Regular Fare:
BLS Reveals That
Big City Unemployment Is Much Higher Than The National Average
The corporate income tax is a jobs program
The Biden Administration’s “American Jobs Plan” is aptly named.
Obviously, spending on infrastructure and other things will provoke activity
that contributes to employment. But less widely understood is that the “pay
for” part is also employment supportive, perhaps more importantly and durably
than the expenditure side. The proposal would increase the corporate tax rate
from 21% to 28%. That’s good, but not enough. It would be better for employment
if the corporate tax rate would be reset to the pre-Obama 35% rate, and better
yet if it were set to the 50%-ish rates that prevailed during the
worker-friendly 1950s. In addition to the top-line rate increase, the plan
includes provisions to counter jurisdiction shopping and close loopholes in the
corporate tax system. To the degree these reforms increase effective corporate
tax rates, they too are employment supportive.
The reason is obvious. Wages and benefits (including employer-side
payroll taxes) are tax-deductible expenses. When the corporate tax rate is just
21%, the opportunity cost to shareholders of every dollar spent on all-in
compensation is 79¢. Only 21¢ gets covered by the tax writeoff. When the
corporate tax rate is 50%, 50¢ out of every dollar spent on worker compensation
comes out of Uncle Sam’s pockets, rather than out of shareholders’. Hiring
workers is a much better deal for firms when the corporate tax rate is high
than it is when corporate tax rates are low. For the same reason raising income
tax rates would be a boon for tax-exempt nonprofits, increasing corporate tax
rates is a boon for labor.
The counters to this are rote, and wrong. “High corporate tax rates
reduce job creators’ incentive to build and grow businesses, swamping any
benefit from reduced wage costs.” That might be plausible in a world that is
not this one. In this world, there is little evidence that variations in the
corporate tax rate much affect aggregate economic activity one way or another.
In the US postwar experience, the higher corporate tax decades were the highest
growth decades.
…
From a neoclassical corporate finance perspective, every investment that
is profitable at a low corporate tax rate is profitable at a higher corporate
tax rates. Under certainty, a profits tax shouldn’t affect business investment
decisions at all. Under uncertainty, the IRR of projects declines with a higher
rate, but the riskiness of projects (and so the hurdle rates imposed) decline
as well, since the state absorbs the impact of losses as well taxing gains. Any
effect is likely to be ambiguous and small, and overwhelmed by the effect of
macro policy on risk appetites and hurdle rates.
Justin Trudeau’s
New Budget Isn’t Really a Break With Austerity
Canada’s Liberal government recently tabled its first budget since the
pandemic began, and it contains some modest shifts away from austerity
economics. But these policies fall far short of what’s needed, and the core of
Trudeau’s budget is about maintaining the status quo.
Quotes of the Week:
"even as economic prospects improve, the Governing Council judges that there is still
considerable excess capacity, and the recovery continues to require
extraordinary monetary policy support."
“There is no “return to big
government” as alleged by the deficit and debt hawks on the
right. Nor is there a looming debt crisis. Rather, there has been a modest
shift in the balance between social Liberals and business Liberals”
“when it comes to climate change, the
impoverished nature of the Liberal imagination is most clearly on display.
Despite grand pronouncements and commitments to hit emissions targets, the
party’s approach is wholly insufficient in addressing the biggest challenge
presently facing humanity.”
Bubble Fare:
The Stock Market
Is Just One Hedge Fund Blowup Away from a Crash. Here’s the Ugly Math.
Archegos is clearly just one roach in a large roach motel.
'Black Swan'
author Nassim Taleb says bitcoin is an open Ponzi scheme and a failed currency
Why
Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
101 Nobel
laureates call for global fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty.
Climate
scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap
COVID Fare:
Gen Z and Millennials Are the Next Vaccine Challenge
The risk of being exposed to Covid-19 indoors is as great at 60 feet as
it is at 6 feet — even when wearing a mask, according to a new study by
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers who challenge social
distancing guidelines adopted across the world.
…
“We argue there really isn’t much of a benefit to the 6-foot rule,
especially when people are wearing masks,” Bazant said in an interview. “It
really has no physical basis because the air a person is breathing while
wearing a mask tends to rise and comes down elsewhere in the room so you’re
more exposed to the average background than you are to a person at a distance.”
The important variable the CDC and the WHO have overlooked is the amount of
time spent indoors, Bazant said. The longer someone is inside with an infected
person, the greater the chance of transmission, he said.
A guideline to limit indoor airborne transmission of
COVID-19
Abstract: The current revival of the American
economy is being predicated on social distancing, specifically the Six-Foot
Rule, a guideline that offers little protection from pathogen-bearing aerosol
droplets sufficiently small to be continuously mixed through an indoor space.
The importance of airborne transmission of COVID-19 is now widely recognized.
While tools for risk assessment have recently been developed, no safety
guideline has been proposed to protect against it. We here build on models of
airborne disease transmission in order to derive an indoor safety guideline
that would impose an upper bound on the “cumulative exposure time,” the product
of the number of occupants and their time in an enclosed space. We demonstrate
how this bound depends on the rates of ventilation and air filtration,
dimensions of the room, breathing rate, respiratory activity and face mask use
of its occupants, and infectiousness of the respiratory aerosols.
Significance: Airborne transmission arises
through the inhalation of aerosol droplets exhaled by an infected person and is
now thought to be the primary transmission route of COVID-19. By assuming that
the respiratory droplets are mixed uniformly through an indoor space, we derive
a simple safety guideline for mitigating airborne transmission that would impose
an upper bound on the product of the number of occupants and their time spent
in a room.
Other Fare:
Habitual coffee drinkers display a distinct pattern of
brain functional connectivity
Photos of the Week:
High-dimensional characterization of post-acute sequalae of COVID-19
EXTRA [controversial
or non-market-related] FARE:
Regular Fare:
Johnstone: Maturity Is
Discovering How Everything You Believe Is A Lie
That sounds made up. Like something you’d make up if you were trying to
manipulate a large number of people into believing something that benefits you.
…. You were lied to. You do not live in an imperfect but well intentioned
democracy in which the people determine the best course of action for their
government using votes, you live in an oligarchy with no meaningful separation
between corporate power and state power, whose fate is determined not by votes
but by a loose transnational alliance of plutocrats and sociopathic government
agencies. You do not live in a separate nation in a world full of other
separate nations, you live in a globe-spanning power alliance which functions
as a single empire controlled by unaccountable elites who use governments as
tools to advance agendas of control and domination.
ESG Fare:
Biden climate summit offers empty spectacle
President Joe Biden convened a global summit of
leaders from 40 countries Thursday, in a two-day event filled with empty
promises from the world’s largest producers and consumers of fossil fuels that
they will change and do better—by 2030, or 2050, or 2060, or some deadline even
further down the road. As for a genuine global plan to tackle the dangers of
global warming and climate change, that is nowhere to be found, since the
affairs of world capitalism are determined by two factors: the profit interests
of giant corporations and the super-rich, and the strategic interests of rival
nation-states. Both these fundamental characteristics of world capitalism
prevent an event like the global summit from having any real significance.
Ilargi: Save Earth Get Rich
I sometimes can’t believe I think I must revisit this
theme time and again, but here we are. Joe Biden is chairing a virtual climate
plan/summit/whatever, and absolutely nothing has changed since the last time
I tried to explain why it is nonsense, or all the other times before that.
But this is the biggest boondoggle/cheat/trick ever played on mankind, so what
choice do I have?
It’s still a bunch of politicians all over the world
who are beholden to a bunch of extremely rich people for their cushy positions
and claim they intend to save the world hand in hand with these rich people. In
other words, our resident sociopaths and psychopaths are the only ones who can
save us. But you’re going to have to pay up, or they won’t do it.
It’s all an intensely moronic piece of theater (no, I
won’t insult Kabuki!), but since all the media is in on it, who would know
that? It’s the biggest show on earth! Your carrots are jobs, profit, and a
saved planet for your children. What’s not to like?
Biden’s billionaire political sponsors promise to save
you, but of course they do need to make a profit off it. One that is preferably
larger than the profits they have been making over the past decades off of the
very things they now pretend to condemn, and are still invested in, fossil
fuels.
Of course they know that will never happen, but they
also know that you do not. So here goes…
…
The biggest carrot of all is that we can shift from
fossil fuels to some other energy source -which wind and solar are not, but who
understands that?- and keep on motoring. It’s like the myth -or is it?- that
lemmings all jump off cliffs together, but then you find Disney, for a movie,
built a large treadmill that only made it look that way.
Yes, you are the lemming, and Gates and Bloomberg, and
all of Wall Street, are Disney. Joe Biden is the treadmill, along with Merkel
and Macron and the rest of the “well-meaning” gang. It makes no difference if a
story like that is true, it’s a good metaphor.
…
And I wish people would stop paying attention to the sociopath-laden
events like COP 21 through 26, and these Biden-chaired summits. They spell
nothing good for you or your children. The only thing that could, is using less
energy, not some other kind, let alone source, of energy. That’s for people who
don’t understand thermodynamics, or physics in general. And I know: that’s most
people and that’s the biggest tragedy of all.
Another False
Start in Africa Sold with Gates Foundation Green Revolution Myths
It’s disturbing to see how far the influence of the Gates
Foundation extends. And worse, it too regularly stands for what the sort of
leading edge [neoliberal] conventional wisdom that McKinsey regularly
promotes. This post described how the much-hyped green revolution, instead of
increasing output, has resulted in environmental degradation and exposure to
toxic substances even as the number of underfed increased.
Bitcoin needs to end, now. And other blockchain-based
currencies along with it. If, like many people, you only have a vague idea of
what Bitcoin is, you need to know two critical facts. First, Bitcoin is a
currency that is “mined” via computing calculations, and second, in aggregate
those calculations use about as much energy as the nation of Argentina. To make
matters worse, that energy use is growing.
A recent analysis in Nature Communications estimated that
by 2024 bitcoin mining in China alone would require nearly 300 terawatt-hours
(TWh), with 130 million tonnes of corresponding CO2 emissions.
being vegan is one of the most moral ways to be a
consumer. …. We love animals; we also
eat them. Why?
COVID Fare:
Just as we cannot afford to
shut down dissenting voices -but we do-, we cannot afford to have only a
limited response to Covid, but -again- we do. We should have, must have, a
multi-pronged, multi-dimensional response to a crisis like this, but we do not.
Instead, we revert back to one dimensional “answers”, because that’s all our
“leaders” can cope with.
To make the rollout of the
current vaccines possible in the first place, we had to do a lot of legal
juggling. First, all other substances that might have worked, had to be
discredited and discarded. That enabled an Emergency Authorization Use, for
-almost- entirely untested substances. Today, proud voices claim 1 billion
people globally have been vaccinated. But since the world population is 7.9
billion, that leaves 6.9 billion not vaccinated people. Do we see the problem?
The problem is the virus
continues to exist, and mutate, in multiple dimensions. And there is zero
chance of those remaining 6.9 billion being jabbed before, say, 2025. Zero. And
no, it’s not about how bad the variants, mutations, are that we see so far,
it’s always about the next mutations.
The vaccines don’t protect
you from getting infected or infecting others. The best they can do is make you
less sick. So we have 1 billion people jabbed, of which a significant number is
prone to get infected regardless, which will push the virus to continue
mutating, and especially into a form that hides from the vaccines. And then
there are the 6.9 billion unvaccinated who can get infected with these new much
more virulent strains.
Against which the vaccines
offer even less protection than against the “original” virus. A recipe for a
huge disaster. How huge? Take a look at India today.
…
It is criminally insane to
not try to boost everyone’s immune systems with something as simple as vitamin
D, or to take HCQ and ivermection more serious, or dexamethasone, or any other
repurposable drugs. We simply need to move in as many dimensions as we can,
because the virus does, too.
Problem is, if ivermectin
would be proven to be effective as a prophylactic or treatment, even it were just
50%, the Emergency Authorization Use for the mRNA vaccines would be in shaky
legal territory.
…
But this is also oh-so
typical of how the entire western world deals with this issue. Myopic,
self-obsessed, profit-oriented, and lying through their teeth. The problem is
not whether the present vaccines are somewhat effective or not, the problem is
that we don’t know but run with them anyway. And leave a country like India to
fend for itself, while complaining they don’t give us enough vaccines while
their own people die in the streets.
There are many stories about
side effects, blood clots in particular, which were predicted but ignored, for
Chrissake. The problem is that in order to “live” in the one dimension of the
present vaccines, we had to close ourselves off from all other dimensions. And
that we cannot afford. This will not end well.
…
We better inject some actual
science into this whole discussion, or else. Then again, so far, there isn’t
even a discussion at all. Dissenting voices are banned. Just one of many things
we cannot afford. Science? It’s nothing to do with science. Just politics.
Presently, people in the west are told that is they get “fully vaccinated”,
they will be able to get back to “normal”. But that is a lie, or at least even
Pfizer et al themselves give no guarantee that transmission will stop.
Genetic
Vaccines: Are They the New Thalidomide?
Increasingly, vaccine
manufacturers and government officials are following the sarcastic maxim from
Samuel Shem’s novel of medical residency entitled The House of God that “if you
don’t take a temperature you can’t find a fever.” In other words, if we don’t
critically look at the actual recorded patient damage, we won’t find our
products to be defective. Now, major media are increasingly getting on board,
condemning “vaccine hesitancy” and pushing everyone to get vaccinated for
COVID, discounting any dangers. But in the practice of medicine, we are
supposed to employ the “precautionary principle” — above all do no harm.
Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19
“vaccines” are experimental, employing a genetic technology never before used
on humans. Ironically, many people who wouldn’t purchase the first edition of a
new car line are lining up to take an injection they know nothing about, that
has never successfully passed animal trials, that could never meet the required
“safety level” for a “drug,” and is unapproved for the prevention of COVID
except as an emergency experiment.
Legally, those who get the
vaccine are unnamed participants in a Stage IV FDA trial.
Moreover, a vaccine is
supposed to prevent disease. By that definition, these agents are not even
vaccines. They are more properly termed “experimental unapproved genetic
agents.” By admission of the manufacturers themselves, both the Pfizer and
Moderna products only lessen the symptoms of COVID; they don’t prevent
transmission.
Vaccination was first
invented to treat smallpox, which had a a fatality rate of up to 60 percent.
Then other diseases such as typhoid and polio were similarly addressed. But
vaccination is not used when effective safe treatment is available. Although
censorship has confused the public understanding, overwhelming evidence dating
back to the 1970s shows that viruses can be treated with “lysosomotropic
agents.” The truth is, hundreds of papers have shown that chloroquine, and its
later version hydroxychloroquine, are very effective in treating this virus if
given early. A worldwide open architecture online review of COVID survival
(hcqtrial.com) showed that death rate was 78.7-percent lower in those countries
where hydroxychloroquine was used early and often:
Multiple large studies done
in outpatient settings show very excellent prevention and cure with these and
other drugs such as Ivermectin.
…
As to the claims of the
efficacy of the drugs, the declaration of 95-percent effectiveness of the
Pfizer product was shown to be bunkum by Dr. Peter Doshi, the associate editor
of the British Medical Journal, writing in that publication. After doing an independent
review of the data submitted to the FDA, Dr. Doshi reported that only 30
percent of test subjects, at best, experienced even the slightest benefit
(symptom reduction). Absolute risk reduction — in other words stopping
transmission — he estimated at less than one percent.
The limited benefit of
taking the drugs is made worse by the relatively high death tolls from the new
mRNA therapy. During the first two months of the rollout of Pfizer and Moderna
“vaccines” in 2021, 95 percent of deaths from vaccines recorded in the Vaccine
Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) were for those agents, meaning only five
percent of reported deaths involved all the other vaccines put together.
Compared to 2019, deaths in VAERS are up 6,000 percent. Thirty-six deaths were
recorded in the first quarter of 2020 versus 1,754 in the first quarter of
2021.
...
To understand what is
actually happening to people after receiving the mRNA agents, I reviewed data
in VAERS — an open-source searchable database of possible vaccine side effects
reported by both providers and patients….
…
In truth, neither recipients
nor their doctors know what is in these “vaccines.” Only a few people at the
top of the Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca research
groups really understand them. These mRNA injections produce a potentially
deadly pathogen — the spike protein — in your cells. The Emergency Use Authorization
for the Pfizer product says that it contains “a nucleoside-modified messenger
RNA (modRNA) encoding the viral spike glycoprotein (S) of SARS-CoV-2.” If your
immune system is strong enough to withstand this onslaught and create some
immunity, you may survive the first onslaught. But even if you don’t die in the
short term, mRNA is an epigenetic controller of DNA. Though this foreign
synthetic mRNA doesn’t actually become part of your DNA to make you a “GMO
human,” as some people have been worrying about, it can control DNA in ways we
have yet to completely understand. We literally have no idea whether this
bodily additive is going to have a side effect of expressing cancer genes, or
of repressing cancer protective genes, or thousands of other potentially deadly
unknowns
…
When any new drug problem
starts, it begins slowly and unrecognized — like a snowball beginning to roll
down a mountain. By the time the problem is generally acknowledged, the
avalanche is well on its way. In the case of thalidomide, over 100,000 children
were severely damaged before the drug was removed from use. Though VAERS has
the potential to shorten recognition time of drug problems by trying to spot
the “unusual patterns,” this requires that physicians be aware of the system,
and take the time to enter any suspected side effects — not just the worst
cases. It also requires that researchers care enough to look. This is not
happening. A report previously submitted to the Agency for Healthcare Research
and Quality revealed that fewer than one percent of adverse events get reported
to VAERS.
…
It’s obvious that the
pharmaceutical industry is willing to release untried technology upon the
entire world population, and not be deterred by any inconvenience such as
unexplained death.
…
We must reject the unspoken
premise under which pharmaceutical companies and doctors operate — that all
vaccines are always safe in all people all the time. It should not be
considered unreasonable to require scientific transparency, honesty by drug
manufacturers, and safety from vaccines.
On that data the Covid shots
are one hundred times more likely to be associated with death than the flu shot
was over a reasonably-comparable number of delivered doses, and like the flu
shot, Covid shots were and are preferentially advised for older, more-morbid
people.
Association is not proof of
causation. But it is certainly a safety
signal and claiming it is not is a lie.
The CDC's death data also
backs this up. In addition it makes
quite clear that the elevation in stroke and heart attack risk from Covid-19 is
very real. This is especially nasty
because strokes and heart attacks kill a lot of people in any ordinary year;
indeed, they are two of the leading causes of death, taking about 750,000 lives
between them and putting another million or more into the ranks of the
permanently disabled. The roughly 8%
elevation of that risk over 2020 compared to 2019 is very serious.
Emerging science says that
the spike protein alone is likely pathogenic and causes those events. Indeed that specific pathogenic behavior is
likely why Covid-19 kills virtually everyone who succumbs. We did not know that in March and April of
2020; we simply took the spike configuration offered from the Chinese and
presumed that without the "N" component of the virus it was harmless
in the body. We had exactly zero
evidence for that belief. The science is
now emerging, which I remind you always takes time, that this was ruinously
wrong; the spike alone causes coagulation disorders and obviously, in the blood
vessels, that can lead directly to strokes and heart attacks along with severe
organ damage leading directly to death.
We presume that the shots will
stop the Covid-19 "infection" deaths and perhaps they will. But dead is dead and why does not matter; if
they stop Covid-19 deaths but potentiate strokes and heart attacks they may
well kill more people over a few years than Covid-19 ever did while natural
infection deaths may have already pretty much run their course!
We do not know at the
present time but the signal in the data indicating trouble is there and is very
significant.
This issue is not just in
the J&J and AZ shots; it is also showing up in the mRNA shots. So says VAERS, not me; go look it up. The death elevation risk from heart attacks
and strokes is likely to large degree due to serious infections with Covid-19
that become systemic and ultimately fatal.
But deliberately causing a pathogenic part of the virus to be produced
by cells involved in the circulation, if indeed the spike protein alone is
pathogenic as the science is now demonstrating, is criminally stupid for
someone who is not already at high risk.
All of the current vaccines do
this.
In addition people love to
mix relative and absolute risk to deceive people on a regular basis and in
every case doing so is a fraud. This was
repeatedly done in "selling" the vaccines to the public. You must compare like with like or you're lying. For example if the risk of death if you do
not get the vaccine is 1/50 (2%) and the risk if you DO get the vaccine is
1/500 (0.2%) then while it is true that your risk of dying has been cut by 90%
you only had a 2% risk of dying if infected in the first place. That is, you were going to survive 98% of the
time; now you will survive 99.8%. That
sounds like a fabulous improvement except if only 10% of the people got the
infection in a year with no vaccine to start with then your base survival rate
was not 98% since that presumes you got infected -- it was in fact 99.8% like
you would survive the year without dying from Covid to start with! That is there's only an 0.2% risk of death
that can possibly be improved upon! Thus
you must now rate the risk of the vaccine doing evil things to you against the
2/1,000 chance of death, not 2/100 since if you get stabbed that risk is
certain where infection is not.
…
The CDC and so-called
"experts" are all started out saying that the blood clot risk was
1-in-1,000,000. Well, that appears to
have been blatantly false too as the data on the mRNA shots says it's far
more-likely than that and that it is not confined to the J&J vaccine.
…
I remind you that the
difference between the jab and infection is that the risk from the jab is
assured if you take it while the risk from infection it only occurs if you get
the virus, which by the CDC again was 10% over the first year and will fall
each year thereafter with successive reductions in those who are not immune
either by vaccination or infection.
Further, most of the deaths
from clotting disorders caused by the shots are almost-certainly not going to
be considered "possibly vaccine related"; a heart attack that results
from thrombosis is not unusual and determining that the vaccine caused it with
medical certainty may be impossible. But
we can certainly see an increase in heart attacks as a whole exactly as we did
last year, nearly all of which are in fact caused by stenosis, that is,
narrowing or blocking of the blood flow to the heart.
If that risk does not return
to materially below the 2019 baseline when the data settles out through April
we will have a screaming safety signal but there will be nothing we can do
about it for those who already took the jab.
…
for someone not at
particular risk the shot is more dangerous than the disease itself when
adjusted for your risk of getting Covid over a year's time, and given that it
is expected you need to take the shot again every year this will not be a
"one time" risk either.
…
The bottom line is that you
have to be crazy to accept a "therapy", no matter what it is, that is
equally or more-dangerous as what it allegedly protects against. Indeed the entire premise of vaccines is that
they are much safer than getting the disease.
Let's compare with a common one that is also relatively new: Chicken Pox
(varicella.) Virtually every kid gets
that stab nowadays.
Chicken pox kills about as
many kids (IFR), on a risk basis, as does Covid-19. Yet last year the Chicken Pox (Varicella)
vaccine was associated with (not proved caused) ONE death and we stabbed about
4 million kids with it. That is wildly
(by a factor of about 100) less-dangerous than Chicken Pox is in a child and
2,500 times less dangerous than Chicken Pox is in an adult.
This is an example of a very
safe vaccine against which there is little or no argument available on the
data. I will take a vaccine that reduces
my risk of death or serious disease by a factor of 100 compared with the risk
of infection adjusted for its risk of being contracted every day and twice on
Sunday. Indeed that's why both myself
and my daughter have had accepted all of those common vaccines.
This is definitely not the
case for any of the Covdi-19 vaccines when it comes to healthy persons; at best
the vaccine is equally dangerous and it might be much more dangerous than
natural infection since we have no data on intermediate and longer-term risk at
all and it appears the clot risk is much higher than originally stated. In fact on the evidence everyone involved
lied about how "rare" these events really are.
The CDC’s VAERS
and Vaccine Complications: The System is Broken
The VAERS system is
currently reporting over 3000 deaths related to the Pfizer and Moderna COVID
vaccines. The numbers in the European
registries are almost exactly in line with this as well. I would guess from a simple perusal that
about half these reports – both death and morbidity – are directly related to
blood clotting issues. VAERS was never a system meant to be perfectly accurate
– but having a 100-200X difference in mortality rates should be
attention-getting to everyone in medicine.
And yet instead of addressing this issue head-on, our medical leaders
continued right on with the party line that EVERYTHING IS SAFE and GOING
SWIMMINGLY – nothing to see here. There
were days that I felt like I was living in The Twilight Zone.
…
Before she died, she told me
to make sure that everyone knows that these vaccines are not as safe as
advertised.
I am a licensed physician in
a US state. I am board bertified in
Internal Medicine. I made every effort
to immediately report this death to the federal officials. I called the FDA and ended up in voicemail
hell. I called the CDC and was literally
hung up on twice. Again, please contrast
that reception to what I describe above in previous “non-crisis” years.
After multiple attempts, I
finally decided to report to VAERS. This
was almost a week ago. To date, the
VAERS has no record of my patient. All
that I have received is an email to confirm my submission. No one from any agency has made any effort to
contact me in any way. It was of little
comfort to note in in the New York Times, that the physicians trying to report
one of the sentinel J&J stroke cases got a similar “hang up in your face”
response from the FDA/CDC.
I want to reiterate – a
patient has died. A board-certified
internist feels this is likely vaccine-related.
And no one has made any effort to contact me. None. A complete departure from the
past. And this is a stringent
safety-reporting system?
What am I trying to say?
The system is broken.
Therefore, we have no idea what is the actual safety profile of these
vaccines.
The patients who have been
affected know it. Word is getting out
that there are problems. Social media is
filled with all kinds of stories. And
our federal officials keep right on with the same “All is well – everything is
safe” mantra. We have media figures
everywhere spouting out safety numbers that I can assure you are not accurate.
Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Immunologist: mRNA Vaccines
are Extremely Dangerous
Professor Doctor Sucharit
Bhakdi is a German virologist and professor of microbiology. He is an ethnic
Thai who was born in the USA and educated at schools in Switzerland, Egypt, and
Thailand. He studied medicine at the University of Bonn. Prior to his
retirement, he was a professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz
and, from 1991 to 2012, director of the Medical Institute for Microbiology and
Hygiene in Germany. Univ.-Prof. Dr. med. Sucharit Bhakdi is a
specialist in microbiology and infection epidemiology. The Spiegel bestselling
author headed the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene at Johannes
Gutenberg University Mainz for 22 years and worked in patient care, research
and teaching. He has published over 300 papers in the fields of immunology,
bacteriology, virology, and cardiovascular disease.
…
There’s more news that isn’t
so good. The vaccination program was started and is now being distributed.That
was the deciding factor why I would have loved to be there in Vienna.
I plead with you, please
inform yourselves. This vaccine is extremely dangerous. People have already
died from it. Young people have died from this vaccine. This is being hidden,
covered up, and no one wants to talk about it.
I’m someone who has always
been transparent. I have only said what I have been compelled to say because it
is scientifically proven. In this context, I am not speaking to you as someone
with political motives,and I don’t have a political agenda. I’m not on the left
nor am I on the right. I stand with you.
This vaccine is so
dangerous, that we dedicated an entire chapter to it called “Immunity and
Immunization”. And it was made available to everyone. You can download this
chapter, for free, at the publisher’s homepage, Goldegg-Verlag. Just do a
search for our book, there you will find a link
Dr. Sucharit
Bhakdi Interview – COVID Vaccine Blood Clot Risk Was Known, Ignored &
Buried
The Shock and
Reality of Catching Covid After Being Vaccinated
Separately, a disturbing
feature of this piece is that it asserts that vaccine-created immunity is
likely to be superior to that of getting the disease. IMHO this is another
terrible way to sell getting vaccinated. You get vaccinated not to wind up in
the hospital and maybe die. Period. It’s a far better way to get Covid immunity
than contracting the disease. And it is not crazy to think that the vaccine
reduces severity of other bad outcomes. But the disgrace in the US is that we
are doing terrible follow up. It’s all ad hoc and far too reliant on patient
and sometimes doctor initiated accounts.
The fact is no one yet knows
how long the vaccine-induced immunity lasts. While it is hard to prove a
negative, Lambert and I have been following studies and the news closely. We
have yet to see anything beyond expert intuition supporting the claim that the
vaccine-generated immunity will last longer than that of getting infected.
Pfizer has only ventured
that the vaccine is effective for “up to” six months. Both Pfizer and Moderna
are telling the public to expect to take boosters annually. By contrast,
large-scale data from the UK, the only country to test citizens on a regular,
systematic basis, has led researchers to say that immunity from contracting
Covid lasted at least six to eight months. Vaccine-created immunity may prove
to be more durable, but to keep presenting that as yet another fact runs the
risk of feeding more skepticism if that proves not to be true.
COVID Quote of the Week:
How about seeing a governor or a
premier come out and say this:
“Neither lockdowns nor masks seem to be
working, for the next six weeks we want as many people as possible to load up
on Vitamin D and Zinc”. We’re going to greenlight Ivermectin and
hydroxychloroquine, and we’re going to launch an operation Warp Speed to study
any and all alternative approaches”
In any society in which the incentives were such that the ruling class
was really trying to solve the problem at hand, this would have happened
without any prompting.
COVID Tweets of the Week:
A subtle distinction: "deploying a vaccine
like one of the ones that we currently have, narrowly targeted at the spike
protein, in advance of a pandemic might work very well, and in the midst of a
pandemic might have exactly the opposite impact"
Dr. Fauci was asked why
Texas, with no statewide
restrictions, hasn’t yet seen a surge this spring, unlike other states. His
answer? It’s not the mandates that matter, it’s behavior. And Texans are simply
behaving better than people in Michigan. Just watch. It’s astounding.
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
CJ Hopkins: The Covidian
Cult (Part II)
How did we ever get to this
point … to the point where, as I put it in The Covidian Cult, “instead of the
cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the
dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the
isolated islands within it?” To understand this, one needs to understand how
cults control the minds of their members, because totalitarian ideological
movements operate more or less the same way, just on a much larger, societal
scale. There is a wealth of research and knowledge on this subject (I mentioned
Robert J. Lifton in my earlier essay), but, to keep things simple, I’ll just
use Margaret Singer’s “Six Conditions of Mind Control” from her 1995 book,
Cults in Our Midst, as a lens to view the Covidian Cult through.
…
The point is, this kind of
ideological conditioning is happening everywhere, every day, on the job, among
friends, even among families. The pressure to conform is intense, because
nothing is more threatening to devoted cultists, or members of totalitarian
ideological movements, than those who challenge their fundamental beliefs,
confront them with facts, or otherwise demonstrate that their “reality” isn’t
reality at all, but, rather, a delusional, paranoid fiction.
….
Basically, society has been
transformed into something resembling an infectious disease ward, or an
enormous hospital from which there is no escape.
…
The fact that in the
Covidian Cult the traditional charismatic cult leader has been replaced by a
menagerie of medical experts and government officials does not change the utter
dependency and abject powerlessness of its members, who have been reduced to a
state approaching infancy. This abject powerlessness is not experienced as a
negative; on the contrary, it is proudly celebrated. Thus the mantra-like
repetition of the “New Normal” platitude “Trust the Science!” by people who, if
you try to show them the science, melt down completely and start jabbering
aggressive nonsense at you to shut you up.
Who Runs The
World? Blackrock and Vanguard
In this conference call, we
see shades of the Great Reset, Agenda 2030, the New World Order. The UN wants
to make sure, as does Schwab that in 2030, poverty, hunger, pollution and
disease no longer plague the Earth. To achieve this, the UN wants taxes from
Western countries to be split by the mega corporations of the elite to create a
brand new society. For this project, the UN says we need a world government –
namely the UN, itself.
And it is clear that the
“pandemic” was orchestrated in order to bring this about. This video does an
incredible job of explaining how it is all being done.
Orwellian Fare:
Glenn Greenwald: The Media Lied
Repeatedly About Officer Brian Sicknick's Death. And They Just Got Caught
Has the looming collapse of
the climate, the annihilation of species, the endless and merciless resource
wars and mass-murdering sanctions devastating whole countries, not by now
persuaded all of us that capitalism does not, indeed cannot, have a conscience?
After Assange, Corbyn, Iraq, Libya and Syria, does anyone believe the corporate
Guardian even pretends to act as a ‘conscience’ for anything? Canadian law
professor Joel Bakan explains the bottom-line for all corporate executives:
‘The law forbids any motivation
for their actions, whether to assist workers, improve the environment, or help
consumers save money. They can do these things with their own money, as private
citizens. As corporate officials, however, stewards of other people’s money,
they have no legal authority to pursue such goals as ends in themselves – only
as means to serve the corporations own interests, which generally means to
maximise the wealth of its shareholders.
‘Corporate social
responsibility is thus illegal – at least when its genuine.’ (Bakan, The
Corporation, Constable, 2004, p.37)
If genuine social
responsibility is illegal, it makes perfect sense that conscience is a threat
to be stifled at every turn
Geo-Political Fare:
Doctorow: The Foreign Policy Segment of President Putin’s ‘State
of the Nation’ Address Today
Escobar: Putin rewrites
the law of the geopolitical jungle
So here’s the new law of the
geopolitical jungle – backed by Mr. Iskander, Mr. Kalibr, Mr. Avangard, Mr.
Peresvet, Mr. Khinzal, Mr. Sarmat, Mr. Zircon and other well-respected
gentlemen, hypersonic and otherwise, later complimented on the record. Those
who poke the Bear to the point of threatening “the fundamental interests of our
security will regret what has been done, as they have regretted nothing for a
very long time.”
The stunning developments of
the past few weeks – the China-US Alaska summit, the Lavrov-Wang Yi summit in
Guilin, the NATO summit, the Iran-China strategic deal, Xi Jinping’s speech at
the Boao forum – now coalesce into a stark new reality: the era of a unilateral
Leviathan imposing its iron will is over.
…
It’s an open question
whether Putin’s State of the Nation will be seriously examined by the toxic
lunatic combo of neocons and humanitarian imperialists bent on simultaneously
harassing Russia and China. But the fact is something extraordinary has already
started to happen: a “de-escalation” of sorts.
…
The Hegemon may always find
a way to deploy a massive P.R. campaign and ultimately claim a diplomatic
success in “dissolving” the impasse. Well, that certainly beats a hot war.
Otherwise, lowly Jungle Book adventurers have been advised: try anything funny
and be ready to meet “asymmetric, swift and harsh”.
Hedges: The Unraveling
of the American Empire
There is not a single case
since 1941 when the coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black
propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, U.S.
sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars or military
interventions carried out by the United States resulted in the establishment of
a democratic government. The two-decade-long wars in the Middle East, the
greatest strategic blunder in American history, have only left in their wake
one failed state after another. Yet, no one in the ruling class is held
accountable.
In America Faux
Reality Can Be More Convincing Than Facts
reports incorrectly that
Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd for more than eight
minutes, “resulting in the man’s death.”
Because of the perspective [of the cell phone video], it looked as if
Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck.., but at the trial the close up police
videos showed that Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s shoulder
blade.
… Can the jurors who have
seen the actual evidence believe it and act on it, or is their decision
controlled by the faux reality of the multitudes who are unaware of the
courtroom evidence? The cost to jurors
of denying the faux reality created by the presstitutes can be extremely high.
… As the medical examiner in
the case said prior to learning that Chauvin’s knee was not on Floyd’s neck, in
the absence of the police intervention the medical evidence would clearly
indicate that Floyd died from overdosing on the dangerous drug fentanyl.
Kunstler: The Movie
Follows the Script
Former police officer
Chauvin is charged with Murder 2, Murder 3, and Manslaughter all predicated on
varying degrees of intention and recklessness in the death of George Floyd, the
internationally acclaimed saint-of-oppressed-peoples who died under Mr. Chauvin’s
knee in an indelible video shared ‘round the world last May. The video has the
status of a religious icon, portraying, as it seems to, the vivid distillation
of the black experience in America: pure, unalloyed, hateful, murderous
subjugation.
The trouble is what’s not in
the indelible picture: Mr. Floyd’s prodigious ingestion of the world’s hardest
narcotic, fentanyl, at a level likely to cause death, plus methedrine, plus
THC, on top of a 90-percent blockage of a coronary artery, and other cardiopathies,
and Covid-19, all according to the official medical examiner. Also, as it
happened in the instance of his arrest, Mr. Floyd was failing to follow police
instructions, and acting dangerously deranged — behavior apt to lead to police
restraint, under which he died, rest his soul.
So, now it will be left to
the jury to sort all this out, under the threat of getting “doxed” (having
their home addresses disclosed) by the Black Lives Matter org, as well as
following the $27-million lawsuit settlement on the Floyd family for “wrongful
death” by the Minneapolis City Council before the trial commenced — not exactly
a propitious lead-in for a fair outcome. One might even view the public
expressions of black opinion leaders and politicians as coercive — but then
coercion is the animating spirit of liberal Wokery, the wish and the will to
punish at all costs.
Jonathan Turley: "Believe
Your Eyes, Chauvin's Knee Killed Floyd": How The Line Between The Press
& The Prosecution Disappeared In The Chauvin Trial
I previously wrote a column
warning that media coverage of the George Floyd trial of Derek Chauvin was
dangerously incomplete and slanted. The concern was that the public was not
being informed of strong defense arguments that would be used at the trial. The
danger is that any acquittal or hung jury would then come as an even greater
surprise - contributing to more rioting and violence. The coverage of the final
day of the trial only magnified those concerns as legal experts and journalists
seemed more set on advocating than reporting on the underlying issues.
Those concerns were evident
within minutes of the defense starting its closing argument. Defense attorney
Eric Nelson did a remarkably good job in defending his client.
Turley again: The Chauvin
Appeal: How The Comments Of The Court & The Prosecutors Could Raise
Challenges Going Forward
There will likely be an
array of conventional appellate issues, from the elements of the murder counts
to the sufficiency of the evidence. Obviously, any appeal will wait until after
sentencing, which will take many weeks. However, two issues were highlighted on
the final day which could play a role in the appeal.
The first on the denial of a
venue change and the sequestering of the jury is very difficult to make work on
appeal. However, there are strong arguments to be made in this case. I believe Judge Cahill should have granted
the venue change and also sequestered this jury. It is not clear if the court
polled the jury on trial coverage, particularly after the inflammatory remarks
of Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Cal.). However, there are credible grounds for
challenging how this jury may have been influenced by the saturation of
coverage of the trial as well as rioting in the area.
Geopolitical tweet of the Week:
#USSTRATCOM Posture
Statement Preview:
The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must
account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very
rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option.
Big Thoughts (incl Ian Welsh 3-fer):
Ian Welsh: Why Do We Do That?
Welsh again: The Ugly Reality
of America’s Powerful
Welsh yet again: The Catastrophic
Covid Crisis In India
It turns out that bad leadership (Cuomo is also a psychopathic
incompetent) is a good predictor for who did catastrophically bad with Covid.
In India Modi is the fool who .., but Modi is an idiot’s idiot, enamored
both with right wing Hindutva religious ideology and with neoliberalism,
because Indian socialism didn’t work well, so the solution is obviously to do
the opposite form of stupidity.
I don’t really have a moral here, except the obvious, that
leadership does matter and that one’s initial impression of competence is
usually right. Modi’s incompetent. Cuomo’s incompetent.
Trump was incompetent. Ford is incompetent. All of them are also malign: they
don’t care about what happens to other people. Ford famously stole money from
his brother’s widow, so he isn’t even in the Biden class of at least being good
to his own family. Probably electing evil incompetent people is a bad
idea, and we should do less of it.
Jeftovic: The Age of
Over-Abundant Elites
I’ve been reading Peter Turchin’s “Ages of Discord”, which tries to look
at patterns of societal strife that he found in previous, pre-industrial
civilizations such as Rome and France, and examine how it holds up in a
post-industrial era. It bears some resemblance to other cycle theories like
Strauss and Howe’s “Fourth Turning” or other long-wave models like Kondratiev
Waves (K-Waves). The basic premise behind these ideas are that societies
undergo cyclical or pendulum-like dynamics between relatively steady states of
prosperity and stability, the internal dynamics of which then produce the
conditions that precipitate reversions into turbulent periods of strife and
chaotic change.
…
If there’s one thing in this highly polarized world that everybody probably
does agree on it’s that we are almost certainly already in one of these periods
of discord right now.
What I’m finding most interesting from Turchin’s take on this isn’t that
periods of stability are not terminated by resource depletion (a la the climate
alarmists), or any other “limits to growth” per se. While population growth in
pre-industrial societies may bump up against “neo-Malthusian” limits, it sets
up a counter-cyclical decline in population growth. How these forces interact
in a transition from stability to chaos is that an over-abundance of elites
creates a situation of the political class splitting into factions and fighting
over the spoils of what is now a shrinking pie in terms of real economic
wealth:
Long Read:
Cook: To Conquer
Nature And Death, We Have Made A New Religion Of Science
…This sense of the the
unknowable, the ineffable has been with humans since our earliest ancestors
became self-conscious.
…
Science has sought to shrink
the realm of the inexplicable. We now understand – at least approximately – the
laws of nature that govern the weather and catastrophic events like an
earthquake. Telescopes and rocket-ships have also allowed us to probe deeper
into the heavens to make a little more sense of the universe outside our tiny
corner of it.
But the more we investigate
the universe the more rigid appear the limits to our knowledge. Like the
shape-people of Flatland, our ability to understand is constrained by the
dimensions we can observe and experience: in our case, the three dimensions of
space and the additional one of time. Influential “string theory” posits
another six dimensions, though we would be unlikely to ever sense them in any
more detail than the shadows almost-detected by the scientists of Flatland.
The deeper we peer into the
big universe of the night sky and our cosmic past, and the deeper we peer into
the small universe inside the atom and our personal past, the greater the sense
of mystery and wonder.
…
Sadly, Sagan’s approach is
not the one that dominates the western tradition. All too often, we behave as
if we are gods. Foolishly, we have made a religion of science. We have
forgotten that in a world of unknowables, the application of science is
necessarily tentative and ideological. It is a tool, one of many that we can
use to understand our place in the universe, and one that is easily
appropriated by the corrupt, by the vain, by those who seek power over others,
by those who worship money.
…
The British scientist James
Lovelock who helped model conditions on Mars for NASA so it would have a better
idea how to build the first probes to land there, is still ridiculed for the
Gaia hypothesis he developed in the 1970s. He understood that our planet was
best not viewed as a very large lump of rock with life-forms living on it,
though distinct from it. Rather Earth was as a complete, endlessly complex,
delicately balanced living entity. Over billions of years, life had grown more
sophisticated, but each species, from the most primitive to the most advanced,
was vital to the whole, maintaining a harmony that sustained the diversity.
Few listened to Lovelock.
Our god-complex got the better of us. And now, as the bees and other insects
disappear, everything he warned of decades ago seems far more urgent. Through
our arrogance, we are destroying the conditions for advanced life. If we don’t stop
soon, the planet will dispose of us and return to an earlier stage of its
evolution. It will begin again, without us, as simple flora and microbes once
again begin recreating gradually – measured in aeons – the conditions
favourable to higher life forms.
But the abusive, mechanistic
relationship we have with our planet is mirrored by the one we have with our
bodies and our health. Dualism has encouraged us to think of our bodies as
fleshy vehicles, which like the metal ones need regular outside intervention,
from a service to a respray or an upgrade. The pandemic has only served to
underscore these unwholesome tendencies.
In part, the medical
establishment, like all establishments, has been corrupted by the desire for
power and enrichment. Science is not some pristine discipline, free from
real-world pressures. Scientists need funding for research, they have mortgages
to pay, and they crave status and career advancement like everyone else.
Kamran Abbasi, executive
editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote an editorial last November warning
of British state corruption that had been unleashed on a grand scale by
covid-19. But it was not just politicians responsible. Scientists and health
experts had been implicated too: “The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political
complex can be manipulated in an emergency.”
He added: “The UK’s pandemic
response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with
worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that
manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.”
…
For much of human history,
our chief concern was the fight for survival – against animals and other
humans, against the elements, against natural disasters. Technological
developments proved invaluable in making our lives safer and easier, whether it
was flint axes and domesticated animals, wheels and combustion engines,
medicines and mass communications. Our brains now seem hardwired to look to
technological innovation to address even the smallest inconvenience, to allay
even our wildest fears.
So, of course, we have
invested our hopes, and sacrificed our economies, in finding a technological
fix to the pandemic. But does this exclusive fixation on technology to solve
the current health crisis not have a parallel with the similar, quick-fix
technological remedies we keep seeking for the many ecological crises we have
created?
New Section – CaitOz Quotes of the Week:
Our entire lives are at this very moment interwoven with the
suffering of other sentient beings. Inseparably so. Our whole lifestyle is
wrapped around an infrastructure of suffering and death. The gears of industry
have filled our oceans with plastic and led our world into a sixth mass
extinction that has caused a drop in insect life so precipitous that
once-commonplace things like firefly-filled evenings and bug-splattered
windshields have become exceedingly scarce just within our own lifetimes. We
cannot with intellectual honesty separate ourselves as individuals from
humanity’s industrial ecocide. …. The people you look at in your day to day
life are fed by factory farming and industrial agriculture. The cells in their
bodies are literally made from the suffering and death of other organisms, and
of the exploited farm and factory workers who made their food available and
affordable to them. We live in civilizations built by toil, theft, slavery,
exploitation and ecocide.
Other Quotes of the Week:
W.J. Astore: President Biden has
announced that all U.S. combat troops will be out of Afghanistan by 9/11 of
this year. So why is the Pentagon budget increasing? Only in America do wars
end and war budgets go up.
Once, many years ago, an ex-boyfriend wore his Michael Vick jersey to
Whole Foods. (Vick, an NFL quarterback, had at the time just been sentenced to
21 months in federal prison for his involvement in a dog fighting ring.) In the
parking lot, another customer asked him if he knew what Vick did, and if so,
how could he support him? My ex pointed to the chicken breasts in her cart and
said, “Lady, I’m vegan.”
Top climate scientists admit they've wasted decades on
wishful thinking about futile tech fixes rather than demanding real action:
'When it comes to perhaps the greatest challenge humanity faces, we often show
a dangerous lack of critical analysis'
Satirical Fare:
Study Finds
Anyone Still Wearing A Mask At This Point Is Probably Just Super Ugly
Vid of the Week:
Under The Skin
with Russell Brand
This week is an incredible episode with Edward Snowden!
We talk about the true power of the state, corporations and Big Tech, the
popularity of conspiracy theories and how the real “conspiracies” and
atrocities are occurring in plain sight. We don’t need to look far to find
corruption.
