Stephanie Kelton: Yes, We Can!
But should we tell the masses?
For the last quarter-century, MMT economists have emphasized that “finding the money” is never the challenge for governments that issue their own non-convertible—i.e. floating exchange rate—fiat currencies. It has long been our position that mainstream macro, which centers the limits of fiscal policy around the (erroneous) concept of a “government budget constraint,” has led us astray.
Instead of treating governments like revenue-constrained households, MMT economists have pushed for a macro framework that replaces the artificial government budget constraint with a real resource (inflation) constraint.
A central tenet of MMT is captured in the recognition that a currency-issuing government can afford to purchase whatever is available and for sale in its own currency. Before COVID, it was harder to persuade people that the government could easily afford to spend trillions without raising a slew of taxes to “pay for” it.
I still remember the pushback I got from some economists back in 2018 for including this line in a co-authored piece called We Can Pay For A Green New Deal. I wrote:
“Anything that is technically feasible is financially affordable.”
I was making the case that the federal government can afford to do big, transformative things, like tackling our climate crisis, without obsessing over the usual question of how to “pay for” it. Finding the money is the easy part—new money is created whenever the government spends. The challenge, I argued, lies in managing bottlenecks and other inflationary impulses along the way.
The Most Deflationary Event In History
There is no doubt that on the supply side, bottlenecks in the global supply chain have been exacerbated by this halting clusterfuck of an economic restart as Keystone Kops policy-makers use "science" as an excuse to implode the economy.
Unfortunately, as indicated by decade low consumer sentiment, there will be NO demand-side follow-through to keep this level of "inflation" sustained. Even less likely now that the pandemic emergency unemployment program has officially ended.
Nevertheless, it's clear that today's economic illiterates still haven't learned that "inflation" is always highest at the end of the cycle and lowest at the beginning.
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Needless to say I am dubious of this strategy of bidding up every asset class ahead of what will soon become the NEW most deflationary event in global history making last year's gamble-from-home vacation seem like a picnic.
I can't see how artificially bidding up prices to unsustainable levels AND thereby maximizing liabilities ahead of a burgeoning global debt crisis makes any sense.
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I've heard many people claim that this is a "stagflationary" event. However, the stagflation of the 1970s took place when capacity utilization was near record highs AND labor share of the economy was AT record highs. Today, both are at RECORD lows.
‘Liquidity Trapped’: Banks Stuck Drowning in Cash Without Borrowers
That’s why – even with the mainstream financial media constantly talking about the growing economy and consumers flush with cash – I remain skeptical.
That’s because – in theory – both a growing economy and low-interest rates should lead to increasing demand for loans. (Meaning: banks should have no problem finding borrowers in this environment).
But – instead – loan demand has remained very anemic.
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Thus I continue to expect lower yields, lower growth, and debt-deflation. Because as I’ve said before – it’s not the supply of money that’s the problem. But the lack of places where to put it all.
Business Travel, Conventions, Office Occupancy Stuck in Collapse: Been so Long, People Forgot What Old Normal Was
Anne Case & Angus Deaton: The Great Divide: Education, Despair and Death
Deaths of despair, morbidity and emotional distress continue to rise in the US. The increases are largely borne by those without a four-year college degree—the majority of American adults. For many less-educated Americans, the economy and society are no longer providing the basis for a good life. Concurrently, all-cause mortality in the US is diverging by education—falling for the college-educated and rising for those without a degree—something not seen in other rich countries. We review the rising prevalence of pain, despair, and suicide among Americans without a BA. Pain and despair created a baseline demand for opioids, but the escalation of addiction came from pharma and its political enablers. We examine “the politics of despair,” how less-educated people have abandoned and been abandoned by the Democratic Party. While healthier states once voted Republican in presidential elections, now the least-healthy states do. We review the evidence on whether or not deaths of despair have risen during the COVID pandemic. More broadly, excess mortality from COVID has not increased the ratio of all-cause mortality rates for those with and without a four-year degree, but has instead replicated the pre-existing mortality ratio.
Econometrics — a second-best explanatory practice
Modern econometrics is fundamentally based on assuming — usually without any explicit justification — that we can gain causal knowledge by considering independent variables that may have an impact on the variation of a dependent variable. This is however, far from self-evident. Often the fundamental causes are constant forces that are not amenable to the kind of analysis econometrics supplies us with.
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Analysis of variation — the foundation of all econometrics — can never in itself reveal how these variations are brought about. First when we are able to tie actions, processes or structures to the statistical relations detected, can we say that we are getting at relevant explanations of causation. Too much in love with axiomatic-deductive modeling, neoclassical economists especially tend to forget that accounting for causation — how causes bring about their effects — demands deep subject-matter knowledge and acquaintance with the intricate fabrics and contexts. As already Keynes argued in his A Treatise on Probability, statistics (and econometrics) should primarily be seen as means to describe patterns of associations and correlations, means that we may use as suggestions of possible causal relations. Forgetting that, economists will continue to be stuck with a second-best explanatory practice.
Doug Noland: Weekly Commentary: Evergrande Moment
It appears an Evergrande debt restructuring is inevitable. From a few decades of close observation, these types of situations generally prove worse than even the more bearish analysts fear. Assume ugly and messy. The presumption all along – by bankers, investors and apartment purchasers – was that Beijing would never allow the collapse of such a huge player. This fundamental market perception is in serious jeopardy. … Evergrande epitomizes China’s historic Credit Bubble. It has borrowed and spent lavishly, in what history will surely view as a company that operated at the epicenter of an extraordinary Bubble of asset inflation, speculation and reckless debt-financed mal-investment. … Developments point to a momentous shift in speculative dynamics. Bond prices are collapsing in increasingly illiquid markets. … While not yet a “Lehman Moment,” a strong analytical case can be made that Evergrande presents a major catalyst for a deflating China Bubble. … “The U.S. will not allow Mexico to collapse” – 1994. “The West will never allow Russia to collapse” – 1998. “Washington would never tolerate a housing bust” – 2007. “Beijing has everything under control and will do whatever it takes to sustain China’s boom” – 2021.
Not so Evergrande
… But in my view, there is not going to be a financial crash in China. The government controls nearly everything, including the central bank, the big four state-owned commercial banks which are the largest banks in the world, the so-called ‘bad banks’, which absorb bad loans, big asset managers, most of the largest companies. The government can order the big four banks to exchange defaulted loans for equity stakes and forget them. It can tell the central bank, the People’s Bank of China, to do whatever it takes. It can tell state-owned asset managers and pension funds to buy shares and bonds to prop up prices and to fund companies. It can tell the state bad banks to buy bad debt from commercial banks. So a financial crisis is ruled out because the state controls the banking system.
… But if not a crash, what about the property bust and the high levels of debt incurred? Won’t they reduce China’s ability to grow at the pace previously achieved and targeted for the next five years? Western economists are clear on this: the debt is so large and China’s productive sectors are now so weak that even if China avoids a financial crash, the hit to household incomes and the profits of the capitalist sector are large enough to reduce investment and GDP growth. China is heading for stagnation, if not a slump.
… Again, as I have argued before, the basic contradiction of China’s economy is not between investment and consumption, or between growth and debt; it is between profitability and productivity. The growing size and influence of the capitalist sector in China is weakening the performance of the economy and widening inequalities. In my view, the Chinese economy is now strong enough not to rely on foreign investment or on unproductive capitalist sectors for growth. Increasing the role of planning and state-led investment, the main basis of China’s economic success over the 70 years of the People’s Republic, has never been more compelling.
Other Charts:
Bubble Fare:
Is This Finally It?
By most measures, Evergrande’s collapse is a more meaningful event than Lehman’s implosion, which is why the two words are so closely associated with each other on social media. Whether Evergrande is a catalyst for the next great financial crisis remains to be seen, although the early signs are worrisome.
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The doom argument rests on the criticality of real estate to the Chinese economy. In particular, the level of malinvestment in that sector since the last global financial crisis is staggering. If you believe Minsky moments are inevitable, you’d be hard pressed to find a better fact set than what’s coming out of China these days. It is difficult to imagine how the collapse of Evergrande doesn’t cause a rolling crisis of confidence across all the other property developers in China, which in turn almost certainly bankrupts the entire Chinese banking system. That’s not hyperbole, that’s simple arithmetic. China’s economy – much like ours, only more so – is a giant Ponzi scheme that rests on a foundation of bloated confidence. That confidence is deeply shaken today.
Having said that, the counter argument is simple. Xi won’t allow the entire economy to collapse, and the major central banks will intervene to stem the bleeding as well. That argument has been the correct one since Alan Greenspan was Fed chair
NBF: Teranet-National Bank House Price Index: Record price growth hides moderation in August
In August, the Teranet-National Bank HPI saw record 12-month growth of 18.4%. This past year has been characterized by widespread price increases in the regions covered by the index. Indeed, prices were up 10% or more in 87% of the 32 urban markets surveyed. In addition, price growth was up 30% or more in 45% of markets. However, this dizzying growth in major urban centers hides a very different dynamic when analyzing the month-over-month variations. In fact, using the unsmoothed composite HPI adjusted for seasonal effects, there have now been five consecutive months in which the monthly increase in prices has been lower than in the previous month. From July to August, prices even remained essentially unchanged (+0.1%). This stagnation coincides with a decrease in activity in the resale market, which is potentially being held back by affordability issues after the staggering price increases. Indeed, home sales have been declining month-to-month for five months now.
COVID-19 notes:
Bring in measures soon or risk 7,000 daily Covid hospitalisations, Sage warns
Our Most Reliable Pandemic Number Is Losing Meaning
A new study suggests that almost half of those hospitalized with COVID-19 have mild or asymptomatic cases.
Paradoxes in the reporting of Covid19 vaccine effectiveness
Why current studies (for or against vaccination) cannot be trusted and what we can do about it
The randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to establish the safety and effectiveness of Covid19 vaccines produced impressive results (Polack et al., 2020) but were inevitably limited in the way they assessed safety (Folegatti et al., 2020)[1] and are effectively continuing (Ledford, Cyranoski, & Van Noorden, 2020; Singh et al., 2021) . Ultimately, the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines will be determined by real world observational data over the coming months and years.
However, data from observational studies on vaccine effectiveness can easily be misinterpreted leading to incorrect conclusions. For example, we previously noted[2] the Public Health England data shown in Figure 1 for Covid19 cases and deaths of vaccinated and unvaccinated people up to June 2021. Overall, the death rate was three times higher in the vaccinated group, leading many to conclude that vaccination increases the risk of death from Covid19. But this conclusion was wrong for this data because, in each of the different age categories (under 50 and 50+), the death rate was lower in the vaccinated group
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Given the impossibility of controlling for all these factors in randomized trials, and the overwhelming complexity of adjusting for them from observational data there is little we can reliably conclude from the data and studies so far. And we have not even mentioned the general failure of these studies to consider the impact and trade-offs of safety on effectiveness.
So, what can we do about this mess? We believe there is an extremely simple and objective solution: if we ignore the cost of vaccination, then ultimately we can all surely agree that the vaccine is effective overall if there are fewer deaths (from any cause) among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. This combines both effectiveness and safety since it encapsulates the trade-off between them. It is not perfect, because there could be systemic differences in treatments given to vaccinated and unvaccinated[7], but it completely bypasses the problem of classifying Covid19 ‘cases’ which, as we have noted, compromises all studies so far.
Lancet: Considerations in boosting COVID-19 vaccine immune responses (co-authored by Phil Krause, who just stepped down from FDA)
Although the benefits of primary COVID-19 vaccination clearly outweigh the risks, there could be risks if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines,3 or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines4). If unnecessary boosting causes significant adverse reactions, there could be implications for vaccine acceptance that go beyond COVID-19 vaccines. Thus, widespread boosting should be undertaken only if there is clear evidence that it is appropriate.
The tangled history of mRNA vaccines
Hundreds of scientists had worked on mRNA vaccines for decades before the coronavirus pandemic brought a breakthrough.
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
World on ‘catastrophic’ path to 2.7C warming, UN chief warns
The Rate of Global Warming During Next 25 Years Could Be Double What it Was in the Previous 50, a Renowned Climate Scientist Warns
Former NASA climate scientist James Hansen urged Congress decades ago to act on climate change. Now he says he expects reduced aerosol pollution to lead to a steep temperature rise.
Mark Blyth: There is no ‘getting back to normal’ with climate breakdown
Can the Economy Afford NOT To Fight Climate Change?
Yves here. If humans are fortunate enough merely to suffer a Jackpot rather than a full-bore collapse, perhaps future historians will try to make sense of why individuals and governments did pretty much squat to prevent climate change even when they recognized it really was well underway and would produce very bad outcomes…
… The results of this new research strengthen the case for ambitious climate policies. “The risk of costs being even higher than previously assumed reaffirms the urgency for fast and strong mitigation,” said ERL study co-author Paul Waidelich of ETH Zürich. “It shows that choosing to not reduce greenhouse gas emissions is an extremely risky economic strategy.”
Climate change risk assessment 2021. pdf
The risks are compounding, and without immediate action the impacts will be devastating
Canada falls short on climate change action, says pre-election report
Carbon Tracker: Flying blind: The glaring absence of climate risks in financial reporting
KEY FINDINGS
· There is little evidence that companies incorporate material climate-related matters into their financial statements.
· Most climate-related assumptions and estimates are not visible in the financial statements.
· Most companies do not tell a consistent story across their reporting.
· There is little evidence that auditors consider the effects of material climate-related financial risks or companies’ announced climate strategies.
· Even with considerable observable inconsistencies across company reporting (‘other information’ and financial statements), auditors rarely comment on any differences.
· Companies do not appear to use ‘Paris-aligned’ assumptions and estimates.
90% of global farm subsidies damage people and planet, says UN.
Paul Mason: Why only radical social transformation can avert a climate catastrophe
In the wake of the IPCC report, it is clear that neither the far left nor the far right have the political answers to deal with the environmental crisis.
Interview with Professor Stephen Macekura exploring critiques of economic growth across the twentieth-century
Ricky Gervais Joins 12-Month Global Campaign to Save Species on the Brink
Koalas are going extinct with as few as 30,000 left in the Australian wild when the country was once home to EIGHT MILLION
ESG ROUNDUP #6 - SpaceX is dropping a massive oil and gas operation onto a wildlife preserve
The Messy Truth About Carbon Footprints
How much attention should each of us be paying to our individual carbon footprint? That question is the subject of a contentious debate that’s been raging in climate circles for quite some time.
In one camp stand folks like author Rebecca Solnit, whose recent op-ed for The Guardian argued that Big Oil invented carbon footprints as a deliberate attempt to “blame us for their greed.” The goal, she wrote, was to use relatively ineffectual calls for voluntary abstinence to distract the public from demanding systems-level interventions — like new taxes or the phasing out of gas-powered cars — that might meaningfully reduce society’s reliance on fossil fuels as a whole.
In the other camp are people like Polish researcher Michał Czepkiewicz, who assert that the concept of carbon footprints was simply co-opted by fossil fuel interests, and that it still has value in illuminating the vast inequality that exists between low- and high-carbon lifestyles. (A recent report from the anti-poverty organization Oxfam found that the wealthiest 10 percent of the global population — which includes the vast majority of people reading this op-ed — were responsible for more than 50 percent of global emissions between 1990 and 2015.)
The real truth, as is so often the case, is that more than one thing can be true at once. …
… We are not each on an individual journey to slash our footprint to zero. We are on a collective mission to shift the only true footprint that matters: that of society as a whole.
Other Fare:
American Colleges and Universities Are Doomed
For most students, obtaining post-secondary education at an American college or university destroys economic value. Notice I did not say completing post-secondary education, because a substantial portion of students who enroll do not complete a degree. The numbers are quite staggering – see the data from educationdata.org below – making dropouts a substantial driver of revenue for these institutions. Approximately 56% of students who enroll in 4-year colleges don’t make it to graduation. This is the dirty little secret our current education power structure would rather you didn’t know.
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Even for those students who do complete a degree, many would have been far better off pursuing an alternative education strategy. The research on this point is a little scattered and often biased, since it is usually written by educators with an agenda, but I would say with high confidence that the fully loaded net present value of a traditional college degree for the median student that graduates is negative. There are some degrees at some schools that are incredibly lucrative, but most graduates would have been better off obtaining alternative and job-specific educational training at much lower cost.
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Most students who show up on campus wouldn’t be there without easy access to financing. The student loan industry is among the more nefarious and cynical in our society. For example, the lenders have lobbied to make it incredibly difficult to discharge student loans during personal bankruptcy proceedings while simultaneously working to make it easier for students to borrow.
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What will become of American colleges and universities? I don’t know. But one can’t destroy value indefinitely, especially with so many compelling alternatives. The ivory tower is headed for a painful restructuring. That which cannot go on forever usually doesn’t.
Tweets of the Week:
Econimica: So as the Federal Reserve discusses "tapering", "normalizing"...remember what drove the Fed to initiate ZIRP, QE, & quasi federal government UBI...it was a demographic decline that's only accelerating against the "business as usual" perpetual growth financial system.
Wonkmonk: "could the 21st century instead turn into a period when interest rates remain so low for so long that we learn to accept eye-popping debt numbers as the inevitable corollary of high asset prices, expanded money supply and a frenetic financial system, and ignore them?"
Yes.
Pics of the Week:
The Best Photos Taken Through Microscopes Will Blow You Away
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
Election Fare:
Corporations Control Canada’s Infrastructure — But the Major Parties Won’t Confront Them
Despite their election rhetoric, Canadian politicians have been acting in the interests of corporations for decades. We need to confront corporate interests — and in order to do so, we have to recognize how intertwined they are with the Canadian state.
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Rhetorically, the Liberal Party has promised a great deal; in practice, they have done very little. Climate change is one of the clearest examples of Trudeau’s party’s lack of boldness.
Where Canada’s federal parties stand on three big climate and environment issues ahead of the election
Canadians who watched the English-language leaders’ debate learned little about the differences between the climate policies of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives, Jagmeet Singh’s NDP and Annamie Paul’s Greens. Here’s what the federal election debate missed
Regular Fare:
Pretty old, but worthwhile link nonetheless, especially as prelude to next link
The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (review of Mariana Mazzucato’s book, so titled)
I have long known in my gut that usual measures of social wealth, most of all GDP, are fraudulent, in that they falsely identify value where there is none. I have intuited we were all being lied to, and that those who assured us that ever more value was being generated by our society by what appear to be objectively valueless activities were, at best, hiding something. This outstanding book, by left-wing economist Mariana Mazzucato, explains what is being hidden, what hard truths are being avoided, and what she thinks we should do about it. And while I don’t agree with all her prescriptions, or with her rosy view of government competency, the first step on the path to self-improvement is admitting you have a problem.
Others have tried to explain the corruption of the modern economy, such as Rana Foroohar in her dreadful Makers and Takers, but Mazzucato succeeds where they failed. Her core claim is that “much of what is passing for value creation is just value extraction in disguise.”
Greer: The Negative-Sum Economy
So gold is not wealth, and money is not wealth. What is wealth? Etymologists will tell you that the word “wealth” comes from the old-fashioned word “weal” the way “health” comes from “heal,” and that “weal” shares an origin back in the mists of Indo-European prehistory with “well” (in the sense of “well-being”) and “will.” In Anglo-Saxon times wel meant “according to one’s wish” and wela meant both “well-being” and “riches.” To be wealthy is to have the things you need and want, the things that support your well-being and enable you to do what you like.
Back in the nineteenth century, John Ruskin pointed out that this concept needs to be balanced by another: illth. As wealth is to weal (and well and will), illth is to ill. To have illth is to be burdened by things you don’t need and don’t want, things that harm your well-being and prevent you from doing what you like. Every economy produces both wealth and illth: that is to say, every economy produces goods and services, but also harms and hindrances. The relative proportion of wealth and illth varies across time, for reasons we’ll discuss later. The distribution of wealth and illth is the great problem of economics. One essential reason modern economists make bad predictions and bad policy so reliably is that they ignore half of this problem, and pretend that the production and distribution of illth isn’t relevant to their discipline.
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It’s important to remember the distinction between money and wealth, because—as already noted—the equation between the two depends on conditions that can change, and have changed very suddenly at various points in the past.
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With this in mind, let’s go a little deeper into the system of tokens we call “money.” At the heart of money as it currently exists is the notion that money should make money. If you put it in a bank account, you should get interest; if you invest it in stocks, you should get dividends and capital gains; if you buy bonds, you should get a return on your investment, and so on. That was not true of money until recently, historically speaking, but it’s been true for several centuries, and almost everyone these days treats it as though it’s as inevitable as tomorrow’s sunrise.
In point of fact, it’s anything but inevitable. It’s a specific gimmick that evolved over the last few centuries. It was invented to deal with the unprecedented era of global economic expansion that began with the systematic exploitation of coal as an energy resource in the eighteenth century, and went into overdrive once petroleum was added to the fossil fuel mix beginning in the 1850s. Before that era, economic growth was normally something that happened only when one society conquered another and got a sudden burst of new resources to exploit. Outside of that special case, the increased weath yielded by technological improvements was neatly balanced by the increased demand for wealth driven by expanding populations and resource depletion.
Fossil fuels broke that pattern by enabling, at least at first, the production of much more wealth than illth. Dealing with that bonanza required expansion of the money supply—a modest expansion during the era of coal, and a much greater expansion during the era of petroleum, which is why the gold standard got shoved aside once the latter era arrived. It became an item of faith during the petroleum era that economic growth was natural and inevitable. That faith remains fixed in place today, even though the conditions that made sustained economic growth possible are fading out of sight in the rearview mirror right now.
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That’s one of the essential messages of the Limits to Growth model I discussed two weeks ago. The lesson taught by the World3 model can be summed up very crisply in terms of the language we’ve been using: over time, economic growth affects the relative production of wealth and illth by any economy. In the early days of economic expansion, it’s easy for an economy to produce more wealth than illth, but the further the expansion runs, the more the balance tips the other way, until eventually the economy produces more illth than wealth. Prolong economic growth too far, and the production of illth overwhelms the production of wealth and forces growth itself to its knees: that’s the lesson our political classes have been trying to ignore for fifty years.
The standard run from The Limits to Growth shows how that ends. Industrial output and food—the main forms of wealth—begin to decline, food gradually, industrial output much more rapidly. Meanwhile pollution—an important form of illth—climbs further before it, too, tips over and starts to decline. Population peaks and declines as well, and resources finish their descent to sustainable levels. What this means in economic terms, of course, is that the sustained economic growth of the last few centuries gives way to a few centuries of sustained economic contraction.
Albert Bates: The Great Pause Week 79: Building Mouse Utopias
Dennis Meadows, co-author of the original Limits to Growth study in 1971, says the problem is transitioning from rapid forward movement to being quiescent.
It’s like riding a bicycle. It is relatively easy to ride a bicycle and its also relatively easy to stand next to your bicycle holding it there still. But to get from rapid forward movement to dismounting and standing — that is a skill set, which if you don’t master it can cause a lot of damage. And that is what we face in our society. We don’t know, certainly at the community or the national level, how to envision a future that is attractive and which doesn’t have growth in it.
Meadows says population is now clearly declining in a number of nations — China, Japan, Russia, “so rather than fight it, by offering subsidies or banning birth control, it would be useful for governments to try to understand how they can run a system in which the population isn’t continuously expanding.”
Their Dream Was a Working Farm (but They Weren’t Farmers).
So one urban couple had a brainstorm: Why not build a house they could share with farmers just starting out, on land that could be farmed?
Climate Crisis Fare:
Why only radical social transformation can avert a climate catastrophe
In the wake of the IPCC report, it is clear that neither the far left nor the far right have the political answers to deal with the environmental crisis.
… The science is clear and urgent. Yet important segments of the electorate, in all countries, do not care. No government in the world has a plan to decarbonise its economy. As a result, the socio-economic scenarios that climate scientists are working with are out of joint with reality.
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The bad news is that under even the most benign scenario, we still hit 1.5 degrees by 2040. The worse news is that all these models now look unrealistic.
When will Societal Collapse from Climate Change Happen?
At this moment of history, a lot has to go very wrong very quickly for first-world societal collapse to happen, and a lot more than that before we get any type of global human extinction event. But that is certainly the direction we are heading. It is both terrifying and very sad.
Climate Tweets of the Week:
Aside from corruption -which is part of a system of political 'donations' from the ultra rich, there is also cognitive dissonance, because doing anything about the climate and biodiversity crises, flies in the face of today's political orthodoxy for politicians, Neoliberalism
COVID Fare:
Covid-19:
Background
Since the beginning of the pandemic, COVID-19 has been regarded as an exceptional disease. Control measures have exclusively focused on ‘the virus’, while failing to account for other biological and social factors that determine severe forms of the disease.
Aim
We argue that although COVID-19 was initially considered a new challenge, justifying extraordinary response measures, this situation has changed — and so should our response.
Main arguments
We now know that COVID-19 shares many features of common infectious respiratory diseases, and can now ascertain that SARS-CoV-2 has not suddenly presented new problems. Instead, it has exposed and exacerbated existing problems in health systems and the underlying health of the population. COVID-19 is evidently not an ‘extraterrestrial’ disease. It is a complex zoonotic disease, and it needs to be managed as such, following long-proven principles of medicine and public health.
Conclusion
A complex disease cannot be solved through a simple, magic-bullet cure or vaccine. The heterogeneity of population profiles susceptible to developing a severe form of COVID-19 suggests the need to adopt varying, targeted measures that are able to address risk profiles in an appropriate way. The critical role of comorbidities in disease severity calls for short-term, virus-targeted interventions to be complemented with medium-term policies aimed at reducing the burden of comorbidities, as well as mitigating the risk of transition from infection to disease. Strategies required include upstream prevention, early treatment, and consolidation of the health system.
The Vaccines Kill Many More People Than They Save
Politicians and so-called experts across the planet increasingly want to force you to get inoculated with a substance that takes away at least twice the lives it saves, across all age groups. It doesn’t matter anymore if this is intentional or just sheer incompetence, we have no time left to discuss that.
We’re killing people. Millions of people. Our loved ones, family, friends, and neighbors. It has to stop. Now. We have gone mad. Maybe Steve Kirsch’s access to the FDA can help.
And when Steve says the vaccines killed 200,000 Americans so far already, and permanently disabled 300,000, remember that this is just the tip of the iceberg: many if not most of the effects will only show up later. And then Pfizer today claims that their stuff is safe for kids 5 years old and up. Who are 99.9996% safe if they get infected, due to their immune system, which also gets killed by the vaccines.
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I summarized part of his (Steve Kirsch’s) latest slide deck here:
What You Need To Know About Covid Vaccine Safety
Censorship required The way to fight truth is using misinformation, intimidation, mandates, and censorship. Our government is ignoring early treatments and tells everyone that early treatment don’t work. They demonize the key treatment used by India to be COVID-free. Their agenda is to push the vaccine, not to cure COVID. Social media companies will censor, demonetize, and/or ban you for telling the truth. If you are a doctor, you can have your license revoked if you say the vaccines are unsafe.
COVID vaccines kill more people than they save for all age groups. On average, in the US, COVID vaccines kill 2 people for every person they save over a 6 month period.
To date
200K Killed
300K permanently disabled
Here’s how we compute the 2:1 ratio that shows the vaccines are nonsensical.
V:C defined
V:C is the ratio of the the number of vaccine-caused deaths (V) relative to the projected number of COVID deaths (C) that could be saved by the vaccine over a 6 month period. A number like 2:1 means we kill 2 people for every COVID death we save. That’s bad. For a COVID vaccine to be viable, you’re looking for V:C of 1:x where x > 100, i.e., you want the risk to be very small compared to the benefit. If you are saving the lives of >100,000 people, you don’t want to have to kill >1,000 people to have to do that. That would completely unacceptable in a civilized society and would be unprecedented in modern times, especially when we have early treatments that work with over 99% risk reduction that don’t have any safety issues.
V:C varies by place, time, age. V:C depends on the vaccine type, the rate of COVID deaths in your community at a particular time, and your age. For this presentation, we’ll compute this as a country-wide average for the US.
Determining V.
In general, the three vaccines in the US work through a very similar process. The vaccines have an estimated death rate of close to 1 death for every 1,000 people who are vaxed. Here, we calculate a deaths per million doses for each age range (using VAERS). For risk/reward assessments done by age, this gives the most precise guidance.
Determining C.
We use COVID mortality data from the CDC to determine the risk of death from COVID.
Is the vaccine safe for some age groups? The vaccines may have a positive risk/benefit for people in a certain demographic. The CDC and FDA think the vaccines are perfectly safe and have killed no one, so they have never done this analysis. For example, the VRBPAC unanimously approved boosters for people over 65. None of the panel members made the risk-benefit calculation. They were guessing. Were they right? No. They were dead wrong based on both our calculations and the real-world evidence. Here’s what the detailed calculations showed…
V:C in the US is not favorable for any age. The table shows the V:C numbers by age.
You can read this article which details how all these numbers were calculated. So for kids, we kill over 6 kids to save 1 kid from a COVID death. Mandating vaccination for anyone, especially school-age children, is proof of a corrupt society. Therefore, it’s nonsensical to vaccinate any age group. The FDA VRBPAC committee concluded that there is a benefit for 65 year old and older, but they refused to consider the mortality caused.
The full presentation, all 8+ hours of it. I set it to start at the point where Kirsch comes in, but knock yourself out. (go to the link for video)
Mathew Crawford: Incorruptible Data and Medical Tyranny
Central to numerous fundamental debates during the pandemic is data
Clearing Up Misinformation About The Spike Protein And Covid Vaccines
The spike protein is a type of protein on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that helps the virus infect cells. The COVID vaccines available in the U.S. work by getting the body to produce this protein (with some modifications) so that the body will generate neutralizing antibodies to it. It turns out that the spike protein by itself, even without the rest of the virus present, has been shown to cause harm to the body.
In Part I of this article I’ll summarize some of the studies that show this. This is not really controversial at this point. However, what is controversial is that some people have asked: if spike is dangerous, might we be endangering people by giving them vaccines that make the body produce spike?
Fact-checking articles that try to shoo away this concern usually refer to the fact that the spike encoded by the vaccines are different from “wild-type” spike (spike from the virus), and for this reason, they are safe. They also state that there is no evidence that the vaccine spike is harmful.
In Part II, I’ll look into the evidence that shows that vaccine-encoded spike is not harmless.
In Part III, I’ll discuss how most responses to concerns about vaccine-encoded spike usually misconstrue the concern, or don’t actually back up their statements with any real data.
In Part IV, I’ll argue that we should consider the possibility that vaccine-encoded spike protein can cause lasting harm even in people that don’t have obvious or serious “adverse events” from the vaccine.
In Part V, I’ll link to statements from other scientists or doctors who have concerns about the vaccines.
Before we go any further: I am not anti-vax. I am double-vaxed with Moderna. I used to be a biologist. I believe vaccines have saved many lives. However, not all vaccines are the same. And not all vaccines are equally safe, and we need to be able to have an open and honest discussion about this.
The Meaning of the FDA Resignations
The trouble now is that the top scientists at the FDA disagree. Further, they think that the push for boosters is courting problems. They think the current regime of one or two shots is working as well as one can expect. Nothing is gained on net from a booster, they say. There just isn’t enough evidence to take the risk of another booster, and another and another. The authors knew this article was appearing. They knew that signing it under the FDA affiliation would lead to a push for their resignations. Life would get very difficult for both of them. They got ahead of the messaging and resigned before it came out. Very smart.
The signed article goes even further to warn of possible downsides. They point out that boosters might seem necessary because “variants expressing new antigens have evolved to the point at which immune responses to the original vaccine antigens no longer protect adequately against currently circulating viruses.” At the same time, there are possible side effects that could discredit all vaccines for a generation or more. “There could be risks,” they write, “if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines, or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines.”)
Berenson: Are You Kidding Me, Pfizer, Volume 1 Gazillion
The FDA just released its briefing book for Pfizer’s request for a third dose of Comirnaty (or is that BNT162b2? No matter! It’s approved either way, sorta). It is every bit the mess we all expected. Let’s go to the highlights: Pfizer basically hasn’t bothered to test the booster AT ALL in the people actually at risk – it conducted a single “Phase 1” trial that covered 12 people over 65. The main Phase 2/3 booster trial (beware efforts to cover multiple “phases” of drug research at once, you want it bad you get it bad) included no one over 55. No one. As in NONE. Which makes total sense – why test the booster in people who actually need it because they’re at high risk from the ro? Nothing good can come of that. So that’s our trial design. Now safety:
Of the 300 people who received the booster, one had a heart attack two months later. No worries, Pfizer concluded it wasn’t related. Yay! Five percent of recipients had enlarged lymph nodes. How about effectiveness? Well, we don’t have enough data – or any data, really – telling us how well the booster will work.
… Oh. But don’t worry, Uncle Joe already told you you can get your booster on September 20. If it’s good enough for our fearless leader, it should be good enough for the FDA, amirite? SCIENCE!
Old fare, but interesting, in a not surprisingly disconcerting way; hat tip Ilargi again, from whom I stole these excerpts: (go to The Automatic Earth to check out all the other links he posted)
Interview with Dr. Vanessa Schmidt-Kruger
We know that normally vaccine development takes a very long time. It’s not just the clinical phase: with this vaccine, it’s set at three times two and a half years, i.e., three phases of 2.5 years each plus the evaluation phase, which makes 7 1/2 years in total. And then one shouldn’t forget that the production optimisation is also important, at least a year would surely be needed for that. That hasn’t taken place at all. The vaccine is already being sold and used, but the production optimisation isn’t yet by any means completed. And there are considerable deficiencies. One issue I would like to discuss are the deficiencies relating to the active substance: by that, I mean the modified RNA that they are synthesising.
As a second issue there are deficiencies in the consistency of the various production batches: they need to always be consistent so that one always obtains the same vaccine volume and quality. The problem that BioNTech had is that in the clinical phase the product, i.e. the RNA, was produced with completely different techniques to how it is being produced now. During the clinical phase they only needed small volumes of vaccine, they were able to use very expensive techniques that delivered highly purified end products. Now that they have entered mass production, that is no longer possible, they have had to switch to lower-cost processes, e.g. using huge quantities of DNA that functions as the substrate to be able to produce the RNA in an in-vitro transcription reaction.
This is done via bacteria, via the fermentation of transformed bacteria that contain this DNA. The bacteria multiply the DNA in huge amounts, and this leads to new dangers or risks, particularly contamination. At the moment for instance the situation is that the DNA is transformed in the bacteria, it is multiplied, next the bacteria are opened and the DNA is extracted, then it is linearised via enzymes, and after that the linearised DNA undergoes in-vitro transcription to produce the RNA using various procedures. The EMA Committee made various requirements of the vaccine manufacturer, i.e. BioNTech. The applicant needs to now develop and introduce various analysis processes to ensure that the substrate is free of microbiological contaminants – they probably mean E Coli bacteria for example.
There don’t seem to be any processes to ensure or monitor for that. They also need to ensure that all the buffers – those are the solvents that are used – are free of RNAses. RNAses are enzymes that degrade RNA. If there are any contaminants of these RNAse solvents, then RNA in the vaccine will be degraded and the vaccine won’t have any effect anymore. They also have to analyse how strong the activity of the enzymes is; that is very important because I explained that after that the RNA is transcribed from the DNA and then the DNA has to be eliminated, it is digested by enzymes: by DNAses. And if this DNA is not digested well enough, if residues are left, this harbours risks – I’ll come back to the risks from DNA residues, but the activity of the enzymes has to be monitored well and at the end you need to have a pure RNA without any more DNA. And that is not the case. BioNTech has admitted that there are DNA contaminants.
[..] It was found that the integrity of the RNA always varies in the batches that had been made. I will come back to that again. There needs to be a standard that is always the same for each batch. This should be used as the reference to measure the standard. And they only have this of course for the processes of the clinical phase. Now we have to generate a new standard for the new manufacturing processes, i.e., for the commercial sales. That hasn’t been done yet, they are in the process of doing that now.
So – the integrity of the RNA means of course the RNA quality. They have found that this is not very high: it was higher for the processes during the clinical phase. In this report they don’t say how high it is, but I have other information that says 78% of the RNA was good [translator: this refers to the integrity], the remainder was not, but now they have found new batches with only 55% RNA integrity, i.e., half of it is basically unviable.
‘Vaccine deaths are being hidden, suppressed and falsely recorded’ – Dr Herman Edeling
***** el gato malo: why "vaccinated covid deaths/hospitalizations" are being counted incorrectly
Mercola: Shockingly, CDC Now Lists Vaccinated Deaths as Unvaccinated
we now find out the agency is counting anyone who died within the first 14 days post-injection as unvaccinated.
Not only does this inaccurately inflate the unvaccinated death toll, but it also hides the real dangers of the COVID shots, as the vast majority of deaths from these shots occur within the first two weeks.
…
It’s not just the CDC’s definition of a breakthrough case that skews the data. Even more egregious and illogical is the fact that the CDC even has two different sets of testing guidelines — one for vaccinated patients and another for the unvaccinated.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC has recommended a PCR test cycle threshold (CT) of 40.9 This flies in the face of scientific consensus, which has long been that a CT over 35 will produce 97% false positives,10 essentially rendering the test useless.11,12,13
In mid-May 2021, the CDC finally lowered its recommended CT count, but only for patients who have received one or more COVID shots.14 So, if you have received a COVID injection, the CDC’s guidelines call for your PCR test to be run at a CT of 28 or less. If you are unvaccinated, your PCR test is to be run at a CT of 40, which grossly overestimates the true prevalence of infection.
Crawford: Gaming Measurement of Vaccine Efficacy
are booster shots increasing covid spread and covid deaths? a look at the israeli data
Boosters began to rise and by the time they hit even 0.5%, deaths were starting to rise with them. the two move in near perfect lockstep. Clearly, correlation is not proof of causality, but this is an awful lot of signal to ignore out of hand especially given our strong reasons to presume causal linkage. …. leads to this close mirroring. this is not a strong endorsement for the overall societal efficacy of vaccines in preventing covid death. …. this is why i find it so disingenuous to only measure vaccine efficacy from 7 or 14 days post dose 2. it’s like claiming that you’ll be safe if you run to the bunker, but ignoring that you must cross a minefield strafed with enemy fire to get there.
Denninger: How ‘Witch Hunts’ Always Start
Such schemes with non-sterilizing vaccines ridiculously increase disease propagation. The absolute worst of this is forced, encouraged or, dare I say, allowed non-sterilizing vaccination among health care workers. That’s manslaughter because some percentage of their patients cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons and by definition those who seek health care are already compromised in some fashion or they wouldn’t be there. Perhaps they have cancer and are taking chemotherapy or have some immunological disorder. A non-sterilized vaccinated nurse or doctor treating them is going to kill them as certain as the sun will rise in the East tomorrow because said doctor or nurse has no idea they’re infected and passing the pathogen to others; as soon as it hits someone who is actually susceptible to get sick that person is screwed.
Mathew Crawford: Estimating Vaccine-Induced Mortality, Part 6: Hawaii in Isolation
On the whole, COVID-19 hasn't hit island nations particularly hard. The per capita mortality of Oceana, Japan, Iceland, Madagascar, New Zealand, and many other island nations has been a tiny fraction of that of the rest of the world. So too were the death rates in Sri Lanka and Indonesia...prior to mass vaccination.
Nor have nations along Hawaii's tropical latitude fared poorly during the pandemic. At around 21 degrees North, Hawaii shares similar sunlight with nations such as India, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Niger, Mali, Cuba, and the Bahamas that have had far lower COVID-19 mortality rates than the world.
Despite all this, and a lot of beautiful land (only 0.1% of SARS-CoV-2 spread seems to occur in outdoor settings), Hawaii's COVID deaths per million residents stands at 474, just barely below the world average of 591. Something doesn't quite seem right about this. Suppose that vaccine deaths are being counted as COVID-19 deaths in the U.S., then we should expect to see an exaggerated effect in the Hawaii data above all. And we do!
….
The Abrien Aguirre Interviews: This article provides a partial breakdown of the interview for those who prefer reading a summary. What he has to say boils down to a few key points: In his experience,
· COVID-19 isn't responsible for many of the nursing home deaths so categorized.
· Vaccines are responsible for many of the nursing home deaths categorized as COVID-19 (affirming Scott McLachlan's take).
· There is systematic and dangerous fraud covering up these facts.
I will point out that I'd never heard of many of the websites sharing Abrien's interview. Some certainly looked like tiny "right wing" sites or even sites set up by Russian propagandists. And on that note, it may be worth pointing out how much more honest RT reporting, and such tiny sites tend to be, which is to say that perhaps Russia's primary strategy for weakening U.S. hegemony is to tell truths that the West isn't prepared to face.
…. You need to watch the interview. Clearly Abrien is real. He is fluently knowledgeable about nursing homes, and how COVID-19 has affected them (or not) in Hawaii. His body language appears genuine. I have little doubt.
… Abrien was himself surprised watching his own words in his video. This seems indicative of having told the truth casually, then realizing the stark reality that he had blown the whistle on endemic corporate malfeasance and malpractice.
For similar to above, and then some, see Ilargi's link in the Must Watch section, below
A Slog Vaxicide Special
One can observe categorically that medical researchers in Australia, India, France, the US, Germany and Japan are showing why the mRNA Covid “vaccines” tested by Oxford Recovery on dogs killed all the vaccinated animals. The detailed nature of deadly Cytokinic overreaction is closely allied to the study of how ‘autoantibodies’ develop. These little mothers are not always good news. Antibodies are produced by our B cells in two ways: (i) randomly, and (ii) in response to a foreign protein or substance within the body. Initially, one B cell produces one specific kind of antibody. In either case, the B cell is allowed to proliferate or is killed off through a process called clonal deletion. Normally, the immune system is able to recognise and ignore the body’s own healthy proteins, cells, and tissues.
But sometimes, the immune system ceases to recognise one or more of the body’s normal constituents as “self,” leading to production of pathological autoantibodies. When this happens, these psycho antibodies go into a frenzy of destruction. The more the body is exposed to mRNA formulations, the more certain death becomes. That certainty helps to explain the emerging narrative about “booster” shots of “vaccine”. This is Anthony Fauci of the US CDC from a live media interview five days ago: “You know, I think we are going to need boosters. And I think very likely, when we look back on this, the proper complete regimen for good full protection will almost certainly be three shots – the first two that we’ve spoken about and a late third boost several months later.”
For the already vaxxed, that would make five jabs in all….and no doubt, a new strain would miraculously appear to justify a 6th and 7th top-up. The growing consensus among vaccination researchers is that exposure to 5-8 of these mRNA jabs over a relatively brief period of time will – dependent on the underlying health of the individual – result in death.
Mask mandates and vaccine passports are a performance, a taking of the knee to a warped health-and-safety morality
Dr Stuart Waiton is a senior lecturer in sociology and criminology at Abertay University.
The Meaning of the FDA Resignations
What’s at stake here? It’s about more than the boosters. It’s about the whole experience of taking away the control of health management from individuals and medical professionals and handing it over to modelers and government officials with coercive power.
The Conspiracy Theorists Were Right; It IS a "Poison-Death Shot"
Did the regulators at the FDA know that all previous coronavirus vaccines had failed in animal trials and that the vaccinated animals became either severely ill or died?
Yes, they did.
Did they know that previous coronavirus vaccines had a tendency to “enhance the infection” and “make the disease worse”?
Yes.
Did Dr Anthony Fauci know that coronavirus vaccines had repeatedly failed and increased the severity of the infection?
Yes, he did. (See here: Fauci on ADE)
Did the drug companies conduct any animal trials prior to the FDA’s approval that would have convinced a reasonable person that the vaccines were safe to use on humans?
No, they didn’t.
Did they complete long-term clinical trials to establish whether the vaccines were safe?
No, there were no long-term clinical trials.
Did they conduct any biodistribution studies that showed where the substance in the injection goes in the body?
They did, but the data was not made available to the public.
Do the contents of the vaccine largely collect in various organs and in the lining of the vascular system?
Yes, they do.
Do large amounts of the substance accumulate in the ovaries?
Yes.
Will this effect female fertility and a woman’s ability to safely bring a baby to term?
The drug companies are currently researching this. The results are unknown.
Does the vaccine enter the bloodstream and collect in the lining of the blood vessels forcing the cells to produce the spike protein?
Yes.
Is the spike protein a “biologically active” pathogen?
It is.
Does the spike protein cause blood clots and leaky blood vessels in a large percentage of the people that are vaccinated?
It does, although the blood clots are mostly microscopic and appear in the capillaries. Only a small percentage of vaccinees get strokes or suffer cardiac arrest.
Should people be made aware of these possible bad outcomes before they agree to get vaccinated? (“Informed consent”)
Yes.
Did the FDA know that Pfizer had “identified vaccine-associated enhanced disease, including vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease, as an important potential risk”?
Yes, they did, but they did not demand that Pfizer fix the problem. Here’s more:
“The FDA noted that Pfizer, “identified vaccine-associated enhanced disease, including vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease, as an important potential risk”. The EMA similarly acknowledged that “vaccine associated enhanced respiratory disease” was “an important potential risk… that may be specific to vaccination for COVID- 19”.
Why neither regulator sought to exclude such dangers prior to emergency use authorization is an open question that all doctors and patients are entitled to ask. Why medical regulators failed to investigate the finding that large vaccine particles cross blood vessel walls, entering the bloodstream and posing risks of blood clotting and leaky vessels is yet another open question again.” (“Open Letter to the EMA and European Parliament”, Doctors for Covid Ethics)
Did the drug companies vaccinate the people in the placebo group after the clinical trials in order to conceal the difference in the long-term health outcomes between the two groups?
That is the conclusion a rational person would make.
So, they nuked the trials?
Yes.
Did the FDA largely shrug-off its regulatory duties and abandon its normal standards and protocols because
a– It wanted to rush the Covid vaccines into service as rapidly as possible?
b– It knew the Covid-19 vaccine would never meet long-term safety standards?
We don’t know yet, but the adverse events report strongly suggests that the Covid-19 vaccine is hands-down the most dangerous vaccine in history.
Is the FDA rushing the “boosters” without proper testing?
Yes, it is. Here’s a clip from author Alex Berenson’s latest at Substack:
“Pfizer basically hasn’t bothered to test the booster AT ALL in the people actually at risk – it conducted a single “Phase 1” trial that covered 12 people over 65. The main Phase 2/3 booster trial (beware efforts to cover multiple “phases” of drug research at once, you want it bad you get it bad) included no one over 55.
No one.
As in NONE.” (“Are you kidding me, Pfizer, volume 1 gazillion”, Alex Berenson, Substack)
Have the boosters been modified or improved to meet the changes in Delta variant?
No.
Is there any additional risk in taking a booster-shot after already taking two experimental gene-based vaccines in less than a year?
Considerable risk. Here’s more from the Doctors for Covid Ethics:
“Given that booster shots repeatedly boost the immune response to the spike protein, they will progressively boost self-to-self immune attack, including boosting complement-mediated damage to vessel walls.
Clinically speaking, the greater the vessel leakage and clotting that subsequently occurs, the more likely that organs supplied by the affected blood flow will sustain damage. From stroke to heart attack to brain vein thrombosis, the symptoms can range from death to headaches, nausea and vomiting, all of which heavily populate adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines.
As well as damage from leakage and clotting alone, it is additionally possible that the vaccine itself may leak into surrounding organs and tissues. Should this take place, the cells of those organs will themselves begin to produce spike protein, and will come under attack in the same way as the vessel walls. Damage to major organs such as the lungs, ovaries, placenta and heart can be expected ensue, with increasing severity and frequency as booster shots are rolled out.” (“Open Letter to the EMA and European Parliament“, Doctors for Covid Ethics)
So, it’s the double-whammy. On the one hand, the booster will perform largely like the original vaccine, penetrating cells and forcing them to produce spike protein which, in turn, generates blood clots and leaky blood vessels. And, on the other, the newly-produced S proteins trigger a damaging immune response in which the complement system attacks and destroys the cells that line the inside of the blood vessels. Every additional booster will intensify this process weakening the vascular system and increasing the clotting. If the Doctors are correct in their analysis, then we could see a sharp uptick in all-cause mortality in the heavily-vaccinated countries in less than a year. Cardiac arrests are already rising.
Here’s another question that’s worth mulling over: Was there any reason for the regulators at the FDA to think that these problems would not arise following the launching of the vaccine campaign?
No. They should have known there would be problems as soon as they saw that the vaccine did not stay in the shoulder as it was supposed to. The vaccine wasn’t supposed to enter the bloodstream and spread across the body leaving billions of spike proteins in its wake. (The spike protein is a cytotoxin, a cell killer. It is not an appropriate antigen for stimulating an immune response. It is a potentially-lethal pathogen that poses a threat to one’s health even if it is separated from the virus.) Nor was the vaccine supposed to trigger Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) which is the condition we hinted at above when referring to “vaccine-associated enhanced disease”. Here’s a brief explanation:
“ADE has proven to be a serious challenge with coronavirus vaccines, and this is the primary reason many have failed in early in-vitro or animal trials. For example, rhesus macaques who were vaccinated with the Spike protein of the SARS-CoV virus demonstrated severe acute lung injury when challenged with SARS-CoV, while monkeys who were not vaccinated did not. Similarly, mice who were immunized with one of four different SARS-CoV vaccines showed histopathological changes in the lungs with eosinophil infiltration after being challenged with SARS-CoV virus. This did not occur in the controls that had not been vaccinated. A similar problem occurred in the development of a vaccine for FIPV, which is a feline coronavirus.” (“Is the Coronavirus Vaccine a Ticking-Time Bomb?”, Science with Dr. Doug)
Is this what we are seeing right now? In all the countries that launched mass-vaccination campaigns early (Israel, Iceland, Scotland, Gibraltar and UK) cases, hospitalizations and deaths are rising faster in the vaccinated portion of the population than the unvaccinated. Why?
Are they really experiencing a fourth or fifth wave or have the vaccines generated “inactivity-enhancing” antibodies that make the disease worse? This 2-minute video helps to clarify what’s going on:
“Vaccines are made to a specific variant. And when that variant mutates, the vaccine no longer recognizes it. It’s like you are seeing a completely new virus. And, because that is so, you actually get more severe symptoms when you are vaccinated against one variant and it mutates and then your body sees the other variant. The science shows, that if you get vaccinated in multiple years (for the flu), you are more likely to get severe disease, you are more likely to get viral replication, and you are more likely to be hospitalized…. We are seeing the same thing in Covid with the Delta variant. So we are actually mandating that people get a vaccine when they can actually get more sick when they are exposed to the virus...In fact, this week, a paper came out that showed that–with the Delta variant– when you are vaccinated your body is supposed to make antibodies that neutralize the virus, but they were supposed to neutralize the old variant. When they see this new variant, the antibodies take the virus and help it infect the cells.” (“Expert testimony on mandatory vaccinations”, Dr Christina Parks PhD., Rumble, start at minute 5:05)
Repeat: “If you get vaccinated in multiple years, you are more likely to get severe disease, you are more likely to get viral replication, and you are more likely to be hospitalized…. With the Delta variant– when you are vaccinated …. the antibodies take the virus and help it infect the cells.”
This is ADE, and this is probably why hospitalizations and deaths are rising among the vaccinated in Israel, UK and the rest. True, the Delta variant is less lethal than the Wuhan virus but, unfortunately, that rule does not apply to those who have been vaccinated and whose antibodies promote the uptake of the virus into their cells. This increases the viral replication function that increases the severity of the disease. In short, people are getting sicker because they were vaccinated. Here’s another short video that helps to explain:
“…The vaccine-induced antibodies will stand up against the virus. and once a virus is under pressure; it changes, it becomes a variant, and the variant cannot be stopped by vaccine-induced antibodies. Vaccine-induced antibodies. also shut down your innate immune system… so variants can come straight through and infect those that are vaccinated. That is viral immune escape, and that means that the vaccinated are defenseless against variants. This is no longer a pandemic of Covid-19. It is a pandemic of variants…
And there is something called recombination, and recombination means a vaccinated host can be infected by more than one variant at a time. …If a vaccinated host is co-infected by more than one variant, the variants will mix DNA, and change and camouflage and produce a super variant. And if a super variants are produced, nothing can stop them. And already they are saying that the latest variant to come out is vaccine resistant. And this is just the beginning. Dr Geert Vanden Bosche warns that if we do not immediately stop mass vaccination campaigns around the world, the world will experience an international catastrophe of mass mortality. I didn’t say that, he did. The vaccinated are a threat to us all.” (“Viral Immune Escape Explained”, Dr. Michael McDowell, Rumble)
It’s not the variant that intensifies the disease, it’s the fact that the vaccine targets one narrow endpoint, the spike protein, that gradually adapts to survive. As the virus progressively learns to avoid the vaccine, vaccine-induced immunity wanes. Natural immunity produces broad, robust immunity to the whole virus not merely one part of it. It is strong and enduring.
So how will the vaccinated fight new forms of the virus, after all, the vaccine is not a medicine that overpowers a particular pathogen. It is a subtle (genetic) reprogramming of the immune system that forces one’s cells to produce a particular version of the spike protein. Boosters that stimulate production of the same protein will have only modest impact. In short, boosters are still fighting the last war.
Also, as we mentioned above, coronavirus vaccines tend to create antibodies that “enhance infectivity” when they encounter adapted forms of the virus. That means that millions of inoculated people will now face forms of the virus for which they have almost no protection and for which their compromised immune systems can only provide limited help. Here’s more from the article above:
“Right now, the fatality rate of the virus is estimated to be approximately 0.26%, and this number seems to be dropping as the virus is naturally attenuating itself through the population. It would be a great shame to vaccinate the entire population against a virus with this low of a fatality rate, especially considering the considerable risk presented by ADE. I believe t his risk of developing ADE in a vaccinated individual will be much greater than 0.26%, and, therefore, the vaccine stands to make the problem worse, not better. It would be the biggest blunder of the century to see the fatality rate of this virus increase in the years to come because of our sloppy, haphazard, rushed efforts to develop a vaccine with such a low threshold of safety testing and the prospect of ADE lurking in the shadows.” (“Is the Coronavirus Vaccine a Ticking-Time Bomb?”, Science with Dr. Doug)
Denninger: To Governor DeSantis, Ivey, Lee And Others
Which one of you Governors would like to have a basically-zero Covid rate? Which one of you would like to be the State with the lowest rate of coronavirus disease, a collapsed health-care burden (to near-zero) and a collapsed rate of death too. How would you like to see this start to happen within two weeks and be so apparent every news stations has to report on it within a month?Here’s how — which, if you read when I put this forward, was something I promoted in early December of 2020. It costs about $2 per person in a household.
It’s simple: For anyone suspected (test results not back yet) you dispense to them five doses of Ivermectin to be taken every day if they are obese or otherwise morbid, and every second day if not along with one dose per every two days for everyone in the household, calibrated by their weight. Everyone in the household also gets ten days of a 1,000mg Vitamin C tablet and ten days of 30mg of Zinc, both dietary supplements. The exception is anyone on a blood thinner; you simply ask and, if they are, they don’t get the drug (but do get the supplements.) The State buys the drug in bulk, from India if you have to (fly a charter over there to pick it up; **** the Feds) and dispenses it.
Why? Read the linked article. This is is not just about treatment; it is also about cutting off forward transmission of the virus. It will not work every time but it doesn’t have to work every time — just often enough to suppress Rt below 1.0 and the virus dies out. The risk of someone having a serious adverse event from this is 1 in 600,000. If Florida has ten percent of their population that gets infected (or suspected to be) or is in a household with someone who is over the next three months (improbably high, but let’s go with it) that would be a cost of about $5 million. For Alabama it would cost about a million. That’s it. Who’s got the stones to do this?
Whoever does it first and collapses their Covid-19 case, hospitalization and death rate is President in 2024 — that is, if the other 49 States don’t have their residents lay siege to DC and their State governments as soon as they see the first State’s results.
For the last quarter-century, MMT economists have emphasized that “finding the money” is never the challenge for governments that issue their own non-convertible—i.e. floating exchange rate—fiat currencies. It has long been our position that mainstream macro, which centers the limits of fiscal policy around the (erroneous) concept of a “government budget constraint,” has led us astray.
Instead of treating governments like revenue-constrained households, MMT economists have pushed for a macro framework that replaces the artificial government budget constraint with a real resource (inflation) constraint.
A central tenet of MMT is captured in the recognition that a currency-issuing government can afford to purchase whatever is available and for sale in its own currency. Before COVID, it was harder to persuade people that the government could easily afford to spend trillions without raising a slew of taxes to “pay for” it.
I still remember the pushback I got from some economists back in 2018 for including this line in a co-authored piece called We Can Pay For A Green New Deal. I wrote:
“Anything that is technically feasible is financially affordable.”
I was making the case that the federal government can afford to do big, transformative things, like tackling our climate crisis, without obsessing over the usual question of how to “pay for” it. Finding the money is the easy part—new money is created whenever the government spends. The challenge, I argued, lies in managing bottlenecks and other inflationary impulses along the way.
The Most Deflationary Event In History
There is no doubt that on the supply side, bottlenecks in the global supply chain have been exacerbated by this halting clusterfuck of an economic restart as Keystone Kops policy-makers use "science" as an excuse to implode the economy.
Unfortunately, as indicated by decade low consumer sentiment, there will be NO demand-side follow-through to keep this level of "inflation" sustained. Even less likely now that the pandemic emergency unemployment program has officially ended.
Nevertheless, it's clear that today's economic illiterates still haven't learned that "inflation" is always highest at the end of the cycle and lowest at the beginning.
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Needless to say I am dubious of this strategy of bidding up every asset class ahead of what will soon become the NEW most deflationary event in global history making last year's gamble-from-home vacation seem like a picnic.
I can't see how artificially bidding up prices to unsustainable levels AND thereby maximizing liabilities ahead of a burgeoning global debt crisis makes any sense.
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I've heard many people claim that this is a "stagflationary" event. However, the stagflation of the 1970s took place when capacity utilization was near record highs AND labor share of the economy was AT record highs. Today, both are at RECORD lows.
‘Liquidity Trapped’: Banks Stuck Drowning in Cash Without Borrowers
That’s why – even with the mainstream financial media constantly talking about the growing economy and consumers flush with cash – I remain skeptical.
That’s because – in theory – both a growing economy and low-interest rates should lead to increasing demand for loans. (Meaning: banks should have no problem finding borrowers in this environment).
But – instead – loan demand has remained very anemic.
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Thus I continue to expect lower yields, lower growth, and debt-deflation. Because as I’ve said before – it’s not the supply of money that’s the problem. But the lack of places where to put it all.
Business Travel, Conventions, Office Occupancy Stuck in Collapse: Been so Long, People Forgot What Old Normal Was
Anne Case & Angus Deaton: The Great Divide: Education, Despair and Death
Deaths of despair, morbidity and emotional distress continue to rise in the US. The increases are largely borne by those without a four-year college degree—the majority of American adults. For many less-educated Americans, the economy and society are no longer providing the basis for a good life. Concurrently, all-cause mortality in the US is diverging by education—falling for the college-educated and rising for those without a degree—something not seen in other rich countries. We review the rising prevalence of pain, despair, and suicide among Americans without a BA. Pain and despair created a baseline demand for opioids, but the escalation of addiction came from pharma and its political enablers. We examine “the politics of despair,” how less-educated people have abandoned and been abandoned by the Democratic Party. While healthier states once voted Republican in presidential elections, now the least-healthy states do. We review the evidence on whether or not deaths of despair have risen during the COVID pandemic. More broadly, excess mortality from COVID has not increased the ratio of all-cause mortality rates for those with and without a four-year degree, but has instead replicated the pre-existing mortality ratio.
Econometrics — a second-best explanatory practice
Modern econometrics is fundamentally based on assuming — usually without any explicit justification — that we can gain causal knowledge by considering independent variables that may have an impact on the variation of a dependent variable. This is however, far from self-evident. Often the fundamental causes are constant forces that are not amenable to the kind of analysis econometrics supplies us with.
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Analysis of variation — the foundation of all econometrics — can never in itself reveal how these variations are brought about. First when we are able to tie actions, processes or structures to the statistical relations detected, can we say that we are getting at relevant explanations of causation. Too much in love with axiomatic-deductive modeling, neoclassical economists especially tend to forget that accounting for causation — how causes bring about their effects — demands deep subject-matter knowledge and acquaintance with the intricate fabrics and contexts. As already Keynes argued in his A Treatise on Probability, statistics (and econometrics) should primarily be seen as means to describe patterns of associations and correlations, means that we may use as suggestions of possible causal relations. Forgetting that, economists will continue to be stuck with a second-best explanatory practice.
Doug Noland: Weekly Commentary: Evergrande Moment
It appears an Evergrande debt restructuring is inevitable. From a few decades of close observation, these types of situations generally prove worse than even the more bearish analysts fear. Assume ugly and messy. The presumption all along – by bankers, investors and apartment purchasers – was that Beijing would never allow the collapse of such a huge player. This fundamental market perception is in serious jeopardy. … Evergrande epitomizes China’s historic Credit Bubble. It has borrowed and spent lavishly, in what history will surely view as a company that operated at the epicenter of an extraordinary Bubble of asset inflation, speculation and reckless debt-financed mal-investment. … Developments point to a momentous shift in speculative dynamics. Bond prices are collapsing in increasingly illiquid markets. … While not yet a “Lehman Moment,” a strong analytical case can be made that Evergrande presents a major catalyst for a deflating China Bubble. … “The U.S. will not allow Mexico to collapse” – 1994. “The West will never allow Russia to collapse” – 1998. “Washington would never tolerate a housing bust” – 2007. “Beijing has everything under control and will do whatever it takes to sustain China’s boom” – 2021.
Not so Evergrande
… But in my view, there is not going to be a financial crash in China. The government controls nearly everything, including the central bank, the big four state-owned commercial banks which are the largest banks in the world, the so-called ‘bad banks’, which absorb bad loans, big asset managers, most of the largest companies. The government can order the big four banks to exchange defaulted loans for equity stakes and forget them. It can tell the central bank, the People’s Bank of China, to do whatever it takes. It can tell state-owned asset managers and pension funds to buy shares and bonds to prop up prices and to fund companies. It can tell the state bad banks to buy bad debt from commercial banks. So a financial crisis is ruled out because the state controls the banking system.
… But if not a crash, what about the property bust and the high levels of debt incurred? Won’t they reduce China’s ability to grow at the pace previously achieved and targeted for the next five years? Western economists are clear on this: the debt is so large and China’s productive sectors are now so weak that even if China avoids a financial crash, the hit to household incomes and the profits of the capitalist sector are large enough to reduce investment and GDP growth. China is heading for stagnation, if not a slump.
… Again, as I have argued before, the basic contradiction of China’s economy is not between investment and consumption, or between growth and debt; it is between profitability and productivity. The growing size and influence of the capitalist sector in China is weakening the performance of the economy and widening inequalities. In my view, the Chinese economy is now strong enough not to rely on foreign investment or on unproductive capitalist sectors for growth. Increasing the role of planning and state-led investment, the main basis of China’s economic success over the 70 years of the People’s Republic, has never been more compelling.
Other Charts:
Bubble Fare:
Is This Finally It?
By most measures, Evergrande’s collapse is a more meaningful event than Lehman’s implosion, which is why the two words are so closely associated with each other on social media. Whether Evergrande is a catalyst for the next great financial crisis remains to be seen, although the early signs are worrisome.
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The doom argument rests on the criticality of real estate to the Chinese economy. In particular, the level of malinvestment in that sector since the last global financial crisis is staggering. If you believe Minsky moments are inevitable, you’d be hard pressed to find a better fact set than what’s coming out of China these days. It is difficult to imagine how the collapse of Evergrande doesn’t cause a rolling crisis of confidence across all the other property developers in China, which in turn almost certainly bankrupts the entire Chinese banking system. That’s not hyperbole, that’s simple arithmetic. China’s economy – much like ours, only more so – is a giant Ponzi scheme that rests on a foundation of bloated confidence. That confidence is deeply shaken today.
Having said that, the counter argument is simple. Xi won’t allow the entire economy to collapse, and the major central banks will intervene to stem the bleeding as well. That argument has been the correct one since Alan Greenspan was Fed chair
NBF: Teranet-National Bank House Price Index: Record price growth hides moderation in August
In August, the Teranet-National Bank HPI saw record 12-month growth of 18.4%. This past year has been characterized by widespread price increases in the regions covered by the index. Indeed, prices were up 10% or more in 87% of the 32 urban markets surveyed. In addition, price growth was up 30% or more in 45% of markets. However, this dizzying growth in major urban centers hides a very different dynamic when analyzing the month-over-month variations. In fact, using the unsmoothed composite HPI adjusted for seasonal effects, there have now been five consecutive months in which the monthly increase in prices has been lower than in the previous month. From July to August, prices even remained essentially unchanged (+0.1%). This stagnation coincides with a decrease in activity in the resale market, which is potentially being held back by affordability issues after the staggering price increases. Indeed, home sales have been declining month-to-month for five months now.
COVID-19 notes:
Bring in measures soon or risk 7,000 daily Covid hospitalisations, Sage warns
Our Most Reliable Pandemic Number Is Losing Meaning
A new study suggests that almost half of those hospitalized with COVID-19 have mild or asymptomatic cases.
Paradoxes in the reporting of Covid19 vaccine effectiveness
Why current studies (for or against vaccination) cannot be trusted and what we can do about it
The randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to establish the safety and effectiveness of Covid19 vaccines produced impressive results (Polack et al., 2020) but were inevitably limited in the way they assessed safety (Folegatti et al., 2020)[1] and are effectively continuing (Ledford, Cyranoski, & Van Noorden, 2020; Singh et al., 2021) . Ultimately, the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines will be determined by real world observational data over the coming months and years.
However, data from observational studies on vaccine effectiveness can easily be misinterpreted leading to incorrect conclusions. For example, we previously noted[2] the Public Health England data shown in Figure 1 for Covid19 cases and deaths of vaccinated and unvaccinated people up to June 2021. Overall, the death rate was three times higher in the vaccinated group, leading many to conclude that vaccination increases the risk of death from Covid19. But this conclusion was wrong for this data because, in each of the different age categories (under 50 and 50+), the death rate was lower in the vaccinated group
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Given the impossibility of controlling for all these factors in randomized trials, and the overwhelming complexity of adjusting for them from observational data there is little we can reliably conclude from the data and studies so far. And we have not even mentioned the general failure of these studies to consider the impact and trade-offs of safety on effectiveness.
So, what can we do about this mess? We believe there is an extremely simple and objective solution: if we ignore the cost of vaccination, then ultimately we can all surely agree that the vaccine is effective overall if there are fewer deaths (from any cause) among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. This combines both effectiveness and safety since it encapsulates the trade-off between them. It is not perfect, because there could be systemic differences in treatments given to vaccinated and unvaccinated[7], but it completely bypasses the problem of classifying Covid19 ‘cases’ which, as we have noted, compromises all studies so far.
Lancet: Considerations in boosting COVID-19 vaccine immune responses (co-authored by Phil Krause, who just stepped down from FDA)
Although the benefits of primary COVID-19 vaccination clearly outweigh the risks, there could be risks if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines,3 or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines4). If unnecessary boosting causes significant adverse reactions, there could be implications for vaccine acceptance that go beyond COVID-19 vaccines. Thus, widespread boosting should be undertaken only if there is clear evidence that it is appropriate.
The tangled history of mRNA vaccines
Hundreds of scientists had worked on mRNA vaccines for decades before the coronavirus pandemic brought a breakthrough.
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
World on ‘catastrophic’ path to 2.7C warming, UN chief warns
The Rate of Global Warming During Next 25 Years Could Be Double What it Was in the Previous 50, a Renowned Climate Scientist Warns
Former NASA climate scientist James Hansen urged Congress decades ago to act on climate change. Now he says he expects reduced aerosol pollution to lead to a steep temperature rise.
Mark Blyth: There is no ‘getting back to normal’ with climate breakdown
Can the Economy Afford NOT To Fight Climate Change?
Yves here. If humans are fortunate enough merely to suffer a Jackpot rather than a full-bore collapse, perhaps future historians will try to make sense of why individuals and governments did pretty much squat to prevent climate change even when they recognized it really was well underway and would produce very bad outcomes…
… The results of this new research strengthen the case for ambitious climate policies. “The risk of costs being even higher than previously assumed reaffirms the urgency for fast and strong mitigation,” said ERL study co-author Paul Waidelich of ETH Zürich. “It shows that choosing to not reduce greenhouse gas emissions is an extremely risky economic strategy.”
Climate change risk assessment 2021. pdf
The risks are compounding, and without immediate action the impacts will be devastating
Canada falls short on climate change action, says pre-election report
Carbon Tracker: Flying blind: The glaring absence of climate risks in financial reporting
KEY FINDINGS
· There is little evidence that companies incorporate material climate-related matters into their financial statements.
· Most climate-related assumptions and estimates are not visible in the financial statements.
· Most companies do not tell a consistent story across their reporting.
· There is little evidence that auditors consider the effects of material climate-related financial risks or companies’ announced climate strategies.
· Even with considerable observable inconsistencies across company reporting (‘other information’ and financial statements), auditors rarely comment on any differences.
· Companies do not appear to use ‘Paris-aligned’ assumptions and estimates.
90% of global farm subsidies damage people and planet, says UN.
Paul Mason: Why only radical social transformation can avert a climate catastrophe
In the wake of the IPCC report, it is clear that neither the far left nor the far right have the political answers to deal with the environmental crisis.
Interview with Professor Stephen Macekura exploring critiques of economic growth across the twentieth-century
Ricky Gervais Joins 12-Month Global Campaign to Save Species on the Brink
Koalas are going extinct with as few as 30,000 left in the Australian wild when the country was once home to EIGHT MILLION
ESG ROUNDUP #6 - SpaceX is dropping a massive oil and gas operation onto a wildlife preserve
The Messy Truth About Carbon Footprints
How much attention should each of us be paying to our individual carbon footprint? That question is the subject of a contentious debate that’s been raging in climate circles for quite some time.
In one camp stand folks like author Rebecca Solnit, whose recent op-ed for The Guardian argued that Big Oil invented carbon footprints as a deliberate attempt to “blame us for their greed.” The goal, she wrote, was to use relatively ineffectual calls for voluntary abstinence to distract the public from demanding systems-level interventions — like new taxes or the phasing out of gas-powered cars — that might meaningfully reduce society’s reliance on fossil fuels as a whole.
In the other camp are people like Polish researcher Michał Czepkiewicz, who assert that the concept of carbon footprints was simply co-opted by fossil fuel interests, and that it still has value in illuminating the vast inequality that exists between low- and high-carbon lifestyles. (A recent report from the anti-poverty organization Oxfam found that the wealthiest 10 percent of the global population — which includes the vast majority of people reading this op-ed — were responsible for more than 50 percent of global emissions between 1990 and 2015.)
The real truth, as is so often the case, is that more than one thing can be true at once. …
… We are not each on an individual journey to slash our footprint to zero. We are on a collective mission to shift the only true footprint that matters: that of society as a whole.
Other Fare:
American Colleges and Universities Are Doomed
For most students, obtaining post-secondary education at an American college or university destroys economic value. Notice I did not say completing post-secondary education, because a substantial portion of students who enroll do not complete a degree. The numbers are quite staggering – see the data from educationdata.org below – making dropouts a substantial driver of revenue for these institutions. Approximately 56% of students who enroll in 4-year colleges don’t make it to graduation. This is the dirty little secret our current education power structure would rather you didn’t know.
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Even for those students who do complete a degree, many would have been far better off pursuing an alternative education strategy. The research on this point is a little scattered and often biased, since it is usually written by educators with an agenda, but I would say with high confidence that the fully loaded net present value of a traditional college degree for the median student that graduates is negative. There are some degrees at some schools that are incredibly lucrative, but most graduates would have been better off obtaining alternative and job-specific educational training at much lower cost.
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Most students who show up on campus wouldn’t be there without easy access to financing. The student loan industry is among the more nefarious and cynical in our society. For example, the lenders have lobbied to make it incredibly difficult to discharge student loans during personal bankruptcy proceedings while simultaneously working to make it easier for students to borrow.
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What will become of American colleges and universities? I don’t know. But one can’t destroy value indefinitely, especially with so many compelling alternatives. The ivory tower is headed for a painful restructuring. That which cannot go on forever usually doesn’t.
Tweets of the Week:
Econimica: So as the Federal Reserve discusses "tapering", "normalizing"...remember what drove the Fed to initiate ZIRP, QE, & quasi federal government UBI...it was a demographic decline that's only accelerating against the "business as usual" perpetual growth financial system.
Wonkmonk: "could the 21st century instead turn into a period when interest rates remain so low for so long that we learn to accept eye-popping debt numbers as the inevitable corollary of high asset prices, expanded money supply and a frenetic financial system, and ignore them?"
Yes.
Pics of the Week:
The Best Photos Taken Through Microscopes Will Blow You Away
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
Election Fare:
Corporations Control Canada’s Infrastructure — But the Major Parties Won’t Confront Them
Despite their election rhetoric, Canadian politicians have been acting in the interests of corporations for decades. We need to confront corporate interests — and in order to do so, we have to recognize how intertwined they are with the Canadian state.
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Rhetorically, the Liberal Party has promised a great deal; in practice, they have done very little. Climate change is one of the clearest examples of Trudeau’s party’s lack of boldness.
Where Canada’s federal parties stand on three big climate and environment issues ahead of the election
Canadians who watched the English-language leaders’ debate learned little about the differences between the climate policies of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives, Jagmeet Singh’s NDP and Annamie Paul’s Greens. Here’s what the federal election debate missed
Regular Fare:
Pretty old, but worthwhile link nonetheless, especially as prelude to next link
The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (review of Mariana Mazzucato’s book, so titled)
I have long known in my gut that usual measures of social wealth, most of all GDP, are fraudulent, in that they falsely identify value where there is none. I have intuited we were all being lied to, and that those who assured us that ever more value was being generated by our society by what appear to be objectively valueless activities were, at best, hiding something. This outstanding book, by left-wing economist Mariana Mazzucato, explains what is being hidden, what hard truths are being avoided, and what she thinks we should do about it. And while I don’t agree with all her prescriptions, or with her rosy view of government competency, the first step on the path to self-improvement is admitting you have a problem.
Others have tried to explain the corruption of the modern economy, such as Rana Foroohar in her dreadful Makers and Takers, but Mazzucato succeeds where they failed. Her core claim is that “much of what is passing for value creation is just value extraction in disguise.”
Greer: The Negative-Sum Economy
So gold is not wealth, and money is not wealth. What is wealth? Etymologists will tell you that the word “wealth” comes from the old-fashioned word “weal” the way “health” comes from “heal,” and that “weal” shares an origin back in the mists of Indo-European prehistory with “well” (in the sense of “well-being”) and “will.” In Anglo-Saxon times wel meant “according to one’s wish” and wela meant both “well-being” and “riches.” To be wealthy is to have the things you need and want, the things that support your well-being and enable you to do what you like.
Back in the nineteenth century, John Ruskin pointed out that this concept needs to be balanced by another: illth. As wealth is to weal (and well and will), illth is to ill. To have illth is to be burdened by things you don’t need and don’t want, things that harm your well-being and prevent you from doing what you like. Every economy produces both wealth and illth: that is to say, every economy produces goods and services, but also harms and hindrances. The relative proportion of wealth and illth varies across time, for reasons we’ll discuss later. The distribution of wealth and illth is the great problem of economics. One essential reason modern economists make bad predictions and bad policy so reliably is that they ignore half of this problem, and pretend that the production and distribution of illth isn’t relevant to their discipline.
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It’s important to remember the distinction between money and wealth, because—as already noted—the equation between the two depends on conditions that can change, and have changed very suddenly at various points in the past.
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With this in mind, let’s go a little deeper into the system of tokens we call “money.” At the heart of money as it currently exists is the notion that money should make money. If you put it in a bank account, you should get interest; if you invest it in stocks, you should get dividends and capital gains; if you buy bonds, you should get a return on your investment, and so on. That was not true of money until recently, historically speaking, but it’s been true for several centuries, and almost everyone these days treats it as though it’s as inevitable as tomorrow’s sunrise.
In point of fact, it’s anything but inevitable. It’s a specific gimmick that evolved over the last few centuries. It was invented to deal with the unprecedented era of global economic expansion that began with the systematic exploitation of coal as an energy resource in the eighteenth century, and went into overdrive once petroleum was added to the fossil fuel mix beginning in the 1850s. Before that era, economic growth was normally something that happened only when one society conquered another and got a sudden burst of new resources to exploit. Outside of that special case, the increased weath yielded by technological improvements was neatly balanced by the increased demand for wealth driven by expanding populations and resource depletion.
Fossil fuels broke that pattern by enabling, at least at first, the production of much more wealth than illth. Dealing with that bonanza required expansion of the money supply—a modest expansion during the era of coal, and a much greater expansion during the era of petroleum, which is why the gold standard got shoved aside once the latter era arrived. It became an item of faith during the petroleum era that economic growth was natural and inevitable. That faith remains fixed in place today, even though the conditions that made sustained economic growth possible are fading out of sight in the rearview mirror right now.
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That’s one of the essential messages of the Limits to Growth model I discussed two weeks ago. The lesson taught by the World3 model can be summed up very crisply in terms of the language we’ve been using: over time, economic growth affects the relative production of wealth and illth by any economy. In the early days of economic expansion, it’s easy for an economy to produce more wealth than illth, but the further the expansion runs, the more the balance tips the other way, until eventually the economy produces more illth than wealth. Prolong economic growth too far, and the production of illth overwhelms the production of wealth and forces growth itself to its knees: that’s the lesson our political classes have been trying to ignore for fifty years.
The standard run from The Limits to Growth shows how that ends. Industrial output and food—the main forms of wealth—begin to decline, food gradually, industrial output much more rapidly. Meanwhile pollution—an important form of illth—climbs further before it, too, tips over and starts to decline. Population peaks and declines as well, and resources finish their descent to sustainable levels. What this means in economic terms, of course, is that the sustained economic growth of the last few centuries gives way to a few centuries of sustained economic contraction.
Albert Bates: The Great Pause Week 79: Building Mouse Utopias
Dennis Meadows, co-author of the original Limits to Growth study in 1971, says the problem is transitioning from rapid forward movement to being quiescent.
It’s like riding a bicycle. It is relatively easy to ride a bicycle and its also relatively easy to stand next to your bicycle holding it there still. But to get from rapid forward movement to dismounting and standing — that is a skill set, which if you don’t master it can cause a lot of damage. And that is what we face in our society. We don’t know, certainly at the community or the national level, how to envision a future that is attractive and which doesn’t have growth in it.
Meadows says population is now clearly declining in a number of nations — China, Japan, Russia, “so rather than fight it, by offering subsidies or banning birth control, it would be useful for governments to try to understand how they can run a system in which the population isn’t continuously expanding.”
Their Dream Was a Working Farm (but They Weren’t Farmers).
So one urban couple had a brainstorm: Why not build a house they could share with farmers just starting out, on land that could be farmed?
Climate Crisis Fare:
Why only radical social transformation can avert a climate catastrophe
In the wake of the IPCC report, it is clear that neither the far left nor the far right have the political answers to deal with the environmental crisis.
… The science is clear and urgent. Yet important segments of the electorate, in all countries, do not care. No government in the world has a plan to decarbonise its economy. As a result, the socio-economic scenarios that climate scientists are working with are out of joint with reality.
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The bad news is that under even the most benign scenario, we still hit 1.5 degrees by 2040. The worse news is that all these models now look unrealistic.
When will Societal Collapse from Climate Change Happen?
At this moment of history, a lot has to go very wrong very quickly for first-world societal collapse to happen, and a lot more than that before we get any type of global human extinction event. But that is certainly the direction we are heading. It is both terrifying and very sad.
Climate Tweets of the Week:
Aside from corruption -which is part of a system of political 'donations' from the ultra rich, there is also cognitive dissonance, because doing anything about the climate and biodiversity crises, flies in the face of today's political orthodoxy for politicians, Neoliberalism
COVID Fare:
Covid-19:
Background
Since the beginning of the pandemic, COVID-19 has been regarded as an exceptional disease. Control measures have exclusively focused on ‘the virus’, while failing to account for other biological and social factors that determine severe forms of the disease.
Aim
We argue that although COVID-19 was initially considered a new challenge, justifying extraordinary response measures, this situation has changed — and so should our response.
Main arguments
We now know that COVID-19 shares many features of common infectious respiratory diseases, and can now ascertain that SARS-CoV-2 has not suddenly presented new problems. Instead, it has exposed and exacerbated existing problems in health systems and the underlying health of the population. COVID-19 is evidently not an ‘extraterrestrial’ disease. It is a complex zoonotic disease, and it needs to be managed as such, following long-proven principles of medicine and public health.
Conclusion
A complex disease cannot be solved through a simple, magic-bullet cure or vaccine. The heterogeneity of population profiles susceptible to developing a severe form of COVID-19 suggests the need to adopt varying, targeted measures that are able to address risk profiles in an appropriate way. The critical role of comorbidities in disease severity calls for short-term, virus-targeted interventions to be complemented with medium-term policies aimed at reducing the burden of comorbidities, as well as mitigating the risk of transition from infection to disease. Strategies required include upstream prevention, early treatment, and consolidation of the health system.
The Vaccines Kill Many More People Than They Save
Politicians and so-called experts across the planet increasingly want to force you to get inoculated with a substance that takes away at least twice the lives it saves, across all age groups. It doesn’t matter anymore if this is intentional or just sheer incompetence, we have no time left to discuss that.
We’re killing people. Millions of people. Our loved ones, family, friends, and neighbors. It has to stop. Now. We have gone mad. Maybe Steve Kirsch’s access to the FDA can help.
And when Steve says the vaccines killed 200,000 Americans so far already, and permanently disabled 300,000, remember that this is just the tip of the iceberg: many if not most of the effects will only show up later. And then Pfizer today claims that their stuff is safe for kids 5 years old and up. Who are 99.9996% safe if they get infected, due to their immune system, which also gets killed by the vaccines.
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I summarized part of his (Steve Kirsch’s) latest slide deck here:
What You Need To Know About Covid Vaccine Safety
Censorship required The way to fight truth is using misinformation, intimidation, mandates, and censorship. Our government is ignoring early treatments and tells everyone that early treatment don’t work. They demonize the key treatment used by India to be COVID-free. Their agenda is to push the vaccine, not to cure COVID. Social media companies will censor, demonetize, and/or ban you for telling the truth. If you are a doctor, you can have your license revoked if you say the vaccines are unsafe.
COVID vaccines kill more people than they save for all age groups. On average, in the US, COVID vaccines kill 2 people for every person they save over a 6 month period.
To date
200K Killed
300K permanently disabled
Here’s how we compute the 2:1 ratio that shows the vaccines are nonsensical.
V:C defined
V:C is the ratio of the the number of vaccine-caused deaths (V) relative to the projected number of COVID deaths (C) that could be saved by the vaccine over a 6 month period. A number like 2:1 means we kill 2 people for every COVID death we save. That’s bad. For a COVID vaccine to be viable, you’re looking for V:C of 1:x where x > 100, i.e., you want the risk to be very small compared to the benefit. If you are saving the lives of >100,000 people, you don’t want to have to kill >1,000 people to have to do that. That would completely unacceptable in a civilized society and would be unprecedented in modern times, especially when we have early treatments that work with over 99% risk reduction that don’t have any safety issues.
V:C varies by place, time, age. V:C depends on the vaccine type, the rate of COVID deaths in your community at a particular time, and your age. For this presentation, we’ll compute this as a country-wide average for the US.
Determining V.
In general, the three vaccines in the US work through a very similar process. The vaccines have an estimated death rate of close to 1 death for every 1,000 people who are vaxed. Here, we calculate a deaths per million doses for each age range (using VAERS). For risk/reward assessments done by age, this gives the most precise guidance.
Determining C.
We use COVID mortality data from the CDC to determine the risk of death from COVID.
Is the vaccine safe for some age groups? The vaccines may have a positive risk/benefit for people in a certain demographic. The CDC and FDA think the vaccines are perfectly safe and have killed no one, so they have never done this analysis. For example, the VRBPAC unanimously approved boosters for people over 65. None of the panel members made the risk-benefit calculation. They were guessing. Were they right? No. They were dead wrong based on both our calculations and the real-world evidence. Here’s what the detailed calculations showed…
V:C in the US is not favorable for any age. The table shows the V:C numbers by age.
The full presentation, all 8+ hours of it. I set it to start at the point where Kirsch comes in, but knock yourself out. (go to the link for video)
Mathew Crawford: Incorruptible Data and Medical Tyranny
Central to numerous fundamental debates during the pandemic is data
- Why do central authorities choose not to collect and examine early treatment data on therapies largely dismissed by late treatment studies?
- How different would vaccine efficacy statistics and risk-benefit analyses look if we do not take the strange and historically unprecedented step of dismissing the first 14 days after vaccination? Would we find out there are Type II COVID cases caused by vaccines that are inappropriately counted against the unvaccinated?
Clearing Up Misinformation About The Spike Protein And Covid Vaccines
The spike protein is a type of protein on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that helps the virus infect cells. The COVID vaccines available in the U.S. work by getting the body to produce this protein (with some modifications) so that the body will generate neutralizing antibodies to it. It turns out that the spike protein by itself, even without the rest of the virus present, has been shown to cause harm to the body.
In Part I of this article I’ll summarize some of the studies that show this. This is not really controversial at this point. However, what is controversial is that some people have asked: if spike is dangerous, might we be endangering people by giving them vaccines that make the body produce spike?
Fact-checking articles that try to shoo away this concern usually refer to the fact that the spike encoded by the vaccines are different from “wild-type” spike (spike from the virus), and for this reason, they are safe. They also state that there is no evidence that the vaccine spike is harmful.
In Part II, I’ll look into the evidence that shows that vaccine-encoded spike is not harmless.
In Part III, I’ll discuss how most responses to concerns about vaccine-encoded spike usually misconstrue the concern, or don’t actually back up their statements with any real data.
In Part IV, I’ll argue that we should consider the possibility that vaccine-encoded spike protein can cause lasting harm even in people that don’t have obvious or serious “adverse events” from the vaccine.
In Part V, I’ll link to statements from other scientists or doctors who have concerns about the vaccines.
Before we go any further: I am not anti-vax. I am double-vaxed with Moderna. I used to be a biologist. I believe vaccines have saved many lives. However, not all vaccines are the same. And not all vaccines are equally safe, and we need to be able to have an open and honest discussion about this.
The Meaning of the FDA Resignations
The trouble now is that the top scientists at the FDA disagree. Further, they think that the push for boosters is courting problems. They think the current regime of one or two shots is working as well as one can expect. Nothing is gained on net from a booster, they say. There just isn’t enough evidence to take the risk of another booster, and another and another. The authors knew this article was appearing. They knew that signing it under the FDA affiliation would lead to a push for their resignations. Life would get very difficult for both of them. They got ahead of the messaging and resigned before it came out. Very smart.
The signed article goes even further to warn of possible downsides. They point out that boosters might seem necessary because “variants expressing new antigens have evolved to the point at which immune responses to the original vaccine antigens no longer protect adequately against currently circulating viruses.” At the same time, there are possible side effects that could discredit all vaccines for a generation or more. “There could be risks,” they write, “if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines, or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines.”)
Berenson: Are You Kidding Me, Pfizer, Volume 1 Gazillion
The FDA just released its briefing book for Pfizer’s request for a third dose of Comirnaty (or is that BNT162b2? No matter! It’s approved either way, sorta). It is every bit the mess we all expected. Let’s go to the highlights: Pfizer basically hasn’t bothered to test the booster AT ALL in the people actually at risk – it conducted a single “Phase 1” trial that covered 12 people over 65. The main Phase 2/3 booster trial (beware efforts to cover multiple “phases” of drug research at once, you want it bad you get it bad) included no one over 55. No one. As in NONE. Which makes total sense – why test the booster in people who actually need it because they’re at high risk from the ro? Nothing good can come of that. So that’s our trial design. Now safety:
Of the 300 people who received the booster, one had a heart attack two months later. No worries, Pfizer concluded it wasn’t related. Yay! Five percent of recipients had enlarged lymph nodes. How about effectiveness? Well, we don’t have enough data – or any data, really – telling us how well the booster will work.
… Oh. But don’t worry, Uncle Joe already told you you can get your booster on September 20. If it’s good enough for our fearless leader, it should be good enough for the FDA, amirite? SCIENCE!
Old fare, but interesting, in a not surprisingly disconcerting way; hat tip Ilargi again, from whom I stole these excerpts: (go to The Automatic Earth to check out all the other links he posted)
Interview with Dr. Vanessa Schmidt-Kruger
We know that normally vaccine development takes a very long time. It’s not just the clinical phase: with this vaccine, it’s set at three times two and a half years, i.e., three phases of 2.5 years each plus the evaluation phase, which makes 7 1/2 years in total. And then one shouldn’t forget that the production optimisation is also important, at least a year would surely be needed for that. That hasn’t taken place at all. The vaccine is already being sold and used, but the production optimisation isn’t yet by any means completed. And there are considerable deficiencies. One issue I would like to discuss are the deficiencies relating to the active substance: by that, I mean the modified RNA that they are synthesising.
As a second issue there are deficiencies in the consistency of the various production batches: they need to always be consistent so that one always obtains the same vaccine volume and quality. The problem that BioNTech had is that in the clinical phase the product, i.e. the RNA, was produced with completely different techniques to how it is being produced now. During the clinical phase they only needed small volumes of vaccine, they were able to use very expensive techniques that delivered highly purified end products. Now that they have entered mass production, that is no longer possible, they have had to switch to lower-cost processes, e.g. using huge quantities of DNA that functions as the substrate to be able to produce the RNA in an in-vitro transcription reaction.
This is done via bacteria, via the fermentation of transformed bacteria that contain this DNA. The bacteria multiply the DNA in huge amounts, and this leads to new dangers or risks, particularly contamination. At the moment for instance the situation is that the DNA is transformed in the bacteria, it is multiplied, next the bacteria are opened and the DNA is extracted, then it is linearised via enzymes, and after that the linearised DNA undergoes in-vitro transcription to produce the RNA using various procedures. The EMA Committee made various requirements of the vaccine manufacturer, i.e. BioNTech. The applicant needs to now develop and introduce various analysis processes to ensure that the substrate is free of microbiological contaminants – they probably mean E Coli bacteria for example.
There don’t seem to be any processes to ensure or monitor for that. They also need to ensure that all the buffers – those are the solvents that are used – are free of RNAses. RNAses are enzymes that degrade RNA. If there are any contaminants of these RNAse solvents, then RNA in the vaccine will be degraded and the vaccine won’t have any effect anymore. They also have to analyse how strong the activity of the enzymes is; that is very important because I explained that after that the RNA is transcribed from the DNA and then the DNA has to be eliminated, it is digested by enzymes: by DNAses. And if this DNA is not digested well enough, if residues are left, this harbours risks – I’ll come back to the risks from DNA residues, but the activity of the enzymes has to be monitored well and at the end you need to have a pure RNA without any more DNA. And that is not the case. BioNTech has admitted that there are DNA contaminants.
[..] It was found that the integrity of the RNA always varies in the batches that had been made. I will come back to that again. There needs to be a standard that is always the same for each batch. This should be used as the reference to measure the standard. And they only have this of course for the processes of the clinical phase. Now we have to generate a new standard for the new manufacturing processes, i.e., for the commercial sales. That hasn’t been done yet, they are in the process of doing that now.
So – the integrity of the RNA means of course the RNA quality. They have found that this is not very high: it was higher for the processes during the clinical phase. In this report they don’t say how high it is, but I have other information that says 78% of the RNA was good [translator: this refers to the integrity], the remainder was not, but now they have found new batches with only 55% RNA integrity, i.e., half of it is basically unviable.
‘Vaccine deaths are being hidden, suppressed and falsely recorded’ – Dr Herman Edeling
***** el gato malo: why "vaccinated covid deaths/hospitalizations" are being counted incorrectly
and how to do it properly
let’s start with an example:
you’re a soldier pinned down in a foxhole. across the field from you is a bunker. getting into the bunker will greatly reduce your risk of being shot.
but the field you must cross is wide open to enemy fire.
if you’re going to make the choice to run for the bunker, on what would you base it?
...
this is about you and making the choice that best ensures your personal safety.
and to do that, you need to know the real vaccine efficacy INCLUDING the “run across the field.”
this has been deliberately swept under the rug and manipulated.
vaccine companies, countries, and health agencies reporting “vaccine efficacy” are using definitions like “14 days after the second dose” for vaccinated. and they are calling all people who have had at least one dose but not reached the 14 day post d2 mark (sometimes 7 days) as “unvaccinated.” and this turns out to be a truly nasty sleight of hand that seriously affects the data.
...
they are doing worse than denying that the open run exists, they are watching you do it, seeing you get shot, and than calling it a “foxhole death” because you never made it to the bunker.
...
they are not only hiding the heightened risk of covid to the newly vaccinated, but they are taking the bad outcomes from that increased risk and blaming it on lack of vaccination.
Mercola: Shockingly, CDC Now Lists Vaccinated Deaths as Unvaccinated
we now find out the agency is counting anyone who died within the first 14 days post-injection as unvaccinated.
Not only does this inaccurately inflate the unvaccinated death toll, but it also hides the real dangers of the COVID shots, as the vast majority of deaths from these shots occur within the first two weeks.
…
It’s not just the CDC’s definition of a breakthrough case that skews the data. Even more egregious and illogical is the fact that the CDC even has two different sets of testing guidelines — one for vaccinated patients and another for the unvaccinated.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC has recommended a PCR test cycle threshold (CT) of 40.9 This flies in the face of scientific consensus, which has long been that a CT over 35 will produce 97% false positives,10 essentially rendering the test useless.11,12,13
In mid-May 2021, the CDC finally lowered its recommended CT count, but only for patients who have received one or more COVID shots.14 So, if you have received a COVID injection, the CDC’s guidelines call for your PCR test to be run at a CT of 28 or less. If you are unvaccinated, your PCR test is to be run at a CT of 40, which grossly overestimates the true prevalence of infection.
Crawford: Gaming Measurement of Vaccine Efficacy
are booster shots increasing covid spread and covid deaths? a look at the israeli data
Boosters began to rise and by the time they hit even 0.5%, deaths were starting to rise with them. the two move in near perfect lockstep. Clearly, correlation is not proof of causality, but this is an awful lot of signal to ignore out of hand especially given our strong reasons to presume causal linkage. …. leads to this close mirroring. this is not a strong endorsement for the overall societal efficacy of vaccines in preventing covid death. …. this is why i find it so disingenuous to only measure vaccine efficacy from 7 or 14 days post dose 2. it’s like claiming that you’ll be safe if you run to the bunker, but ignoring that you must cross a minefield strafed with enemy fire to get there.
Denninger: How ‘Witch Hunts’ Always Start
Such schemes with non-sterilizing vaccines ridiculously increase disease propagation. The absolute worst of this is forced, encouraged or, dare I say, allowed non-sterilizing vaccination among health care workers. That’s manslaughter because some percentage of their patients cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons and by definition those who seek health care are already compromised in some fashion or they wouldn’t be there. Perhaps they have cancer and are taking chemotherapy or have some immunological disorder. A non-sterilized vaccinated nurse or doctor treating them is going to kill them as certain as the sun will rise in the East tomorrow because said doctor or nurse has no idea they’re infected and passing the pathogen to others; as soon as it hits someone who is actually susceptible to get sick that person is screwed.
Mathew Crawford: Estimating Vaccine-Induced Mortality, Part 6: Hawaii in Isolation
On the whole, COVID-19 hasn't hit island nations particularly hard. The per capita mortality of Oceana, Japan, Iceland, Madagascar, New Zealand, and many other island nations has been a tiny fraction of that of the rest of the world. So too were the death rates in Sri Lanka and Indonesia...prior to mass vaccination.
Nor have nations along Hawaii's tropical latitude fared poorly during the pandemic. At around 21 degrees North, Hawaii shares similar sunlight with nations such as India, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Niger, Mali, Cuba, and the Bahamas that have had far lower COVID-19 mortality rates than the world.
Despite all this, and a lot of beautiful land (only 0.1% of SARS-CoV-2 spread seems to occur in outdoor settings), Hawaii's COVID deaths per million residents stands at 474, just barely below the world average of 591. Something doesn't quite seem right about this. Suppose that vaccine deaths are being counted as COVID-19 deaths in the U.S., then we should expect to see an exaggerated effect in the Hawaii data above all. And we do!
….
The Abrien Aguirre Interviews: This article provides a partial breakdown of the interview for those who prefer reading a summary. What he has to say boils down to a few key points: In his experience,
· COVID-19 isn't responsible for many of the nursing home deaths so categorized.
· Vaccines are responsible for many of the nursing home deaths categorized as COVID-19 (affirming Scott McLachlan's take).
· There is systematic and dangerous fraud covering up these facts.
I will point out that I'd never heard of many of the websites sharing Abrien's interview. Some certainly looked like tiny "right wing" sites or even sites set up by Russian propagandists. And on that note, it may be worth pointing out how much more honest RT reporting, and such tiny sites tend to be, which is to say that perhaps Russia's primary strategy for weakening U.S. hegemony is to tell truths that the West isn't prepared to face.
…. You need to watch the interview. Clearly Abrien is real. He is fluently knowledgeable about nursing homes, and how COVID-19 has affected them (or not) in Hawaii. His body language appears genuine. I have little doubt.
… Abrien was himself surprised watching his own words in his video. This seems indicative of having told the truth casually, then realizing the stark reality that he had blown the whistle on endemic corporate malfeasance and malpractice.
For similar to above, and then some, see Ilargi's link in the Must Watch section, below
A Slog Vaxicide Special
One can observe categorically that medical researchers in Australia, India, France, the US, Germany and Japan are showing why the mRNA Covid “vaccines” tested by Oxford Recovery on dogs killed all the vaccinated animals. The detailed nature of deadly Cytokinic overreaction is closely allied to the study of how ‘autoantibodies’ develop. These little mothers are not always good news. Antibodies are produced by our B cells in two ways: (i) randomly, and (ii) in response to a foreign protein or substance within the body. Initially, one B cell produces one specific kind of antibody. In either case, the B cell is allowed to proliferate or is killed off through a process called clonal deletion. Normally, the immune system is able to recognise and ignore the body’s own healthy proteins, cells, and tissues.
But sometimes, the immune system ceases to recognise one or more of the body’s normal constituents as “self,” leading to production of pathological autoantibodies. When this happens, these psycho antibodies go into a frenzy of destruction. The more the body is exposed to mRNA formulations, the more certain death becomes. That certainty helps to explain the emerging narrative about “booster” shots of “vaccine”. This is Anthony Fauci of the US CDC from a live media interview five days ago: “You know, I think we are going to need boosters. And I think very likely, when we look back on this, the proper complete regimen for good full protection will almost certainly be three shots – the first two that we’ve spoken about and a late third boost several months later.”
For the already vaxxed, that would make five jabs in all….and no doubt, a new strain would miraculously appear to justify a 6th and 7th top-up. The growing consensus among vaccination researchers is that exposure to 5-8 of these mRNA jabs over a relatively brief period of time will – dependent on the underlying health of the individual – result in death.
Mask mandates and vaccine passports are a performance, a taking of the knee to a warped health-and-safety morality
Dr Stuart Waiton is a senior lecturer in sociology and criminology at Abertay University.
The Meaning of the FDA Resignations
What’s at stake here? It’s about more than the boosters. It’s about the whole experience of taking away the control of health management from individuals and medical professionals and handing it over to modelers and government officials with coercive power.
The Conspiracy Theorists Were Right; It IS a "Poison-Death Shot"
Did the regulators at the FDA know that all previous coronavirus vaccines had failed in animal trials and that the vaccinated animals became either severely ill or died?
Yes, they did.
Did they know that previous coronavirus vaccines had a tendency to “enhance the infection” and “make the disease worse”?
Yes.
Did Dr Anthony Fauci know that coronavirus vaccines had repeatedly failed and increased the severity of the infection?
Yes, he did. (See here: Fauci on ADE)
Did the drug companies conduct any animal trials prior to the FDA’s approval that would have convinced a reasonable person that the vaccines were safe to use on humans?
No, they didn’t.
Did they complete long-term clinical trials to establish whether the vaccines were safe?
No, there were no long-term clinical trials.
Did they conduct any biodistribution studies that showed where the substance in the injection goes in the body?
They did, but the data was not made available to the public.
Do the contents of the vaccine largely collect in various organs and in the lining of the vascular system?
Yes, they do.
Do large amounts of the substance accumulate in the ovaries?
Yes.
Will this effect female fertility and a woman’s ability to safely bring a baby to term?
The drug companies are currently researching this. The results are unknown.
Does the vaccine enter the bloodstream and collect in the lining of the blood vessels forcing the cells to produce the spike protein?
Yes.
Is the spike protein a “biologically active” pathogen?
It is.
Does the spike protein cause blood clots and leaky blood vessels in a large percentage of the people that are vaccinated?
It does, although the blood clots are mostly microscopic and appear in the capillaries. Only a small percentage of vaccinees get strokes or suffer cardiac arrest.
Should people be made aware of these possible bad outcomes before they agree to get vaccinated? (“Informed consent”)
Yes.
Did the FDA know that Pfizer had “identified vaccine-associated enhanced disease, including vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease, as an important potential risk”?
Yes, they did, but they did not demand that Pfizer fix the problem. Here’s more:
“The FDA noted that Pfizer, “identified vaccine-associated enhanced disease, including vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease, as an important potential risk”. The EMA similarly acknowledged that “vaccine associated enhanced respiratory disease” was “an important potential risk… that may be specific to vaccination for COVID- 19”.
Why neither regulator sought to exclude such dangers prior to emergency use authorization is an open question that all doctors and patients are entitled to ask. Why medical regulators failed to investigate the finding that large vaccine particles cross blood vessel walls, entering the bloodstream and posing risks of blood clotting and leaky vessels is yet another open question again.” (“Open Letter to the EMA and European Parliament”, Doctors for Covid Ethics)
Did the drug companies vaccinate the people in the placebo group after the clinical trials in order to conceal the difference in the long-term health outcomes between the two groups?
That is the conclusion a rational person would make.
So, they nuked the trials?
Yes.
Did the FDA largely shrug-off its regulatory duties and abandon its normal standards and protocols because
a– It wanted to rush the Covid vaccines into service as rapidly as possible?
b– It knew the Covid-19 vaccine would never meet long-term safety standards?
We don’t know yet, but the adverse events report strongly suggests that the Covid-19 vaccine is hands-down the most dangerous vaccine in history.
Is the FDA rushing the “boosters” without proper testing?
Yes, it is. Here’s a clip from author Alex Berenson’s latest at Substack:
“Pfizer basically hasn’t bothered to test the booster AT ALL in the people actually at risk – it conducted a single “Phase 1” trial that covered 12 people over 65. The main Phase 2/3 booster trial (beware efforts to cover multiple “phases” of drug research at once, you want it bad you get it bad) included no one over 55.
No one.
As in NONE.” (“Are you kidding me, Pfizer, volume 1 gazillion”, Alex Berenson, Substack)
Have the boosters been modified or improved to meet the changes in Delta variant?
No.
Is there any additional risk in taking a booster-shot after already taking two experimental gene-based vaccines in less than a year?
Considerable risk. Here’s more from the Doctors for Covid Ethics:
“Given that booster shots repeatedly boost the immune response to the spike protein, they will progressively boost self-to-self immune attack, including boosting complement-mediated damage to vessel walls.
Clinically speaking, the greater the vessel leakage and clotting that subsequently occurs, the more likely that organs supplied by the affected blood flow will sustain damage. From stroke to heart attack to brain vein thrombosis, the symptoms can range from death to headaches, nausea and vomiting, all of which heavily populate adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines.
As well as damage from leakage and clotting alone, it is additionally possible that the vaccine itself may leak into surrounding organs and tissues. Should this take place, the cells of those organs will themselves begin to produce spike protein, and will come under attack in the same way as the vessel walls. Damage to major organs such as the lungs, ovaries, placenta and heart can be expected ensue, with increasing severity and frequency as booster shots are rolled out.” (“Open Letter to the EMA and European Parliament“, Doctors for Covid Ethics)
So, it’s the double-whammy. On the one hand, the booster will perform largely like the original vaccine, penetrating cells and forcing them to produce spike protein which, in turn, generates blood clots and leaky blood vessels. And, on the other, the newly-produced S proteins trigger a damaging immune response in which the complement system attacks and destroys the cells that line the inside of the blood vessels. Every additional booster will intensify this process weakening the vascular system and increasing the clotting. If the Doctors are correct in their analysis, then we could see a sharp uptick in all-cause mortality in the heavily-vaccinated countries in less than a year. Cardiac arrests are already rising.
Here’s another question that’s worth mulling over: Was there any reason for the regulators at the FDA to think that these problems would not arise following the launching of the vaccine campaign?
No. They should have known there would be problems as soon as they saw that the vaccine did not stay in the shoulder as it was supposed to. The vaccine wasn’t supposed to enter the bloodstream and spread across the body leaving billions of spike proteins in its wake. (The spike protein is a cytotoxin, a cell killer. It is not an appropriate antigen for stimulating an immune response. It is a potentially-lethal pathogen that poses a threat to one’s health even if it is separated from the virus.) Nor was the vaccine supposed to trigger Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) which is the condition we hinted at above when referring to “vaccine-associated enhanced disease”. Here’s a brief explanation:
“ADE has proven to be a serious challenge with coronavirus vaccines, and this is the primary reason many have failed in early in-vitro or animal trials. For example, rhesus macaques who were vaccinated with the Spike protein of the SARS-CoV virus demonstrated severe acute lung injury when challenged with SARS-CoV, while monkeys who were not vaccinated did not. Similarly, mice who were immunized with one of four different SARS-CoV vaccines showed histopathological changes in the lungs with eosinophil infiltration after being challenged with SARS-CoV virus. This did not occur in the controls that had not been vaccinated. A similar problem occurred in the development of a vaccine for FIPV, which is a feline coronavirus.” (“Is the Coronavirus Vaccine a Ticking-Time Bomb?”, Science with Dr. Doug)
Is this what we are seeing right now? In all the countries that launched mass-vaccination campaigns early (Israel, Iceland, Scotland, Gibraltar and UK) cases, hospitalizations and deaths are rising faster in the vaccinated portion of the population than the unvaccinated. Why?
Are they really experiencing a fourth or fifth wave or have the vaccines generated “inactivity-enhancing” antibodies that make the disease worse? This 2-minute video helps to clarify what’s going on:
“Vaccines are made to a specific variant. And when that variant mutates, the vaccine no longer recognizes it. It’s like you are seeing a completely new virus. And, because that is so, you actually get more severe symptoms when you are vaccinated against one variant and it mutates and then your body sees the other variant. The science shows, that if you get vaccinated in multiple years (for the flu), you are more likely to get severe disease, you are more likely to get viral replication, and you are more likely to be hospitalized…. We are seeing the same thing in Covid with the Delta variant. So we are actually mandating that people get a vaccine when they can actually get more sick when they are exposed to the virus...In fact, this week, a paper came out that showed that–with the Delta variant– when you are vaccinated your body is supposed to make antibodies that neutralize the virus, but they were supposed to neutralize the old variant. When they see this new variant, the antibodies take the virus and help it infect the cells.” (“Expert testimony on mandatory vaccinations”, Dr Christina Parks PhD., Rumble, start at minute 5:05)
Repeat: “If you get vaccinated in multiple years, you are more likely to get severe disease, you are more likely to get viral replication, and you are more likely to be hospitalized…. With the Delta variant– when you are vaccinated …. the antibodies take the virus and help it infect the cells.”
This is ADE, and this is probably why hospitalizations and deaths are rising among the vaccinated in Israel, UK and the rest. True, the Delta variant is less lethal than the Wuhan virus but, unfortunately, that rule does not apply to those who have been vaccinated and whose antibodies promote the uptake of the virus into their cells. This increases the viral replication function that increases the severity of the disease. In short, people are getting sicker because they were vaccinated. Here’s another short video that helps to explain:
“…The vaccine-induced antibodies will stand up against the virus. and once a virus is under pressure; it changes, it becomes a variant, and the variant cannot be stopped by vaccine-induced antibodies. Vaccine-induced antibodies. also shut down your innate immune system… so variants can come straight through and infect those that are vaccinated. That is viral immune escape, and that means that the vaccinated are defenseless against variants. This is no longer a pandemic of Covid-19. It is a pandemic of variants…
And there is something called recombination, and recombination means a vaccinated host can be infected by more than one variant at a time. …If a vaccinated host is co-infected by more than one variant, the variants will mix DNA, and change and camouflage and produce a super variant. And if a super variants are produced, nothing can stop them. And already they are saying that the latest variant to come out is vaccine resistant. And this is just the beginning. Dr Geert Vanden Bosche warns that if we do not immediately stop mass vaccination campaigns around the world, the world will experience an international catastrophe of mass mortality. I didn’t say that, he did. The vaccinated are a threat to us all.” (“Viral Immune Escape Explained”, Dr. Michael McDowell, Rumble)
It’s not the variant that intensifies the disease, it’s the fact that the vaccine targets one narrow endpoint, the spike protein, that gradually adapts to survive. As the virus progressively learns to avoid the vaccine, vaccine-induced immunity wanes. Natural immunity produces broad, robust immunity to the whole virus not merely one part of it. It is strong and enduring.
So how will the vaccinated fight new forms of the virus, after all, the vaccine is not a medicine that overpowers a particular pathogen. It is a subtle (genetic) reprogramming of the immune system that forces one’s cells to produce a particular version of the spike protein. Boosters that stimulate production of the same protein will have only modest impact. In short, boosters are still fighting the last war.
Also, as we mentioned above, coronavirus vaccines tend to create antibodies that “enhance infectivity” when they encounter adapted forms of the virus. That means that millions of inoculated people will now face forms of the virus for which they have almost no protection and for which their compromised immune systems can only provide limited help. Here’s more from the article above:
“Right now, the fatality rate of the virus is estimated to be approximately 0.26%, and this number seems to be dropping as the virus is naturally attenuating itself through the population. It would be a great shame to vaccinate the entire population against a virus with this low of a fatality rate, especially considering the considerable risk presented by ADE. I believe t his risk of developing ADE in a vaccinated individual will be much greater than 0.26%, and, therefore, the vaccine stands to make the problem worse, not better. It would be the biggest blunder of the century to see the fatality rate of this virus increase in the years to come because of our sloppy, haphazard, rushed efforts to develop a vaccine with such a low threshold of safety testing and the prospect of ADE lurking in the shadows.” (“Is the Coronavirus Vaccine a Ticking-Time Bomb?”, Science with Dr. Doug)
Denninger: To Governor DeSantis, Ivey, Lee And Others
Which one of you Governors would like to have a basically-zero Covid rate? Which one of you would like to be the State with the lowest rate of coronavirus disease, a collapsed health-care burden (to near-zero) and a collapsed rate of death too. How would you like to see this start to happen within two weeks and be so apparent every news stations has to report on it within a month?Here’s how — which, if you read when I put this forward, was something I promoted in early December of 2020. It costs about $2 per person in a household.
It’s simple: For anyone suspected (test results not back yet) you dispense to them five doses of Ivermectin to be taken every day if they are obese or otherwise morbid, and every second day if not along with one dose per every two days for everyone in the household, calibrated by their weight. Everyone in the household also gets ten days of a 1,000mg Vitamin C tablet and ten days of 30mg of Zinc, both dietary supplements. The exception is anyone on a blood thinner; you simply ask and, if they are, they don’t get the drug (but do get the supplements.) The State buys the drug in bulk, from India if you have to (fly a charter over there to pick it up; **** the Feds) and dispenses it.
Why? Read the linked article. This is is not just about treatment; it is also about cutting off forward transmission of the virus. It will not work every time but it doesn’t have to work every time — just often enough to suppress Rt below 1.0 and the virus dies out. The risk of someone having a serious adverse event from this is 1 in 600,000. If Florida has ten percent of their population that gets infected (or suspected to be) or is in a household with someone who is over the next three months (improbably high, but let’s go with it) that would be a cost of about $5 million. For Alabama it would cost about a million. That’s it. Who’s got the stones to do this?
Whoever does it first and collapses their Covid-19 case, hospitalization and death rate is President in 2024 — that is, if the other 49 States don’t have their residents lay siege to DC and their State governments as soon as they see the first State’s results.
Mark Reeder: Use of a null assumption to re-analyze data collected through a rolling cohort subject to selection bias due to informative censoring
COVID Quotes of the Week:
Dr. Robert Malone: "how do you reconcile that this [safe, off-patent, inexpensive] drug - that's being used in emerging economies all across the world to good effect - is being trashed in US and western media. The appearance is because these folks are bought and paid for."
So far most deaths from the vaccine occur during the first two weeks. To blame these deaths on the lack of vaccination instead of on the vaccine, the CDC rules that you are not actually vaccinated until two weeks after having the second injection.
Kunstler: The deceit of the CDC and the FDA in gaming and cooking their Covid-19 data is now emerging from the fog of pandemic hysteria. I will also dare to conjecture that the number of recent and current Covid-19 “cases” turns out to be actually and overwhelmingly adverse reactions to the mRNA experiment, not the disease itself, and that holy hell will erupt among the public as it becomes understood that their livelihoods — and their health — are being stolen as part of this fraud.
Kirsch: STOP listening to the science! Whatever YouTube says is what you should believe. The science says that Ivermectin works. The science is wrong. What matters is what YouTube says, not science. Stop thinking for yourself and do whatever YouTube says. Otherwise, you will be banned, block, and demonetized.
Zelenko: “I’ll do one more mind experiment with you: If everyone on the planet were to get Covid and not get treated, the death-rate globally would be less than half a percent. I’m not advocating for that, because 35 million people would die. However, if we follow the advice of some of the global leaders– like Bill Gates who said last year said “7 billion people need to be vaccinated”– then the death-rate will be over 2 billion people! SO, WAKE UP! THIS IS WORLD WAR 3! We are seeing a level of malevolence that we haven’t seen in the history of humanity!” Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, Author of The Zelenko “Early Treatment” Protocol that saved thousands of Covid-19 patients.
"There’s no evidence that it happens, nor is there any mechanistic reason to imagine that it would happen," Fauci told CNN
That said, at least 46 claims of post-vax swollen testicles have been reported for the Covid-19 jab to the VAERS database of adverse reactions, though it's unknown if any of them resulted in a canceled wedding.
COVID Tweets of the Week:
Small study:
Fully vaccinated people shed as much virus if infected as infected unvaxxed people
Worse, they're more likely to be *asymptomatic* big shedders!
Asymptomatic big shedders were the threat all our lockdown measures are based on
Vaccination *increased* that threat
Even the @CDCgov has acknowledged that there's NO WAY to tell which #Variant someone has unless "Whole Genome Sequencing" is made and that is NOT being done at ALL! #PCR won't even tell apart the #Flu from #Covid
The variants are very minimal - less than 12 amino acids in a field of 1270. And the variants are in different domains of the virus. Biologically almost zero chance of affecting the way that the virus behaves. Variants are the cover story for Syringe doesn't work. See chart.
Low-vaccinated India has now 60% less Coronavirus deaths than the same week last year.
Mid-vaxxed US is up 39% from last year.
Highly-vaccinated Israel and Canada are up 100% and 200% respectively.
I don’t know why it’s so.
Kirsch: Jessica Rose, PhD just had her paper on VAERS analysis of myocarditis rejected after two rounds of review at "Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine." NO REASON GIVEN. This is scientific misconduct at its finest by the peer reviewers (not the Journal). Jessica is first-rate.
You cannot get any paper published that is anti-vaccine nowadays. Academics will ONLY believe what is peer reviewed. So the vaccines are safe because there are no papers saying it isn't, even though the data shows it isn't. BUT NOBODY LOOKS AT THE DATA anymore.
COVID Quotes of the Week:
Dr. Robert Malone: "how do you reconcile that this [safe, off-patent, inexpensive] drug - that's being used in emerging economies all across the world to good effect - is being trashed in US and western media. The appearance is because these folks are bought and paid for."
So far most deaths from the vaccine occur during the first two weeks. To blame these deaths on the lack of vaccination instead of on the vaccine, the CDC rules that you are not actually vaccinated until two weeks after having the second injection.
Kunstler: The deceit of the CDC and the FDA in gaming and cooking their Covid-19 data is now emerging from the fog of pandemic hysteria. I will also dare to conjecture that the number of recent and current Covid-19 “cases” turns out to be actually and overwhelmingly adverse reactions to the mRNA experiment, not the disease itself, and that holy hell will erupt among the public as it becomes understood that their livelihoods — and their health — are being stolen as part of this fraud.
Kirsch: STOP listening to the science! Whatever YouTube says is what you should believe. The science says that Ivermectin works. The science is wrong. What matters is what YouTube says, not science. Stop thinking for yourself and do whatever YouTube says. Otherwise, you will be banned, block, and demonetized.
Zelenko: “I’ll do one more mind experiment with you: If everyone on the planet were to get Covid and not get treated, the death-rate globally would be less than half a percent. I’m not advocating for that, because 35 million people would die. However, if we follow the advice of some of the global leaders– like Bill Gates who said last year said “7 billion people need to be vaccinated”– then the death-rate will be over 2 billion people! SO, WAKE UP! THIS IS WORLD WAR 3! We are seeing a level of malevolence that we haven’t seen in the history of humanity!” Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, Author of The Zelenko “Early Treatment” Protocol that saved thousands of Covid-19 patients.
"There’s no evidence that it happens, nor is there any mechanistic reason to imagine that it would happen," Fauci told CNN
That said, at least 46 claims of post-vax swollen testicles have been reported for the Covid-19 jab to the VAERS database of adverse reactions, though it's unknown if any of them resulted in a canceled wedding.
COVID Tweets of the Week:
Small study:
Fully vaccinated people shed as much virus if infected as infected unvaxxed people
Worse, they're more likely to be *asymptomatic* big shedders!
Asymptomatic big shedders were the threat all our lockdown measures are based on
Vaccination *increased* that threat
Even the @CDCgov has acknowledged that there's NO WAY to tell which #Variant someone has unless "Whole Genome Sequencing" is made and that is NOT being done at ALL! #PCR won't even tell apart the #Flu from #Covid
The variants are very minimal - less than 12 amino acids in a field of 1270. And the variants are in different domains of the virus. Biologically almost zero chance of affecting the way that the virus behaves. Variants are the cover story for Syringe doesn't work. See chart.
Low-vaccinated India has now 60% less Coronavirus deaths than the same week last year.
Mid-vaxxed US is up 39% from last year.
Highly-vaccinated Israel and Canada are up 100% and 200% respectively.
I don’t know why it’s so.
Kirsch: Jessica Rose, PhD just had her paper on VAERS analysis of myocarditis rejected after two rounds of review at "Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine." NO REASON GIVEN. This is scientific misconduct at its finest by the peer reviewers (not the Journal). Jessica is first-rate.
You cannot get any paper published that is anti-vaccine nowadays. Academics will ONLY believe what is peer reviewed. So the vaccines are safe because there are no papers saying it isn't, even though the data shows it isn't. BUT NOBODY LOOKS AT THE DATA anymore.
In my hospital the majority of Covid “Unvaccinated” cases are in people who received the first or second jab, but do not yet qualify for the definition the CDC has created for “vaccinated.” This is a pandemic of people who got a shot.
Chris Martenson: When the dust settles, early treatment will be something we look back on and wonder how it was ever fought against, and why, and by whom.
Chris Martenson: When the dust settles, early treatment will be something we look back on and wonder how it was ever fought against, and why, and by whom.
Speaking with nurses at the hospital I'm at in AZ. They're not worried about covid, they're worried about what happens when half the nurses at this hospital quit in a few days when their vaccine mandate goes into effect. None of the nurses are blaming the unvaccinated.
They just won't let go of the vaccine passports plan, despite its obvious flaws in terms of protecting health. This is probably because it's really part of a wider agenda to impose police-state digital IDs.
I ask ethics Prof. Julie Ponesse about the ugly possibility of physically forced vaccines. Dehumanizing the unvaccinated is the start. Listen on TWiC
COVID Thread of the Week:
Walter M Chesnut:
2) ….. The Spike is proven to be brought into the cell by
3) Endocytosis. The spike protein is internalized into cells rapidly and is detected in cells within 5 mi, a hallmark of endocytosis. The amount of spike protein in cells continues to increase for up to 30 min. Thus, SARS-CoV-2 spike protein enters cells via endocytosis. Once it
4) is in the cell, its signaling damages mitochondria. The team then replicated this process in the lab, exposing healthy endothelial cells (which line arteries) to the spike protein. They showed that the spike protein damaged the cells by binding ACE2. This binding disrupted
5) ACE2’s molecular signaling to mitochondria (organelles that generate energy for cells), causing the mitochondria to become damaged and fragmented. Once the mitochondria are damages, this then activates the autoimmune response of the body. The accumulation of defective
6) mitochondria led to overproduction of an inflammatory protein called type 1 interferon. The findings suggest that failed quality control of mitochondria may cause Sjogren’s, lupus, and other autoimmune diseases through production of interferon. The Spike Protein then proceeds
7) to travel from cell to cell via EXTRACELLULAR VESICLES. This means, of course, they will NOT BE FOUND IN THE BLOOD. We would not have been aware all this time. As the S1 unit has been found in monocytes 15 months post infection, it may be traveling intracellularly, executing a
8) “Sherman’s March Through Georgia” on the mitochondria, resulting in multisystemic autoimmunity. Again, we have known the spike enters cells via endocytosis since 2008. …
CO-VIDs of the Week:
Dr. Peter A. McCullough: "All of Hill's tenets of causality are fulfilled. We are very certain about this, the vaccine is directly killing individuals".
Watch the full video here
Must watch:
See Us. Hear Us. Believe Us. Heal Us.
Also:
go to The Automatic Earth for the vid, but here is Ilargi’s preamble
Ilargi: I Am Afraid
After 20 months of reading into the topic for hours every single day, if there’s one thing I’m convinced of, it’s that a simple sufficient daily intake of vitamin D, zinc and ivermectin or chloroquine (and you can “fancy that up”, check the site below) would have stopped, and still can stop, at least 70% of cases. Ergo: no more overwhelmed heath care, no more lockdowns, no more economic damage. We could, should, have done this 20 months ago.
And then if someone does get sick -immune systems can be heavily compromised, for instance in obese people-, there are protocols aplenty for early treatment. There are entire series of them at c19early.com. 90% of deaths have been entirely preventable. And 90% of those in the future, will be, too. But not for the same reason.
The reason these treatments are being kept from you is that they would destroy the legal basis on which the vaccines operate. But that would be a good thing, because these substances have started to make a lot of victims, killing people or maiming them, and it is enough. It is also what I am afraid of, that those numbers will absolutely skyrocket.
Repeat: The vaccines do not protect you from infecting others or being infected, or from severe disease or death (though that last bit takes time to sink in). They MAY have some effect for a few months, but then their effect starts waning, and you will need more of the same. In the meantime, they appear to enhance the infectiousness of the vaccinated. Who are given vaccine passports and QR codes, for heaven’s sake, so they can go infect more people.
The problem is that you are not allowed to know about any of this. But the next problem is they will not be able to hide that fact, for much longer, that the vaccines are killing machines. For now, vaccine deaths are all hidden in Covid death numbers, especially the “Delta cases”, a very convenient grab bag, if not for the fact that Delta was supposed to be a much milder variant than Alpha. And wouldn’t you know, there’s plenty tricks to list vaccinated deaths as unvaccinated.
…
…
The last few days have scared the heebees out of me, even if we knew something like this might start to happen. It’s here, and they’re still trying to force you to take these things. I called it Russian Roulette a while back, but it’s worse than that.
Listen to this undertaker from Milton Keynes (UK), who is sure almost all Covid deaths coming in now are vaccine deaths (disguised as Delta), and then tell me I’m afraid of nothing: (see vid, Funeral Director Whistleblower John O’Looney with Max Igan, also available here)
For the record, tho it was a compelling interview and i have little doubt he was sincere, I don't agree with his speculative conclusions.
It is easy to see how he arrived at them; the mind is predisposed to take a collection of information and try to make a sensible pattern of it; and his conclusions are consistent with the observations he has made; but they don’t necessarily cohere well with other facts he didn't consider, or other elements that he has not addressed; for example, his theory (depopulation agenda) doesn’t do a good job of answering questions like: if this theory were organized by the rich elite in the U.S.-dominated West, why would Russia and China et al go along with the vaccination program; either way, why would the West not be aiming to distribute vaccines moreso outside their own countries, i.e. in the developing world, rather than hogging the vaccines for their own populations; needless to say, the notion that the sociopaths who run the world couldn't be psychopathic enough to have a depopulation agenda would not be one of my complaints against his theory.
As usual, the theory that is more likely correct is simply to assert a combination of irrationality, incompetence, profit-driven corporatocratic greed, and pro-techno wishful thinking.
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
Excerpted extensively thanks to Ilargi, and linked to on another site, because Mercola does not leave his posts up any longer, due to the extreme censorship he has been forced to contend with
Mercola: Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon?
In his book, “Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon? A Scientific and Forensic Investigation,” Dr. Richard Fleming documents evidence showing SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon created over the past two decades. Once you conclude that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon, you must also recognize that the COVID shots are nothing more than the genetic reproduction of that bioweapon. In other words, they are bioweapons too. The same people involved in the funding of this bioweapon are the same people who have interfered with doctors providing treatment to patients, and the same people who have been involved in the development of these COVID shots. Health care workers are injecting people with something they cannot possibly give informed consent for, which means health care workers are violating their Hippocratic Oath.
Health care workers who give these COVID shots are also violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Treaty, the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki and other legal statutes. Helping you take control of your health in these crazy times is Dr. Richard Fleming, a prolific author in addition to being a physicist, a nuclear cardiologist, researcher and attorney. Here, we discuss his latest book “Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon? A Scientific and Forensic Investigation,” slated for release September 7, 2021. It’s currently available for preorder on Amazon. It’s an incredibly well-documented book and contains history that many of us aren’t aware of. As it turns out, the creation of this virus goes back not a year or two but two decades.
[..] “You see real efforts to produce viruses, coronaviruses, in particular. Spike proteins of coronaviruses to be even more specific, as I show in the book, paid for by the federal government by people who say they were not involved in gain-of-function research. Well, their fingerprints are on the documents, or on the published papers or on the grants or on the patents. You can’t say that you’re not involved in things when the documents show differently. They show the work and the money that came out of the federal government that went to Peter Daszak at EcoHealth, that went to Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other places. For me, as a researcher, obviously, once I start to investigate something, the only way you can stop me from doing that is to put a bullet in my head.
Otherwise, I’m going to stay after it. There are things that are not in the book that are going to come out in international criminal court, things I’m saving for that, because this virus is, by definition, a biological weapon. It violates the biological weapons convention treaty. You just have to look at the definitions. It provides nothing useful to humanity. It’s dangerous. When Fort Detrick is involved and the Department of Defense is involved … and you see these monies and you see the people that are involved, you realize that … the United States was playing China, China was playing the United States, and you saw who got caught in between. And they’re still playing the game. For lack of a better term, this book is an indictment.
That’s now my attorney hat going on saying that I have provided in this book evidence that I would take to a grand jury … I’m not somebody who is going to give up on having these people dealt with, because all the freedoms that we have lost, and the rights that we have lost as individuals, not to mention just the numbers of people who have died. My argument is … the reason why they died is because they didn’t get treatment for the inflammation and the blood clotting that I and other doctors have shown works. The ultimate argument is that you can’t kill somebody more than dead … they can’t do worse than kill the patient. And we’ve already seen what doing nothing does. It kills the patient.
At no other time in American history have doctors looked at patients and said, ‘We can’t do anything for you. Go home and come back when you get sicker.’ We have always treated people with breathing problems with medications for breathing problems. We’ve always treated people with clotting problems with medicines to stop the clotting. And so, the reason why this is so critical to understand is because the same people who were involved in the funding of this bioweapon are the same people who have interfered with doctors providing treatment to patients, and the same people who have been involved in the development of these vaccines.”
GeoPolitical Fare:
Morrison, the third amigo, speaks loudly to Xi
The three amigos – an Aussie marketing huckster, an English buffoon and an American senior citizen. Fresh from being chased out of Afghanistan and humiliated by barbarian terrorists they’d set out to defeat 20 years earlier. Their marquee initiative – for Washington and London to supply nuclear propulsion technology for Australian submarines – is serious. … China has 66 submarines. It’s expected to have 10 more by 2030. Six of those new boats will be nuclear-powered, according to the US Office of Naval Intelligence. In the time it takes China to build 10 new submarines, Australia will be taking delivery of exactly none.
CaitOz Fare:
The fact that our world is hurtling toward man-made obliteration on multiple fronts should probably occupy more of our conversational bandwidth than it does.
❖
My basic overall position is that humanity is about to end itself via climate chaos or nuclear war due to global capitalism and oligarchic imperialism, that propaganda prevents people from rising up to stop this, and our only path out is a mass-scale psychological transformation.
If you’ve ever been curious why I don’t write more about this or that subject, it’s usually because the above is my area of focus. Everything I write points to this in some way. That’s what I do here.
Australia Continues Its Plunge Into Authoritarianism And Military Brinkmanship
So there you have it. Australia is not aligned with the US to protect itself from China. Australia is aligned with the US to protect itself from the US.
…
And we continue to see other authoritarian escalations in Australia which have nothing to do with Covid as well.
…
This slide into military brinkmanship and authoritarian dystopia shows no signs of stopping. The abuses of the powerful will continue to grow more egregious until the people open their eyes to what’s going on and begin taking action to steer us away from the existential dangers we are hurtling toward on multiple fronts.
Other Quotes of the Week:
Maté: For 2+ years, the Mueller team fed a credulous media a series of disingenuous indictments falsely suggesting a Trump-Russia conspiracy that they knew wasn't there, because it all originated w/ a DNC-funded scam. Now we get an indictment offering a window into how the scam began.
Greenwald: It really is this simple: in the corporate media, the more you lie, the more you get promoted, as long as you lie for the right cause and the right people (the security state). See for yourself:
I find @TheStalwart one of the brightest guys out there (& the 2nd smartest OddLots co-host!) but even he's undergoing a few epiphanies lately-
He articulated (very well) what I've been saying very badly for a while-
Despite no real elections or changes in leadership, China is a genuine democracy (as is Russia but let's get there one step at a time) unlike USA (or UK) where we revere the trappings of democracy & regularly change leaders but the populace only has trivial representation
The flaw lies in the very nature & purpose of the STATE itself, which is not to serve society at large & its long-term survival, as supposed, but the misguided personal self-interests of its elites & favoured (esp. wealthy) clients, at the expense of society at large. That's it!
Garcia: AOC aims to have her cake and eat it too. She is both the user and the used… AOC's attendance at the Met Gala was nothing if not one long drawn-out dog whistle to the ruling class that she is absolutely no threat to them.
Astore: OK: Wearing what amounts to a bumper sticker on a gown isn’t going to change the world. It’s a stunt to grab attention, with an element of narcissism to it. But if you’re going to pull a stunt like this, why not go big? Why not be radical?
Big Thoughts:
Welsh: The Lack of Belief In Good
I’ve written in the past that I consider most humans neither good nor bad, but weak. They do more or less what their group wants. But really I’d say that humans, absent fear and incentives, have a slight bias to good. Most people like helping people, don’t like hurting people and so on, as long as they themselves are not hurting or blinded by greed.
The moment a lot of people become chronically scared or greedy, however, that goes away. The scared are defensive and ready to be angry and hate, the greedy become sociopathic or even psychopathic, concerned only for themselves and sometimes a few people around them. Furthermore incentives always cause tunnel vision: people pursuing incentives ignore everything that doesn’t get them to the incentive, and even well designed incentives leave out much that should be done.
Pics of the Week:
India:
They just won't let go of the vaccine passports plan, despite its obvious flaws in terms of protecting health. This is probably because it's really part of a wider agenda to impose police-state digital IDs.
I ask ethics Prof. Julie Ponesse about the ugly possibility of physically forced vaccines. Dehumanizing the unvaccinated is the start. Listen on TWiC
COVID Thread of the Week:
Walter M Chesnut:
2) ….. The Spike is proven to be brought into the cell by
3) Endocytosis. The spike protein is internalized into cells rapidly and is detected in cells within 5 mi, a hallmark of endocytosis. The amount of spike protein in cells continues to increase for up to 30 min. Thus, SARS-CoV-2 spike protein enters cells via endocytosis. Once it
4) is in the cell, its signaling damages mitochondria. The team then replicated this process in the lab, exposing healthy endothelial cells (which line arteries) to the spike protein. They showed that the spike protein damaged the cells by binding ACE2. This binding disrupted
5) ACE2’s molecular signaling to mitochondria (organelles that generate energy for cells), causing the mitochondria to become damaged and fragmented. Once the mitochondria are damages, this then activates the autoimmune response of the body. The accumulation of defective
6) mitochondria led to overproduction of an inflammatory protein called type 1 interferon. The findings suggest that failed quality control of mitochondria may cause Sjogren’s, lupus, and other autoimmune diseases through production of interferon. The Spike Protein then proceeds
7) to travel from cell to cell via EXTRACELLULAR VESICLES. This means, of course, they will NOT BE FOUND IN THE BLOOD. We would not have been aware all this time. As the S1 unit has been found in monocytes 15 months post infection, it may be traveling intracellularly, executing a
8) “Sherman’s March Through Georgia” on the mitochondria, resulting in multisystemic autoimmunity. Again, we have known the spike enters cells via endocytosis since 2008. …
CO-VIDs of the Week:
Dr. Peter A. McCullough: "All of Hill's tenets of causality are fulfilled. We are very certain about this, the vaccine is directly killing individuals".
Watch the full video here
Must watch:
See Us. Hear Us. Believe Us. Heal Us.
Also:
go to The Automatic Earth for the vid, but here is Ilargi’s preamble
Ilargi: I Am Afraid
After 20 months of reading into the topic for hours every single day, if there’s one thing I’m convinced of, it’s that a simple sufficient daily intake of vitamin D, zinc and ivermectin or chloroquine (and you can “fancy that up”, check the site below) would have stopped, and still can stop, at least 70% of cases. Ergo: no more overwhelmed heath care, no more lockdowns, no more economic damage. We could, should, have done this 20 months ago.
And then if someone does get sick -immune systems can be heavily compromised, for instance in obese people-, there are protocols aplenty for early treatment. There are entire series of them at c19early.com. 90% of deaths have been entirely preventable. And 90% of those in the future, will be, too. But not for the same reason.
The reason these treatments are being kept from you is that they would destroy the legal basis on which the vaccines operate. But that would be a good thing, because these substances have started to make a lot of victims, killing people or maiming them, and it is enough. It is also what I am afraid of, that those numbers will absolutely skyrocket.
Repeat: The vaccines do not protect you from infecting others or being infected, or from severe disease or death (though that last bit takes time to sink in). They MAY have some effect for a few months, but then their effect starts waning, and you will need more of the same. In the meantime, they appear to enhance the infectiousness of the vaccinated. Who are given vaccine passports and QR codes, for heaven’s sake, so they can go infect more people.
The problem is that you are not allowed to know about any of this. But the next problem is they will not be able to hide that fact, for much longer, that the vaccines are killing machines. For now, vaccine deaths are all hidden in Covid death numbers, especially the “Delta cases”, a very convenient grab bag, if not for the fact that Delta was supposed to be a much milder variant than Alpha. And wouldn’t you know, there’s plenty tricks to list vaccinated deaths as unvaccinated.
…
…
The last few days have scared the heebees out of me, even if we knew something like this might start to happen. It’s here, and they’re still trying to force you to take these things. I called it Russian Roulette a while back, but it’s worse than that.
Listen to this undertaker from Milton Keynes (UK), who is sure almost all Covid deaths coming in now are vaccine deaths (disguised as Delta), and then tell me I’m afraid of nothing: (see vid, Funeral Director Whistleblower John O’Looney with Max Igan, also available here)
For the record, tho it was a compelling interview and i have little doubt he was sincere, I don't agree with his speculative conclusions.
It is easy to see how he arrived at them; the mind is predisposed to take a collection of information and try to make a sensible pattern of it; and his conclusions are consistent with the observations he has made; but they don’t necessarily cohere well with other facts he didn't consider, or other elements that he has not addressed; for example, his theory (depopulation agenda) doesn’t do a good job of answering questions like: if this theory were organized by the rich elite in the U.S.-dominated West, why would Russia and China et al go along with the vaccination program; either way, why would the West not be aiming to distribute vaccines moreso outside their own countries, i.e. in the developing world, rather than hogging the vaccines for their own populations; needless to say, the notion that the sociopaths who run the world couldn't be psychopathic enough to have a depopulation agenda would not be one of my complaints against his theory.
As usual, the theory that is more likely correct is simply to assert a combination of irrationality, incompetence, profit-driven corporatocratic greed, and pro-techno wishful thinking.
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
Excerpted extensively thanks to Ilargi, and linked to on another site, because Mercola does not leave his posts up any longer, due to the extreme censorship he has been forced to contend with
Mercola: Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon?
In his book, “Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon? A Scientific and Forensic Investigation,” Dr. Richard Fleming documents evidence showing SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon created over the past two decades. Once you conclude that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon, you must also recognize that the COVID shots are nothing more than the genetic reproduction of that bioweapon. In other words, they are bioweapons too. The same people involved in the funding of this bioweapon are the same people who have interfered with doctors providing treatment to patients, and the same people who have been involved in the development of these COVID shots. Health care workers are injecting people with something they cannot possibly give informed consent for, which means health care workers are violating their Hippocratic Oath.
Health care workers who give these COVID shots are also violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Treaty, the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki and other legal statutes. Helping you take control of your health in these crazy times is Dr. Richard Fleming, a prolific author in addition to being a physicist, a nuclear cardiologist, researcher and attorney. Here, we discuss his latest book “Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon? A Scientific and Forensic Investigation,” slated for release September 7, 2021. It’s currently available for preorder on Amazon. It’s an incredibly well-documented book and contains history that many of us aren’t aware of. As it turns out, the creation of this virus goes back not a year or two but two decades.
[..] “You see real efforts to produce viruses, coronaviruses, in particular. Spike proteins of coronaviruses to be even more specific, as I show in the book, paid for by the federal government by people who say they were not involved in gain-of-function research. Well, their fingerprints are on the documents, or on the published papers or on the grants or on the patents. You can’t say that you’re not involved in things when the documents show differently. They show the work and the money that came out of the federal government that went to Peter Daszak at EcoHealth, that went to Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other places. For me, as a researcher, obviously, once I start to investigate something, the only way you can stop me from doing that is to put a bullet in my head.
Otherwise, I’m going to stay after it. There are things that are not in the book that are going to come out in international criminal court, things I’m saving for that, because this virus is, by definition, a biological weapon. It violates the biological weapons convention treaty. You just have to look at the definitions. It provides nothing useful to humanity. It’s dangerous. When Fort Detrick is involved and the Department of Defense is involved … and you see these monies and you see the people that are involved, you realize that … the United States was playing China, China was playing the United States, and you saw who got caught in between. And they’re still playing the game. For lack of a better term, this book is an indictment.
That’s now my attorney hat going on saying that I have provided in this book evidence that I would take to a grand jury … I’m not somebody who is going to give up on having these people dealt with, because all the freedoms that we have lost, and the rights that we have lost as individuals, not to mention just the numbers of people who have died. My argument is … the reason why they died is because they didn’t get treatment for the inflammation and the blood clotting that I and other doctors have shown works. The ultimate argument is that you can’t kill somebody more than dead … they can’t do worse than kill the patient. And we’ve already seen what doing nothing does. It kills the patient.
At no other time in American history have doctors looked at patients and said, ‘We can’t do anything for you. Go home and come back when you get sicker.’ We have always treated people with breathing problems with medications for breathing problems. We’ve always treated people with clotting problems with medicines to stop the clotting. And so, the reason why this is so critical to understand is because the same people who were involved in the funding of this bioweapon are the same people who have interfered with doctors providing treatment to patients, and the same people who have been involved in the development of these vaccines.”
GeoPolitical Fare:
Morrison, the third amigo, speaks loudly to Xi
The three amigos – an Aussie marketing huckster, an English buffoon and an American senior citizen. Fresh from being chased out of Afghanistan and humiliated by barbarian terrorists they’d set out to defeat 20 years earlier. Their marquee initiative – for Washington and London to supply nuclear propulsion technology for Australian submarines – is serious. … China has 66 submarines. It’s expected to have 10 more by 2030. Six of those new boats will be nuclear-powered, according to the US Office of Naval Intelligence. In the time it takes China to build 10 new submarines, Australia will be taking delivery of exactly none.
CaitOz Fare:
The fact that our world is hurtling toward man-made obliteration on multiple fronts should probably occupy more of our conversational bandwidth than it does.
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My basic overall position is that humanity is about to end itself via climate chaos or nuclear war due to global capitalism and oligarchic imperialism, that propaganda prevents people from rising up to stop this, and our only path out is a mass-scale psychological transformation.
If you’ve ever been curious why I don’t write more about this or that subject, it’s usually because the above is my area of focus. Everything I write points to this in some way. That’s what I do here.
Australia Continues Its Plunge Into Authoritarianism And Military Brinkmanship
So there you have it. Australia is not aligned with the US to protect itself from China. Australia is aligned with the US to protect itself from the US.
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And we continue to see other authoritarian escalations in Australia which have nothing to do with Covid as well.
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This slide into military brinkmanship and authoritarian dystopia shows no signs of stopping. The abuses of the powerful will continue to grow more egregious until the people open their eyes to what’s going on and begin taking action to steer us away from the existential dangers we are hurtling toward on multiple fronts.
Other Quotes of the Week:
Maté: For 2+ years, the Mueller team fed a credulous media a series of disingenuous indictments falsely suggesting a Trump-Russia conspiracy that they knew wasn't there, because it all originated w/ a DNC-funded scam. Now we get an indictment offering a window into how the scam began.
Greenwald: It really is this simple: in the corporate media, the more you lie, the more you get promoted, as long as you lie for the right cause and the right people (the security state). See for yourself:
I find @TheStalwart one of the brightest guys out there (& the 2nd smartest OddLots co-host!) but even he's undergoing a few epiphanies lately-
He articulated (very well) what I've been saying very badly for a while-
Despite no real elections or changes in leadership, China is a genuine democracy (as is Russia but let's get there one step at a time) unlike USA (or UK) where we revere the trappings of democracy & regularly change leaders but the populace only has trivial representation
The flaw lies in the very nature & purpose of the STATE itself, which is not to serve society at large & its long-term survival, as supposed, but the misguided personal self-interests of its elites & favoured (esp. wealthy) clients, at the expense of society at large. That's it!
Garcia: AOC aims to have her cake and eat it too. She is both the user and the used… AOC's attendance at the Met Gala was nothing if not one long drawn-out dog whistle to the ruling class that she is absolutely no threat to them.
Astore: OK: Wearing what amounts to a bumper sticker on a gown isn’t going to change the world. It’s a stunt to grab attention, with an element of narcissism to it. But if you’re going to pull a stunt like this, why not go big? Why not be radical?
Big Thoughts:
Welsh: The Lack of Belief In Good
I’ve written in the past that I consider most humans neither good nor bad, but weak. They do more or less what their group wants. But really I’d say that humans, absent fear and incentives, have a slight bias to good. Most people like helping people, don’t like hurting people and so on, as long as they themselves are not hurting or blinded by greed.
The moment a lot of people become chronically scared or greedy, however, that goes away. The scared are defensive and ready to be angry and hate, the greedy become sociopathic or even psychopathic, concerned only for themselves and sometimes a few people around them. Furthermore incentives always cause tunnel vision: people pursuing incentives ignore everything that doesn’t get them to the incentive, and even well designed incentives leave out much that should be done.
Pics of the Week:
India:
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