few years have
revealed limits in economists’ understanding of the economy and suggest several
important questions I hope the profession will try to answer.
Makoto Sakurai: An essay on Japan’s monetary policy: experience and
lessons. Bank of International Settlements.
If CPI Measured
Actual House Prices, Inflation Would Be 3% Right Now
Inheritance, not
work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership
Bubble Fare:
Crescat Capital: As Good As It Gets.
In November, we shared a Crescat macro model that combines 15 fundamental
valuation factors to show how US stocks have recently reached their most
overvalued levels since 1900. The problem with speculative excess and the risks
it poses to unprepared investors is simple to understand. Ultra-easy financial
conditions create major manic tops in markets. As we show in the chart below,
with both the tech bubble of 2000 and the housing bubble of 2007, the GS
Financial Conditions Index reached cyclically low levels that distinctly marked
these market tops. Financial conditions today, driven by historic low interest
rates and tight credit spreads, are the loosest yet, the easiest of the past
thirty years, at the same time as valuations and leverage are the highest. These
excesses are clearly unsustainable and mark a potentially timely setup for a
major market reversal.
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Abrupt shift to
hotter and drier climate over inner East Asia beyond the tipping point
How anthropogenically driven climate change is affecting heat waves and
drought is one of the most important environmental issues facing societies
around the globe. Zhang et al. present a 260-year-long record of temperature
and soil moisture over inner East Asia that reveals an abrupt shift to hotter
and drier conditions (see the Perspective by Zhang and Fang). Extreme episodes
of hotter and drier climate over the past 20 years, which are unprecedented in
the earlier records, are caused by a positive feedback loop between soil
moisture deficits and surface warming and potentially represent the start of an
irreversible trend.
Other Fare:
The Code That Controls Your Money
COBOL is a coding language older than Weird Al Yankovic. The people who
know how to use it are often just as old. It underpins the entire financial
system. And it can’t be removed. How a computer language controls the financial
life of the world.
EXTRA FARE:
COVID Fare:
What the Covid
Vaccine Hype Fails to Mention
Pfizer recently announced
that its covid vaccine was more than 90 percent “effective” at preventing
covid-19. Shortly after this announcement, Moderna announced that its covid
vaccine was 94.5 percent “effective” at preventing covid-19. Unlike the flu
vaccine, which is one shot, both covid vaccines require two shots given three
to four weeks apart. Hidden toward the end of both announcements, were the
definitions of “effective.”
Both trials have a treatment
group that received the vaccine and a control group that did not. All the trial
subjects were covid negative prior to the start of the trial. The analysis for
both trials was performed when a target number of “cases” were reached. “Cases”
were defined by positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing. There was no
information about the cycle number for the PCR tests. There was no information
about whether the “cases” had symptoms or not. There was no information about
hospitalizations or deaths. The Pfizer study had 43,538 participants and was
analyzed after 164 cases. So, roughly 150 out 21,750 participants (less than
0.7 percent) became PCR positive in the control group and about one-tenth that
number in the vaccine group became PCR positive. The Moderna trial had 30,000
participants. There were 95 “cases” in the 15,000 control participants (about
0.6 percent) and 5 “cases” in the 15,000 vaccine participants (about
one-twentieth of 0.6 percent). The “efficacy” figures quoted in these
announcements are odds ratios.
There is no evidence, yet,
that the vaccine prevented any hospitalizations or any deaths.
…
There is no information
about how long any protective benefit from the vaccine would persist.
…
There is no information
about safety. None.
…
Many of my colleagues want
to see the safety data after a year of use before getting vaccinated; these
colleagues are concerned about possible autoimmune side effects that may not
appear for months after vaccination.
These announcements by
Pfizer and Moderna are encouraging. I certainly hope that these vaccines
protect people from the harm of covid-19. I certainly hope that these vaccines
are safe. If both of these conditions are true, nobody will need to be coerced
into taking the vaccine. However, you should pay even more attention about what
is left out of an announcement than about what is stated. The pharmaceutical
companies are more than happy for patients to misunderstand what is meant by
efficacy. Caveat emptor!
Underground parties continue
to take place during pandemic
The sauce has hit the fan at
Toronto's Adamson Barbecue restaurant, where, after opening for a third day in defiance
of multiple lockdown orders, owner Adam Skelly was just taken away in handcuffs
by police.
Political Fare:
Curtin: The Past Lives
On: The Elite Strategy To Divide and Conquer
The truth is that both the
Trump voters and the Biden voters have been taken for a ride. It is a game, a show, a movie, a
spectacle. It hasn’t changed much since
1969; the rich have gotten richer and the poor, working, and middle classes
have gotten poorer and more desperate.
Those who have profited have embraced the fraud.
…
If the Democrats and the
Republicans are at war as is often claimed, it is only over who gets the larger
part of the spoils. Trump and Biden work for the same bosses, those I call the
Umbrella People (those who own and run the country through their
intelligence/military/media operatives), who produce and direct the movie that
keeps so many Americans on the edge of their seats in the hope that their
chosen good guy wins in the end.
...
So what’s changed under
Trump? We are talking about nuances,
small changes. A clown with a big mouth
versus traditional, “dignified” con men.
If you were writing this
script as part of long-term planning and average people were getting disgusted
from decades of being screwed and were sick of politicians and their lying
ways, wouldn’t you stop the reruns and create a new show? Come on, this is Hollywood where creative
showmen can dazzle our minds with plots so twisted that when you leave the theater
you keep wondering what it was all about and arguing with your friends about
the ending. So create a throwback film where the good guy versus the bad guy
was seemingly very clear, and while the system ground on, people would be at
each other’s throats over the obvious differences, even while they were
fabricated.
Variety is necessary. You wouldn’t want to repeat the film from
2008 when a well-spoken black man came into town out of nowhere to clean up the
mess created by the poorly spoken white sheriff who loved war and then the
black hero went on to wage war in seven countries while his fans sat contented
in the audience loving the show and making believe they didn’t see what was
happening on the screen even though their hero jailed whistle blowers and
greatly expanded the surveillance state right in front of their eyes.
No, as the years passed,
those two guys turned out to be buddies, and their wives hit it off, and a
famous photograph appeared of the good guy’s wife hugging the bad guy, which
was not a good thing for the script that has the Republicans warring against
the Democrats.
A new story line was needed.
How about an opéra bouffe, someone suggested, and the rest is history. Or
pseudo-history. This is the real matrix. The most sophisticated mind control
operation up to this point, with the coronavirus lockdown added to propel it to
what the producers hope is a conclusion.
…
Chris Hedges: Here's the
Truth: The Oligarchy Loves This Democratic Decay and Politics of Lies
American political leaders
display a widening disconnect from reality intended to mask their complicity in
the seizure of power by global corporations and billionaires.
Sidney Powell has finally released the Kraken - filing two lawsuits in
Michigan and Georgia late Wednesday alleging massive schemes to rig the
election for Joe Biden.
In Georgia, Powell claims in a 104-page complaint filed in the US
District Court in Atlanta that the purpose of the scheme was "illegally
and fraudulently manipulating the vote count to make certain the election of
Joe Biden as president of the United States."
"Old-fashioned ballot-stuffing" has been "amplified and
rendered virtually invisible by computer software created and run by domestic
and foreign actors for that very purpose," the suit continues, adding that
"Mathematical and statistical anomalies rising to the level of
impossibilities, as shown by affidavits of multiple witnesses, documentation,
and expert testimony evince this scheme across the state of Georgia."
…
In Michigan, Powell filed a 75-page complaint seeking to set aside the
results of the election, claiming that "hundreds of thousands of illegal,
ineligible, duplicate, or purely fictitious ballots" enabled by
"massive election fraud" facilitated Biden's win in the state.
"The scheme and artifice to defraud was for the purpose of illegally
and fraudulently manipulating the vote count to manufacture an election of Joe
Biden as president of the United States," the suit alleges, adding that
the most "troubling, insidious, and egregious ploy” involved “systemic
adaptation of old-fashioned ‘ballot-stuffing.'"
As Mimi Ngyuen Ly of The Epoch Times notes: The complaint alleged “an especially
egregious range of conduct” in Wayne County and the City of Detroit and similar
conduct throughout the state, which it attributed to direction from Michigan
state election officials. It noted that the “same pattern of election fraud and
voter fraud writ large occurred in all the swing states with only minor
variations” in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Wisconsin.
The 'Smartest
Man In The Room' Just Joined Sidney Powell's Team
So what does the brilliant Dr. Kershavarz-Nia have to say? This:
1. Hammer and Scorecard is real, not a hoax (as Democrats allege), and
both are used to manipulate election outcomes.
2. Dominion, ES&S, Scytl, and Smartmatic are all vulnerable to fraud
and vote manipulation — and the mainstream media reported on these
vulnerabilities in the past.
3. Dominion has been used in other countries to "forge election
results."
4. Dominion's corporate structure is deliberately confusing to hide
relationships with Venezuela, China, and Cuba.
5. Dominion machines are easily hackable.
6. Dominion memory cards with cryptographic key access to the systems
were stolen in 2019.
Although he had no access to the machines, Dr. Kershavarz has looked at
available data about the election and the vote results. Based on that information, he concluded
1. The counts in the disputed states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan,
Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia) show electronic manipulation.
2. The simultaneous decision in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada,
and Georgia to pretend to halt counting votes was unprecedented and
demonstrated a coordinated effort to collude toward desired results.
3. One to two percent of votes were forged in Biden's favor.
4. Optical scanners were set to accept unverified, un-validated ballots.
5. The scanners failed to keep records for audits, an outcome that must
have been deliberately programmed.
6. The stolen cryptographic key, which applied to all voting systems, was
used to alter vote counts.
7. The favorable votes pouring in after hours for Biden could not be
accounted for by a Democrat preference for mailed in ballots. They demonstrated manipulation. For example, in Pennsylvania, it was
physically impossible to feed 400,000 ballots into the machines within 2–3
hours.
8. Dominion used Chinese parts, and there's reason to believe that China,
Venezuela, Cuba interfered in the election.
9. There was a Hammer and Scorecard cyber-attack that altered votes in
the battleground states, and then forwarded the results to Scytl servers in
Frankfurt, Germany, to avoid detection.
10. The systems failed to produce any auditable results.
Based on the above findings, Dr. Keshavarz-Nia concluded with "high
confidence that the election 2020 data were altered in all battleground states
resulting in a [sic] hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for
President Trump to be transferred [sic] to Vice President Biden."
Anomalies in
Vote Counts and Their Effects on Election 2020
A Quantitative Analysis of Decisive Vote Updates in Michigan, Wisconsin,
and Georgia on and after Election Night
This report studies 8,954 individual updates to the vote totals in all 50
states and finds that four individual updates — two of which were widely
noticed on the internet, including by the President — are profoundly anomalous;
they deviate from a pattern which is otherwise found in the vast majority of
the remaining 8,950 vote updates. The findings presented by this report
[28]suggest that four vote count updates — which collectively were decisive in
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, and thus decisive of a critical forty-two
electoral votes — are especially anomalous and merit further investigation.
In particular, the finding that the broader data follows general patterns
and our ability to measure just how much any individual vote update does — or
doesn’t — follow this pattern allows us to make concrete claims about both how
extreme any given vote update is and about what any particular vote update
might have looked like, had it been less extreme one one axis or another.
We further find that if these updates were only more extreme than 99% of
all updates nationally in terms of their deviation from this generally-observed
pattern, that, holding all else equal, Joe Biden may very well have lost the
states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, and that he would have 42 fewer
Electoral votes — putting Biden below the number required to win the
Presidency. Either way, it is
indisputable that his margin of victory in these three states relies on four
most anomalous vote updates identified by the metric developed in this report.
In a just universe, the SCOTUS would invalidate the election results in
several states and send the matter into the House of Representatives as the
constitution stipulates. Heads would explode from sea to shining sea as heroes
of the Resistance — Brennan, Comey, Weissmann, Strzok, and many more — realize
they will not be getting their get-out-of-jail-free cards after all. Hunter B
would retreat to the Chateau Marmont with his crack pipe for one last lost
weekend. Nancy Pelosi would melt into a puddle of rage, prednisone, and
hairspray in the capitol rotunda. And for Ol’ White Joe Biden it would be just
another day of fog and stillness.
…
But then, suppose the election is not overturned and Joe Biden glides
into the Oval Office on those marvelously greased skids set up for him,
propelled by a mighty tail-wind of Woke hopes and dreams for a golden era of
work-optional free stuff and renewed overseas nation-building. Be careful what
you wish for, DNC. Unlike Mr. Trump in 2016, Joe Biden will not even enjoy the
perception that he was somehow legitimately elected, if only by a fluke. In fact,
the Swamp gang’s credibility will erode daily because independent,
entrepreneurial investigators will be out in the swing state thickets figuring
out exactly how the election was managed, and how all those Dominion voting
machines were gamed, and how exactly this shady company, with origins and
operations all around the world, won state contracts with money changing hands.
A day will not pass when Joe B is off-the-hook for all that, and meanwhile he
will not evade being revealed as the empty shell of what he was before the
axons in his brain-pan demyelinated — a third-rate grifting pol available to
all comers with an open checkbook.
[Political] Quotes of the Week:
Dominion Executive: “Trump is not going to
win. I made f***ing sure of that.”
Trump: “this is an election we
won easily. We won it by a lot. This election has to be turned around.” “What
we saw on November 3rd was not the United States of America. Democrats cheated.
It was a fraudulent election. It would be very easy for me to wait 4 years and
try again. We can’t wait for 4 years. Don’t be intimidated by these people.
They don’t love our country!” “They kept poll watchers in pens in Philadelphia
and then they threw them out of the building. You couldn’t see a thing on those
cameras. They could have been playing a baseball game.” “It’s a disgrace this
is happening to our country. We got 11 million more votes than we did 4 years
ago. At 10pm in the evening we were way ahead. Everybody knows we won it. The
whole world is watching us. We can’t let them get away with this. We have more
votes than voters!” Trump ends his remarks by telling Giuliani over speakerphone:
“This is going to be your crowning achievement because you’re saving our
country.”
Yarvin: “It is useless to
speculate on the details of a Philadelphia election. One need only say the
words, “Philadelphia election,” and anyone on or near the grave of Mark Twain
will experience a little earthquake. Has Philadelphia ever had a free and fair
election? (This country, for what it is,
takes itself too seriously. Have you ever considered the possibility that
America has always been a joke? I’m sure most historians have.)”
[ESG] Quote of the Week:
Re: Kerry, another career sell-out
like Biden: “The only conclusion you can draw is that Biden, having vowed to
make fighting climate change a top priority, simply wants someone who’ll look
like he’s trying hard — but won’t actually get anything done.”
Satirical Fare:
Walmart Thanks Government For Completely Obliterating Their Small Business Competition
[RIP] Tweet Vid of the Week:
The epitome of cool is THIS warm-up routine.
Pic of the Week:
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