Regular Fare:
Global reflation?
(PDF) Bank of International Settlements.
“A closer look at the data
reveals that the pickup in inflation can be ascribed largely to base effects,
increases in the prices of a small number of pandemic-affected items and higher
energy prices. A common thread through these causes is that their effect on
inflation is likely to be temporary.”
Quantitative
Easing: how the world got hooked on magicked-up money
Going cold turkey would
finish off a dysfunctional global financial system that’s now hopelessly
addicted to emergency infusions. The only solution is surgery on the system
itself.
…
So why, fundamentally, does
the 21st-century economy seem to need so much QE? The first step in finding
answers is to go back to basics regarding the nature of money.
This is tricky terrain for
economists, because—remarkably enough—they are not routinely trained in the
theory of money and banking. You can get through an economics degree, even an
economics career, without pausing to think seriously about either. As Claudio
Borio of the Bank for International Settlements explained in 2019: “bar a few
who have sailed into these waters, money has been allowed to sink by the
macroeconomics profession. And with little or no regrets.”
To understand how grave an
intellectual vacuum this leaves, imagine the chaos if physicists working on
space projects had not been trained in the theory of gravity—a concept that is
fundamental to physics in the way that money is fundamental to the economy.
To the extent that
mainstream economists think about money at all, they are divided on it. Some,
like Bank of England economists, do understand that money originates as a
social construct; that credit—or, in the words still written on every banknote,
a “promise to pay”—is based on trust, and ultimately underpinned by regulation
and the institutions of the state.
Importantly, commercial bank
money rests upon the same social foundations. When banks make loans, they have
always acted as “magic money trees,” creating new deposits in the accounts of
those who borrow from them—in effect new money.
…
Cryptocurrencies such as
Bitcoin are the supreme example of where the commodity-exchange theory leads.
They are creatures of the “dark web,” which is designed to avoid regulation.
This is a form of money based not on trust, but on distrust of public
authority. Bitcoin “miners” hope to replicate gold, the scarce asset that for
so long underpinned the world’s money, with their digitally-created, but
apparently finite, commodity. Scarcity is the attraction, a supposed defence
against state meddling. What’s forgotten is that if the world’s economic
activity actually had to be calibrated to fit an arbitrarily fixed volume of
circulating cryptocurrency, then—exactly as under the gold standard—the world
would experience prolonged and painful depressions. This threat hasn’t stopped
cryptocurrencies becoming big business …
China’s Worrying
Economic Signs That Only the Government Has Noticed
"Everything
Will Go To Zero" - Macquarie Strategist Envisions Era Of Tech-Driven
Deflation
Bubble Fare:
Hussman: What Triggered the Crash?
Tweets of the Week:
Rosie: The lopsided US inflation story: about 90% of the core CPI was +0.2% in June (+2% YoY) and 10% of it jumped over 5% (+20% YoY). Autos (used, new, rentals), airlines, movies, hotels — there's your inflation. The skew is unprecedented.
Taking a look at the contribution to core-inflation: both reopening sensitive areas + the semi-chip shortage are driving price increases (esp. w/ autos)
& if you exclude these 2 (albeit major) factors ~ there’s been deflation
These shortages will revert IMO, but damage is done
COVID-19 notes:
Tomas Pueyo: Delta Variant:
Everything You Need to Know
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Relentless
heat wave and lack of rain scorching Saskatchewan crops
Amazon
rainforest now emitting more CO2 than it absorbs
1 big thing: Climate
extremes may be worsening faster
When climate breakdown goes nuclear
In other words, nuclear’s sustainable electricity claim sits in the context of a much larger picture - that coastal and inland nuclear will be one of the first, and most significant, casualties to ramping climate impact.Other Fare:
Authorities bust
crypto-mining farm running on 4,000 Sony PlayStation 4s
Pics of the Week:
Germany floods: At least 42 dead and dozens missing after record rain
You don’t have to be from Thunder Bay to understand and enjoy this.
They went down the Trans Canada Highway, causing 3 accidents.
Yes, they went to jail… Yes, alcohol was involved.
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
Climate Crisis Fare:
Thomas Neuberger: Industry Calls the Climate Shots in the Biden Administration
In contrast to the praise Biden is getting from people like Maureen Dowd (the essence of her latest column is "See, Bernie likes Biden and he likes Bernie"), Biden's actual deeds, especially on climate, are deadly.(The other essence of Dowd's latest column is, "Continue to hope; Bernie can still save us." She writes, "Sanders ... and Biden have a bond that could have a profound effect on the lives of Americans," whitewashing Biden with Sanders' remaining cred. No mention of Sanders' ultimate powerlessness.)
Food And Water Watch (FWW), a group that's always excellent on climate and environmental issues, has put together a list of Biden's actions that contradict his promises. It's an easy read. Taken together, these are deadly indictments.
If Biden wanted to fix the increasingly urgent climate problem, he'd be doing that now and we'd be seeing him do it. Instead he fed us nice words when he wanted our vote, then contradicted those words with his constant and ongoing deeds once he gained power. There can be no question that industry calls the shots in his administration.
Read and weep. The following is excerpted and adapted from the FWW article. Read it in full for additional detail on each of these points.
…
…
The FWW report was published on June 30, so it ends here. July's affronts to reason and a habitable climate are unreported.
This is just a fact. There will be no climate solution from the Biden administration. It's been fully industry-captured.
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are
ignored.” ~ Aldous Huxley
The foundation beneath our house of cards is beginning
to buckle and heave. For far too long, humans have poked the sleeping monster
of abrupt climate change and it’s starting to awaken. Thus far, nearly a
thousand deaths in British Columbia alone are likely attributable to hyperthermia
caused by a persistent heat dome that has spiked temperatures to unprecedented
levels. Take note that we are seeing these unreal temperature spikes at the end
of a cooler La Nina cycle. When these heat domes form during the next warmer El
Nino cycle, the results will be disastrous. We have now made such mass casualty
events 150 times more likely with our heat-trapping gases which have doubled
the earth’s energy imbalance in just the last 15 years…
…Modern society is more connected than ever digitally,
but not emotionally or intimately. Too fragmented and dysfunctional to save
itself, we exist not as human beings but as consumers and statistical numbers
on a spreadsheet. Thus it is easy to write off the millions of deaths from
industrial pollution as a cost of doing business, especially when the rules of
the game are written for shareholders far removed from the damage being
wrought. Our suicidal march into the abyss seems to be preordained because we
have paid no heed to an endless stream of dire scientific reports and warnings
that span decades. Like the collapse of the Surfside apartment building in Miami where the
residents lived oblivious to warnings signs from decades ago, the collapse of
industrial civilization will follow a similar response to anthropogenic climate
breakdown. At this late stage, techno-optimists still cling to the belief that
somehow we can adapt and thrive in an inhospitable and deteriorating
post-Holocene epoch. At the same time, disinformation and propaganda continue
to be spread by those who are outright denying the growing existential threat.
The end result is the same, no matter which side prevails. Humans can’t even
agree on what is reality, so how could they possibly organize a coherent
response in time:
·
“We should be alarmed because the IPCC models are just
not good enough,” Dame Julia Slingo of the @metoffice says.
·
“The obvious acceleration of the breakdown of our
stable climate simply confirms that – when it comes to the climate emergency –
we are in deep, deep s***!” says UCL’s @ProfBillMcGuire. “Many in the climate
science community would agree, in private if not in public.”
·
“It blows my mind that we could get the temperatures
that we’re observing here in the Pacific north-west, especially on the west
sides of the Cascades that have that proximity to the ocean, that it could get
that hot for so many days in a row,” said Nick Bond, Washington state
climatologist. “I would have been willing to guess something like that in the
middle of the century, in the latter part of the century.”
·
“The extreme nature of the record, along with others,
is a cause for real concern,” says veteran scientist Professor Sir Brian
Hoskins. “What the climate models project for the future is what we would get
if we are lucky. The models’ behaviour may be too conservative.”
As has been pointed out before, but which is still not
accepted let alone understood by the vast majority, is that even if we employed
techno-fixes such as Bill Gates’ Solar Radiation Management Company, it would
not stop climate change’s evil twin, ocean acidification, which is threatening
to collapse the entire marine ecosystem. A recent paper by marine biologists
and environmental consultants has warned that human society faces extinction if
nothing is done to reverse the destruction of the oceans:
…
Keep in mind that we don’t have to reach the same
elevated levels of CO2 in past geologic extinction events for things to get
really nasty, causing modern civilization to crumble. Remember also that the
Anthropocene Extinction has multiple prongs such as chemical and plastic
pollution, deforestation, and other manmade pressures on the environment that
did not exist in Earth’s history. According to paleontologist Dr. Peter Ward, all major extinctions
occurred when CO2 levels exceeded 1000ppm. Past extinction events took hundreds
of thousands to millions of years to play out, but our current rate of change
is 25,000 times faster than the last known event (Paleocene Thermal Extinction)
which took a million years for CO2 to increase by 100ppm. We are on track to
reach 1000ppm within a century, but we’ll never get their of our own volition
because our civilization will be toast long before then; however, once tipping
points in the climate system are breached, positive feedback loops will have
been set in motion that will propel CO2 levels upward beyond our control.
…
You may be asking yourself when humans will finally
wise up and end this madness. Henri L Vichier-Guerre, a reader of this blog,
recently posted a quote from a very good book entitled Requiem for a
Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change by Clive Hamilton in
2010:
…even with the
most optimistic set of assumptions – the ending of deforestation, a halving of
emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and
then falling by 3 per cent a year for a few decades – we have no chance of
preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that
will spark uncontrollable climate change. The Earth’s climate would enter a
chaotic era lasting thousands of years before natural processes eventually establish
some sort of equilibrium. Whether human beings would still be a force on the
planet, or even survive, is a moot point. One thing seems certain: there will
be far fewer of us.
As Henri L Vichier-Guerre points out, none of those
optimistic things have happened in the intervening years. On the contrary, the
ecological destruction has accelerated and the chances of anyone at all
surviving grows more remote with each passing year. Henri goes on to say the
following on why no one in any significant seat of power is talking about our
impending doom:
Not everyone believes we should be completely
forthright with the general public about the depths of our crisis, including
many of those in our Government.
Because it’s far too late to do anything to mitigate
the crisis.
Far too late to avoid a global environmental,
ecological and economic catastrophe.
This may go some way to explaining why the general
public is still not being told the truth by Governments around the world.
It may go some way to explaining why many of the
super-rich have already set up lavish underground ‘doomsday bunkers’ where they
and their families can bug out when the shit hits the fan.
We have plenty of bread and circus distractions to
keep us preoccupied until the very end. Television did not get its name ‘The
Boob Tube’ for nothing. Now we have the infinite scroll of websites to
hypnotize and control the masses. Click that ‘Like’ button. Sophisticated
social media algorithms feed you what you want to see and hear 24/7. Cognitive
biases are reinforced and facts no longer matter in a world suffering from
severe truth decay. Aldous Huxley’s vision of a world driven by absolute
consumerism that sacrifices human values and controls the masses with a
non-stop supply of diversions via mindless entertainment and sensorial
stimulation has become a dystopic reality. Just as in his book, it’s all
happening in broad daylight with the tacit acceptance of everyone as we watch
the world burn.
Bruno
Latour and our Shared Common Future
Are the rich showing the rest of the world what they want for us?
… I'm of course drawing a
conclusion about a future we've not arrived at, but still, provocative as it
is, the question is both real and important. Do the rich (or as the writer
Masaccio always calls them, "the filthy rich") think that their own
survival depends on abandoning the rest of us? Because it certainly looks like
the rich either a) have no plan to deal with the certain-by-now climate crisis,
or b) their plans do not include us.
I know that's a provocative
thought, but it's also a real possibility, perhaps the most real possibility in
the whole "what do to about climate" discussion. If the rich do
abandon the rest of us, it's going to be a very different world than the one
where we all join together, however late.
…
First, whether this explains
the "deadly cocktail" or not, it's absolutely true that "the
present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape."
Not "will reorganize" — "has reorganized."
The world, in its
non-response, or pretended partial response, has already engaged with the
climate crisis, and has been doing so for more than a decade, since the
Copenhagen Conference in 2009 (which Barack Obama, John Kerry and the Chinese,
working together, sabotaged) or the Kyoto Conference in 1997.
Sabotaging the 2009
Copenhagen climate conference was an overt political act. The public’s
non-response to that sabotage — or the media’s non-reporting of it — was an
overt social act. Both are evidence of an already-reorganized political
landscape.
Second, note that Latour is
taking as a fact that "some powerful people [are convinced] the ecological
threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any
pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world."
…
It wouldn't take much of a
collapse to reduce us back to a purely mechanical world, or worse, a
beast-of-burden world in which slaves are among the beasts. You could do that
to a city in a month if you cut off its electricity, food, water and
transportation. A modern and massively severe climate emergency — or a
simultaneous series of them — could easily do that in a day.
Ask yourself: Where would
the world's cities be if they could not be rescued from the outside? How
quickly then would global "modern life" devolve, and what would it
devolve to after all the dying had occurred?
Finally, Latour asserts that
if the species is to survive, our politics has to be reimagined — shifted
"sideways" as he puts it — from consideration of our own global or
national needs to consideration of the needs of the earth (exactly the point
made here, by the way, and discussed here).
That sounds
counterintuitive. How can not thinking of ourselves first, not considering
first our needs as a species, be our best route to preserving our future?
The answer, as Latour
indicates, is this: Look where considering the global and national first has
brought us. Look where preserving "us" first — the modern us; the
nation-state us; the rapacious manufacturing-state us — has brought our world.
Preserving "us"
means preserving an economy that preserves the saddle the rich have placed on
our backs. It means preserving the belief that living "well" means
accumulating increasingly expensive and complex things to bring a happiness
that never satisfies, a fruit that's always out of reach.
…
Are the rich too dumb to
know what everyone else has already figured out? Certainly some of them are.
And it's true that some are just playing with their money, setting it on public
fire to prove they can.
But I'll bet at least some
of them think they're building Noah's Ark.
Climate Tweets of the Week:
Aerial
view of one of the areas of Yakutia, Russia's coldest and largest territory, which by now has
lost at least a million hectares of forests to wildfires. No estimate yet of
how damaging the situation has been/is to wildlife
A
great article although it displays classic denial of reality.
The prof
tells us that 360ppm CO2 = Pliocene 3°C and that Miocene beckons. That it's
just a matter of time to reach equilibrium.
But THEN
she tells us that there's hope.
This is
normal as she has a young son.
Not even many
Scientists get risk & exponential..
"Many
in the climate science community would agree, in private if not in public.
..more
extreme scenarios have tended to be marginalised."
I
still worry that many in the policy community do not appreciate the full range of outcomes that could result from
our current trajectory. The meme "we're on track for 3C global
warming" is too overconfident - 4C or more by 2100 is still easily
possible
This
is wishful thinking, I'm afraid. The idea that there is coming a turning point—a moment
when awareness rises to a fever pitch and creates the widespread full
commitment needed to drive forward an orderly transition—is a failure to grasp
the situation
We're
barrelling head first into a cataclysmic climate disaster of planetary scale, and our governments and
economies are COMPLETELY disregarding the emergency exit that would spare us.
We're not going to make it, and it's not because "solutions" don't
exist.
A Thread, I
guess. 1/ .......
We
aren't running out of time to act, we ran out of time a years ago. We're acting amidst the failures of inaction.
The idea
that any serious problem demands a long period of study and consultation is an
artifact of a world that vanished in storms, flames and flood waters.
Arrived? think of it this way; on current trajectory the
release of GHG's, spawning centuries of warming and climate transformation,
will only stop when civilization essentially collapses.
So it
hasn't "arrived" - it has merely begun.
[in response to: European officials say 'climate change has arrived']
Only
a radical transformation of society and an end to capitalist/socialist growth development
that is killing all life on Earth will give humans any chance to survive into
the future
Even most
greens are not radical enough to embrace a total de growth world with nature
This
is how the Earth system responds. We shouldn't be surprised.
Yes
it is the start of runaway warming.
So
here we are, 50C in the Arctic Circle and people in Portland pray for rain. All the media
really does is draw a veil over what the facts mean: we are screwed and it's
all coming down unless something very radical changes.
Imagine if
the news told you what was important today?
COVID Fare:
The CDC Owes
Parents Better Messaging on the Vaccine for Kids
The agency's strange math and blunt statements are missing key
nuances—and may be underplaying myocarditis cases in teenage boys in
particular.
On June 23, an advisory
committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met to discuss,
among other topics, vaccine-related cases of myocarditis, which have
hospitalized hundreds of adolescents. Evidence of a correlation between the
condition, an inflammation of the heart muscle, and the vaccines had been
mounting for months. Numerous countries had altered or withheld recommendations
for pediatric vaccination, with some citing an ambiguous risk-benefit. One day
after the committee meeting, however, CDC director Rochelle Walensky went on TV
and calmly reassured viewers that there was nothing to worry about: Vaccinating
kids age 12 and up, at the full dosage and same schedule as adults, should
continue with alacrity.
Walensky cited a string of
statistics that showed “the benefits of vaccination far outweigh any harm.” But
some epidemiologists, public health experts, pediatricians, cardiologists, and
other scientists dispute the CDC’s numbers, characterizations, and conclusion.
The agency, they variously contend, is both exaggerating the risks of Covid-19
to young people and underplaying the potential risks of the vaccine to them.
Much data that would support the CDC’s declarations are either unknown,
unrevealed, or far messier than the agency and its director portray. And the
data that are known and clear have been projected through a specific lens with
blunt certainty. The absolute risk of the vaccine still appears to be extremely
small for young people but, on balance, when the data are seen through a
different frame, the relative individual risk from vaccination, particularly
for healthy young males, may be higher than it is to not be vaccinated at this
time.
There is no debate among
most experts critical of the CDC about the value of vaccines on a societal
level to help usher in the end of the pandemic, which is the ultimate goal of
the vaccine. Rather, the matter at hand is the CDC’s messaging, which fails to
help parents and children make properly informed decisions about the vaccines
on an individual level. As Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist and physician at
Johns Hopkins, recently tweeted, “One can be both very pro-Covid-19 vaccination
and also be worried about the individual risk:benefit profile of Covid-19
vaccines in <16 yo.”
First, the link between the
mRNA vaccines and myocarditis, particularly in young males, is sufficiently
clear that the FDA revised its vaccine fact sheets to include a warning about
it. As of June 11 (the latest date most data were collected for the meeting),
128 cases within seven days of the second dose had been reported in boys aged
12 to 17, when the CDC’s expected number for that same population was zero to
four cases.
Denninger: Which Would You Rather Have?
you have two choices:
•
Risk Covid-19 infection. Do
what you can to blunt and prevent it up front. You may be resistant (80% of the
population was and is) by cross-reaction, but there is no cheap and available
way to know, nor to quantify how resistant; it could range from “immune” to
“will get sniffles” to “will get a mild flu.” If you get infected anyway then
choose to either (1) tough it out and do nothing or (2) hit it immediately with
drugs that we have decades of data on — they may do nothing or they may help
but the odds are overwhelming that they will not kill you. Either way, once you
get infected you have a measure of immunity. This is what everyone has done
with every respiratory pandemic in history up until this one, except that until
the last 30 or 40 years there were no early treatments at all, so “tough it
out” it was.
•
Take a lightly-tested shot.
With that option you get some measure of immunity. However, the usual testing
for adverse effects was truncated severely. There was no, for example, sample
group of 1,000 where everyone got blood drawn and a panoply of tests run every
few days for a couple of months to gauge immediate adverse effect impact. The
usual dose-ranging studies were truncated, so whether you really needed the
“full dose” or a quarter of it would do the same thing is unknown, and whether
the adverse effects were more-severe with a higher dose is also unknown.
Pharmacological distribution studies, also part of the usual testing paradigm
for a drug, were either not done at all or not published, so where the shot
accumulates along with its products were…. unknown (now known due to a leak of
a paper out of Japan, and it’s not good.)
The claim, made without evidence, was that the immunity provided by the
second choice was at least as good if not better than that provided by the
first choice. There was zero scientific evidence for this; that statement was a
bald-faced lie intended to induce you to do something that was, on-balance,
known to be dangerous simply because we deliberately did not take the time to
find out.
There is now evidence
emerging that the second choice is wildly dangerous. Emerging evidence is that
six in ten jab recipients in a small study have elevated clotting indications.
For comparison in healthy adults about 1 in 10 has an elevated level in this
test without showing pathology. It is very likely this is not harmless but at present we have exactly
zero data on how dangerous that elevation will prove over time. I note that clotting disorders of any sort
are the kind of thing that produce both heart attacks and strokes, and if you
are diagnosed with this under ordinary circumstances doctors get real worried
about what might happen either immediately or in the foreseeable future. We
didn’t know this up front because we did not look but it correlates with the
examples of sudden stroke and heart attack that are being occasionally reported
soon after getting the jabs. Is the risk immediate and then over? We don’t
know.
Myocarditis, inflammation of
the heart muscle, is a serious condition now associated with these jabs. It
occasionally shows up in people as a result of viral infection. It is now
showing up at a significantly elevated rate after taking the jabs, especially
in young men. We do not know why. We do not know why because, once again, we
did not do the work early on to detect troponin and d-Dimer elevation during
the early tests. This work was not done because it takes time and it was
most-important for TRUMP and BIDEN to both start jabbing people immediately and
then for both, along with Governors and State Health Department officials, to
coerce people by lying to them about safety and claiming that these jabs were
in fact tested and known to be safe. So-called “private entities” including
businesses and colleges jumped on the bandwagon. Note that neither private
firms or colleges are immune from suit for getting it wrong; the drug companies
are but not educational institutions or employers, including medical employers.
Four
New Discoveries About Safety And Efficacy Of COVID Vaccines
Doctors for Covid Ethics has
sent the following letter to tens of thousands of doctors in Europe,
summarising four recent scientific findings critical to the COVID-19
vaccination program. The letter explains each finding as it relates to the
biology of COVID-19 vaccines, including interactions with the immune system.
Taken together, the letter
warns that these new pieces of evidence force all physicians administering
COVID-19 vaccines to re-evaluate the merits of COVID-19 vaccination, in the
interests of their own ethical standing, and their patients’ safety and health.
Summary
Rapid and efficient
memory-type immune responses occur reliably in virtually all unvaccinated
individuals who are exposed to SARS-CoV-2. The effectiveness of further
boosting the immune response through vaccination is therefore highly doubtful.
Vaccination may instead aggravate disease through antibody-dependent
enhancement (ADE).
Discovery 1: SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Circulates Shortly After
Vaccination.
SARS-CoV-2 proteins were
measured in longitudinal plasma samples collected from 13 participants who
received two doses of Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine [1]. With 11 of the 13, the
SARS-CoV-2 spike protein was detected in the blood within only one day after
the first vaccine injection. Significance. Spike protein molecules were
produced within cells that are in contact with the bloodstream—mostly
endothelial cells—and released into the circulation. This means that a) the
immune system will attack those endothelial cells, and b) the circulating spike
protein molecules will activate thrombocytes. Both effects will promote blood
clotting. This explains the many clotting-related adverse events—stroke, heart
attack, venous thrombosis—that are being reported after vaccination.
Discovery 2: Rapid, Memory-Type Antibody Response After Vaccination.
Several studies have
demonstrated that circulating SARS-CoV-2-specific IgG and IgA antibodies became
detectable within 1-2 weeks after application of mRNA vaccines [1–3].
Significance. bRapid production of IgG and IgA always indicates a secondary,
memory-type response that is elicited through re-stimulation of pre-existing
immune cells. Primary immune responses to novel antigens take longer to evolve
and initially produce IgM antibodies, which is then followed by the isotype
switch to IgG and IgA.bA certain amount of IgM was indeed detected alongside
IgG and IgA in some studies [1,4]. Importantly, however, IgG rose faster than
IgM [4], which confirms that the early IgG response was indeed of the memory
type.
This memory response
indicates pre-existing, cross-reactive immunity due to previous infection with
ordinary respiratory human coronavirus strains. The delayed IgM response most
likely represents a primary response to novel epitopes which are specific to
SARS-CoV-2.bMemory-type responses have also been documented with respect to
T-cell-mediated immunity [5–7]. Overall, these findings indicate that our immune
system efficiently recognizes SARS-CoV-2 as “known” even on first contact.
Severe cases of the disease thus cannot be ascribed to lacking immunity.
Instead, severe cases might very well be caused or aggravated by pre-existing
immunity through antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE, see below).
Discovery 3: SARS-CoV-2 Elicits Robust Adaptive Immune Responses
Regardless Of Disease Severity.
Serum antibody profiles were
reported for 203 individuals following SARS-CoV-2 infection [8]. 202 (>99%)
of the participants exhibited SARS-CoV-2 specific antibodies. With 193
individuals (95%), these antibodies prevented SARS-CoV-2 infection in cell
culture and also inhibited binding of the spike protein to the ACE2 receptor.
Furthermore, CD8+ T-cell responses specific for SARS-CoV-2 were clear and
quantifiable in 95 of 106 (90%) HLA-A2-positive individuals. Significance. This
study confirms the above assertion that the immune response to initial contact
with SARS-CoV-2 is of the memory type.
In addition, it shows that
this reaction occurs with almost all individuals, and particularly also with
those who experience no manifest clinical symptoms. The goal of the vaccination
is to stimulate production of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, but we now know that
such antibodies can and will be rapidly generated by everyone upon the
slightest viral challenge, even without vaccination. Severe lung infections
always take many days to develop, which means that if the antibodies generated
by the memory response are needed, they will arrive on time. Therefore,
vaccination is unlikely to provide significant benefit with respect to the
prevention of severe lung infection.
Discovery 4: Rapid Increase Of Spike Protein Antibodies After The Second
Injection Of MRNA Vaccines.
IgG and IgA antibody titres
were monitored before vaccination and after the first and the second injection
of mRNA vaccines [3]. Antibody titres rose with some delay after the first
injection, then plateaued, but rose again very shortly after the second
injection. Significance. Even though the antibody response to the first
injection is of the memory type, the small time lag after the injection may
mitigate adverse reactions, because the abundance of spike protein on the cells
in the blood vessel walls and in other tissues may have already passed its peak
when the antibodies arrive.
The situation changes
dramatically with the second injection. Then the spikes are produced and
protrude into the bloodstream that is already swarming with both reactive
lymphocytes and antibodies. The antibodies will cause the complement system
[9,10] and also neutrophil granulocytes to attack the spike protein-bearing
cells. The possible consequences of all-out self-attack by the immune system
are frightening.
…
Conclusion
The collective findings
discussed above clearly show that the benefits of vaccination are highly
doubtful. In contrast, the harm the vaccines do is very well substantiated,
with more than 15.000 vaccination-associated deaths now documented in the EU
drug adverse events database (EudraVigilance), and over 7.000 more deaths
within the UK and the US [13].
The latest ZOE data shows that, as of July 12th, infections in
the vaccinated (with at least one dose) in the U.K. now outnumber those in the
unvaccinated for the first time, as the former continue to surge while the
latter plummet (see above).
COVID Tweets / thread of the Week:
Something really odd is
going on: In Europe we are seeing surges at many places where most of the
population has already been vaccinated. At the same time, the 15 least
vaccinated countries don‘t seem to face any problem. At some point, denying
this problem will get painful.
*for safe
Covid vaccines that provide sterilizing immunity
GeoPolitical Fare:
The
sabotaging of Kamala Harris
Joe Biden's
reputation has been shored up at the expense of his party's future
… All this to
defend the US-installed Afghan puppet governments whose main business was
protecting the nation’s growing opium trade which made Afghanistan the world’s
largest exporter of opium/morphine that was processed into heroin. Another
proud moment for Washington which, in the 1970’s had been up to its ears in
Indochina’s opium trade, and later in Central America’s cocaine business.
Mikhail
Bulgakov, “Master and Margarita” and the anti-Russian hysteria in the United
States
… I have
identified above a raison d’état for the Russophobia which controls public
policy in the United States. But that is at the level of top policy makers.
Below that level and in the broad public the logic is precisely the witch hunt,
finger-pointing directed at the Kremlin as the source of all the world’s
ills. The separate allegations, such as
a supposedly aggressive Russia keen to destroy democratic nations and to raise
the fortunes of its own autocracy, do not stand up to any reasonable analysis.
What we have here is political science at the kindergarten level, where one and
one, if ever totaled, come to four. That
no one calls this out is a sign of mass hypnosis or hysteria.
… However, my
own position on these matters is rather different. It is not just that you cannot beat card
cheats, that you cannot dissuade propagandists from their mission, but that you
cannot beat mass hysteria, which is what is going on. You waste your breath.
You cannot
argue with mass hypnosis. You can keep a
diary, write a chronicle that reveals the falseness of the spirit of the age to
hopefully enlighten future readers, because, as we hear in another of the main
points of Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita, “manuscripts do not burn.”
That is what I do….
Orwellian Fare:
CJ Hopkins: The Approaching
Storm
So, it looks like GloboCap isn’t going to be happy until they have
fomented the widespread social unrest — or de facto global civil war — that
they need as a pretext to lock in the new pathologized totalitarianism and
remake whatever remains of society into a global pseudo-medicalized police
state, or that appears to where we’re headed currently
…
You can’t remake entire societies into quasi-totalitarian systems without
civil unrest, chaos, rioting, war, or some other form of cataclysm.
Brainwashing the masses is all fine and good, but, at some point, you need to
goad the people who are resisting your new totalitarian “reality” into getting
unruly, so you can crack down on them, and transform them into official
enemies, which appears to be what is happening currently.
GloboCap is dialing up the totalitarianism, and they are rubbing it in
our faces.
CaitOz Fare:
Our Rulers Have
All The Power And None Of The Responsibility
As the world burns, as ecosystems die off, as the insects vanish, as the forests disappear, as soil becomes rapidly less fertile, as extinction takes over, as the oceans gasp for air and become lifeless deserts while continents of plastic form in their waters, it is
interesting how often you hear the sentiment that this is the result of some
flaw in humanity for which we all share equal guilt.
To hear people talk about it, you’d think we all had some say in the way
our society is organized, the way food, goods and energy are distributed, the
kinds of vehicles which dominate our civilization, the way our planet is being
stripped bare to turn millionaires into billionaires and billionaires into
trillionaires.
And of course, we don’t. We’ve never gotten to vote on how corporations
behave in our world. We never got a vote on which technologies would be suppressed and which would
be subsidized and backed by wars and military scams. We never got a vote on the
US war machine becoming the worst polluter of any institution on
earth. We never got a vote on whether a tree should be cut down for profit or
left standing for the benefit it provides to our ecosystem.
And the things we do get to vote on don’t count because our dominant
political systems are owned by corporate elites. And even if they weren’t
it wouldn’t matter because those elites use media propaganda to brainwash us at
mass scale and manufacture our consent for the ecocidal paradigm that has
turned them into modern-day kings.
The Sociopaths
Are Cocksure While Those With Empathy Are Full Of Doubt
In a 1933 essay lamenting the rise of Nazism in Germany, Bertrand Russell
wrote: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the
stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
Which is of course a dynamic that’s still at play in the modern world;
the Dunning-Kruger effect is a thing, and one need only to look at American
presidents to see that there’s little relationship between one’s intelligence
and how far they can rise if they get it in their heads that they ought to be
in charge of things.
But I think a much bigger factor in the problems our world faces is not
so much about intelligence as empathy
Violent
Extremists Took Over The US Capitol Long Before January 6
…perhaps the most annoying thing about all the melodramatic garment-rending
over how close the US Capitol came to being taken over by violent extremists is
that the US Capitol has been under the control of violent extremists for a very
long time already.
…
Hollywood trained us to fear psychopathic killers prowling around in the
dark so we won’t notice the psychopathic killers who rule our world in broad
daylight. We’ve been trained to fear the serial killer covered in blood and
wielding a chainsaw so we won’t notice the serial killer wearing a suit and
wielding a pen.
If you needed any more proof that western media does not
exist to tell you the truth about the world, there you go. The news in our
society exists not to create an informed populace but to preserve partisan
worldviews which protect the interests of the imperialist oligarchic class.
US Military
Intervention Is Never, Ever, EVER The Solution
People who believe US military intervention solves problems are as dumb
as flat-earthers but infinitely more destructive. It is always disastrous and
it never achieves what its proponents claim it will achieve.
Whenever I say this I always get one or two geniuses stepping in to say
“Aha, I believe you are forgetting a little thing known as World War Two?”
To such Einsteins I always say yes, your mind burns
with the brightness of a thousand galaxies, but first of all that
wasn’t interventionism since the US was attacked and Germany declared war on it
immediately thereafter. More importantly, though, it’s very telling that people
have to reach all the way back through history to an age where the world was
almost unrecognizably different from the world of today to even try and find an
example of the US military being used in a way that was not evil and
disastrous.
“We’ve
Got To Fight Disinformation,” Says Empire Made Entirely Of Disinformation
The
weirdest thing about the Biden administration tasking itself with the
censorship of “disinformation” on social media is that the United States is the
hub of a globe-spanning empire that is built upon a foundation of
disinformation, maintained by disinformation, and facilitated by
disinformation.
Longish Read:
Charles Eisenstein: Fascism and the Antifestival
Consider the following passage from the early 20th-century anthropologist James Frazer, entitled “The Collapse of the Nredom Tribe: A Case of Religious Hysteria.”
Jenkins’ chronicle begins at a moment when the Nredom “tribe” (actually a numerous and highly organized society) was already showing signs of social, political, and ecological decline. For years its priests had been warning of evil spirits on the verge of attacking the people. Finally on the third year of Jenkins’ ethnographic residency, some members of the tribe began to take ill. An evil spirit was afoot! As the priests explained it, the spirit could possess anyone who did not abide by various new taboos and perform necessary rituals. Once possessed by the spirit, a person became unclean, at risk of transmitting it to anyone they associated with. No one could see the spirit without special ceremonial instruments such as the priests possessed, but they made drawings of it to show the populace.
A ritual was devised to determine whether any given person was possessed by the spirit. A specially consecrated wand was moistened with the bodily fluids of the person suspected of possession, and then sent to a special hut where priests would subject the stick to further divinatory rituals designed to force the evil spirit to reveal itself. Thereupon, agents of the priests would notify the unfortunate tribesperson of his or her possession. Anyone so adjudged of possession had to remain in strict separation from the rest of the tribe for a fortnight.
Some of the taboos and rituals that the unfortunate superstitious natives adopted were quite bizarre. For example, the priests had marks placed a fathom-length apart in all public places, stating that if everyone stood no closer to each other than the marks indicated, that they would enjoy magical protection. They also demanded that everyone who might come into proximity to the unclean perform frequent ritual ablutions and other forms of bodily purification, and wear various forms of ceremonial headgear to frighten off the spirit. All public gatherings were prohibited, and even normal functions of life severely curtailed. No activity was permitted except with the priests’ explicit sanction.
As you can imagine, this regime generated intense social stress, hardship, and some degree of opposition. Soon the priests were busy stamping out various heresies. Some heretics claimed that the rituals to stop transmission of the evil spirit wouldn’t work, or that the spirit was not so dangerous. Some heretics doubted in the very existence of the evil spirit, saying the heightened levels of sickness were due to some other cause. Others loudly proclaimed that the evil spirit had been loosed upon the populace by the priests themselves. Social tensions mounted as the priests tried to silence the heretics and arouse the populace against them.
Most people in the tribe trusted the priests, but many apparently harbored doubts too, because adherence to the rituals was inconsistent. Knowing that public rejection of the strict regime of taboos and rituals was inevitable, the priests announced they were developing a new sacrament, a magic potion that would protect the recipient forever from possession. Administered by a deputized priest via a slightly painful ritual of skin piercing, the potion sanctified all those who received it. These sanctified brethren could engage in normal life again, although they still had to abide by certain of the new rituals and taboos. Those refusing the potion remained unclean and were subject to all kinds of penalties, shaming, and ostracism.
Unfortunately, the new potion proved less effective than the priests originally promised. According to the priests, other ghosts and spirits were laying in wait, against whom new rituals and taboos must be applied and new potions administered. The power given unto the priests in this time of crisis would need to be permanent. And, they hinted darkly, this plague of evil was a kind of punishment for the tribe’s sinful ways, particularly the sins of the heretics. Heresy must be stamped out! The unclean must be sanctified! Soon religious pogroms swept the land, followed by counter-pogroms against the priests themselves. And Nredom society collapsed.
Okay, I confess. I made up this passage. The priests are the scientists. The wand is the PCR test swab. The unclean are those who test positive. The potion is the vaccine. My point is not that Covid is nothing but a religious hysteria. My point is that, whatever else Covid is, it is also a religious hysteria; that this lens greatly illuminates our current condition and quite probably upcoming events. Our social responses to Covid bear so striking a resemblance to ritual practices and ideas (masks, potions, tabooed persons, sanctification, etc.) that we have to ask how much of our public health policy is really scientific, and how much is religion in disguise.
...I hesitate to call anything “just a ritual,” a dismissal that ignores the mysterious relationship between ritual and reality; however, the dubious efficacy of many of our public health practices invites the judgment that they are, indeed, “just rituals.” I will not attempt here to make a case that masks, lockdowns, distancing, and so forth are dubious. Ultimately the argument comes down to whether our systems of knowledge production (science and journalism) are sound, and whether our medical and political authorities are trustworthy. To doubt public health orthodoxy is to answer no, they are not sound, they are not trustworthy. However, anyone who tries to make this case must, by necessity, source evidence from outside official institutions – evidence which, for the true believers, is illegitimate by definition.
One is unlikely to prove the priests wrong using information sanctioned by the priests. If you try, you are exposed as a heretic.
One contemporary term for a heretic is a “conspiracy theorist.” The term belongs in quotes because it is one thing to claim our institutions are unsound, and quite another to claim that a conscious conspiracy makes them so. “Conspiracy theorist” has become one of the ways to dismiss and dehumanize dissidents to public health orthodoxy.
The swiftness with which deviants from Covid orthodoxy are consigned to subhuman categories is alarming. It is just what is needed to prepare them for their role as Girardian scapegoats. A perennial human reflex, in times of trouble, is to find or create heretics and outcasts. Today they are called “anti-maskers,” “anti-vaxxers,” “science deniers,” “Q-adjacent,” “conspiracy theorists,” “covidiots,” and “domestic extremists,” subjects of a kind of virtual pogrom that humiliates, blames, and often digitally extinguishes its targets. And sometimes the consequences are more than digital.
Pics of the Week:
So the Kids are now calling the Vaccines “clot shots”. And the ambulances
“Jab Cabs”
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