If The Jabs Are Safe And Effective - Why Are Their Manufacturers Shielded By Liability Waivers?

CTH  |  Many people have asked: how is the best way to stop the insanity behind the incessant vaccine narrative?  The likely best approach is to start demanding the pharmaceutical companies have their liability waivers removed.

If the vaccine is safe and effective, why would the U.S. government still need to provide liability waivers from adverse vaccine outcomes?

Start pressuring legislators and elected officials to force the elimination of the waivers.  Alinsky them… Make them live up to their own narrative; their own words, their own rules.  If the vaccines are safe/effective, why do we need the waivers?    If you want to get more people vaccinated, drop the waiver moving forward.

Eliminate those liability waivers and watch how fast every vaccine mandate is dropped, while every voice demanding vaccination goes quiet.

One Unadvertised Scheme - AMONG MANY - For Shaking Down "Middle-Class" Peasants

@seangotcher #housing ♬ San Tropez - Illect Recordings

msn |  In a video that’s garnered more than 2.4 million views on TikTok, Nevada real-estate agent Sean Gotcher criticizes the “iBuying” business model, in which companies buy and sell homes for a profit. In the video, he proposes that a nameless company has a website where many people search for homes “when they’re bored,” and he says that same company “uses that information to go into that ZIP code and start purchasing houses.”

In other words, he’s suggesting that companies such as Zillow are using the data they glean from people’s perusal of home listings on their sites to make decisions about which houses to buy as iBuyers.

Gotcher later argues that the company will buy 30 homes at one price, and then purchase a 31st home at a higher price. “What that just did is create a new comp,” Gotcher says, referring to comparable prices on nearby properties, which appraisers use to determine the value of a home for sale. He then says the company can turn around and sell the other homes at that new, higher price.

In subsequent videos, Gotcher takes on Zillow and Redfin more directly, criticizing their respective business practices.

“I’m happy to see the conversation that’s occurring at every printer in every real estate office about data storage, mixed with buying power and recognizable marketing is finally happening outside our office doors so more can participate in the discussion,” Gotcher, who works for Level Up Real Estate in Henderson, Nev., told MarketWatch in an email.

The video subsequently garnered even more attention on Twitter when a person with the username Gladvillain shared it after learning that the user’s mother had sold her home to Zillow. Many users claimed that Zillow was purchasing “all of the homes,” and said they planned to boycott the platform.

Both Zillow and Redfin contradicted the video’s claims. “The internet has empowered millions of consumers with more information, transparency and tools in real estate to help them make smarter real estate decisions, many provided by Zillow for more than a decade,” a Zillow spokesperson told MarketWatch in an email. “Unfortunately, the internet can also sometimes be a source of misinformation and falsehoods — as is this case.”

A Redfin spokesperson added that the company doesn’t “have the share to manipulate the market nor do we have any desire to, because intentionally overpaying for homes would be a terrible business model.”

Real-estate experts debunked many of the points made in the viral video, and argued that other forces are to blame for the country’s competitive, pricey housing market.

“If you could rig the residential housing market that easily, the Realtors would have done it long ago,” said Gilles Duranton, a real-estate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

 

 

Billionaires Were Undistracted And Undeterred By The Controlavirus Shenanigans...,

ips |  U.S. billionaires have seen their wealth surge $1.8 trillion during the pandemic, their collective fortune skyrocketing by nearly two-thirds (62 percent) from just short of $3 trillion at the start of the COVID crisis on March 18, 2020, to $4.8 trillion on August 17, 2021, according to a report from Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality (IPS). A table of the top 15 billionaires is below and the full data set is here.

Elon Musk has seen his wealth increase by an eye-popping $150 billion during the pandemic, a gain of over 600 percent.

America’s billionaire bonanza demonstrates the flaws in our current economic and tax systems President Biden and Democrats in Congress are trying to remedy by advancing a $3.5 trillion budget package, which has already passed the U.S. Senate and is being considered in the U.S. House today. If it becomes law through the budget reconciliation process this fall, it will aid communities and working families by making healthcare, eldercare, childcare, housing and education more affordable, investing in clean energy, expanding the Child Tax Credit and providing 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave. It will be paid for by making the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share of taxes, and it will not raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year.

Not only did the wealth of billionaires grow, but so did their numbers: in March of last year, there were 614 Americans with 10-figure bank accounts; this August, there are 708. Their $1.8 trillion of increased wealth alone over 17 months, which will not be taxed unless they sell their assets, would pay for more than half of Biden’s 10-year $3.5 trillion investment package.

21st Century Slavery Looks A Lot Like 19th Century Slavery

motherjones |  When I first came to the Dominican Republic 30 years ago evidence of forced labor in the sugar harvest was glaringly obvious: Men with shotguns guarded locked gates to trap workers in the cane fields. But the International Labor Organization’s indicators of forced labor include more subtle abuses like the hazardous working conditions, low pay, and other issues cane workers regularly describe today.

“We’re talking about coercive forces that are psychological, coercive forces that are driven by debt,” said Duncan Jepson, managing director of the international anti-trafficking group Liberty Shared. “And that’s slightly more subtle than methods of violence.”

One Sunday morning, Euclides and I went to a batey for an Evangelical church service, under a patchwork of red and blue tarps affixed to wooden poles. We’d been invited by a couple I’ll call Efrain and Noni. Noni paced back and forth before the congregation, microphone in her hand, leaning back, giving it everything.

In contrast to his wife, Efrain sat quietly in a folding chair. He’s a “mixer,” part of a team of fumigators who sometimes use sticks ripped from trees to stir chemicals in open 55-gallon drums. Despite Central Romana’s promises to provide health care to workers, Efrain told us he has to pay for much of it himself, which has pushed him into spiraling debt. Together with expenses caused by his brother’s thrombosis, he now owes 30,000 pesos—about $600, or nearly three months’ pay. The lender charges 10 percent per week, Efrain explains: “If you borrow 1,000 pesos, you have to give this person 100 pesos per week in interest.” Yearly, that adds up to 520 percent interest.

More than two dozen cane workers told us their salaries are so low that they’ve turned to money lenders in nearby towns. A municipal firefighter who has a side business making loans to cane workers explained that while Central Romana doesn’t operate the loan shark rings, the company’s low wages leave workers desperate and willing to pay exorbitant rates. One of the ILO’s elements of forced labor is “fraudulent debt from which workers cannot escape.”

It’s a brutal cycle, Efrain tells us. The canecutters are in debt until they die.

Sugar is not the only thing that’s made the Fanjuls so rich. Their profits are sweetened thanks to the politics of the United States. Not only does Central Romana benefit from a tariff program under which the Dominican Republic gets a greater share than any other sugar-exporting nation—with the company filling nearly two-thirds of that quota—but it also profits from a congressionally authorized federal price-support program that inflates the value of each pound by about 10 cents. Vincent Smith, an agricultural economist and critic of the program, estimates the Fanjul family is “getting at least $150 million a year” in net benefits from the program, with another $25 million going to Central Romana’s imports. “That’s a very substantial concentration of benefits on a very small number of folks,” Smith says.

Some of that money goes back to seed the American political system. Over the last 20 years, Big Sugar has spent more than $220 million on campaign contributions and lobbying to sustain the price-supports and oppose stricter dietary guidelines, with 40 percent of that, according to OpenSecrets, coming from Fanjul-affiliated companies and lobbying groups. Smith, citing Federal Election Commission data, points out that the Fanjul empire and allied sugar organizations spend 10 million every year on lobbying and campaign contributions. “They’re not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts,” says Sheila Krumholz, OpenSecrets’ executive director. “It’s a very good investment.”

 

I Told You This Months Ago: It's NOT About Public Health - It's Private Wealth And Perpetual Control

thegrayzone  |  The death by starvation of Etwariya Devi, a 67-year-old widow from the rural Indian state of Jharkhand, might have passed without notice had it not been part of a more widespread trend.

Like 1.3 billion of her fellow Indians, Devi had been pushed to enroll in a biometric digital ID system called Aadhaar in order to access public services, including her monthly allotment of 25kg of rice. When her fingerprint failed to register with the shoddy system, Devi was denied her food ration. Throughout the course of the following three months in 2017, she was repeatedly refused food until she succumbed to hunger, alone in her home. 

Premani Kumar, a 64-year-old woman also from Jharkhand, met the same demise as Devi, dying of hunger and exhaustion the same year after the Aadhaar system transferred her pension payments to another person without her permission, while cutting off her monthly food rations. 

A similarly cruel fate was reserved for Santoshi Kumari, an 11-year-old girl, also from Jharkhand, who reportedly died begging for rice after her family’s ration card was canceled because it had not been linked to their Aadhaar digital ID.

These three heart-rending casualties were among a spate of deaths in rural India in 2017 which came as a direct result of the Aadhaar digital ID system.

With over one billion Indians in its database, Aadhaar is the largest biometric digital ID program ever constructed. Besides serving as a portal to government services, it tracks users’ movements between cities, their employment status, and purchasing records. It is a de facto social credit system that serves as the key entry point for accessing services in India.

Having branded Aadhaar’s creator, fellow billionaire Nandan Nilekani, as a “hero,” initiatives backed by tech oligarch Bill Gates have long sought to bring the “Aadhaar approach to other countries.” With the onset of the Covid-19 crisis, Gates and other mavens of the digital ID industry have an unprecedented opportunity to introduce their programs into the wealthy countries of the Global North.

For those yearning for an end to pandemic-related restrictions, credential programs certifying their vaccination against Covid-19 have been marketed as the key to reopening the economy and restoring their personal freedom. But the implementation of immunity passports is also accelerating the establishment of a global digital identity infrastructure.

As the military surveillance firm and NATO contractor Thales recently put it, vaccine passports “are a precursor to digital ID wallets.”

And as the CEO of iProove, a biometric ID company and Homeland Security contractor, emphasized to Forbes, “The evolution of vaccine certificates will actually drive the whole field of digital ID in the future. So, therefore, this is not just about Covid, this is about something even bigger.”

For the national security state, digital immunity passports promise unprecedented control over populations wherever such systems are implemented. Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner of Ontario, Canada has described the vaccine passport system already active in her province as “a new, inescapable web of surveillance with geolocation data being tracked everywhere.”

The Real Culture War Is A Battle Between What People Need vs What Money Wants

GodsSpies |   “The news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class—the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.”
— George Carlin, quoted here

It's going to be interesting to see, in the next five to fifteen years, the methods the rich must use to keep their power when the climate crisis hits with full and majestic force. The coming chaos and revolutionary fervor that suffering millions and billions will bring to the table will each be world-historical in scope. What under those conditions will the powerful do, the very very few, to keep the very many from taking control? Whatever the result, none of our governments will survive in their current form.

Keep in mind, revolutions are not orderly, and this one almost certainly won't be well led. Yes, from time to time, the world kicks out a George Washington, fit for the challenge of his time, a man who willing to fortify the republic he helped to build rather than just profit from it.

And yes, from time to time the world kicks out a Napoleon or Vespasian, a man fit to rule his time well, at least for the most part, even if that rule is decidedly autocratic.

But most of the time the world kicks out masters of chaos, egomaniacal destroyers and opportunists, people like Alcibiades of Athens, or Ronald Reagan, people who gain power in disgruntled times, and through their actions make the world worse for everyone. Reagan took a struggling country, the proto-neoliberal nation of the Carter years, a nation steeped in stagflation, and set in fatal motion the wealth machine that will soon destroy us all, including the machine itself.

If we don't get off of fossil fuel in time, the rich will suffer with the rest of us the destruction they will cause. Our leaders won't contemplate any measure that reduces their power, and we won't contemplate forcing them to leave. Under those constraints, the problem has no solution.

The rich won't stand down. Will the people stand up? On that one question hangs all of the rest of this tale.

 

Retail And Pharmaceutical Distribution Of Psychedelics Will Destroy Millions More Minds And Lives

caitlinjohnstone |   “Money has begun flowing into companies intending to monetize psychedelic therapy as new research has increasingly shown that blowing one’s mind can alter it for the better,” reads a new article for the Los Angeles Times titled “Money is pouring into psychedelics. Meet the mystical hedge fund investor bankrolling the boom.”

“This scientific and commercial excitement rests on research showing that psychedelics can supercharge mental health treatment for PTSD, depression, anxiety, addiction, and other chronic ailments of the mind, enabling patients to dive deep, confront their traumas and — a rarity for mental illnesses — return healed,” the article reads. “That goes for synthetic chemicals such as MDMA and ketamine as well as plant-derived drugs such as psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), the South American plant brew ayahuasca, and the West African root-derived substance iboga.”

LA Times’ Sam Dean shares the personal journey of hedge fund investor Sa’ad Shah and his involvement in what has become a multibillion-dollar psychedelics industry long before even the legal infrastructure necessary for such companies to turn a profit is in place. We learn of Shah’s experience with ayahuasca, his interest in mystical traditions and personal growth, and his conviction in the shift that has for the last few years been known as the psychedelic renaissance.

And then, about halfway down the article, we get to the actual meat of the matter:

“Shah welcomes big pharma and big institutions to enter the fray in the interest of spreading the chemical gospel far and wide. He sees the financial and therapeutic potential for psychedelics not in the cannabis model, which would make psychedelics broadly available for retail purchase, but in the pharmaceutical mode — psychedelics as prescribed drugs, with patent rights, administered in medical settings.”

That “with patent rights” bit right there is behind the so-called psychedelic renaissance we’ve been hearing so much about: “favoring the FDA regulatory route over the Oregon route,” as a psychiatrist cited in the article put it. It’s being driven not by the need to free human consciousness from the prohibition-induced coma it’s been under since the sixties so that we can collectively navigate through the many existential hurdles our species is fast approaching with wisdom and insight, but by the agenda to make rich people even richer by forcefully controlling psychedelic substances via the pharmaceutical industry.

Political Livestock Management Continues To Devolve EXACTLY How The Archdruid Said It Would...,

ritholtz |  “In every well-ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members, the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”

-Justice John Marshall Harlan, Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905)

I noted back in February that America’s CEOs were “Having a Good Year.” Not just in their response to a deadly pandemic, or to the logistical challenges of remote work or feeding a nation stuck at home, but even their response to the January 6^th attempted coup (Let’s stop pussyfooting around with equivocal words like “insurrection”).

The CEO crew congratulated the legitimate victor, dismissed nonsensical conspiracy theories, froze contributions to elected Capitol rioters, and generally behaved like responsible citizens facing a credible crisis of Democracy. Of course, there was some backsliding – I crossed Toyota off of my list never to be purchased or recommended again – but generally speaking, the corporate sector behaved rather well.

The Vaccine hesitancy that has been stoked by bad actors – an unseemly mix of malicious, opportunistic, and plain old stupid – has presented another chance for the corporate sector to demonstrate leadership. The track record is at best mixed.

If for no other reason than self-interest, it’s time for Corporate America to step up its Vax game – and fast. More than their new hires, companies need to get their customers, aka the public, vaccinated. Otherwise, we are going to be living through an echo of 2020, with Covid as an ongoing and perhaps even long-term drag on the economy. This will affect revenue and earnings at all companies.

Even better, as an exercise, let’s name names. Consider these 10 companies as well-situated to effect real social change relative to Vaccines. But really, any company can show leadership.

The Archdruid Believes The mRNA Neo-Vaccinoids Are Hanlon's Razor Gone Wild

ecosophia |  Stage Seven: Don’t Breathe A Word Of This

 

There was another reason for people to be suspicious, though that wasn’t clear at first.  Everyone who’s had to use Microsoft programs knows that Bill Gates’ management style tends to produce second-rate, bug-ridden products that don’t work the way they’re supposed to work, and have to be pushed on reluctant consumers via high-pressure marketing and monopolistic practices. It turns out that the same was true of the biotechnology on which the Covid-19 vaccines are based. That would have been discovered in the usual way during the two to five years of testing a new vaccine normally gets, but the Covid vaccines didn’t get that; the first one to be authorized had a total of eight weeks of not especially rigorous testing, the others didn’t get much more, and so a far from minor problem slipped past.  In the spring of 2021 word thus began to trickle out that the Covid-19 vaccines had a serious problem with ADE: once the initial protection wore off, a process which took a few months, people who’d been vaccinated were much more likely to get seriously ill from repeat exposure to Covid-19 than people who hadn’t. Thus the federal government and the medical industry suddenly had a self-inflicted disaster on their hands. 
 

Stage Eight: Panic In The C-Suites
 

The first response of the people in power, of course, was to find somebody else to take the blame. That’s when politicians and the media turned on a dime (again) and suddenly started admitting that the virus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s when Bill Gates suddenly stopped being the poster child for the vaccine effort and got dumped in a hurry by his wife and kids, and when Anthony Fauci suddenly had to deal with a flurry of negative publicity and the unexplained cancellation of his ghostwritten memoirs. The goal was to find someone—Gates, Fauci, the Chinese, anyone—who could be made into the fall guy and blamed for the impending mess. Apparently that first round of bad news was followed by even worse news, however; I suspect that the news was that the ADE caused by the vaccine had a noticeable fatality rate, but that’s just a guess. One way or another, finding fall guys wasn’t an adequate dodge any more, since at this stage it wasn’t just careers that were at risk:  it was potentially the viability of the entire political-economic establishment.
 

Stage Nine: Things Get Serious
 

All of a sudden, as a result, it was no longer enough to vaccinate 70% of the US population. Everyone without exception had to get vaccinated—if everyone gets the vaccine, after all, it will be easier to claim that what’s happening is a nasty new variant rather than vaccine-driven ADE, since nobody will be able to point out that the unvaccinated aren’t getting it.  All of a sudden, officials dropped the (inaccurate) claim that the vaccines keep you from getting Covid-19. New outbreaks flared in which most people who got sick had been fully vaccinated; stories surfaced in the media about how strange it was that so many people were getting really nasty summer colds; the labor shortage somehow just kept getting worse and other shortages snowballed, but if you suggested that it was because too many people were sick you could count on being shouted down. Authorities began to talk earnestly about how a new variant might show up soon that would kill a third of the people who caught it. Under normal circumstances, there’s no way they could know that in advance. It makes perfect sense, however, if the vaccines have been found to cause serious ADE and they already have a good idea of what the fatality rate will be. 
 

This is where we are as I write this. If my hypothesis is right, here’s what we can expect. 
 

Stage Ten: Hoping for a Miracle
 

As ADE becomes more common, breakthrough infection clusters will pop up with increasing frequency, and the higher the percentage of the population in that region is vaccinated, the worse they will be. Variants will be blamed for this. Word of the imminent crisis will spread through the upper levels of society, however, causing increasingly frantic and irrational behavior, until it becomes next to impossible to get anything done if it depends on the government or big corporations. Medical laboratories will scramble to find a way to counteract ADE, though that’s been tried for decades now without success. Meanwhile the people who refuse to get vaccinated won’t budge no matter how much furious rhetoric and punitive policy gets dumped on them. Once this becomes clear, authorities will insist that everyone but a few holdouts has been vaccinated, in the fond hope that people will believe them one more time. 
 

Stage Eleven: Into The Endgame
 

When ADE becomes too widespread to ignore and people begin to die in significant numbers, expect governments to proclaim the arrival of the predicted new hyper-lethal variant and impose a new round of shutdowns, mask mandates, and the like. The media will insist that the people who are dying are all unvaccinated as long as they can get away with it; pay attention to the vaccination status and health outcomes of people you know for a reality check. Unless some way of stopping ADE-enhanced infections can be found in a hurry, medical systems will buckle under the caseload and triage will become the order of the day. How soon this will happen, if it does, is impossible to say in advance. It’s also impossible to know in advance how soon it will become clear that the vaccines are responsible—or just how violent a backlash against the political and economic establishment this could provoke. 

Is There Nothing These Oxygen-Thieving Maggots Won't Parasitize?

WSJ  |  A bidding war broke out this winter at a new subdivision north of Houston. But the prize this time was the entire subdivision, not just a single suburban house, illustrating the rise of big investors as a potent new force in the U.S. housing market.

D.R. Horton Inc. DHI 1.01% built 124 houses in Conroe, Texas, rented them out and then put the whole community, Amber Pines at Fosters Ridge, on the block. A Who’s Who of investors and home-rental firms flocked to the December sale. The winning $32 million bid came from an online property-investing platform, Fundrise LLC, which manages more than $1 billion on behalf of about 150,000 individuals.

The country’s most prolific home builder booked roughly twice what it typically makes selling houses to the middle class—an encouraging debut in the business of selling entire neighborhoods to investors.

“We certainly wouldn’t expect every single-family community we sell to sell at a 50% gross margin,” the builder’s finance chief, Bill Wheat, said at a recent investor conference.

From individuals with smartphones and a few thousand dollars to pensions and private-equity firms with billions, yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family houses to rent out or flip. They are competing for houses with ordinary Americans, who are armed with the cheapest mortgage financing ever, and driving up home prices.

“You now have permanent capital competing with a young couple trying to buy a house,” said John Burns, whose eponymous real estate consulting firm estimates that in many of the nation’s top markets, roughly one in every five houses sold is bought by someone who never moves in. “That’s going to make U.S. housing permanently more expensive,” he said.

The consulting firm found Houston to be a favorite haunt of investors who have lately accounted for 24% of home purchases there. Investors’ slice of the housing market grows—as it does in other boomtowns, such as Miami, Phoenix and Las Vegas—among properties priced below $300,000 and in decent school districts.

“Limited housing supply, low rates, a global reach for yield, and what we’re calling the institutionalization of real-estate investors has set the stage for another speculative investor-driven home price bubble,” the firm concluded.

 

Covid Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese: Why Don't We Address Systemic Obesity?

 aier |  Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the media and politicians have insisted we rely on the “judgment calls” of their proclaimed experts to guide policy. Facile but incorrect stories about lockdowns dominated. 

In March, Dr. Fauci again incorrectly predicted that doom was upon us when Texas relaxed its pandemic rules. 

Kahneman writes: “It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.” Perhaps, Kahneman is too kind. With Covid, predictions are founded on politics, not science, as Bill Maher recently pointedly and humorously explained. 

We are ignorant of our ignorance. It is time to look for new patterns in the evidence of those who have not survived.

Who Didn’t Come Back from Covid

The military was wise enough to listen to Wald. It would have been perverse to ignore the cockpit and reinforce parts of the plane that could survive bullet hits.

Policy makers, politicians, and the media have largely ignored the cockpit of good health: the human immunological system.

Maher pointed to a recent CDC study that reported the vast majority (78%) of those hospitalized or dead from Covid have been overweight or obese.

Of Americans aged 20 and over 73.6% are overweight; 42.5% are obese. (Obesity is defined as a body mass index (BMI) of over 30.) Many studies explain how obesity decreases resistance to infection. Obesity is linked to type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, which increase the odds of hospitalization from Covid. 

The Covid survival narrative has focused attention on lockdowns, masks and vaccinations. Maher pointed out the role that obesity played: “People died because talking about obesity had become a third rail in America.” Maher continued, “the last thing you want to do is say something insensitive. We would literally rather die. Instead, we were told to lock down. Unfortunately, the killer was already in the house and her name is Little Debbie.”

Little Debbie, of course, is Maher’s reference to heavily processed foods that are ubiquitous in the American diet. 

A significant factor in the startling numbers of overweight Americans is the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in heavily processed foods. 

The total per capita consumption of all sugars in the United States is approximately 150 pounds a year. Of that, the average American consumes over 50 pounds of corn sweeteners a year.

Sugar is heavily subsidized by the US government through loans, purchases of sugar, and tariffs on imported sugar. Government incentives have created a high-fructose corn syrup industry which didn’t exist prior to the 1970s. US sugar prices can be up to twice the world price.

From 1995-2020, corn subsidies in the United States totaled $116.6 billion. The subsidized and surplus corn ends up not only as processed food but as animal feed. 

If Livestock Had ANY IDEA What's In Store For Them....,

newsweek  |  The Spanish firm Grifols helped set off a kerfuffle last year when it, along with other firms, offered nearly double the going price for blood donations for a COVID-19 treatment trial. Brigham Young University in Idaho had to threaten some enterprising students with suspension to keep them from intentionally trying to contract COVID-19. The trial failed, however, and now the Barcelona-based firm is hoping to extract something far more valuable from the plasma of young volunteers: a set of microscopic molecules that could reverse the process of aging itself.

Earlier this year, Grifols closed on a $146 million-deal to buy Alkahest, a company founded by Stanford University neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, who, along with Saul Villeda, revealed in scientific papers published in 2011 and 2014 that the blood from young mice had seemingly miraculous restorative effects on the brains of elderly mice. The discovery adds to a hot area of inquiry called geroscience that "seeks to understand molecular and cellular mechanisms that make aging a major risk factor and driver of common chronic conditions and diseases of older adulthood," according to the National Institutes of Health. In the last six years, Alkahest has identified more than 8,000 proteins in the blood that show potential promise as therapies. Its efforts and those of Grifols have resulted in at least six phase 2 trials completed or underway to treat a wide range of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Alkahest and a growing number of other geroscience health startups signal a change in thinking about some of the most intractable diseases facing humankind. Rather than focusing solely on the etiology of individual diseases like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and arthritis—or, for that matter, COVID-19—geroscientists are trying to understand how these diseases relate to the single largest risk factor of all: human aging. Their goal is to hack the process of aging itself and, in the process, delay or stave off the onset of many of the diseases most associated with growing old.

The idea that aging and illness go hand and hand is, of course, nothing new. What's new is the newfound confidence of scientists that "aging" can be measured, reverse-engineered and controlled.

Until recently, "people working on diseases did not think that aging was modifiable," says Felipe Sierra, who recently retired as director of the Division of Aging Biology at the National Institute on Aging, a part of the NIH. "That is actually what many medical books say: The main risk factor for cardiovascular disease is aging, but we cannot change aging so let's talk about cholesterol and obesity. For Alzheimer's, aging is the main risk factor—but let's talk about the buildup in the brain of beta-amyloid proteins. Now that is beginning to change."

 

Tissue Rejuvenation Via Plasma Dilution

lifespan  |  Back in 2005, Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy showed that joining the circulatory systems of young and old mice together in a procedure called parabiosis could rejuvenate aged tissues and reverse some aspects of aging in old mice.

Following this discovery, many researchers concluded that there must be something special in young blood that was able to spur rejuvenation in aged animals, and various companies have been trying to find out what. Indeed, we recently reported that researchers were apparently successful in halving the epigenetic age of old rats by treating them with Elixir, a proprietary mix of pro-youthful factors normally found in young blood.

However, a question still remains: was the rejuvenation the result of there being something beneficial in the young blood, or is it more a case of dilution of the harmful factors present in old blood?

Today, we want to spotlight a new study by Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy, which again lends more weight to the idea that the rejuvenation is most likely due to a dilution of pro-aging factors in old blood rather than there being any special sauce in young blood [1].

During the study, the research team discovered that by replacing half of the blood plasma in old mice with a saline and albumin mixture, the albumin replacing the lost protein that was removed when the original old blood plasma was taken, they could achieve a similar or even greater rejuvenation effect in brain, liver, and muscle tissues as joining two mice together through parabiosis or giving old mice young blood.

We had the opportunity to interview Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy about this new discovery and to see if we could get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding aged blood rejuvenation.

Steve: This recent paper builds on the 2015 paper of TGF beta, but it goes even further back to the days when you guys had a lab next door to Amy Wagers and Tony Wyss-Coray and you all shared the techniques, including the parabiosis technique.

Irina: Yes. Actually, I would like also to thank you, Elena, and the whole organization for highlighting our work and giving us an opportunity to speak in interviews.

Steve: You are very welcome. So, is this dilution? Is it what you put in that’s more important, is it what you take out, or is it both? I personally think that the evidence strongly suggests that it’s more what you take out, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t good stuff in young blood.

Irina: Since our 2005 heterochronic parabiosis paper, many people jumped into this boat of young blood, thinking that the reason for rejuvenation is that there are less young factors in an old animal and we provided them. Meanwhile, all our work even leading to that paper suggested the opposite outcome: that there are excessive factors in old blood that are actually good proteins; for example, TGF beta. You cannot live without TGF beta. But, when people age, the levels of this protein become elevated, and they start doing counterproductive things for tissue repair, induce inflammation, increase fibrosis, and prevent proliferation of tissue stem cells. That was our point of view for the past 15 years, and every single paper that we published since was putting forward the general idea that it is not the young blood, it is the old blood that needs thought and attention.

Pfizer And Moderna Looking To Get PAID For Their mRNA Therapeutics...,

theintercept  |  Pfizer, Moderna, and other coronavirus vaccine makers have said repeatedly that they intend to hike prices on vaccines as early as this year, as the potential need for additional booster shots and future demand could lead to an unprecedented financial windfall.

One estimate projects that if Pfizer raised the price of its coronavirus vaccine from $19.50 to $175 per dose, as one Pfizer executive recently suggested, and if every adult American were to take it, the cost would be $44.7 billion — nearly 10 percent of all U.S. drug spending.

But the federal government, which funded crucial biomedical research to develop the patented messenger RNA technology behind the leading Covid-19 vaccines, is on the verge of eliminating a legal mechanism to control the prices of key medical products, including vaccines. 

Next week, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, will wrap up a comment period to modify the rules governing the Bayh-Dole Act, a law that regulates the transfer of federally funded inventions into commercial property. Under the current interpretation of the law, the government may “march in” and suspend the use of patents developed via government-funded inventions if it determines that the products are excessively priced.

The rulemaking is the latest flashpoint in a decades long battle to control drug prices. The drug industry has fought successfully to prevent “march-in” rights in the past; the government has never managed to exercise them. But over the last year, a growing number of Republicans and Democrats, including newly appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Beccera, have called for the use of march-in rights to rein in drug prices.

This supposed leverage to control prices — on coronavirus medications and dozens of other drugs whose development relied heavily on government-backed research — would be gone if the rule-change proceeds.

 

The Rich Have Reached The Zenith Of Their Power In NYC

FT  |   The tax fight is a preamble for an upcoming mayoral election that all sides view as one of the most consequential in New York’s history. The Democratic primary, which is expected to crown the eventual winner in a city where seven out of every eight voters are Democrats, is in June. Business leaders and the wealthy have been nursing existential dread at the possibility of what one prominent property developer calls another “ideological” mayor. That is, someone in the mould of the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, who is limited to serving two terms. Two days after winning the 2013 Democratic primary, De Blasio attended a private lunch with the city’s business leaders and promptly alienated many of them. They expected he would solicit their advice and extend a hand. Instead, the mayor reprised his “tale of two cities” campaign rhetoric, and declared that he cared about the other side. “Faces dropped,” one attendee recalls. 

That divide has only deepened in the ensuing years. De Blasio’s legion of executive class critics deride him as a lazy manager who deploys politicised rhetoric to cover for his own incompetence. While the budget has increased by 35 per cent during his tenure, problems like homelessness and public housing have worsened — even before the pandemic. “The city is at a crossroads. This is truly the most important election of our lifetime and in NYC’s history,” Stephen Ross, chair of The Related Companies, and de facto king of the city’s developers, wrote to fellow business leaders last month as he urged them to join his effort to elect a business-friendly mayor. The race’s outcome, Ross wrote, will determine whether “NYC will rebound or languish”. Looming large for executives like Ross is the grim memory of the 1970s, when a fraying city ended up losing half its Fortune 500 companies — many fleeing to surrounding suburbs — and shedding more than 1m inhabitants. That era also birthed a civic movement. It was christened at a breakfast meeting at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue in 1971 when the developer Lew Rudin and hotelier Robert Tisch hatched what would become the Association for a Better New York, a group of business leaders who aimed to step in where city government was failing. ABNY’s moguls lobbied the federal government on the city’s behalf. They also brought labour leaders into their tent.

 

I Had No Idea - May Have To Stop Whining About Covid Passports - Jes DAYYUM......,

pluralistic |  The zombie economy shambles on. Obama's loan-shark bailout and the eviction crisis let the architects of subprime buy up whole towns' worth of homes and turn them into hugely profitable slums: high-rent, low-quality deathtraps.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-housing-invitation/

Wall St landlords package rents from subprime rentals into bonds, backed by the loan-shark's guarantee: arm-breakers will evict the shit out of anyone who stops paying.

America-a land where eviction was once a rarity-now faces an eviction epidemic.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out

The foreclosure crisis was only possible because Wall St and the courts collaborated to streamline the historically complicated and time-consuming process of taking away someone's home. Same goes for the eviction epidemic.

It's a simple equation: the more loan-sharks spend on arm-breakers, the lower the expected profits.

Improvements to arm-breaking processes – cost-savings on traditional coercion or innovative new forms of terror – are powerful engines for unlocking new debt markets.

When innovation calls, tech answers. Our devices are increasingly "smart," and inside every smart device is a potential arm-breaker. Digital arm-breakers have been around since the first DRM systems, but they really took off in 2008.

That's when subprime car loans boomed. People who lost everything in the GFC still needed to get to work, and thanks to chronic US underinvestment in transit, that means owning a car. So loan-sharks and tech teamed up to deliver a new lost-cost, high-efficiency arm-breaker.

They leveraged the nation's mature wireless network to install cellular killswitches in cars. You could extend an unrepayable loan to a desperate person, and use an unmutable second stereo system to bombard them with earsplitting overdue notices.

https://edition.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/04/17/aa.bills.shut.engine.down/index.html

If they didn't pay, you could remotely cut off the ignition and send a precise location to your repo man.

Smart killswitches let you impose fine-grained control over debtors – say, enforcing a rule against driving over the county line.

https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/

Within a decade, the bond-market for payments from subprime car drivers was edging up on $1T; not because borrowers didn't default, but because they defaulted later, and the car could be easily re-leased to another desperate person.

The zombie economy shambled on. Tech built undeletable, always-on kill-switches, lo-jacks, and spyware into an ever-expanding constellation of devices, like laptops.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/rental-company-control/478365/

Rent-to-own subprime laptops were the epicenter of innovation in digital arm-breaking. Laptops shipped with spyware for covert operation of cameras and mic and access ot files.

That went beyond repoing a laptop! Lenders could make and share covert sex-tapes of their customers!

They spied on children, plundered MP3 collections, stole passwords, read email. It was beyond the wildest dreams of analog loan-sharks.

Valodya Tells The U.S. Establishment "I Am Not Your Negroe"

theconversation |  The tense test of strength began when Biden was asked about Putin in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos and agreed he was “a killer” and didn’t have a soul. He also said Putin will “pay a price” for his actions.

Putin then took the unusual step of going on the state broadcaster VGTRK with a prepared five-minute statement in response to Biden. 

In an unusually pointed manner, Putin recalled the US history of genocide of its Indigenous people, the cruel experience of slavery, the continuing repression of Black Americans today and the unprovoked US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war.

He suggested states should not judge others by their own standards:

Whatever you say about others is what you are yourself.

Some American journalists and observers have reacted to this as “trolling”. It was not. 

It was the preamble to Putin’s most important message in years to what he called the American “establishment, the ruling class”. He said the US leadership is determined to have relations with Russia, but only “on its own terms”.

Although they think that we are the same as they are, we are different people. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to defend our own interests.

And we will work with them, but in those areas in which we ourselves are interested, and on those conditions that we consider beneficial for ourselves. And they will have to reckon with it. They will have to reckon with this, despite all attempts to stop our development. Despite the sanctions, insults, they will have to reckon with this.

This is new for Putin. He has for years made the point, always politely, that Western powers need to deal with Russia on a basis of correct diplomatic protocols and mutual respect for national sovereignty, if they want to ease tensions.

But never before has he been as blunt as this, saying in effect: do not dare try to judge us or punish us for not meeting what you say are universal standards, because we are different from you. Those days are now over.

 

 

How About The Fancy Asian Human Traffickers And Local Government(s) Looking The Other Way?

CJR  |  Meanwhile, coverage of the shooting by national media outlets remained vague; reporters seemed reluctant (or were unable) to find details about the victims or pick up reports from the Korean press. Instead, the mainstream press published profiles of the shooter. And when the Atlanta Sheriff’s Office held a press conference on Wednesday morning, the press raced to take down the official statement, which uncritically echoed the suspect’s claims that he suffered from sexual addiction, and which minimized the role of racial animus in his motivation for the killing spree. 

Lee, who had worked the police beat in Korea earlier in his career, was in disbelief. “I’ve never before seen a case where the police suggest: ‘The suspect said it wasn’t the case, therefore it’s not the case,’ ” he says. Worse, the press replicated the official statement in headlines and presented it as breaking news. In most news pieces, the spokesperson’s words were treated as self-explanatory, without additional context or questions. “It was almost as though the press believed what was said to be correct, like they wanted it to be the case,” Lee says.  

To Lee, the official statement was “clearly too absurd to repeat.” He felt no obligation to cover the press conference or to recite the spokesperson’s words. Instead, Atlanta K ran a story that recounted the community response to the official statement, titled: “ ‘Does a bad day mean you can kill someone?’: white police officers’ protection of a white murderer.” 

The press corrected course a day later, but already, public perception of the suspect’s racist and anti-Asian motives had been muddied. The shooter’s explanation for the murders—sex addiction—had been widely circulated, giving weight to long-standing associations between Asian-owned massage shops and illicit sex work. Investigations into the spas in the past week cited suggestive customer reviews and a history of police raids (some of which had been undertaken wrongfully, Lee says), in effect imputing criminality to the women. The media should ask if it is meaningful to determine whether the victims had been offering sexual services, and whether such questions are worth stigmatizing the deceased women and risking harm to family members and other spa workers. This also means that survivors, who have long lived under the radar—fearful of losing their livelihoods and immigration statuses—feel discouraged from talking publicly. “Unless they have immense courage, it’s improbable for these women to want to put themselves out there,” Lee says. 

From the beginning, Lee had feared this sort of scrutiny. Reporters for national media outlets had asked him about criminal activity at the spas, to which he declined to respond. Why speculate on a question that lacks clear relevance to the story at hand? Already, the women have been unfairly immortalized in association with their place of work. The spas could never be a full reflection of who the women were; they were survival jobs—jobs the women might have worked tirelessly to retire from, had they been allowed to live out their lives.

Fancy Asians Are Like Vampires Hiding Among And Exploiting Regular Asian Folks...,

NYTimes |  Sue-ling Wang prided himself on being a self-made businessman.

The son of a farmer in Taiwan, he attended a vocational school that trained students at a factory producing zippers and ballpoint pens. But he made his ascent after arriving in America on a scholarship and obtaining a Ph.D., then starting his own company in the Atlanta area three decades ago.

He appeared at civic events, donated to Republican candidates and ensconced himself in an exclusive country club community northeast of Atlanta where he bought two stately homes, each valued at about $1 million.

Later this year, he will assume the role of head of the World Taiwanese Chambers of Commerce. It is a prestigious post: Taiwan’s government recently produced a 14-minute video of him discussing his life that included a photo of him with the island democracy’s president, Tsai Ing-wen.

“When we go abroad, we are not afraid of hardship, because we must raise our children, we want to glorify our ancestors,” Mr. Wang, himself a father, said in the video.

In telling his immigrant success story, Mr. Wang, 68, did not mention his tie to a business whose employees had little opportunity to follow his path: Gold Spa, one of the three Atlanta-area massage parlors where a gunman last week killed eight people and wounded another.

Six victims were of Korean or Chinese descent, fueling outrage and despair about the surge of anti-Asian violence, particularly against women, in the United States.

But as details about the employees emerged, so too did another narrative: the story of the wealth divide among people of Asian descent in America — a community often viewed by outsiders as monolithic and whose economic disparities have long been misunderstood.

The income gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is, in fact, greatest among Asians, who are considered the most economically divided group in the country, according to the Pew Research Center.

 

 

 

 

Pfizer Seeks State Assets In Exchange For mRNA Artificial Infection Deals

thebureauinvestigates |  Pfizer has been accused of “bullying” Latin American governments in Covid vaccine negotiations and has asked some countries to put up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as a guarantee against the cost of any future legal cases, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.

In the case of one country, demands made by the pharmaceutical giant led to a three-month delay in a vaccine deal being agreed. For Argentina and Brazil, no national deals were agreed at all. Any hold-up in countries receiving vaccines means more people contracting Covid-19 and potentially dying.

Officials from Argentina and the other Latin American country, which cannot be named as it has signed a confidentiality agreement with Pfizer, said the company’s negotiators demanded additional indemnity against any civil claims citizens might file if they experienced adverse effects after being inoculated. In Argentina and Brazil, Pfizer asked for sovereign assets to be put up as collateral for any future legal costs. 

One official who was present in the unnamed country’s negotiations described Pfizer’s demands as “high-level bullying” and said the government felt like it was being “held to ransom” in order to access life-saving vaccines.

Campaigners are already warning of a “vaccine apartheid” in which rich Western countries may be inoculated years before poorer regions. Now, legal experts have raised concerns that Pfizer’s demands amount to an abuse of power.

“Pharmaceutical companies shouldn't be using their power to limit life-saving vaccines in low- and middle-income countries,” said Professor Lawrence Gostin, director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “[This] seems to be exactly what they're doing.”

Protection against liability shouldn’t be used as “the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of desperate countries with a desperate population,” he added.

Pfizer has been in talks with more than 100 countries and supranational organisations, and has supply agreements with nine countries in Latin America and the Caribbean: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay. The terms of those deals are unknown.

Pfizer told the Bureau: “Globally, we have also allocated doses to low- and lower-middle-income countries at a not-for-profit price, including an advance purchase agreement with Covax to provide up to 40 million doses in 2021. We are committed to supporting efforts aimed at providing developing countries with the same access to vaccines as the rest of the world.” It declined to comment on ongoing private negotiations.

Most governments are offering indemnity – exemption from legal liability – to the vaccine manufacturers they are buying from. This means that a citizen who suffers an adverse effect after being vaccinated can file a claim against the manufacturer and, if successful, the government would pay the compensation. In some countries people can also apply for compensation through specific structures without going to court.