Regular Fare:
Convex Strategies: Risk Update
... The above central bank gibberish about inflation, ostensibly the most critical negative externality of their efforts to artificially sustain the economic sandpile that they’ve tasked themselves with propping up, is just one of endless examples of the failings of the tools and understandings with measuring risk within complex adaptive systems. We quoted from Per Bak in last month’s Update in relation to how economists view the findings of Benoit Mandelbrot in terms of the power law nature of markets and economies. It warrants another reminder here: “His findings have been largely ignored by economists, probably because they don’t have the faintest clue as to what is going on.”
It is really Mandelbrot’s work, dating back to the 1960s, and detailed in his 2004 book, “The (Mis) Behavior of Markets”, that lays out the shortcomings of the generally accepted theories and models applied to markets and economies today. The truly amazing thing about his work is that nobody really disputes it, yet they carry on disregarding it anyway.
Kolanovic On Yesterday's Shock Move In Bonds: "A Technical Overshoot That Will Revert; Buy The Dip"
But did the world really change yesterday?
That's the rhetorical question JPMorgan's one time quant and current global head of strategy Marko Kolanovic asked in a note published this morning, and not surprisingly, answered in the negative:
"No. Despite the large move in yield curves, equity factors, and commodities there was no new macro-economic data that would explain such move, no change in COVID trends (the downward trajectory continues), and no new surprise coming from corporate earnings."
That's one way of interpreting what happened; another is that central banks merely confirmed the macro-economic data that was staring everyone in the face for months - i.e., that inflation is not transitory - and that instead of sticking their heads in the sand, central banks are finally admitting they are behind the curve. And, as a result, bond traders - many of whom have never worked in an inflationary environment - scrambled to trade alongside this long overdue admission from the money printers.
Or:
Bond Market Crash Will Surprise Only The Uninformed
Bonds will collapse on investors’ delayed realization that inflation is here to stay, and won’t be tamed without serious policy tightening.
"Our Fire And Ice Narrative Remains Intact": Why Wall Street's Most Bearish Analyst Simply Refuses To Capitulate
The bottom line, according to Wilson is that "the growth slowdown will be worse and last longer than expected—i.e., well into the first half of 2022 as the payback in demand arrives with the sharp y/y decline in personal disposable income" a thesis we wholeheartedly agree with as we have been noting recently the vast majority of Americans have already run out of "excess savings" which helped to propel the economy for much of 2021
The Crack Up Boom And Bust
Ludwig Von Mises died in 1973 long before Quantitative Easing (aka. monetary welfare for the rich) was invented. His conventional inflationary theories never predicted the massive deflationary impulse that Globalization would soon create. A world of poverty imported by container ship straight to America's shores. Unlike prior mercantilist eras throughout history, Asia's exporters have never cared that the U.S. dollar was no longer backed by gold, hence they have never rejected it as Von Mises predicted. Instead, they took their bounty in factories, jobs, and industries. Now, ironically, they are as wed to this Faustian Bargain trade relationship as we are.
It's clear from the comments on my Twitter feed that most people don't understand the difference between inflation and deflation. That's because at the individual level they feel very similar - a declining standard of living as a paycheck no longer covers expenses. Which explains why most people view this as an inflationary death spiral. At the macro level however, inflation and deflation are nothing alike. Inflation takes place when consumer purchasing power is rising along with wages to fuel the inflationary spiral. It assumes FULL employment. What if no one had a job, would there be inflation? Of course not. The U.S. currently has the lowest EMPLOYMENT rate in modern history. People are leaving the workforce in droves and economists can't figure out why.
… There are other deflationary factors that were accelerated by the pandemic: One was the overuse of technology.
… And of course global debt exploded during the pandemic.
… Taking this all together, I am not a deflationist, I am a hyper-deflationist. The only thing standing between us and hard economic reality is human history's largest asset bubble. Consumer confidence has already collapsed and it has taken down housing and auto confidence along with it. This is the consequence of monetary welfare for the rich. It has bid up asset values beyond the reach of normal citizens. As a result, household liabilities have sky-rocketed. The deflationary burden is increasing with each passing day and it will accelerate upon asset bubble collapse.
Roberts: Stocks, profit margins and the economy
A rise in the cost of borrowing should lead to a fall in stock market investment as most financial investors borrow to speculate. However, the US stock market seems impervious to the news on inflation and interest rates. Why is that?
The reason seems to be that investors are still convinced that the global economy is recovering fast as the vaccines roll out and the fiscal stimulus plans of many governments, particularly the US, are to continue. As a result, forecasts of revenues and earnings being made by companies are very strong, with earnings rising at a 20% yoy pace.
…
How does that square with the data which show that the profitability of capital in the US is near record lows?
Well first, both the stock market jump and the profits being recorded are heavily concentrated in the information technology sector and within that, the so-called FAANGS. This was something I and others pointed out before the pandemic struck in 2019. But it is even more so in 2021. … So if you strip out these sectors from the stock market and the profits data, then the rest of the corporate sector is not doing so well, at all. Moreover, US corporate profits have been heavily subsidised in the last year from government handouts.
This explains the numerator in the measure of average profitability of capital in the US. Then there is the denominator. Profit margins measure profits against output. But profitability of capital measures profits against the cost of fixed assets (plant, machinery, technology) and the wage bill. And investment in fixed assets has been weak, in the sense of delivering productivity-increasing technology outside the tech sector itself. Vast swathes of industry and services in the US, Europe and Japan are barely making enough profits to cover the depreciation of existing assets and the cost of debt incurred. Investment (capex) relative to depreciation, which measures investment in new technology, has been declining over the long term, and especially in the pandemic slump, with little sign of recovery in 2021.
So while the tech sector holds up the stock markets and gives the impression of a widespread leap forward in profits, the rest of the capitalist economy is in the doldrums and has been throughout the ‘long depression’ of the 2010s.
What is noticeable when we get to the so-called ‘real economy’ and away from the fantasy world of the stock and bond markets (the markets for what Marx called ‘fictitious capital’) is that the recovery from the pandemic slump of 2020 is beginning to falter.
…
Indeed, by the end of 2022, JPM still expects world GDP to be below the pre-pandemic level – and well below where world GDP would have been without a pandemic slump. The recovery is not V-shaped but a reverse square root
A Global Oil Shortage Is Inevitable
Green energy: A bubble in unrealistic expectations?
This week’s EVA provides another sneak preview into David Hay’s book-in-process, “Bubble 3.0” discussing what he thinks is the crucial topic of “greenflation.” This is a term he coined referring to the rising price for metals and minerals that are essential for solar and wind power, electric cars, and other renewable technologies.
It also centers on the reality that as global policymakers have turned against the fossil fuel industry, energy producers are for the first time in history not responding to dramatically higher prices by increasing production. Consequently, there is a difficult tradeoff that arises as the world pushes harder to combat climate change, driving up energy costs to painful levels, especially for lower income individuals.
Will the Supply Chain Crisis Lead to More Onshoring?
… But let’s get back to the biggest reason there is no way, no how we will see a massive wave of onshoring, no matter how bad supply chain breakdowns get: management incentives and financialization.
… The one thing that could make Doomberg right is war with China. And that’s not implausible given the bizarre US love of eyepoking, particularly over issues that China regards as non-negotiable, number one being the status of Taiwan.
The Global Supply Shock Is About To Enter A Negative Feedback Loop With Weakening Demand
Bringing it all together, the data remain on the pessimistic end of expectations in terms of the macro outlook. The aggressive flattening of curves in recent days is consistent with a view of a very low global r* and high excess savings interacting with an increasingly vicious negative supply shock
Tverberg: Spike in energy prices suggests that sharp changes are ahead
An analysis of what is going terribly wrong in the world economy
The world economy requires stability.
… Back in the 1950 to 1979 era, when energy supplies of many kinds were growing rapidly, it was possible to build stability into the economic system:
… But as high energy prices hit in the 1970s, the system became more and more strained.
… Now, through several iterations, the economy has become increasingly complex, with less and less redundancy to provide stability. The energy price spike that is being experienced today is a warning that something is very, very wrong. As I see the situation, the trend toward complexity has gone too far; the economic system is starting to break down. Sharp changes appear to be ahead. The world economy is shifting into contraction mode, with more and more parts of the system failing.
… [1] If energy supplies are inexpensive and widely available, it is easy to build an economy.
…..
[9] Major changes for the worse seem to be ahead for the world economy.
At this point, it seems as if complexity has gone too far. The pandemic moved the world economy in the direction of contraction but prices of fossil fuels tend to spike as the economy opens up.
The recent spikes in prices are highly unlikely to produce the natural gas, coal and oil that is required. They are more likely to cause recession. Fossil fuel suppliers need high prices guaranteed for the long term. Even if such guarantees could be provided, it would still take several years to ramp up production to the level needed.
The general trend of the economy is likely to be in the direction of the Seneca Cliff (Figure 1). Everything won’t collapse all at once, but big “chunks” may start breaking away.
The debt system is a very vulnerable part. Debt is, in effect, a promise of goods or services made with energy in the future. If the energy isn’t there, the promised goods and services won’t be available. Governments may try to hide this problem with new debt, but governments can’t solve the underlying problem of missing goods and services.
…
I could continue speculating on the changes ahead. The basic problem, as I see it, is that we have reached limits on oil, coal and natural gas extraction, pretty much simultaneously. The limits are really complexity limits. The renewables that we have today aren’t able to save us, regardless of what the models of Mark Jacobson and others might say.
In the next few years, I am afraid that we will find out how collapse actually proceeds in a very interconnected world economy.
Plunge In Export Shipments Sparks US GDP Downgrades, Economy On Verge Of Contraction
‘I quit’ is all the rage. Blip or sea change?
China Can’t Offset Its Property Bubble Easily
The Chinese regime may contain the financial implications, but it can’t offset the real estate sector’s effect on the real economy. This means weaker growth, higher risk, and lower consumption and investor appetite for China exposure. The central bank can’t solve a problem of solvency with liquidity.
Property bubble-driven growth always leads to debt-driven stagnation.
Evergrande is just the tip of China’s debt iceberg
Taibbi: "Meltdown": How "Hope and Change" led to MAGA
Interview with David Sirota, creator of the new Audible podcast series about the aftereffects of the 2008 financial crash
… Trump hammered Obama on corruption and favoritism, painted Hillary Clinton as the sequel agent of Wall Street, and won making promises of sweeping action. This, Sirota says, is how “hope and change became MAGA and mayhem.” In an interview with Useful Idiots, he explained how the series was intended to be a wakeup call for Democrats, who continue to head off real examinations of their recent past, inviting, perhaps, repeats of the same self-inflicted disaster.
Bill Mitchell: When ‘new’ is really old and doesn’t get us very far – latest BIS paper
It takes a while for the mainstream organisations in economics, banking and finance to start to realise that the framework they use cannot explain the actual events in the real world, without serious revision. The problem though, is that the overall framework is flawed and the typical ‘response to anomaly’ approach, which changes a few assumptions to get ‘novel results’ is inadequate because it leaves one blind to all the possible policy solutions. The latest example is the Bank of International Settlements paper – Indebted Demand (released October 19, 2021) – which was written by three economists from Princeton, Harvard and Chicago Booth, respectively. They now recognise that rising inequality and massive household debt is a major problem for economic growth and macroeconomic stability. But, in maintaining ‘conventional’ assumptions about the government sector, they miss the vital linkages in the story, that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists have been providing for the last 25 or so years. Whether these responses to anomaly represent progress or different variations in a flawed ‘chess’ strategy is a matter of opinion. My thought is they are a largely a waste of time, although marginally, they demonstrate that elements of mainstream macro theory that were considered core elements a decade ago are no longer sustainable.
The BIS paper authors think they have come up with something new, although if they had read the literature they would know that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists have been talking about the phenomena they identify since the 1990s.
In attempting to reduce the hysteria about government debt that dominates the mainstream, MMT economists shift the attention to the public debt held by the currency-users (households, firms etc).
While mainstream economists, especially those who seek public attention with wild claims, come up with solvency thresholds (remember the 80 per cent threshold from the spreadsheet twins Reinhardt and Rogoff), MMT economists point out that the non-government sector balance sheets can reach a state of precarity, which then impacts back on private spending growth and output and employment levels.
We have been writing about the impacts of excessive private credit growth for decades.
It was obvious that governments could temporarily pursue austerity programs and introduce fiscal drag into the system as they chased fiscal surpluses if they could manage the politics of that anti-social policy strategy.
However, if the strategy to retrench the public sector was to avoid creating a major economic recession, then the government had to rely on an explosion of private credit growth to maintain household consumption spending as the fiscal squeeze was undermining it.
The strategy to suppress real wages growth over the last few decades also relied on credit growth sustaining household consumption spending.
Governments achieved that state through the financial market deregulations of the 1980s and 1990s and the lax prudential oversight that marked this period. …
…
Who would have thought?
And the BIS authors conclude that “Financial deregulation … unambiguously reduces long-run equilibrium interest rates and increases household debt”, and, in turn, reduces aggregate spending and income generation overall.
Gosh! Revelations.
The paper examines what all this means for fiscal and monetary policy.
This is where the wheels fall off.
…
…
In that context, the reliance on monetary policy to address the downward pressures on aggregate spending, forced interest rates lower and lower until, now, we have negative short term rates in some jurisdictions.
It is all tied together, and the BIS authors do not see that because they maintain a ‘conventional’ model of government.
Other Charts: (links: one, two, )
Bubble Fare:
Tesla Becomes Lowest-Revenue Company to Hit $1 Trillion Market Value
Old but interesting:
Ponzis and bitcoin as a response to a bad economy: the case of Nigeria
If you start with a large population of unhappy young people who want to play life-changing zero-sum games, combine that with limitations on legal gambling, and add in a massive economic collapse which only makes their lives worse, you're going to get a big wave of illegal ponzi schemes cropping up. Canada and the US also have problems with inequality and poverty, albeit not as extreme as Nigeria. Our economies have also been hit by the biggest shock in decades. But unlike Nigeria, Canada and the US have well-developed capital markets. So when desperate Canadians and Americans look for long shot life-changing bets, they needn't limit themselves to traditional gambles like lotteries, casinos, or online poker. Online brokerages like Robin Hood and Wealthsimple make it easy for us to make hundred-to-one bets in options markets or leverage up on Tesla or GameStop stock.
COVID-19 notes:
Jabs do not reduce risk of passing Covid within household, study suggests
Research reveals fully vaccinated people are just as likely to pass virus on to those they share a home with
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
The Centerpiece of the Build Back Better Climate Plan Has Been Stripped Out
There’s No Cheap Way to Deal With the Climate Crisis
David Wallace-Wells: Avoiding apocalypse
COP26: Doomsters, deniers, deal-makers and dreamers
The first COP (Conference of the Parties) was held in Berlin in 1995, a time when there were 360 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere: eighty above the pre-industrial standard of 280 and already ten above the “safe” concentration later highlighted by Bill McKibben’s advocacy group 350.org. Today, we are at 420, a level not seen on Earth since sea levels were twenty metres higher than they are now.
The inaugural conference was called out of a sense of crisis. Since then, we have more than doubled the damage done, with half of all the carbon ever released into the atmosphere by humans since the dawn of humanity put there since that first COP.
… According to the first instalment of the next major report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – its sixth, due to be completed next year – at least one third of warming up to this point has been “masked” by the cooling effects of aerosol pollution, a phenomenon that is currently killing as many as ten million people each year. Take that away, and we would be well past the goal enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement of limiting the temperature rise to 1.5°C, and perhaps past 2°C as well – a level long felt to be the threshold of catastrophe.
At present, though scientists generally believe methane drawdown can offset that aerosol effect, limiting warming to even 2°C seems unlikely.
Schwarzenegger: 'Nothing is getting done' at U.N. climate summits
… saying they promote countries' empty promises on emissions reductions and funding.
Russia Has Abandoned Climate Denial and That May Prove Awkward
The Kremlin’s COP26 summit proposals risk dragging geopolitical disputes into climate negotiations
Climate Change: The Greatest National Security Threat to the United States
Frances Coppola: How to use People's QE to fight climate change
Other Fare:
2021 Pesticides in the Pantry: Transparency & Risk in Food Supply Chains
People weren’t so lazy back then
While it’s been well documented that technological and social changes have reduced levels of physical activity the past two centuries, the precise drop-off had never been calculated. The paper puts a quantitative number to the literature and shows that historical records of resting body temperature may be able to serve as a measure of population-level physical activity.
People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much
Breaking up social-media companies is one way to fix them. Shutting their users up is a better one.
… It’s long past time to question a fundamental premise of online life: What if people shouldn’t be able to say so much, and to so many, so often?
… Wouldn’t it just be better if fewer people posted less stuff, less frequently, and if smaller audiences saw it?
Scientists discover new phase of water, known as "superionic ice," inside planets
Contrarian Perspectives:
Extra [controversial or non-market-related] Fare:
*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Regular Fare:
Matt Stoller: Enough is Enough: The Criminal Case Against Mark Zuckerberg
The rule of law does not apply to the powerful. It should. And Facebook is a good place to start.
Fauci Funded Yet Another Cruel Beagle Experiment
Add this to the growing list.
Anthony Fauci Has Been Abusing Animals for 40 Years
The stuff you've seen on social media barely scratches the surface.
It Wasn’t Just Beagles and Monkeys – Fauci’s NIH Also Funded Medical Experiments on AIDS Orphans in NY City
Climate Crisis Fare:
‘Every Turn in This Case Has Been Another Brick Wall, and Behind It Is Chevron’
What Big Oil Knew About Climate Change, in Its Own Words
By the late 1970s, the American Petroleum Institute had formed a secret committee called the “CO2 and Climate Task Force,” which included representatives of many of the major oil companies, to privately monitor and discuss the latest developments in climate science.
In 1980, the task force invited a scientist from Stanford University, John Laurmann, to brief them on the state of climate science. Today, we have a copy of Laurmann’s presentation, which warned that if fossil fuels continued to be used, global warming would be “barely noticeable” by 2005, but by the 2060s would have “globally catastrophic effects.” That same year, the American Petroleum Institute called on governments to triple coal production worldwide, insisting there would be no negative consequences despite what it knew internally.
COVID Fare:
*** Crawford: The Pandemic Wars: Anatomy of a Risk-Benefit Analysis
Let us be clear, we are living in an extremely confusing war where the current battlefront involves a vaccination campaign. But understanding reveals the nature of illusions. What is it that we need to understand that would settle a debate between two groups of good faith actors, one of which is under the spell of a propaganda machine while each believes that describes the other?
The Answer: A risk-benefit analysis (RBA) of the mass vaccination program.
This is my attempt to help you, the reader, understand what the RBA should look like. That is not to say that I know for certain that I have it all right. That's a tall order for anyone. But I believe that long before this task is complete, a great many people will be able to read through this and reach a more informed conclusion.
Before we get to the RBA itself, let's lay out the criteria for policy analysis of the experimental mass vaccination program for COVID-19.
The Criteria
There are many ways to formulate a set of criteria for whether or not experimental mass vaccination for COVID-19 using the currently available vaccines is good policy, but the following are similar to those traditionally used by health agencies around the world.
1. The measured benefits to individuals must outweigh the measured risks.
2. There is no superior policy option.
3. The policy entails no substantial risks (knowns, known unknowns, or unknown unknowns) that could overwhelm the degree to which the RBA outpaces simpler options.
There is an implicit zeroth criterion of informed consent.
Thousands of Physicians and Medical Scientists Sign “Rome Declaration” in Protest, Launch New Information Platform
Over 7,200 physicians and medical scientists worldwide have signed the “Rome Declaration” to alert citizens about the deadly consequences of Covid-19 policy makers’ and medical authorities’ unprecedented behavior; behavior such as denying patient access to lifesaving early treatments, disrupting the sacred, physician-patient relationship and suppressing open scientific discussion for profits and power. …
Berenson: The CDC hits a new low
(I didn’t think it was possible either.)
But yesterday the Centers for Disease Control, America’s not-at-all-politicized public health agency, released a new study purporting to show that vaccination protects against Covid infection better than natural immunity. Of course, a wave of stories about the benefits of mRNA vaccination followed.
To do this, the CDC used some magic statistical analysis to turn inside raw data that actually showed almost four times as many fully vaccinated people being hospitalized with Covid as those with natural immunity - and FIFTEEN TIMES as many over the summer.
I kid you not.
Further, the study runs contrary to a much larger paper from Israeli researchers in August. … In contrast - how do I put this politely? - the CDC study is meaningless gibberish that would never have been published if the agency did not face huge political pressure to get people vaccinated.
Let’s take a look. …
… Science!
*** el gato malo: swedish study shows covid vaccines drop below zero efficacy on spread by about 200 days
companies like pfizer are VERY good at clinical trials.
they do not make mistakes. they make choices.
and given these longer term results, it seems clear why they chose to run short trials and then eliminate the control groups after about 90 days. because that’s when things start to go off the rails.
…
it also raises questions about whether the vaccines ever provide ANY sterilizing immunity at all or if they merely prevent symptoms. recall that both the mRNA drug trials only tested those reporting symptoms for covid to assess efficacy.
again, seems like a choice, not an error.
…
i wonder if it was avoided because it it conflicted with the conclusions the authors wanted to draw (lest they be banished from the grant money gravy train) which were, of course:
“The results have important clinical implications, as they strengthen the evidence-based rationale for administration of a third booster dose”
but there seems to be quite a strong argument to the contrary. this means that the efficacy of these vaccines wanes VERY rapidly. you’d need to boost every 3 months to keep it high and every 6 to keep it about about 30% on symptomatic infection and 45% on hospital/death.
so you’re rebuying immunity every 3-6 months, taking the adverse event risk again, and using it to avoid an outcome (getting covid) that is not terribly dangerous for most and thus getting very little absolute risk reduction (detailed discussion here). this was already a bad bet for most under 50 and pretty much anyone without comorbidities.
but having to make the bet, over and over, just to stand still means that eventually, it’s a bad bet for anyone
…
the simple fact is this: rushing vaccines of a brand new type never before used in humans (but known to be problematic in animals) was always a deeply bad idea.
we had no idea how this was going to play out.
the trials were short and rigged to mask fade and side effects while overstating efficacy. VE was used instead of absolute risk reduction, and cost/benefit was not even considered.
…
is there even a cessation condition here? is there any data that would lead the FDA to rethink or the politicians and health agencies to stop these programs?
because it looks to me like “more boosters!” is the answer to every question.
that’s not the sign of evidence based medicine.
that’s the sign of a cult.
eugyppius: Every Week It Gets Worse: The Latest PHE Vaccine Surveillance Report
Even Public Health England knows the infection numbers are bad.
*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Regular Fare:
Matt Stoller: Enough is Enough: The Criminal Case Against Mark Zuckerberg
The rule of law does not apply to the powerful. It should. And Facebook is a good place to start.
Fauci Funded Yet Another Cruel Beagle Experiment
Add this to the growing list.
Anthony Fauci Has Been Abusing Animals for 40 Years
The stuff you've seen on social media barely scratches the surface.
It Wasn’t Just Beagles and Monkeys – Fauci’s NIH Also Funded Medical Experiments on AIDS Orphans in NY City
Climate Crisis Fare:
‘Every Turn in This Case Has Been Another Brick Wall, and Behind It Is Chevron’
What Big Oil Knew About Climate Change, in Its Own Words
By the late 1970s, the American Petroleum Institute had formed a secret committee called the “CO2 and Climate Task Force,” which included representatives of many of the major oil companies, to privately monitor and discuss the latest developments in climate science.
In 1980, the task force invited a scientist from Stanford University, John Laurmann, to brief them on the state of climate science. Today, we have a copy of Laurmann’s presentation, which warned that if fossil fuels continued to be used, global warming would be “barely noticeable” by 2005, but by the 2060s would have “globally catastrophic effects.” That same year, the American Petroleum Institute called on governments to triple coal production worldwide, insisting there would be no negative consequences despite what it knew internally.
COVID Fare:
*** Crawford: The Pandemic Wars: Anatomy of a Risk-Benefit Analysis
Let us be clear, we are living in an extremely confusing war where the current battlefront involves a vaccination campaign. But understanding reveals the nature of illusions. What is it that we need to understand that would settle a debate between two groups of good faith actors, one of which is under the spell of a propaganda machine while each believes that describes the other?
The Answer: A risk-benefit analysis (RBA) of the mass vaccination program.
This is my attempt to help you, the reader, understand what the RBA should look like. That is not to say that I know for certain that I have it all right. That's a tall order for anyone. But I believe that long before this task is complete, a great many people will be able to read through this and reach a more informed conclusion.
Before we get to the RBA itself, let's lay out the criteria for policy analysis of the experimental mass vaccination program for COVID-19.
The Criteria
There are many ways to formulate a set of criteria for whether or not experimental mass vaccination for COVID-19 using the currently available vaccines is good policy, but the following are similar to those traditionally used by health agencies around the world.
1. The measured benefits to individuals must outweigh the measured risks.
2. There is no superior policy option.
3. The policy entails no substantial risks (knowns, known unknowns, or unknown unknowns) that could overwhelm the degree to which the RBA outpaces simpler options.
There is an implicit zeroth criterion of informed consent.
Thousands of Physicians and Medical Scientists Sign “Rome Declaration” in Protest, Launch New Information Platform
Over 7,200 physicians and medical scientists worldwide have signed the “Rome Declaration” to alert citizens about the deadly consequences of Covid-19 policy makers’ and medical authorities’ unprecedented behavior; behavior such as denying patient access to lifesaving early treatments, disrupting the sacred, physician-patient relationship and suppressing open scientific discussion for profits and power. …
Berenson: The CDC hits a new low
(I didn’t think it was possible either.)
But yesterday the Centers for Disease Control, America’s not-at-all-politicized public health agency, released a new study purporting to show that vaccination protects against Covid infection better than natural immunity. Of course, a wave of stories about the benefits of mRNA vaccination followed.
To do this, the CDC used some magic statistical analysis to turn inside raw data that actually showed almost four times as many fully vaccinated people being hospitalized with Covid as those with natural immunity - and FIFTEEN TIMES as many over the summer.
I kid you not.
Further, the study runs contrary to a much larger paper from Israeli researchers in August. … In contrast - how do I put this politely? - the CDC study is meaningless gibberish that would never have been published if the agency did not face huge political pressure to get people vaccinated.
Let’s take a look. …
… Science!
*** el gato malo: swedish study shows covid vaccines drop below zero efficacy on spread by about 200 days
companies like pfizer are VERY good at clinical trials.
they do not make mistakes. they make choices.
and given these longer term results, it seems clear why they chose to run short trials and then eliminate the control groups after about 90 days. because that’s when things start to go off the rails.
…
it also raises questions about whether the vaccines ever provide ANY sterilizing immunity at all or if they merely prevent symptoms. recall that both the mRNA drug trials only tested those reporting symptoms for covid to assess efficacy.
again, seems like a choice, not an error.
…
i wonder if it was avoided because it it conflicted with the conclusions the authors wanted to draw (lest they be banished from the grant money gravy train) which were, of course:
“The results have important clinical implications, as they strengthen the evidence-based rationale for administration of a third booster dose”
but there seems to be quite a strong argument to the contrary. this means that the efficacy of these vaccines wanes VERY rapidly. you’d need to boost every 3 months to keep it high and every 6 to keep it about about 30% on symptomatic infection and 45% on hospital/death.
so you’re rebuying immunity every 3-6 months, taking the adverse event risk again, and using it to avoid an outcome (getting covid) that is not terribly dangerous for most and thus getting very little absolute risk reduction (detailed discussion here). this was already a bad bet for most under 50 and pretty much anyone without comorbidities.
but having to make the bet, over and over, just to stand still means that eventually, it’s a bad bet for anyone
…
the simple fact is this: rushing vaccines of a brand new type never before used in humans (but known to be problematic in animals) was always a deeply bad idea.
we had no idea how this was going to play out.
the trials were short and rigged to mask fade and side effects while overstating efficacy. VE was used instead of absolute risk reduction, and cost/benefit was not even considered.
- the immunity was supposed to be sterilizing. it’s not.
- the effects were supposed to be strong. they aren’t.
- the efficacy was supposed to be durable. it isn’t.
- they were supposed to protect the most vulnerable. but that’s who they work least well on.
…
is there even a cessation condition here? is there any data that would lead the FDA to rethink or the politicians and health agencies to stop these programs?
because it looks to me like “more boosters!” is the answer to every question.
that’s not the sign of evidence based medicine.
that’s the sign of a cult.
eugyppius: Every Week It Gets Worse: The Latest PHE Vaccine Surveillance Report
Even Public Health England knows the infection numbers are bad.
*** eugyppius: There Are No Arguments on the Other Side
Drosten is basically Germany’s Fauci. …. How had a man such as this come to openly wish for multiple SARS-2 infections before millions of admiring listeners? The answer is vaccine failure. Drosten spoke after steep case spikes in the United States and Israel had shown all the world that the SARS-2 vaccines do not stop transmission. These events had destroyed all arguments for Germany’s coercive vaccination policies, along with any lingering hopes that anybody, anywhere would eradicate SARS-2. It was up to Drosten to see how these awkward facts might be sown into the tapestry of virus hysteria that he and the rest of the propaganda apparatus had spent the last 18 months spinning.
His particular messaging trial balloon is interesting, as one of various clues suggesting that elites understand the vaccines have failed, and that they no longer believe that anything beyond natural immunity will end the pandemic. As numbers deteriorate over the winter, they will beat the vaccination drums ever louder – not because they think this will help, but because the alternative to blaming the unvaccinated is admitting failure.
… I’m often asked what arguments vaccinators like Drosten might bring against our positions. The truth is that the vaccinators don’t have coherent arguments anymore; they just have power. You can tell this from the lazy and extremely stupid things that they say in the press all the time:
… The great problem these geniuses now face, is that while virus anxiety has become a self-reinforcing phenomenon with a life of its own, none of their hysteria-fuelled methods have worked. The people in charge have sown demand for virus eradication, which is the one thing they cannot deliver.
… The discourse surrounding vaccination isn’t supposed to be correct. It’s supposed to justify vaccination policies politically and encourage compliance. If the vaccines were actually safe and effective, this encouragement wouldn’t be necessary and none of us would be here saying any of these things. The Pfizer child vaccine trial is the latest in a long line of travesties showing that there is no longer any interest, anywhere, in studying the safety or the effectiveness of the vaccines at all. The vaccinators are like a cornered animal. They will say anything to escape the inconvenient trap that their own rhetoric and heedless policies have put them in.
*** eugyppius: The Vaccines Cannot Do What Is Asked of Them
A universalising pandemic ideology blinds our leaders to the strategic possibilities open to them, and compels one policy failure after the other.
Increasingly, politicians and medical bureaucrats are entranced by a bizarre pandemic ideology. Like most ideologies, it remains oblivious to evidence and argument, holding that the risk of severe outcomes from Corona infection is far more evenly distributed across the population than it is; and allowing only universal solutions, such as quarantining and vaccinating entire populations. These obtuse views, which just won’t go away, are at the root of our failed and destructive policies. For 20 months now, this pandemic ideology has blinded everyone in charge to the possibility of shielding the vulnerable, leveraging seasonal patterns in infection, and leaving the kids alone. The stratified nature of Corona risk is the key to unravelling the pandemic, and it’s the one thing nobody will recognise.
Success in the pandemic has come to be defined by a series of vague, poorly differentiated statistics, including above all Corona infections, hospitalisations and deaths, and now vaccination rates. In their exclusive focus on these numbers, the press propagate constantly the myth that this is all there is to know about Corona. This impoverished discussion drives bureaucrats and politicians to seek solutions for one vague meaningless metric (Corona ICU admissions) in another vague meaningless metric (vaccination rates). In this way their policies are constructed in a rhetorical world that has very little to do with what is actually happening.
Every day our understanding of what the vaccines can do becomes clearer. It’s not nothing, but it’s much less than we were promised.
Some of our best evidence so far comes from ...
...
...
So those are the benefits, but as in everything there are also costs – and here they turn out to be substantial.
We’ve already touched on one: The vaccines appear to induce negative efficacy against infection. ...
... By now it is also clear that the vaccines cause a range of adverse reactions. The best documented is myocarditis in young men, a side effect observed most frequently after dose 2 of the mRNA vaccines. We probably won’t know the true rate of vaccine-induced myocarditis for many years. From excess mortality in younger cohorts and many anecdotal media reports, we can surmise that it is much more common than anybody will admit.
...
It does not take a Ph.D. in public health to extract a sensible vaccination policy from all this:
...
Of course, this is the opposite of what our pandemic ideology permits. Instead, almost all of our governments deploy the vaccines in the most reckless and counterproductive ways possible.
Denninger: And Now, The Admission....
But now we have an actual Government so-called expert, in this case Germany’s, stating out loud that the vaccines are in fact worthless as a public health measure. They neither prevent you from getting the virus or transmitting it, making them nothing more than a very dangerous flu shot.The flu shot usually doesn’t prevent you from getting or spreading the flu either. Indeed in Canada nurses have won court cases against their employers who argued for mandatory flu shots on exactly this basis. The flu shot, which is pushed heavily by a lot of doctors and so-called “experts”, has the virtue of being quite safe, however, that only about 20 or 25 people die associated with it and it has no record of causing effects like myocarditis. Neither can be said for these jabs that are somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times as dangerous — bad enough that for someone under the age of 30 who doesn’t have a pre-existing life-threatening condition the jab is more-dangerous than the virus itself.
But what’s worse is the continuing stream of data out of England which strongly suggests that not only do these jabs not stop you from getting the virus they also have a very nasty tendency to prevent you from building “N” antibodies if and when you do get infected after being jabbed. That’s very bad, because it is those antibodies that, we have reason to believe, are in fact critical to prevent serious or fatal outcomes
Humanity Is Sleepwalking Towards Medical Apartheid
Even as scientific studies show that vaccines alone cannot extricate humanity from the Covid-19 crisis, governments are rushing headlong towards the creation of a ‘vaccinated economy’ without any consideration for the consequences. It’s time for an injection of sanity and informed democratic debate. An astonishing thing happened this week that should have – were it not for a media industrial complex that coddles and cossets the powers that be – incited journalists to scream bloody murder around our increasingly imprisoned planet. What the world got instead was the deafening cacophony of crickets.
When a reporter asked New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern about the possibility of the Pacific island nation being fragmented into two distinct classes of citizens – the vaccinated and unvaccinated – Arden didn’t miss a beat as she responded with her trademark Cheshire grin, “That is what it is. So yep. Yep.” After being further prodded by the deferential journalist as to why she favored apartheid, Ardern, who has already mandated vaccines for government employees or else, responded, unscientifically, that “people who have been vaccinated will want to know that they are around other vaccinated people; they’ll want to know that they’re in a safe environment.”
Under normal conditions – that is, before scientific inquiry was sent back kicking and screaming to the Dark Ages – Ardern’s outrageous remark would have been greeted by robust and vigorous debate from both the political and medical communities. After all, the vaccinated should feel absolutely at ease mingling among the unvaccinated in stuffy public places given that they are, supposedly, protected? Isn’t that the point of the vaccines, to protect the vaccinated and get us back to some semblance of ‘normal’? If not, then why the incessant push to jab every single person on the planet, and not just once, as initially promised, but multiple times? The answer, at least according to Queen Ardern, is so that everyone can feel “confident” once again among their fellow man. That makes absolutely zero sense, especially as new studies show no discernible decrease in infection rates among the vaccinated. So why hedge our bets when just the opposite seems to be happening?
In a recent study by Harvard researchers, published in the European Journal of Epidemiology, it was discovered that, looking at statistics around the world, “there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases…” The researchers then delivered a brutal body slam to conventional (political) thinking by revealing that “the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have HIGHER (emphasis added) COVID-19 cases per 1 million people.”
Is the FDA about to approve an experimental COVID vaccine for kids?
Private profits over public health.
… These facts would seem to contradict the legal and factual justifications necessary for giving the vaccine an EUA for kids aged 5-11.
… Anyway, we make these observations and discuss the facts but we’re not sure how much it matters. It seems the FDA has already reached its decision on the necessity for a vaccine for children 5-11 years of age. The October 26 meeting would just be a pretext, the last hoop it has to jump through before vaccines are mandated in schools around the country.
Crawford: Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee -- 10/26/2021
The September 17 meeting was one for the history books. Many experts lined up to unload massive ammo regarding vaccine safety that had previously been suppressed from public conversation. In debate parlance, it was a savage ass whoopin'. After a 16-2 vote to reject booster shots for everyone (age 16 and up), chaos broke loose leading to additional votes with vague and confused wording encouraging booster shots for the elderly. Following the meeting, the committee's recommendation was completely ignored by the CDC. The committee meeting in the Pfizer board room may have proved more persuasive?
It is an interesting question whether such a meeting is actually about bringing together expert opinions and data to inform decisions, or whether those decisions are already decided by wealth transfers for vaccine doses that have already taken place.
Toby Rogers: Ten red flags in the FDA's risk-benefit analysis of Pfizer's EUA application to inject American children 5 to 11 with its mRNA product
The FDA briefing document is preposterous junk science and it must be withdrawn immediately
Where to even begin with the FDA’s preposterous risk-benefit analysis of Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 “vaccine” in children ages 5 to 11?
Reasons to reject Pfizer’s EUA application for mRNA shots for children ages 5 to 11:
1. There is no COVID health emergency in children 5 to 11. …
2. The vaccine does not stop infection, transmission, hospitalization, nor death….
3. The Pfizer mRNA vaccine causes catastrophic side effects, particularly myocarditis and pericarditis in youth. …
4. Mass vaccination turns kids into shedders of more infectious variants. Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche writes: …
5. There is an emerging body of evidence that shows that COVID vaccines leave people less well off than doing nothing at all.
*** FDA Experts Ask Why Kids Are “Dropping Like Flies” Right After Getting Vaccine
On October 26th 2021, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held a meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) to review the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer mRNA Covid-19 injection and decide whether or not to extend the Emergency Use Authorisation of the Pfizer vaccines for children aged 5 to 11. Steve Kirsch, Executive Director of the Covid-19 Early Treatment Fund was invited to speak at the meeting and due to the short time frame given to speak he felt it was best to prepare 30 slides which asked some extremely serious questions on the safety of giving an experimental injection to children. Every question asked by the Executive Director of the Covid-19 Early Treatment Fund were questions that he feels need to be answered before any vote to authorise Covid-19 vaccination for 5 to 11-year-old children, and they were as follows…
Berenson: Eugyppius on "Original Antigenic Sin" and why we should never vaccinate kids against the ro. NEVER. As in not ever.
As in not now, or later, or EVER.
As in move to a state where it’s not required if your state requires it.
As in protest.
As in lie.
As in know the science better than your kid’s pediatrician, her teacher, her school board member, so that you can explain - simply and without getting upset - why they do not know what they’re talking about.
As in DO NOT let your kids get a jab of mRNA that will at best protect them for a matter of months and at worst will wrongfoot their immune systems so that for THE REST OF THEIR LIVES they will be burdened with a miswired response to a virus that they would otherwise defeat easily.
*** eugyppius: More on Original Antigenic Sin and the Folly of Our Universal Vaccination Campaign
A deeper look at a decisive limitation of our adaptive immune systems
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The Public Health England data provide powerful reasons to suspect that the vaccines may be compromising immunity to SARS-2 via Original Antigenic Sin. This is not a crazy internet fantasy, but a well-observed limitation of human immunity. It is the primary reason that respiratory viruses like influenza return again and again.
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Strategic vaccination conferring immunity against likely future strains is of course exactly the opposite of our current efforts to give every last living human multiple vaccinations against an extinct strain of SARS-2.
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The complex system constituted by SARS-CoV-2 and its interactions with the human immune system, on the other hand, remains barely understood. In chasing an empty fantasy of herd immunity, authorities are denying human populations everywhere the opportunity to develop the layered, population-wide resistance against successive SARS-2 strains that is the foundation of our immunity against other respiratory viruses. Aside from the minority that have managed to recover from natural infection before the vaccinators got to them, most humans will have their crucial, primary immune response conditioned by the spike protein of SARS-2 in its vintage 2020 configuration.
It is a near certainty that this immunity will attenuate antibody responses to the spike protein of current and future variants, forever.
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The most dangerous thing to do, at this point, would be to vaccinate children. The virus is not a threat to them, and if they are infected by the new forms of SARS-2 that are sure to emerge every winter, we will begin to establish – through them and the as yet unvaccinated – the layered immunity that is the only way of coming to terms with SARS-2 in the longer term. As long as the vaccinators are permitted to continue their radical and increasingly insane campaign, though, nothing will improve. Indeed, their policies threaten to bring about a semi-permanent pandemic state for generations to come.
Crawford: Challenging the Narrative on COVID-19 Deaths Amongst Children
"First you make people believe they have a problem, and then you sell them the solution." -Oliver Markus MalloyAs readers here know, I almost never write an article without full citations for each claim. But I want to go ahead and make a statement, so forgive my time constraints. I may come back and edit this article with links to my own article or articles by others later, and will note edits at those times. But some of the claims will be uncontroversial.
- During the pandemic, the vast majority of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths have been among the elderly.
- The vast majority of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths have been among those deficient in key nutrients, including Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and zinc.
- The majority of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths (maybe 80%) have been among those with autoimmune disorders, including those not previously documented and those simply associated with advanced aging. (This is the "hidden comorbidity" the health industry doesn't seem to want to talk about.)
- 94% of COVID-19 deaths occurred among people with comorbidities such as obesity or diabetes.
Here, Dr. Tom Hong, a pro-vaccine doctor, talks through his own reservations about vaccinating children, and the data analysis that came down from the FDA. He's right---it's untrustworthy garbage.
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My honest guess is that once we examine associations between the four risk factors I began this article with, we will find a Venn diagram of essentially complete exclusion of the vast majority of children. And any competent biostatistician or actuary knows this.
Any supposed risk-benefit analysis that does not distinguish healthy children from the small proportion of high risk children who make up nearly all severe COVID-19 cases among children is a dangerous fraud. It does not take a genius to understand that desegregating those data pools results in making the benefits of vaccination among the healthy groups appear to be orders of magnitude greater than it is.
Toby Rogers: What is the Number Needed to Vaccinate (NNTV) to prevent a single COVID-19 fatality in kids 5 to 11 based on the Pfizer EUA
A funny thing happened this afternoon. Not funny as in “haha”. More like funny as in, “ohhhhh that’s how the FDA rigs the process.”
I was reading the CDC’s “Guidance for Health Economics Studies Presented to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), 2019 Update” and I realized that the FDA’s woeful risk-benefit analysis in connection with Pfizer’s EUA application to jab children ages 5 to 11 violates many of the principles of the CDC’s Guidance document. The CDC “Guidance” document describes 21 things that every health economics study in connection with vaccines must do and the FDA risk-benefit analysis violated at least half of them.
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Pharma HATES talking about NNTV and they hate talking about NNTV even more when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines because the NNTV is so ridiculously high that this vaccine could not pass any honest risk-benefit analysis.
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Let’s examine Pfizer’s EUA application and the FDA’s risk-benefit analysis. By Pfizer’s own admission, there were zero hospitalization, ICU admissions, or deaths, in the treatment or control group in their study of 2,300 children ages 5 to 11.
So the Number Needed to Vaccinate in order to prevent a single hospitalization, ICU admission, or death, according to Pfizer’s own data, is infinity. ∞. Not the good kind of infinity as in God or love or time or the universe. This is the bad kind of infinity as in you could vaccinate every child age 5 to 11 in the U.S. and not prevent a single hospitalization, ICU admission, or death from coronavirus according to Pfizer’s own clinical trial data as submitted to the FDA. Of course Pfizer likes this kind of infinity because it means infinite profits.
Okay but everyone knows that Pfizer was not even trying to conduct a responsible study. Pfizer could have submitted to the FDA a paper napkin with the words “Iz Gud!” written in crayon and the VRBPAC would have approved the shot. They are all in the cartel together and they are all looking forward to their massive payoff/payday.
But let’s not be like Pharma. Instead, let’s attempt to come up with a best guess estimate based on real world data.
…
- ..
- ...
- So then the NNTV to prevent a single fatality in this age group is 630,775 (28,384,878 / 45). But it’s a two dose regimen so if one wants to calculate the NNTV per injection the number doubles to 1,261,550. It’s literally the worst NNTV in the history of vaccination.
If you inject that many children, you certainly will have lots and lots of serious side effects including disability and death. So let’s look at the risk side of the equation.
…
For every one child saved by the shot, another 117 would be killed by the shot.
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Updated 10/31/2021 to add: An astute reader texted me with the details from Pfizer’s clinical trial in adults. He wrote:
Kirsch: Why Won’t The CDC or FDA Reveal The VAERS URF?
The most important thing to know about VAERS is that it is always underreported. This is widely known.
To properly interpret any safety data, you must know the underreporting factor (URF).
…
When we do the math, we find that the URF is 41, well in line with the mean and range described in the Baker paper. It means that over 150,000 people have been killed by the vaccine so far (and we show 8 different ways in that paper, only one of which uses VAERS).
The troubling thing is this: nobody at the CDC, FDA, or on any of the outside committees will admit this. When they are asked, “what is the URF for serious events in VAERS for the COVID vaccine” they are unable to respond.
*** Kirsch: It’s time for John Su to go
The CDC's expert on VAERS hasn't computed the URF or spotted any safety signals. His negligence has led to the death of over 150,000 Americans. It was deliberate. Here's the proof.
Executive Summary
1. Dr. John Su is the government’s top expert on reporting safety signals to the CDC and FDA. His incompetence/corruption in failing to compute a simple number required for a proper risk-benefit analysis, has led to the needless loss of life of over 150,000 Americans.
2. Dr. Su should be immediately fired by the CDC. There is no excuse for anyone in such a critical position at the CDC to make a mistake of this magnitude without being held accountable.
3. Su claimed in a CDC meeting that VAERS, the official database used to track adverse events, is nearly fully reported (close to 1). He’s wrong. Dead wrong. The reality is that it is extremely underreported (close to 41). This was clearly done intentionally. If it were just due to incompetence or negligence, Dr. Su would have corrected the error when it was first brought to his attention. He did not.
4. Even more troubling is that we could not find any evidence that Dr. Su has ever computed the underreporting factor (URF) for the COVID vaccines. This is extremely troubling because the correct URF is required to compute an accurate cost-benefit analysis. Had the committees had the correct URF, these vaccinesw[sh]ould have been stopped immediately.
5. Once you have the correct URF, it is clear that the vaccines kill more people than they save for all age ranges. They are nonsensical, even if they were 100% effective. This is why Su’s error was critical: at a URF of 1, the vaccines are viable; at a URF of 41 they are nonsensical.
6. A URF of 41 reveals that the true myocarditis rate for 16 year old boys is close to 1 in 325. That is not rare; it’s a train wreck. The 5 year survival rate of those kids is completely unknown. Any cardiologist who says that you have “nothing to worry about if your kid gets myocarditis from the vaccine” is lying to you. We haven’t got a clue.
7. Myocarditis is the least of your worries. There are hundreds of serious safety signals from these vaccines like death, heart attack, cardiac arrest, DVT, pulmonary embolism, intracranial hemorrhage, stroke, tinnitus, elevated cancers, latent viruses that re-emerge, blindness, aphasia, blood clots, numbness, muscle spasms, diabetes, guillain-barre syndrome, Bell’s palsy, and many more, but the CDC and FDA cannot spot any of them even those elevated 1,000X over baseline. They are inept, corrupt or both. Case in point: it was Israel who found the myocarditis signal, not the CDC.
8. The CDC, FDA, John Su, and Tom Shimabukuro were offered multiple opportunities to respond to this article. They all declined. We couldn’t find anyone who was willing to defend John Su’s actions.
9. To this day, the CDC and FDA refuse to supply anyone with the document showing the URF calculation. It has to remain a secret or everyone will realize that they fucked up royally.
10. Congress is ignoring all the deaths, and encouraging people to get vaccinated. All attempts to get anyone in Congress to pay attention to the death toll in VAERS have been ignored.
11. The mainstream medical community, like Congress, is ignoring all the deaths, and actively encouraging people to get vaccinated. The medical community is doing the exact opposite of what the science says. There are thousands of doctors who realize what is going on, but they are afraid to speak out. At first their excuse of ignoring my risk-benefit analysis is that it wasn’t published in the peer-reviewed literature. Then, after the same results were published in the peer-reviewed medical literature, the excuse was that the author of that wasn’t an expert. Wow. The bar keeps moving. Instead of reviewing the data, we are judged by who we are and whether our conclusions comport with mainstream thinking. This is the way science is apparently done today.
12. None of the vaccine cheerleaders will defend their position. No prominent vaccine advocate will debate my team of experts. They all refuse.
13. Change is happening, but it’s slow. My slide decks on skirsch.io (such as the “All you need to know” deck and my “20 questions” deck) have been used to change the mind of school boards to drop the mandates. One school board voted 3:1 in favor of dropping the mandate and specifically cited my slide deck as the primary reason for their vote. I was proud to have contributed to that effort. It was a parent that made the presentation and provided the link to the board. I only found out about it afterwards.
14. Their reputation is a lot more important than your life. Let’s be clear. Everyone in Congress thinks the vaccines are safe. No one is going to go against that and hold the CDC accountable and risk being labelled “anti-science” by their peers. So they aren’t ever going to admit they were misled even when the evidence is clear cut (and it doesn’t get any better than this). The sad fact is that their reputation is more important to them than your life. I don’t know of a single exception who has the courage to stand up for the truth. Do you?
Bahrain’s Tale of COVID-19, Medicine, and Vaccination
Prior to the vaccine rollout, Bahrain had pushed its case fatality rate to a mere 0.08%, one of the lower fatality rates for COVID-19 sufferers in the world. After the vaccine rollout, that mortality rate skyrocketed 14-fold.
Heather Heying: Vitamin D Deficiency and Covid-19
vitamin D deficiency associated with 630% increase in death risk in hospitalized patients with covid
if it works about as well on hospital risk as death risk, this compounds. (i’m guessing here as an example and have no actual data)
86% less hospital and 86% less death if hospital = 98% overall risk reduction. it could well not be that high. maybe it’s 95%. maybe it’s 80% if you adjust for risk factors etc. still, that’s a HUGE number.
it’s WAY better than a vaccine.
and vitamin D is cheap, safe, easy to get, and has lots of other benefits.
COVID-19 Mortality Risk Correlates Inversely with Vitamin D3 Status, and a Mortality Rate Close to Zero Could Theoretically Be Achieved at 50 ng/mL 25(OH)D3
Berenson: Playing God (badly)
Moderna wound up turning away from making mRNA drugs for repeated dosing and focusing on vaccines for just this reason; a successful vaccine should need only one or two doses to produce a sustained if not permanent immune response, thus eliminating the need for regular dosing.
But the problems don’t end there. If the injected particles drop their genetic payload into the wrong cells, they can also do damage.
Scientists have also now repeatedly demonstrated that the spike proteins the mRNA Covid vaccines create can be toxic - especially to blood vessel cells - all by themselves, without the rest of Sars-Cov-2 attached. (See, for example: ttps://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcvm.2021.687783/full)
Which doesn’t matter, the Covid vaccine fanatics told us, because the spike protein the vaccines generate doesn’t circulate.
Except it does.
But wait, there’s more.
We know that in the short run, mRNA vaccines lead to a drop in crucial white blood cells called lymphocytes - Pfizer and BioNTech themselves acknowledged this problem. (SOURCE: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2814-7)
Now the British government is warning that people who receive the vaccines appear to have a less complete immune response to Sars-Cov-2 after infection.
Maybe even more concerning, scientists now have found evidence the vaccines may produce worrisome longer-term changes in the immune system:
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This is not to say that the mRNA (and DNA/AAV) Covid vaccines are necessarily dangerous, or that their risks outweigh their benefits. But we should all understand just how radical these therapies are, and how many unknowns they carry.
The only solution to these unknowns is very large trials conducted for long periods.
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But an equally large sin against science was the fact that regulators allowed Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna to unblind and thus destroy their pivotal trials within weeks after they presented early data.
Now we are stumbling in the dark.
And that might not matter much if the Covid vaccines had ended the Covid epidemic. But they have not.
…
Now the public health authorities and the rest of the media are pushing “boosters” - again, for a biotechnology that was repurposed as a vaccine BECAUSE IT FAILED UPON REPEATED DOSING.
Meanwhile, they are simply ignoring the odd increase in all-cause non-Covid mortality that many countries are now seeing.
Where this journey ends I do not know.
But I know this: we invented about the most complex product imaginable, tested it in a relative handful of people for a few months, a far shorter timetable than is typical for drug development. Now we are shoving it on every human we can reach - to prevent (or more accurately fail to prevent) an illness that is not particularly dangerous to most of them.
85% of Covid-19 Deaths & 75% of Hospitalisations were among the Fully Vaccinated in the last month according to the latest Public Health data
why are so many in the US now so sick?
addition to US ER data: cardiovascular AE's are exploding
NPR: ERs Swamped With Seriously Ill Patients – But Most Don’t Have Covid
A.30 Variant ‘Efficiently Evades’ Antibodies Induced By Pfizer & AstraZeneca
The A.30 variant of the coronavirus, detected in Angola and Sweden, is highly resistant to antibodies induced by the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines, a new lab study has shown.
Japan Drops Vax Rollout, Goes To Ivermectin, Ends Covid Almost Overnight
The European Medicines Agency said Thursday that new preliminary data from the Nordic countries supports a warning the agency adopted in July that inflammatory heart conditions called myocarditis and pericarditis can occur in very rare cases following vaccination with Covid-19 shots made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech. By far, however, the absolute superstar among foreign nations dealing with COVID is Japan. Japan has PULLED the vaccines and substituted Ivermectin – and in one month, wiped COVID out in that country! [..] By September deaths from the COVID-19 Vaccine jabs were being investigated. At roughly that time, the vials were under scrutiny and metal “magnetic” material was found in them. Very shortly thereafter, the Japanese minister of health announced doctors could prescribe Ivermectin. A month later, the Western press is shocked that COVID has all but disappeared from the island.
Kirsch: The new rules of medicine
CO-VID Tweets of the Week:
Dr. Scott Jensen
You should take two minutes and really listen to this. The words are sharp and cut through the lies. The tone is of righteous anger which we all should feel. … This is Christine Anderson of the European Parliament. [Also here, in case twitter censors it.]
Dr. Peter McCullough Explains How Myocarditis Differs When Caused by Natural Infection vs Vaccine
"Now there's pre-clinical studies suggesting the lipid nanoparticles actually go right into the heart. The heart expresses the spike protein and the body attacks the heart."
Joe Rogan: 200 congress people took Ivermectin.
COVID Quotes of the Week:
Kunstler: We’ll have to stand by months, maybe years, to find out what the effects are of mRNA shots in human children, but two known possibilities stand out: inflammation and scarring of the heart (myocarditis + sequelae), and an incrementally disabled immune system. Do you really want those shots in your children? — America might ask.
Jordan Schachtel: Birx remains committed to peddling pure pseudoscience. She spent the entirety of her time in the White House forcing this destructive nonsense down the throats of state governors who hesitantly complied due to federal pressure. The newfound George Bush Center fellow is now back in D.C. to double down on the insanity.
Mathew Crawford: The CDC and FDA run their pharmacovigilance like a black box, and it looks strangely rigged given the way the tabulation process doesn't just make the vaccines look effective at preventing COVID-19 (but not "COVID-like illness"?), but seem oddly to make recipients suddenly dodge most of the aggregate of other causes of mortality as well… If it doesn't raise a red flag in your mind that [according to their data] the vaccinated suffer two-thirds less mortality outside of COVID-19, you're truly hypnotised.
Ilargi: Wait, so we can’t use Ivermectin because “We don’t have enough data,” But..
“Let’s vaccinate children to see how safe the vaccine is because we don’t have enough data.”
Whitney Webb: Can't believe defending a corrupt, shitty career bureaucrat and Big Pharma shill like Tony Fauci is the hill that some people who identify as "left" still want to die on.
Toby Rogers: Dr. Chen defines “misinformation” as anything that contradicts the Pharma narrative. Dr. Chen is adamant that nothing be allowed to pierce his protective Pharma information bubble. I’m reminded of the phrase, “Methinks thou doth protest too much.”
Ian Miller: You sit in your monstrously uncomfortable seat and marvel at the insane, performative stupidity of the entire experience and tell yourself it’s just not worth doing it again. There is no end in sight to the theatrical experience of modern “safety.”
Jerry A. Coyne, Ph.D is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, demonstrating how even super smart scientists get most of their information from regular channels like the mainstream media, and don’t invest the same type of research or critical thinking you might expect from the author of Faith vs Fact:
Two vaccine stories: First, the FDA has authorized emergency use Pfizer vaccinations for children 5-11 years old. My own opinion, though I have no offspring, is to get your kids vaccinated pronto. The side effects have proven so far to be minimal—and no reports of heart problems. The mortality rate from the virus is infinitely higher than from the vaccination, so get your kids signed up now.
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
Whitney Webb: COVID-19: Moderna Gets Its Miracle
COVID-19 erased the regulatory and trial-related hurdles that Moderna could never surmount before. Yet, how did Moderna know that COVID-19 would create those conditions months before anyone else, and why did they later claim that their vaccine being tested in NIH trials was different than their commercial candidate?
*** el gato malo: more evidence fauci, daszak, and the NIH are STILL lying about wuhan
since the moment this all began (and likely quite a ways before any of us knew about it) fauci, the NIH, ecohealth (EHA), and a cast of who knows how many have been in full cover up and deny mode on what what happened and precisely who funded what at the wuhan institute of virology (WIV). and their claims keep falling apart as the facts come out.
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we empaneled the very perps accused of the crime to investigate it and this blue ribbon fox commission assures us there was no vulpine involvement in the henhouse murders. those footprints must be raccoons or something.
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this is clearly just the work that could lead to covid 19. it’s the same work daszak was bragging about in late 2019.
the idea that this was somehow an accident is ridiculous. it’s obviously what they had been pursuing for years.
the idea that this exact roadmap somehow led to some other virus and that despite this looking like a duck, quacking like a duck, and having made piles and piles of little baby ducks, no way was what they had at wuhan a duck is just too much to swallow.
… to expect those who have done nothing but lie (and run a genuine, no kidding conspiracy to cover the lie) to suddenly be telling the whole truth about what gene strains they worked on in wuhan requires a special kind of gullibility.
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imagine how different the world might have been had we had media and politicians willing to dig and do their jobs last year. instead of having tony and co run riot over america with their self-serving pseudoscience, these people could have been run out of town on a rail.
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some BIG questions remain. perhaps biggest among them is this:
what is the relationship between the mRNA vaccines that appeared so suddenly after this virus was allegedly first gene sequenced and this set of projects centered on and around wuhan?
because the speed of that development has always looked implausible (at best) and impossible (almost certainly).
no other mRNA vaccine has ever appeared in just a couple weeks. they take years (unless you were already way ahead on the work.) the payload for moderna came from the NIH. pfizer’s came from bioNtech, a tiny EU co that just happened to get a huge pile of bill gates money in the fall of 2019.
and even now, they cannot build a booster that’s based on delta. so how do you nail the first one in a couple weeks in two different places and then sit unable to to the next one anywhere on earth for 6-9 months?
el gato malo: the morality of medical "authorities"
now consider the sort of person who would:
1. conceive of such an experiment
2. think is was morally permissible to run such an experiment
3. have the stomach to actually run and observe such an experiment
4. have so little basic humanity that they could joke while doing so
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these people are NOT like most of us. 99% of humans would be unable to perform that experiment terrorizing monkeys whose brains were damaged to intensify fear. that is not a normal capability, much less a normal inclination.
and this makes granting vast social power to people such as these an incredibly bad idea.
they have about as much humanity as the viruses they study.
it’s why you should be terrified of technocracy, especially bio-technocracy.
el gato malo: pfizer CEO on vaccine hesitancy
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this would be a grotesque enough set of false framing, no true scotsman, gaslighting, straw manning, and outright emotional manipulation even if the vaccines stopped the spread of covid.
but clearly, they do not. at all.
so in the face of that “data” the “facts” become plain: this is pure emotional manipulation.
he’s teaching you how to use dishonest psyop tactics as a form of big pharma MLM and framing the literal abandonment of rationality as “facts and data.”
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alas, despite this “expansive corporate integrity agreement” they seem to be the same old pfizer only now they were smart enough to be sure they banned doctors from speaking against them, sold them straight to governments, and got full, blanket lability waivers for these products that no one could possibly be hesitant about if they knew the facts.
because that’s what you always do when the data and facts are on your side, right?
i know a lot of folks in biotech and most are fine people. lots of small companies work on lots of really important science. it’s where all the actual innovation is taking place. big pharma is another beast altogether. these are marketing and manipulation experts. they lie, bribe, cheat, and rig markets. they capture regulators in a revolving door of sinecure and employment opportunities.
they play dirty enough to make a congolese cobalt miner break down and weep.
they are not your friends.
and they do not have you best interests at heart.
el gato malo: 2020 is the year that turned all of public health into an endless series of fad diets
…the caliber of studies being made up by the CDC to try to validate vaccines (and WOW were THEY a bunch of TOTAL FAILS) is on par with
… this is hucksterism, not health policy.
… trust in these public agencies to be either competent or trustworthy to manage public health and especially public health information programs was always ill-founded.
read the history of the USDA food pyramid some time.
it was MADE UP. there was no science. there were no studies. it was a clownshow of convenience and cronyism.
it was also badly wrong.
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this is EXACTLY what’s being done with nonsensical and broadly debunked policy on masks, lockdowns, distancing, schools, and increasingly with untested and obviously problematic vaccines that
there seems to be some deep societal reservoir of trust in these federal agencies.
“there must be an expert who knows!”
“they’d never let people do this without a good reason!”
“they would never act this reckless!”
no, there isn’t. and yes, they would.
there are no checks on this system. it’s an ad hoc weasel circus full of politicians and marketing people. the scientists barely even get a look in on policy.
Hopkins: (New Normal) Winter is Coming
Seriously, the point of this entire exercise (or at least this phase of this entire exercise) is to radically, irrevocably, transform society into a monolithic corporate campus where everyone has to scan their IDs at every turn of an endless maze of perpetually monitored, eco-friendly, gender-fluid, ideologically uniform, non-smoking, totally meat-free “safe spaces” owned and operated by GloboCap, or one of its agents
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And so on. I think you get the picture. This Winter is probably going to get a little nutty … or, OK, more than a little nutty. In terms of manufactured mass hysteria, it is probably going to make Russiagate, the War on Populism, the Global War on Terror, the Red Scare, and every other manufactured mass-hysteria campaign you can possibly think of look like an amateur production of Wagner’s Götterdammerung.
In other words, kiss reality (or whatever is left of reality at this point) goodbye. The clock is ticking, and GloboCap knows it. If they expect to pull this Great Reset off, they are going to need to terrorize the New-Normal masses into a state of protracted pants-shitting panic and uncontrollable mindless hatred of “the Unvaccinated,” and anyone challenging their rule. A repeat of the Winters of 2020 and 2021 is not going to cut it. It is going to take more than the now standard repertoire of fake and manipulated statistics, dire projections, photos of “death trucks,” non-overflowing overflowing hospitals, and all the other familiar features of the neo-Goebbelsian propaganda juggernaut we have been subjected to for over 18 months.
They are facing a growing working-class revolt. Millions of people in countries all over the world are protesting in the streets, organizing strikes, walk-outs, “sick-outs,” and mounting other forms of opposition. Despite the corporate media’s Orwellian attempts to blackout any coverage of it, or demonize us all as “far-right extremists,” the New Normals are very aware that this is happening. And the official narrative is finally falling apart. The actual facts are undeniable by anyone with an ounce of integrity, so much so that even major GloboCap propaganda outlets like The Guardian are being forced to grudgingly admit the truth.
No, GloboCap has no choice at this point but to let loose with every weapon in its arsenal — short of full-blown despotism, which it cannot deploy without destroying itself
Vax Mandate Pushback Fare:
12,000 Air Force Personnel, Including Elite Pilots, Have Rejected Vax Order As Tuesday Deadline Looms
NYPD's Largest Police Union Sues Mayor Over COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate
NYPD data shows nearly 50% of cops are unvaccinated in some precincts
NYPD preparing for potential crush of retirements ahead of vaccine mandate
‘Oh Hell No’: Ice Cube ditches movie & $9 million after refusing to get Covid-19 vaccine
'I Had To Stand Up And Try To Do Something:' Professor Of Medicine On Suing School Over Vaccine Mandate
"Stop Medical Apartheid!" - Police Passive As Huge Crowd Protests Australia's Draconian Pandemic Powers Bill
COVID Graphics Fare: (one, two, three & four)
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For every one child saved by the shot, another 117 would be killed by the shot.
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Updated 10/31/2021 to add: An astute reader texted me with the details from Pfizer’s clinical trial in adults. He wrote:
In Pfizer’s 6 month clinical trial in adults — there was 1 covid death our of 22,000 in the vaccine (“treatment”) group and 2 Covid deaths out of 22,000 in the placebo group (see Table s4). So NNTV = 22,000. The catch is there were 5 heart attack deaths in the vaccine group and only 1 in placebo group. So for every 1 life saved from Covid, the Pfizer vaccine kills 4 from heart attacks. All cause mortality in the 6 month study was 20 in vaccine group and 14 in placebo group. So a 42% all cause mortality increase among the vaccinated. The vaccine loses practically all efficacy after 6 months so they had to curtail the study. They unblinded and offered the vaccine to the placebo group. At that point the rising harm line had long ago intersected the sinking efficacy line.
Kirsch: Why Won’t The CDC or FDA Reveal The VAERS URF?
The most important thing to know about VAERS is that it is always underreported. This is widely known.
To properly interpret any safety data, you must know the underreporting factor (URF).
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When we do the math, we find that the URF is 41, well in line with the mean and range described in the Baker paper. It means that over 150,000 people have been killed by the vaccine so far (and we show 8 different ways in that paper, only one of which uses VAERS).
The troubling thing is this: nobody at the CDC, FDA, or on any of the outside committees will admit this. When they are asked, “what is the URF for serious events in VAERS for the COVID vaccine” they are unable to respond.
*** Kirsch: It’s time for John Su to go
The CDC's expert on VAERS hasn't computed the URF or spotted any safety signals. His negligence has led to the death of over 150,000 Americans. It was deliberate. Here's the proof.
Executive Summary
1. Dr. John Su is the government’s top expert on reporting safety signals to the CDC and FDA. His incompetence/corruption in failing to compute a simple number required for a proper risk-benefit analysis, has led to the needless loss of life of over 150,000 Americans.
2. Dr. Su should be immediately fired by the CDC. There is no excuse for anyone in such a critical position at the CDC to make a mistake of this magnitude without being held accountable.
3. Su claimed in a CDC meeting that VAERS, the official database used to track adverse events, is nearly fully reported (close to 1). He’s wrong. Dead wrong. The reality is that it is extremely underreported (close to 41). This was clearly done intentionally. If it were just due to incompetence or negligence, Dr. Su would have corrected the error when it was first brought to his attention. He did not.
4. Even more troubling is that we could not find any evidence that Dr. Su has ever computed the underreporting factor (URF) for the COVID vaccines. This is extremely troubling because the correct URF is required to compute an accurate cost-benefit analysis. Had the committees had the correct URF, these vaccines
5. Once you have the correct URF, it is clear that the vaccines kill more people than they save for all age ranges. They are nonsensical, even if they were 100% effective. This is why Su’s error was critical: at a URF of 1, the vaccines are viable; at a URF of 41 they are nonsensical.
6. A URF of 41 reveals that the true myocarditis rate for 16 year old boys is close to 1 in 325. That is not rare; it’s a train wreck. The 5 year survival rate of those kids is completely unknown. Any cardiologist who says that you have “nothing to worry about if your kid gets myocarditis from the vaccine” is lying to you. We haven’t got a clue.
7. Myocarditis is the least of your worries. There are hundreds of serious safety signals from these vaccines like death, heart attack, cardiac arrest, DVT, pulmonary embolism, intracranial hemorrhage, stroke, tinnitus, elevated cancers, latent viruses that re-emerge, blindness, aphasia, blood clots, numbness, muscle spasms, diabetes, guillain-barre syndrome, Bell’s palsy, and many more, but the CDC and FDA cannot spot any of them even those elevated 1,000X over baseline. They are inept, corrupt or both. Case in point: it was Israel who found the myocarditis signal, not the CDC.
8. The CDC, FDA, John Su, and Tom Shimabukuro were offered multiple opportunities to respond to this article. They all declined. We couldn’t find anyone who was willing to defend John Su’s actions.
9. To this day, the CDC and FDA refuse to supply anyone with the document showing the URF calculation. It has to remain a secret or everyone will realize that they fucked up royally.
10. Congress is ignoring all the deaths, and encouraging people to get vaccinated. All attempts to get anyone in Congress to pay attention to the death toll in VAERS have been ignored.
11. The mainstream medical community, like Congress, is ignoring all the deaths, and actively encouraging people to get vaccinated. The medical community is doing the exact opposite of what the science says. There are thousands of doctors who realize what is going on, but they are afraid to speak out. At first their excuse of ignoring my risk-benefit analysis is that it wasn’t published in the peer-reviewed literature. Then, after the same results were published in the peer-reviewed medical literature, the excuse was that the author of that wasn’t an expert. Wow. The bar keeps moving. Instead of reviewing the data, we are judged by who we are and whether our conclusions comport with mainstream thinking. This is the way science is apparently done today.
12. None of the vaccine cheerleaders will defend their position. No prominent vaccine advocate will debate my team of experts. They all refuse.
13. Change is happening, but it’s slow. My slide decks on skirsch.io (such as the “All you need to know” deck and my “20 questions” deck) have been used to change the mind of school boards to drop the mandates. One school board voted 3:1 in favor of dropping the mandate and specifically cited my slide deck as the primary reason for their vote. I was proud to have contributed to that effort. It was a parent that made the presentation and provided the link to the board. I only found out about it afterwards.
14. Their reputation is a lot more important than your life. Let’s be clear. Everyone in Congress thinks the vaccines are safe. No one is going to go against that and hold the CDC accountable and risk being labelled “anti-science” by their peers. So they aren’t ever going to admit they were misled even when the evidence is clear cut (and it doesn’t get any better than this). The sad fact is that their reputation is more important to them than your life. I don’t know of a single exception who has the courage to stand up for the truth. Do you?
Bahrain’s Tale of COVID-19, Medicine, and Vaccination
Prior to the vaccine rollout, Bahrain had pushed its case fatality rate to a mere 0.08%, one of the lower fatality rates for COVID-19 sufferers in the world. After the vaccine rollout, that mortality rate skyrocketed 14-fold.
Heather Heying: Vitamin D Deficiency and Covid-19
vitamin D deficiency associated with 630% increase in death risk in hospitalized patients with covid
if it works about as well on hospital risk as death risk, this compounds. (i’m guessing here as an example and have no actual data)
86% less hospital and 86% less death if hospital = 98% overall risk reduction. it could well not be that high. maybe it’s 95%. maybe it’s 80% if you adjust for risk factors etc. still, that’s a HUGE number.
it’s WAY better than a vaccine.
and vitamin D is cheap, safe, easy to get, and has lots of other benefits.
COVID-19 Mortality Risk Correlates Inversely with Vitamin D3 Status, and a Mortality Rate Close to Zero Could Theoretically Be Achieved at 50 ng/mL 25(OH)D3
Berenson: Playing God (badly)
Moderna wound up turning away from making mRNA drugs for repeated dosing and focusing on vaccines for just this reason; a successful vaccine should need only one or two doses to produce a sustained if not permanent immune response, thus eliminating the need for regular dosing.
But the problems don’t end there. If the injected particles drop their genetic payload into the wrong cells, they can also do damage.
Scientists have also now repeatedly demonstrated that the spike proteins the mRNA Covid vaccines create can be toxic - especially to blood vessel cells - all by themselves, without the rest of Sars-Cov-2 attached. (See, for example: ttps://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcvm.2021.687783/full)
Which doesn’t matter, the Covid vaccine fanatics told us, because the spike protein the vaccines generate doesn’t circulate.
Except it does.
But wait, there’s more.
We know that in the short run, mRNA vaccines lead to a drop in crucial white blood cells called lymphocytes - Pfizer and BioNTech themselves acknowledged this problem. (SOURCE: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2814-7)
Now the British government is warning that people who receive the vaccines appear to have a less complete immune response to Sars-Cov-2 after infection.
Maybe even more concerning, scientists now have found evidence the vaccines may produce worrisome longer-term changes in the immune system:
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This is not to say that the mRNA (and DNA/AAV) Covid vaccines are necessarily dangerous, or that their risks outweigh their benefits. But we should all understand just how radical these therapies are, and how many unknowns they carry.
The only solution to these unknowns is very large trials conducted for long periods.
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But an equally large sin against science was the fact that regulators allowed Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna to unblind and thus destroy their pivotal trials within weeks after they presented early data.
Now we are stumbling in the dark.
And that might not matter much if the Covid vaccines had ended the Covid epidemic. But they have not.
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Now the public health authorities and the rest of the media are pushing “boosters” - again, for a biotechnology that was repurposed as a vaccine BECAUSE IT FAILED UPON REPEATED DOSING.
Meanwhile, they are simply ignoring the odd increase in all-cause non-Covid mortality that many countries are now seeing.
Where this journey ends I do not know.
But I know this: we invented about the most complex product imaginable, tested it in a relative handful of people for a few months, a far shorter timetable than is typical for drug development. Now we are shoving it on every human we can reach - to prevent (or more accurately fail to prevent) an illness that is not particularly dangerous to most of them.
85% of Covid-19 Deaths & 75% of Hospitalisations were among the Fully Vaccinated in the last month according to the latest Public Health data
why are so many in the US now so sick?
addition to US ER data: cardiovascular AE's are exploding
NPR: ERs Swamped With Seriously Ill Patients – But Most Don’t Have Covid
A.30 Variant ‘Efficiently Evades’ Antibodies Induced By Pfizer & AstraZeneca
The A.30 variant of the coronavirus, detected in Angola and Sweden, is highly resistant to antibodies induced by the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines, a new lab study has shown.
Japan Drops Vax Rollout, Goes To Ivermectin, Ends Covid Almost Overnight
The European Medicines Agency said Thursday that new preliminary data from the Nordic countries supports a warning the agency adopted in July that inflammatory heart conditions called myocarditis and pericarditis can occur in very rare cases following vaccination with Covid-19 shots made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech. By far, however, the absolute superstar among foreign nations dealing with COVID is Japan. Japan has PULLED the vaccines and substituted Ivermectin – and in one month, wiped COVID out in that country! [..] By September deaths from the COVID-19 Vaccine jabs were being investigated. At roughly that time, the vials were under scrutiny and metal “magnetic” material was found in them. Very shortly thereafter, the Japanese minister of health announced doctors could prescribe Ivermectin. A month later, the Western press is shocked that COVID has all but disappeared from the island.
Kirsch: The new rules of medicine
Welcome to the new normal
Here are five examples that in the “old days” would ruffle feathers of everyone. Today, it is expected so nobody raises even an eyebrow. It doesn’t even merit a tweet.
- Phase 3 clinical trial fraud is now expected: Maddie de Garay, a 12-year old injured in the Pfizer 12-15 year old trial is now paralyzed for life. It started less than 24 hours after her second dose. The drug company lied and reports it as “abdominal pain” so that they would get FDA approval since one paralysis out of 1,100 kids would doom the trial. The FDA hears about it, promises to investigate, but does nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even a phone call or email to the family. Compensation received by the family: ZERO. The trial documents they signed promised that there were no serious adverse events. Pfizer doesn’t even send a letter of apology. Crickets from the medical community. They really don’t care if kids are injured in vaccine trials.
- Papers that endanger the “safe and effective” narrative will be censored, no questions asked. No appeals. It used to be that papers that pass peer review get published. No longer. Jessica Rose’s paper, A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products was published but then the publisher decided to take down the paper over the objections of the editor of the journal. The reason: the publisher claims the paper was “not invited.” That isn’t true. The paper exposes that myocarditis is more dangerous than people had been led to believe. It was removed because it would have upset the false narrative that the vaccines are safe and effective. No objections from the medical community at all. Just another day. Censorship of science that doesn’t support the false narrative is not only acceptable today, it’s actually expected.
- Evidence-based medicine hierarchy principles no longer apply. There is a new Sheriff in town. The highest level of evidence in evidence-based medicine used to be the peer-reviewed meta-analysis and systematic review. No longer. If expert opinion, formerly the lowest level of evidence, from the NIH, FDA, WHO, AMA, Gates Foundation, GAVI, or a major drug company don’t support it. If any of them say “don’t use it,” the medical community follows orders. No questions asked. Ivermectin is the poster child here.
- Drugs that work against COVID must be suppressed since they would jeopardize the EUA of the vaccines. Don’t even bother to do the trials on repurposed drugs any more. It is a waste of time. For example, Fluvoxamine was shown in a large Phase 3 trial to reduce the risk of death from COVID by 12X. That’s better than anything we have today. The NIH and WHO continue to ignore it. They will simply say, “we need more evidence.” Doesn’t matter how many people die in the meantime. Doctors like George Fareed and Brian Tyson who discover early treatment multi-drug protocols with 99.76% risk reduction are now “persona non grata” at the NIH. All attempts to contact the NIH or FDA will be ignored.
- Open scientific oral discussion/debate is now forbidden. It used to be that if you had a scientific disagreement with a colleague, you’d talk to them. No longer. The new way is dueling documents, progressively longer and longer. Generally 100 pages or more. And you only get to play that game after you have your side published. No more real-time discussions and debates that would settle issues quickly. This is a pandemic but we can’t sacrifice written documentation just to settle an argument quickly. We need to take time to do it right and document everything, no matter how long it takes.
- You must not question the mainstream narrative. Nobody prominent who supports the narrative that the vaccines are safe and effective shall agree to debate any prominent opponent of the narrative. Only bad outcomes can come of that. Challengers shall be censored, intimidated, jailed, or killed if necessary.
- No more accountability. CDC scientists who don’t do their job (like John Su) shall not be held accountable. So if they screw up, they screw up. Even if millions of people die. The CDC and FDA are always right and cannot be questioned. If they release a report saying vaccines reduce all-cause mortality by 66%, instead of laughing at how absurd that is (since it would mean that nobody could die from anything except accidents and even those would be reduced), everyone is expected to suck it up and say nothing. If the CDC says cloth masks work for COVID, it’s true. If they say they don’t work for smoke, it’s true. If you point out that the virus is 25x smaller than smoke, you will have your medical license revoked for endangering the public.
Did I miss any changes? Does anyone have a copy of the original memo that was circulated to the medical community? I had to piece together this list just from my personal experience.
CO-VID of the Week:
Why 5*****s instead of the usual 3***s?
when you watch this video, and become convinced that the official guidance we’ve been propagandized with regarding masks is B.S… ie. that masking is “effective” only as virtue signaling, political theatre and “othering” of non-mask wearers… hopefully it will help break down everyone’s natural barriers to questioning authority, revisiting their assumptions, admitting they were wrong on accepting this non-scientific political guidance, but on so much else
CO-VID Tweets of the Week:
Dr. Scott Jensen
You should take two minutes and really listen to this. The words are sharp and cut through the lies. The tone is of righteous anger which we all should feel. … This is Christine Anderson of the European Parliament. [Also here, in case twitter censors it.]
Dr. Peter McCullough Explains How Myocarditis Differs When Caused by Natural Infection vs Vaccine
"Now there's pre-clinical studies suggesting the lipid nanoparticles actually go right into the heart. The heart expresses the spike protein and the body attacks the heart."
Joe Rogan: 200 congress people took Ivermectin.
COVID Quotes of the Week:
Kunstler: We’ll have to stand by months, maybe years, to find out what the effects are of mRNA shots in human children, but two known possibilities stand out: inflammation and scarring of the heart (myocarditis + sequelae), and an incrementally disabled immune system. Do you really want those shots in your children? — America might ask.
Jordan Schachtel: Birx remains committed to peddling pure pseudoscience. She spent the entirety of her time in the White House forcing this destructive nonsense down the throats of state governors who hesitantly complied due to federal pressure. The newfound George Bush Center fellow is now back in D.C. to double down on the insanity.
Mathew Crawford: The CDC and FDA run their pharmacovigilance like a black box, and it looks strangely rigged given the way the tabulation process doesn't just make the vaccines look effective at preventing COVID-19 (but not "COVID-like illness"?), but seem oddly to make recipients suddenly dodge most of the aggregate of other causes of mortality as well… If it doesn't raise a red flag in your mind that [according to their data] the vaccinated suffer two-thirds less mortality outside of COVID-19, you're truly hypnotised.
Ilargi: Wait, so we can’t use Ivermectin because “We don’t have enough data,” But..
“Let’s vaccinate children to see how safe the vaccine is because we don’t have enough data.”
Whitney Webb: Can't believe defending a corrupt, shitty career bureaucrat and Big Pharma shill like Tony Fauci is the hill that some people who identify as "left" still want to die on.
Toby Rogers: Dr. Chen defines “misinformation” as anything that contradicts the Pharma narrative. Dr. Chen is adamant that nothing be allowed to pierce his protective Pharma information bubble. I’m reminded of the phrase, “Methinks thou doth protest too much.”
Ian Miller: You sit in your monstrously uncomfortable seat and marvel at the insane, performative stupidity of the entire experience and tell yourself it’s just not worth doing it again. There is no end in sight to the theatrical experience of modern “safety.”
Jerry A. Coyne, Ph.D is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, demonstrating how even super smart scientists get most of their information from regular channels like the mainstream media, and don’t invest the same type of research or critical thinking you might expect from the author of Faith vs Fact:
Two vaccine stories: First, the FDA has authorized emergency use Pfizer vaccinations for children 5-11 years old. My own opinion, though I have no offspring, is to get your kids vaccinated pronto. The side effects have proven so far to be minimal—and no reports of heart problems. The mortality rate from the virus is infinitely higher than from the vaccination, so get your kids signed up now.
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
Whitney Webb: COVID-19: Moderna Gets Its Miracle
COVID-19 erased the regulatory and trial-related hurdles that Moderna could never surmount before. Yet, how did Moderna know that COVID-19 would create those conditions months before anyone else, and why did they later claim that their vaccine being tested in NIH trials was different than their commercial candidate?
*** el gato malo: more evidence fauci, daszak, and the NIH are STILL lying about wuhan
since the moment this all began (and likely quite a ways before any of us knew about it) fauci, the NIH, ecohealth (EHA), and a cast of who knows how many have been in full cover up and deny mode on what what happened and precisely who funded what at the wuhan institute of virology (WIV). and their claims keep falling apart as the facts come out.
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we empaneled the very perps accused of the crime to investigate it and this blue ribbon fox commission assures us there was no vulpine involvement in the henhouse murders. those footprints must be raccoons or something.
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this is clearly just the work that could lead to covid 19. it’s the same work daszak was bragging about in late 2019.
the idea that this was somehow an accident is ridiculous. it’s obviously what they had been pursuing for years.
the idea that this exact roadmap somehow led to some other virus and that despite this looking like a duck, quacking like a duck, and having made piles and piles of little baby ducks, no way was what they had at wuhan a duck is just too much to swallow.
… to expect those who have done nothing but lie (and run a genuine, no kidding conspiracy to cover the lie) to suddenly be telling the whole truth about what gene strains they worked on in wuhan requires a special kind of gullibility.
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imagine how different the world might have been had we had media and politicians willing to dig and do their jobs last year. instead of having tony and co run riot over america with their self-serving pseudoscience, these people could have been run out of town on a rail.
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some BIG questions remain. perhaps biggest among them is this:
what is the relationship between the mRNA vaccines that appeared so suddenly after this virus was allegedly first gene sequenced and this set of projects centered on and around wuhan?
because the speed of that development has always looked implausible (at best) and impossible (almost certainly).
no other mRNA vaccine has ever appeared in just a couple weeks. they take years (unless you were already way ahead on the work.) the payload for moderna came from the NIH. pfizer’s came from bioNtech, a tiny EU co that just happened to get a huge pile of bill gates money in the fall of 2019.
and even now, they cannot build a booster that’s based on delta. so how do you nail the first one in a couple weeks in two different places and then sit unable to to the next one anywhere on earth for 6-9 months?
el gato malo: the morality of medical "authorities"
now consider the sort of person who would:
1. conceive of such an experiment
2. think is was morally permissible to run such an experiment
3. have the stomach to actually run and observe such an experiment
4. have so little basic humanity that they could joke while doing so
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these people are NOT like most of us. 99% of humans would be unable to perform that experiment terrorizing monkeys whose brains were damaged to intensify fear. that is not a normal capability, much less a normal inclination.
and this makes granting vast social power to people such as these an incredibly bad idea.
they have about as much humanity as the viruses they study.
it’s why you should be terrified of technocracy, especially bio-technocracy.
el gato malo: pfizer CEO on vaccine hesitancy
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this would be a grotesque enough set of false framing, no true scotsman, gaslighting, straw manning, and outright emotional manipulation even if the vaccines stopped the spread of covid.
but clearly, they do not. at all.
so in the face of that “data” the “facts” become plain: this is pure emotional manipulation.
he’s teaching you how to use dishonest psyop tactics as a form of big pharma MLM and framing the literal abandonment of rationality as “facts and data.”
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alas, despite this “expansive corporate integrity agreement” they seem to be the same old pfizer only now they were smart enough to be sure they banned doctors from speaking against them, sold them straight to governments, and got full, blanket lability waivers for these products that no one could possibly be hesitant about if they knew the facts.
because that’s what you always do when the data and facts are on your side, right?
i know a lot of folks in biotech and most are fine people. lots of small companies work on lots of really important science. it’s where all the actual innovation is taking place. big pharma is another beast altogether. these are marketing and manipulation experts. they lie, bribe, cheat, and rig markets. they capture regulators in a revolving door of sinecure and employment opportunities.
they play dirty enough to make a congolese cobalt miner break down and weep.
they are not your friends.
and they do not have you best interests at heart.
el gato malo: 2020 is the year that turned all of public health into an endless series of fad diets
…the caliber of studies being made up by the CDC to try to validate vaccines (and WOW were THEY a bunch of TOTAL FAILS) is on par with
… this is hucksterism, not health policy.
… trust in these public agencies to be either competent or trustworthy to manage public health and especially public health information programs was always ill-founded.
read the history of the USDA food pyramid some time.
it was MADE UP. there was no science. there were no studies. it was a clownshow of convenience and cronyism.
it was also badly wrong.
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this is EXACTLY what’s being done with nonsensical and broadly debunked policy on masks, lockdowns, distancing, schools, and increasingly with untested and obviously problematic vaccines that
- stop neither contraction nor contagion of covid,
- may well be making it worse,
- and may well be rekindling a pandemic by selecting for hotter variants just like getting the “less fat more carbs” nutrition wrong kindled an epidemic of ill health and obesity.
there seems to be some deep societal reservoir of trust in these federal agencies.
“there must be an expert who knows!”
“they’d never let people do this without a good reason!”
“they would never act this reckless!”
no, there isn’t. and yes, they would.
there are no checks on this system. it’s an ad hoc weasel circus full of politicians and marketing people. the scientists barely even get a look in on policy.
Hopkins: (New Normal) Winter is Coming
Seriously, the point of this entire exercise (or at least this phase of this entire exercise) is to radically, irrevocably, transform society into a monolithic corporate campus where everyone has to scan their IDs at every turn of an endless maze of perpetually monitored, eco-friendly, gender-fluid, ideologically uniform, non-smoking, totally meat-free “safe spaces” owned and operated by GloboCap, or one of its agents
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And so on. I think you get the picture. This Winter is probably going to get a little nutty … or, OK, more than a little nutty. In terms of manufactured mass hysteria, it is probably going to make Russiagate, the War on Populism, the Global War on Terror, the Red Scare, and every other manufactured mass-hysteria campaign you can possibly think of look like an amateur production of Wagner’s Götterdammerung.
In other words, kiss reality (or whatever is left of reality at this point) goodbye. The clock is ticking, and GloboCap knows it. If they expect to pull this Great Reset off, they are going to need to terrorize the New-Normal masses into a state of protracted pants-shitting panic and uncontrollable mindless hatred of “the Unvaccinated,” and anyone challenging their rule. A repeat of the Winters of 2020 and 2021 is not going to cut it. It is going to take more than the now standard repertoire of fake and manipulated statistics, dire projections, photos of “death trucks,” non-overflowing overflowing hospitals, and all the other familiar features of the neo-Goebbelsian propaganda juggernaut we have been subjected to for over 18 months.
They are facing a growing working-class revolt. Millions of people in countries all over the world are protesting in the streets, organizing strikes, walk-outs, “sick-outs,” and mounting other forms of opposition. Despite the corporate media’s Orwellian attempts to blackout any coverage of it, or demonize us all as “far-right extremists,” the New Normals are very aware that this is happening. And the official narrative is finally falling apart. The actual facts are undeniable by anyone with an ounce of integrity, so much so that even major GloboCap propaganda outlets like The Guardian are being forced to grudgingly admit the truth.
No, GloboCap has no choice at this point but to let loose with every weapon in its arsenal — short of full-blown despotism, which it cannot deploy without destroying itself
Vax Mandate Pushback Fare:
12,000 Air Force Personnel, Including Elite Pilots, Have Rejected Vax Order As Tuesday Deadline Looms
NYPD's Largest Police Union Sues Mayor Over COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate
NYPD data shows nearly 50% of cops are unvaccinated in some precincts
NYPD preparing for potential crush of retirements ahead of vaccine mandate
‘Oh Hell No’: Ice Cube ditches movie & $9 million after refusing to get Covid-19 vaccine
'I Had To Stand Up And Try To Do Something:' Professor Of Medicine On Suing School Over Vaccine Mandate
"Stop Medical Apartheid!" - Police Passive As Huge Crowd Protests Australia's Draconian Pandemic Powers Bill
COVID Graphics Fare: (one, two, three & four)
GeoPolitical Fare:
“The Spoils of War”: How Profits Rather Than Empire Define Success for the Pentagon
Intriguingly, it’s also not a left-wing critique, exactly. Leftist analysis of the American war machine generally credits it with a coherent plan to rule the world and an implacable lust for the violence needed to make it happen. “If you’re a dove, you think the whole thing’s really rotten,” Cockburn said in a recent appearance on Intercepted. However, “a lot of my good sources, and indeed friends, whose political views in other areas might make your hair stand on end” despise the military’s profligate behavior for their own reasons.
Cockburn suggests that the Pentagon and the corporations that feed off it have generated the largest and most byzantine bureaucracy in human history, filled with innumerable fiefdoms far more focused on besting their internal rivals than outside enemies. Today’s generals and admirals don’t engage in unnecessary activities like trying to win wars, but instead while their days away plotting how to join the board of General Dynamics six hours after their retirement party.
‘They targeted us for one reason: We’re succeeding in changing the paradigm’
After being outlawed as 'terrorist organizations' overnight, Palestinian human rights groups talk to +972 about why Israel's allegations are not just unfounded, but amount to an act of political persecution.
Lebanon: “We’re all going to hell”
NATO Sliding Towards War Against Russia In Ukraine.
Why I see a war in the Donbass as (almost) inevitable
Orwellian Fare:
Lee Camp: The Four Layers of Reality — and Why We’re Only Allowed to Talk About One
we have three or four levels of reality that we should be discussing all the time because they’re incredibly important. But, generally speaking, American politicians and media don’t talk about the deeper layers. In fact, they only talk about the surface layer (because they’re corporate tools).
James K. Galbraith: The JFK Cover-Up Strikes Again
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In other words, most Americans accept a conspiracy theory. They can see that the “lone gunman” story cannot be reconciled with the claim that national defense, intelligence operations, or foreign relations in 2021 would be compromised by releasing all documents, with no redactions, as required by law, nearly 58 years after Kennedy’s assassination by that lone gunman.
I am not accusing Biden, or the agencies whose advice he accepted on these matters, of breaking the law. On the contrary, I take them at their word: that in their view, a full disclosure of all documents would compromise military, intelligence, and foreign relations.
It is not difficult to imagine how. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there was a conspiracy. Suppose that the remaining documents, together with those already released, were to establish – or permit private citizens to establish – what most Americans already believe. In that case, it would be obvious that the cover-up involved senior US government officials – including the leaders of the very agencies currently being tasked with reviewing the records. And, as a point of logic, it follows that in every succeeding cohort, under every president, the cover-up has continued. Isn’t that the only plausible way the current interests of those agencies might be damaged?
For First Time in Public, a Detainee Describes Torture at C.I.A. Black Sites
"'The experiment of total domination.'"
WHISTLE-BLOWING and the exposure of the officially hidden have long and honorable traditions, in America and elsewhere. As one would logically expect, challenges to our empires of secrecy have grown more frequent along with the grotesque expansion of these antidemocratic domains. This has proceeded in consonance with the elaboration of the national-security state
Gearóid Ó Colmáin: In Defense of Pesticide
… In Australia, both the Queensland and Victoria premiers have confirmed that concentration camps are going to be used for anti-vaxers.
… In Lithuania, citizens need an ‘ opportunity’ pass to access all goods and services. Unvaccinated citizens are completely locked out of society. This is the model we will have in a year or so in Western Europe if the elites succeed in implementing their ‘health’ plans.
… The “virus” is a key element in the formation of consensus around the idea that overpopulation is the problem. And something needs to be done about that.
CaitOz Fare:
From Press Freedom To Prison Systems, Everything Assange Touches Gets Illuminated
Since Assange’s imprisonment there’s been a jaw-dropping deluge of revelations about the malfeasance of the power structures which rule over us which could not have been exposed to such an extent in any other way.
…. On the global level there are vast power structures which have a vested interest in keeping their misdeeds out of public attention and making sure we all remain confused and misinformed about what’s really going on in the world. On a sociological level there are individuals who have a vested interest in keeping their personal actions out of the light and preventing anyone from clearly seeing what they’re really up to. On an internal level we’ve all got subconscious forces at play within ourselves whose existence depends on avoiding the light of conscious perception.
So they’re just openly brutalizing a journalist for exposing US war crimes, while arguing that they can be trusted to treat him humanely and give him a fair trial if granted extradition. This after it has already been confirmed that the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate him during the Trump administration, after we learned that the prosecution relied on false testimony from a convicted child molester and diagnosed sociopath, after it was revealed that the CIA spied on Assange and his lawyers in the Ecuadorian embassy, and after intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein famously died under highly suspicious circumstances in a US prison cell.
The Democratic Party is doing exactly what anyone who knows anything predicted it would do when they reclaimed the White House and the Senate and it’s going to be rad watching American liberals learn exactly zero lessons from it.
Right after Biden was sworn in I wrote that the next two years are going to be the Democratic Party at its most transparent, because the Democratic Party exists to kill all leftward movement in the most powerful government on earth.
I always get people telling me, “Capitalism just means free trade.” No it doesn’t, that’s just some stupid nonsense libertarian types started saying a few years ago. Capitalism means what the Marxists who coined and popularized the term have been saying it means since the 1800s: the owners of the means of production exploiting workers by paying them a fraction of the wealth they generate. Capitalism is a system which financially coerces those who have nothing to sell but their labor to sell it to the owners of the means of production, necessarily at a price that is far below the amount of value they generate and with no influence over the industries they are powering with their work. It is inherently exploitative, and leads to corporations with no human interest pursuing profit at all cost even at the expense of the ecosystem we all depend on for survival.
*** Billionaires Are Not Morally Qualified To Shape Human Civilization
Human civilization is being engineered in myriad ways by an unfathomably wealthy class who are so emotionally and psychologically stunted that they refuse to end world hunger despite having the ability to easily do so.
The United Nations has estimated that world hunger could be ended for an additional expenditure of $30 billion a year, with other estimates considerably lower. The other day Elon Musk became the first person ever to attain a net worth of over $300 billion. A year ago his net worth was $115 billion. According to Inequality.org, America’s billionaires have a combined net worth of $5.1 trillion, which is a 70 percent increase from their combined net worth of under $3 trillion at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
So we’re talking about a class which could easily put a complete halt to human beings dying of starvation on this planet by simply putting some of their vast fortunes toward making sure everyone gets enough to eat. But they don’t.
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There are almost infinite examples I could highlight, but I think my point is clear. Billionaires and billionaire corporations own our media, influence our thinking, manipulate our economies, interfere in our politics, determine the fate of our ecosystem, and shape our world. And they are the very least qualified among us to be doing so.
At a hotly anticipated remote keynote presentation on Friday, billionaire Jeff Bezos revealed the details of an exciting new virtual reality experience which he says will allow consumers to log on to an artificial fantasy world completely unlike our existing reality. “We’re calling it Mainstream Media, or MSM for short,” Bezos told viewers. … “In fact, the psychological technology is so immersive that users aren’t generally even aware that they’re not experiencing actual reality.”
Other Quotes of the Week:
Varoufakis: Hands off our mÎta, our Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation https://metacpc.org/en/, Mr Zuckerberg. You, and your minions wouldn't recognise civilisation even if it hit you with a bargepole
Ian Miller: There are few things in this world that the media loves more than advocating for the masses to submit to and follow their demands. It fulfills so many of their favorite impulses; authoritarianism, their innate and unearned sense of self-importance, and a desire to sneeringly dismiss those who disagree with their acceptable forms of political and social ideology.
KLG: I stopped paying attention to Crooked Timber (the shades of Immanuel Kant and Isaiah Berlin should sue for misappropriation) when one of them called me a moron for making the argument that many people who voted for Trump in 2016 had good reason and that the road to Trump was surveyed by Carter, cleared by Reagan and Bush I, graded by Clinton and Bush II, and then paved with polished granite by Obama…I see this particular post as the more genteel strain of TDS exhibited by the PMC. And a bit precious. Do these people ever leave their bubble? Rhetorical question.
Must Read:
*** The Treason of the Healers
In 1927, the French intellectual Julien Benda published La Trahison des Clercs which has been translated to English as The Betrayal (and sometimes the Treason) of the Intellectuals. The book is a searing indictment of the role played by intellectuals from both sides of the First World War in fanning the flames of that devastating conflict which raised the threshold of man’s capacity for murder and destruction to theretofore unimaginable levels.
For Benda, the great and unpardonable sin of the intellectuals in both Germany and France was to abandon the imperative to generate “disinterested” knowledge, and to instead lend their talents and prestige to tasks of promoting home-borne chauvinism on one hand, and the systematic denigration of the enemy’s culture and citizens on the other.
The rise of the figure of the intellectual, as we understand it today, is intimately linked to two interlocking historical processes from the last third of the 19th century: the rapid secularization of society and the rise of the daily newspaper.
…. However, it did not take long to discover that the newly ascendant men of science were just as prone as Benda’s treasonous writers to abuse the institutional powers conferred on them by society and the state in order to pursue narrowly subscribed, and often deeply inhumane, campaigns of bullying and/or human experimentation.
… But when it comes to acknowledging this, things are much the way they are when it comes to acknowledging the serial crimes of the US empire. It is—as Harold Pinter said in addressing this last matter in his Nobel speech—as if, “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”
And because we have largely ignored these outrages against human dignity and the core ethos of healing—explaining them away the very few times when they are mentioned with the ever-useful “a few bad apples” meme—we find ourselves completely flat footed before the dangers of a new expert-led imposition of highly questionable public health policies, as well as a medical cadre that is more arrogant and less capable of personal and collective insight than one could have ever believed to be possible.
… Indeed, I am more and more convinced that most practicing physicians have read precious few studies on the clinical treatment of Covid or the effectiveness of the public health measures that were invented out of whole cloth in March of 2020 to combat the spread of the disease.
Rather, like the hierarchically-minded “good students” they were and are, they simply assume that someone somewhere up the chain of power has actually read things about these matters, subjected them to critique, and decided they all made perfect sense. Indeed, never has Thomas Kuhn’s portrayal of the drone-like and paradigm-enslaved thinking of most working scientists looked more true.
How else can we explain the fact that so many physicians have sat by silently while blatant anti-science and anti-logic nonsense is proffered to the public day after day by their media colleagues, and worse yet, have, in numerous cases, organized and led campaigns to silence the minority in their ranks who have the courage to challenge these absurd claims and the policies they make possible?
Need examples?...
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Have these bathetic citers of Hippocrates begun to think about what this could mean down the road for the practice of medicine? After having cheered government efforts to foist experimental injections on tens, and more probably, hundreds of millions of people for whom these injections can do no statistically significant good, and thus only harm, they are in no position to stop further pharmaceutical demands from the combined forces of big business and government.
Fun Fare:
Pfizer Claims Vaccine Will Reduce Average Daily Child COVID Deaths From Almost Zero To Almost Zero
FDA officials praised Pfizer for fighting a virus that is the leading killer of children after cancer, vehicular accidents, suicide, heart disease, drowning, suffocation, the flu, meteors from space, and slipping on a banana peel. Experts say the vaccine will probably kill more kids than it saves, but it's ok because science.
We Ask Dr. Fauci About What He's Planning For The Next Pandemic
Misinformed horse uses COVID-19 vaccine to treat worm infestation
L.G.B.
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