What Becomes A Country Drained Of Its Economic LifeBlood?

deagel |  There have been many questions about the countries forecast specially the one focusing on the United States of America (USA). They won't be answered one by one but below you can find some explanation, thoughts and reflections. We are going to keep this as short as possible.

The majority of the economic and demographic data used in the making of the forecasts is widely available by institutions such as the CIA, IMF, UN, USG, etc. You can see the most relevant data at every single country's page. There is a tiny part of data coming from a variety of shadow sources such as Internet gurus, unsigned reports and others. But all these sources are from the internet and are of public domain for at least a minority. For example, several years ago Dagong, the Chinese ratings agency, published a report analyzing the physical economy of the States comparing it with those of China, Germany and Japan. The conclusion was that the US GDP was something between $5 to $10 trillion instead of $15 trillion as officially reported by the USG. We assume that the official data, especially economic, released by governments is fake, cooked or distorted in some degree. Historically it is well known that the former Soviet Union was making up fake statistics years before its collapse. Western as well as other countries are making up their numbers today to conceal their real state of affairs. We are sure that many people out there can find government statistics in their own countries that by their own personal experience are hard to believe or are so optimistic that may belong to a different country.

Despite the numeric data "quantity" there is a "quality" model which has not a direct translation into numeric data. The 2014 strain of Ebola has a death rate of 50-60% but try to imagine what would happen if there is a pandemic of Ebola with hundreds of thousands or millions infected with the virus. So far the few cases of Ebola-infected people have "enjoyed" intensive healthcare with anti-viral and breathing assistance but above all with abundant human support by Physicians and nurses. In a pandemic scenario that kind of healthcare won't be available for the overwhelming number of infected leading to a dramatic increase of the death rate due to the lack of proper healthcare. The "quality" factor is that the death rate could increase to 80-90% in a pandemic scenario from the stated 50-60% rate. The figure itself is not important what is relevant is the fact that the scenario can evolve beyond the initial conditions from a 50% death toll to more than 90%. By the way, no pandemic or nuclear war is included in the forecast.

The key element to understand the process that the USA will enter in the upcoming decade is migration. In the past, specially in the 20th century, the key factor that allowed the USA to rise to its colossus status was immigration with the benefits of a demographic expansion supporting the credit expansion and the brain drain from the rest of the world benefiting the States. The collapse of the Western financial system will wipe out the standard of living of its population while ending ponzi schemes such as the stock exchange and the pension funds. The population will be hit so badly by a full array of bubbles and ponzi schemes that the migration engine will start to work in reverse accelerating itself due to ripple effects thus leading to the demise of the States. This unseen situation for the States will develop itself in a cascade pattern with unprecedented and devastating effects for the economy. Jobs offshoring will surely end with many American Corporations relocating overseas thus becoming foreign Corporations!!!! We see a significant part of the American population migrating to Latin America and Asia while migration to Europe - suffering a similar illness - won't be relevant. Nevertheless the death toll will be horrible. Take into account that the Soviet Union's population was poorer than the Americans nowadays or even then. The ex-Soviets suffered during the following struggle in the 1990s with a significant death toll and the loss of national pride. Might we say "Twice the pride, double the fall"? Nope. The American standard of living is one of the highest, far more than double of the Soviets while having added a services economy that will be gone along with the financial system. When pensioners see their retirement disappear in front of their eyes and there are no servicing jobs you can imagine what is going to happen next. At least younger people can migrate. Never in human history were so many elders among the population. In past centuries people were lucky to get to their 30s or 40s. The American downfall is set to be far worse than the Soviet Union's one. A confluence of crisis with a devastating result.

The Demographic crisis in the former Soviet Union countries has extended for over two decades, if we accept that it ended early in this decade (2010s). The demographic crisis will hit the World in the near future and is projected to last between three and eight decades more or less depending on technological breakthrough and environmental issues. The aftermath is more likely a frozen picture with the population numbers staying the same for a very, very long period of time. The countries forecast population numbers do reflect birth/deaths but also migratory movements. Many countries are going to increase their gross population due to immigration while their native population may shrink.

Over the past two thousand years we have witnessed the Western civilization built around the Mediterranean Sea shifting to Northern Europe and then by the mid 20th century shifting to an Atlantic axis to finally get centered into the States in the past 30 years. The next move will see the civilization being centered in Asia with Russia and China on top. Historically a change in the economic paradigm has resulted in a death toll that is rarely highlighted by mainstream historians. When the transition from rural areas to large cities happened in Europe many people unable to accept the new paradigm killed themselves. They killed themselves by a psychological factor. This is not mainstream but it is true. A new crisis joins old, well known patterns with new ones.

Sorry to disappoint many of you with our forecast. It is getting worse and worse every year since the beginning of the pre-crisis in 2007. It is already said that this website is non-profit, built on spare time and we provide our information and services AS IS without further explanations and/or guarantees. We are not linked to any government in any way, shape or form. We are not a death or satanic cult or arms dealers as some BS is floating around the internet on this topic. Take into account that the forecast is nothing more than a model whether flawed or correct. It is not God's word or a magic device that allows to foresee the future.

Sunday, October 26th, 2014

Red And Black Ants Must NEVER SEE The Jar Or The Hand That Shakes It!!!

nakedcapitalism |  Something else is going on beneath the actual events, for sure. I happened across this story and took a gander at the WSB reddit board and was blown away by the amount of energy there — it was lively and real — something so foreign in an age of sleuths, slights and deception. It does not matter that what was being done would have minimal overall impact on HFs or the financial system in the grand scheme of things. All that matters was people came together spontaneously to do something with no regard for the consequences. And something did happen. Some brokerages halted trading of GME and other affected companies, and it drew quite the media attention as well as a flutter in congress. Maybe it is no big deal as Yves seems to think, but I disagree.

Consider for a moment that this was a somewhat random collection of people (and maybe some big money too) uniting for something that is foolish and self-defeating. People who can afford not to lose, and yet still choose to do so.

Consider also that social media, tech companies, and corporate interests are all geared to measure and predict public sentiment, or further, as for public relations, to shape it. This is predicated upon the continual cycle of researching, organizing, and staging an event (ie product release, new policy, crises) that the public is primed to react to, and upon the assumption that people will generally seek their own interest and well being, often irrationally.

What happens when people act spontaneously (without some widely publicized event or first mover), in tandem, against their own interest and well being? Obviously some people will stand to gain and some to lose. That’s not the point. What is, is that a good chunk of people, bought into their own game with no regard for how it ought to be played, and in the process they (for that moment) changed the rules. And for once they moved and everyone else reacted.

FORGET THE ARTICLE - THE REAL VALUE IS IN THE COMMENTS - OF WHICH THIS IS ONE

Here for contrast, is a great and highly detailed article detailing the hand that's shaking the jar.

AWWW SNAP Wall St. Elite - Unlike In 2008 - Ants Done Caught You Shaking The Jar!!!

 thehill |  Online messaging platform Discord on Wednesday banned the r/WallStreetBets (WSB) server, which became the center for discussions among amateur online traders who fueled an unexpected surge in GameStop’s stock this week. 

A Discord spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Hill that the decision to remove the server was due to users sharing “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings,” adding that it “did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks.”

“The server has been on our Trust & Safety team’s radar for some time due to occasional content that violates our Community Guidelines, including hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation,” the spokesperson added. 

The statement went on to say, “Discord welcomes a broad variety of personal finance discussions, from investment clubs and day traders to college students and professional financial advisors. We are monitoring this situation and in the event there are allegations of illegal activities, we will cooperate with authorities as appropriate.”

This comes after Discord in the days after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol banned a server called “The Donald,” a pro-Trump community linked to banned subreddit r/The_Donald and TheDonald.win. 

theverge |  Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organized campaigns to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store — and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a one-star rating — the company has now deleted enough reviews to bring it back up to nearly four stars.

Jesus Christ they really are going all in to reveal the extent of the cabal that runs this country and rigs the rules https://t.co/w0tSQypp9Z

— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) January 29, 2021

Robinhood came under intense scrutiny on Thursday, after the stock trading app announced it would block purchases of GameStop, AMC, and other stocks made popular by the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, and some users have already replaced their deleted one-star reviews with new ones to make their anger heard.

RT |  A popular stock trading chat group has been booted off Facebook due to alleged violations of its “sexual exploitation” rules, claims the page’s founder, who accused “major institutions” of trying to avenge the GameStop debacle.

The Robinhood Stock Traders group boasted more than 157,000 members before it was taken offline on Wednesday, its 23-year-old founder, Allen Tran, told Reuters, adding that the social media giant cited its policies surrounding “adult sexual exploitation.” A notification of the ban seen by Reuters included no further reasoning for what prompted the move.

The page has no formal affiliation with the stock trading app of the same name.

Tran, however, maintains that he has never seen explicit or sexual content on the page, arguing instead that the group was targeted by “major institutions” after members racked up thousands of dollars from trades first proposed in Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets community, which has driven a dramatic price surge in certain heavily shorted stocks, namely those of GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry and Nokia.

“The major institutions are attempting to silence our community. We are positively impacting people’s lives and they are attacking our group because we are more powerful than them,” Tran wrote in a Facebook post after the group’s ban, arguing “there is power in masses.”

Uh..., You See Wha'Happened Wuz....,

hedge fund manager is not doing well pic.twitter.com/6RrdEfykil

— kylie brakeman (@deadeyebrakeman) January 28, 2021

americancompass |  Certainly don’t laze about smoking weed, or even worse, mango Juul pods, playing that god-forsaken game machine. That PS fucking 4, or whatever. My generation, we didn’t sit staring at a computer, wasting our days away. We made things. We worked out our bodies. We built things. Come on. Make something of yourself. What are you going to do all your life? Stock shelves during the day, and eat nuggets and play that game at night? What are you, a loser? Be like Jim. You remember Jim. He studied hard, went to Harvard, and now works at a big financial firm. Come on, you lazy loser. Make something of yourself.

It is pretty simple. At the very, very top of our meritocracy is a big game called Wall Street, that the smartest and cleverest get to play, and get paid big bucks for it. They get to choose their character: Trader, Salesperson, Broker, or Lawyer. The traders get to choose their weapon: Stocks, Bonds, Mortgages, Derivatives. Then they are off, navigating different levels, slaying this and that company, currency, or country.

Below that is that vast landscape of losers who spend their days building roads, growing food, flipping hamburgers, teaching kids, building small businesses, landscaping yards, and their nights shooting hoops, or reading books, or caring for kids, or going to church. Or, God forbid, playing XBOX or PS4. Those are the worst.

A lot of those losers, of every variety but especially the people who play video games, also spend a lot of time on Reddit, or Discord, or Twitch, live-streaming, shitposting, and just having fun.

When they were doing this, some of them noticed that Wall Street was also just a game, and a very profitable one. Sure, it was a little different than Zelda, or Grand Theft Auto, or Demon Souls, but it was a game nonetheless. So they started dipping their toes in and learning this pretty cool and serious game. Then they started telling their friends about it, who told their friends and so on and so on.

Some made a little money here and there, others got run over, but hey, it was just another game. Cool. Of course they were the outsiders, the losers, the clowns fucking around for shits and giggles. They understood that. They knew nobody treated them seriously. Hell, they had been called lazy losers all their lives. Might as well embrace that. So they proudly named themselves “Degenerates” and “Autistic Retards.” Own the stigma, because you ain’t gonna ever shake it or lose it no matter how hard you try.

They dabbled here and there, got a little better at it, and soon attracted a few serious players with serious money into their fold. Wall Street players, slumming it, who saw a community of misfits they could lead, teach, or scam, depending on their ethics.

So it went, and their numbers and ability grew, and then this summer some of the cleverest Wall Street players, who specialized in making big bets on companies failing, came after GameStop, something they had personal views on. That perked up their interest. Making it even cooler, some legitimately skilled Wall Street players who had joined their island of misfit toys pointed out that GameStop was a good buy, not a good sell, and convinced some of the degenerates to join them.

Then Scoops The Liminal Perspective On The Current Political Moment

CTH |  Everything from within the DC system is designed to lie to you.  Accept that and you begin to realize how events are NEVER what they appear on the surface.

The owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is Jeffrey Sprecher.  Remember the position of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in regards to Senator Loeffler?  Well, Mr. Sprecher is the husband of former Senator Kelly Loeffler.

Kelly Loeffler’s seat was purchased by their elite status and position.  Why would a billionaire run for an elected office paying a few hundred thousand?

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell positioned Loeffler with committee assignments based on that status of influence and affluence.

Jeffrey Sprecher and Kelly Loeffler entered politics for their elite interests.

The ruse of the DecptiCons is always that a motive to the benefit of the republic lies behind their candidacy. This is the same ruse that lay behind Mitt Romney, another DeceptiCon.  There are no purely altruistic motives behind these politicians, particularly in the Senate.

Their motives are all about status, power and greed.  They are not representatives of the people; they are representative of their own elite fellowship and interests, and this crosses both parties.  Everything else is chaff and countermeasures to ensure their position.

That is the brutal and uncomfortable reality to accept.  The entire system is corrupt.

The swamp is deep and filled with DeceptiCons who will strike at any given moment once they attain a useful position. President Trump went to Georgia to campaign for Senator Kelly Loeffler. Simultaneous to President Trump’s visible support, Loeffler’s husband Jeffrey Sprecher, owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), announced the NYSE will not blacklist Chinese telecommunications firms outlined in Trump’s executive order.

 

Conservative Treehouse Does An Exceptionally Fine Job Explaining The Gamestop Situation

CTH |  It started with a bunch of smart ordinary Wall Street market watchers assembling on Reddit and noticing that hedgefunds were making millions destroying the stock value of GameStop (GME) -and others-  by short selling the stock and trading the position.

[Short Lesson to Understand Short-Selling Here]

The hedgefunds were so greedy the short-sellers borrowed more than 140% of the total number of shares of stock of GME (GameStop) in order to destroy it.  The stock value dropped from $20 to $4 as the sharks made millions in the short-sells.  That’s when the Reddit investment community,Wall Street Bets, noticed an opportunity.

One of the issues with short-selling is that short-sellers must always eventually purchase the stocks they borrowed.  That means if the stock value increases you are committed to buying it, you will lose money, and you cannot get away from the loss in your short-sell position so long as the stock value is high.

Knowing the borrowed shares were more than the total number of outstanding shares of the entire GME stock, the rebellious alliance knew the short-sellers (hedgefunds) would have to eventually buy them.  So the independent group, mass numbers of individual investors, started purchasing shares and driving up the GameStop stock value.

The ONLY GIBBERISH More Ridiculous Than Anti-Racist Gibberish - Is Economics...!!!

WaPo | The market gyrations involving GameStop’s 64-fold rise in price since August are certainly eye-opening. How a money-losing company whose stock previously traded less than 10 million shares a day can shoot up to trading 50 million-plus shares in a day — and cause the stock price of a completely unrelated but similarly named Australian company (GME Resources) to rise 50 percent on Thursday — is hard to reconcile with today’s uber-efficient high-frequency markets.

Media coverage routinely refers to GameStop’s price surge as a bubble. But what are financial bubbles — and what causes them? As I noted when writing about bubbles in 2008 in the Review of Financial Studies, the phenomenon had been around for centuries — in the 18th century, Scottish economist Adam Smith called it “overtrading.” But that doesn’t explain what starts a bubble in the first place. Plenty of economists, historians and others have tried.

The Swedish economist Knut Wicksell, in an observation that resonates today, argued in 1898 that bubbles are attributable to interest rates that are too low. In 1929 — we know what happened in the markets then — the Dutch economist historian N.W. Posthumus cited the entrance of nonprofessional buyers fueled by credit. In this view, today’s Federal Reserve and the Reddit crowd would seem natural culprits.

What you need to know about GameStop’s stock price chaos

An alternative view in history is that bubbles can emerge if traders are rational but markets are irrational. The economist and historian Charles P. Kindleberger makes this argument in his classic 1978 book, “Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises.” What drives market irrationality, Kindleberger says, is the fallacy of composition: Each trader believes he can sell at a higher price, and if he can in fact do so, then it is rational for him to buy. But not everyone in the market can do that, so the market as a whole behaves irrationally.

A variant on this irrationality of the market theme underlies the “beauty contest” analogy offered in 1936 by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. He argued that individuals do not pick stocks based on what they think a firm is worth, but rather on what they think other people will think it is worth. (Has Keynes’s “beauty contest” morphed into today’s “chat room”?) In that description, each individual is acting rationally, but the market overall is not.

Short sellers in GameStop — mostly hedge funds that had been betting massively on the company’s stock to fall — had reportedly lost $23.6 billion as of Wednesday. They may find little consolation in the dictum often attributed to Keynes: “Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

David A. Martin PhD Does Some Helladocious Slick-Talking - As Do His Censors And Critics...,

westonaprice |  Dr. David Martin, founder and chairman of M-CAM Inc, challenges our presuppositions about the new mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. Quoting the pharmaceutical companies themselves, David suggests that these are not vaccines, but, in actuality, gene therapy. He explains what the vaccines may do to us, what they are promising they can do for us, and how to distinguish the difference. Fist tap Dale.

 

factcheck |  If Event 201 is the backbone of the conspiracy theory in “Plandemic,” then David Martin is the central character. He’s featured throughout the video, making claims primarily about patents.

Martin runs a company called M-CAM, which analyzes patents and intellectual property to estimate the investment value of companies.

M-CAM has five investment companies as clients, managing assets of $1.1 million, according to a recent statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Not big in investments, seems more like another guy using predictive modeling as a selling tool for many types of information,” Suzanne Lynch told FactCheck.org in an email, after looking through M-CAM’s SEC filings. Lynch has worked on Wall Street and is now a professor of economic crime at Utica College.

Samuel Rosen, an assistant professor of finance at Temple University’s Fox School of Business, similarly described M-CAM, broadly, as an investment research company and noted in an email to FactCheck.org that it appears Martin manages a small hedge fund, too.

But Martin has also peddled conspiracy theories over the years. He published a novel in 2011, which he claimed was based on real events, alleging a rigged 2008 presidential election that was somehow tied to the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Since the pandemic began, he has used his YouTube channel to promote COVID-19 conspiracy theories. He repeats many of those claims in “Plandemic: Indoctornation.”

In one video from April, Martin referred to Event 201, saying: “COVID-19 is a branded campaign … that is funded by people in the software, data sciences and social media industry. That’s who built COVID-19.”

The gist of Martin’s video was that wealthy philanthropists like Bill Gates, technology companies, pharmaceutical companies and global health organizations colluded to create a virus that would force governments to fund research and development of vaccines and therapies in order to enrich themselves.

For “Plandemic,” though, Martin shifts his focus away from “the software, data sciences and social media industry.” Instead, he takes aim largely at government entities.

Martin claims that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saw “the possibility of a gold strike” when the SARS epidemic arose in 2003.

“They saw that a virus they knew could be easily manipulated was something that was very valuable,” he says, pointing to a patent filed by the CDC that year. The patent covered the isolated virus that causes SARS and ways to detect it.

Skimming across the screen while Martin makes that claim is a headline for a November 2003 news story about the race to patent the virus. However, that story doesn’t support his argument. It actually explains that the CDC wasn’t pursuing the patent for profit. Rather, it was doing so to keep others from monopolizing research.

“The whole purpose of the patent is to prevent folks from controlling the technology,” the story quotes CDC spokesman Llelwyn Grant as saying. “This is being done to give the industry and other researchers reasonable access to the samples.”

Similarly, the director of the CDC at the time, Dr. Julie Gerberding, told reporters that filing for the patent was “a protective measure to make sure that the access to the virus remains open for everyone.”

“The concern that the federal government is looking at right now is that we could be locked out of this opportunity to work with this virus if it’s patented by someone else, and so by initiating steps to secure patent rights, we assure that we will be able to continue to make the virus and the products from the virus available in the public domain, and that we can continue to promote the rapid technological transfer of this biomedical information into tools and products that are useful to patients,” Gerberding said in a May 2003 telebriefing.

So, Martin’s claim is at odds with the CDC’s publicly stated motivation, and he offers no evidence to support his argument.

Next, Martin claims that federal law wouldn’t have allowed for a patent on that isolated virus.

Again, he’s wrong.

Instead of reading from U.S. patent law, as he says he is in the video, Martin reads from a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision. That’s an important distinction since the decision, which changed one aspect of patent law that’s relevant here, came 10 years after the CDC filed for a patent related to the virus that causes SARS.

“Nature is prohibited from being patented,” Martin says, claiming that he was quoting from a section of patent law. Building on that, he claims, “either SARS, coronavirus, was manufactured, therefore making a patent on it legal, or it was natural, therefore making a patent on it illegal.”

But that’s a false dichotomy.

While the Supreme Court did find that “[a] naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” that decision came a decade after the CDC sought the patent.

“Isolated genes (that is, genes extracted from a longer DNA sequence) used to be patentable in the past because the courts decided that just the act of extracting them and removing the non-coding segments caused enough of a modification to turn them into patent-eligible things,” Mario Biagioli, a professor at UCLA School of Law, told FactCheck.org in an email. “No more.  A few years ago the Supreme Court decided that simply isolating a gene did not change it enough. It remained a ‘product of nature’ and therefore unpatentable.”

So, claiming that the patent is either illegal or the virus was “manufactured” is wrong.

Vaccines Stimulate Production Of Antigens - This mRNA Jab Stimulates Production Of Pathogen

Nature |  mRNA vaccines represent a promising alternative to conventional vaccine approaches because of their high potency, capacity for rapid development and potential for low-cost manufacture and safe administration. However, their application has until recently been restricted by the instability and inefficient in vivo delivery of mRNA. Recent technological advances have now largely overcome these issues, and multiple mRNA vaccine platforms against infectious diseases and several types of cancer have demonstrated encouraging results in both animal models and humans. This Review provides a detailed overview of mRNA vaccines and considers future directions and challenges in advancing this promising vaccine platform to widespread therapeutic use.

Vaccines prevent many millions of illnesses and save numerous lives every year¹. As a result of widespread vaccine use, the smallpox virus has been completely eradicated and the incidence of polio, measles and other childhood diseases has been drastically reduced around the world². Conventional vaccine approaches, such as live attenuated and inactivated pathogens and subunit vaccines, provide durable protection against a variety of dangerous diseases³. Despite this success, there remain major hurdles to vaccine development against a variety of infectious pathogens, especially those better able to evade the adaptive immune response⁴. Moreover, for most emerging virus vaccines, the main obstacle is not the effectiveness of conventional approaches but the need for more rapid development and large-scale deployment. Finally, conventional vaccine approaches may not be applicable to non-infectious diseases, such as cancer. The development of more potent and versatile vaccine platforms is therefore urgently needed.

Nucleic acid therapeutics have emerged as promising alternatives to conventional vaccine approaches. The first report of the successful use of in vitro transcribed (IVT) mRNA in animals was published in 1990, when reporter gene mRNAs were injected into mice and protein production was detected⁵. A subsequent study in 1992 demonstrated that administration of vasopressin-encoding mRNA in the hypothalamus could elicit a physiological response in rats⁶. However, these early promising results did not lead to substantial investment in developing mRNA therapeutics, largely owing to concerns associated with mRNA instability, high innate immunogenicity and inefficient in vivo delivery. Instead, the field pursued DNA-based and protein-based therapeutic approaches^7,8.

Over the past decade, major technological innovation and research investment have enabled mRNA to become a promising therapeutic tool in the fields of vaccine development and protein replacement therapy. The use of mRNA has several beneficial features over subunit, killed and live attenuated virus, as well as DNA-based vaccines. First, safety: as mRNA is a non-infectious, non-integrating platform, there is no potential risk of infection or insertional mutagenesis. Additionally, mRNA is degraded by normal cellular processes, and its in vivo half-life can be regulated through the use of various modifications and delivery methods^9,10,11,12. The inherent immunogenicity of the mRNA can be down-modulated to further increase the safety profile^9,12,13. Second, efficacy: various modifications make mRNA more stable and highly translatable^9,12,13. Efficient in vivo delivery can be achieved by formulating mRNA into carrier molecules, allowing rapid uptake and expression in the cytoplasm (reviewed in Refs 10,11). mRNA is the minimal genetic vector; therefore, anti-vector immunity is avoided, and mRNA vaccines can be administered repeatedly. Third, production: mRNA vaccines have the potential for rapid, inexpensive and scalable manufacturing, mainly owing to the high yields of in vitro transcription reactions.

The mRNA vaccine field is developing extremely rapidly; a large body of preclinical data has accumulated over the past several years, and multiple human clinical trials have been initiated. In this Review, we discuss current mRNA vaccine approaches, summarize the latest findings, highlight challenges and recent successes, and offer perspectives on the future of mRNA vaccines. The data suggest that mRNA vaccines have the potential to solve many of the challenges in vaccine development for both infectious diseases and cancer.

Between l'Affaire Epstein And Gamestop: Why People Believe Coincidence Theories

technologyreview |  Lunik: Inside the CIA’s audacious plot to steal a Soviet satellite. How a team of spies in Mexico got their hands on Russia's space secrets—and tried to change the course of the Cold War.

Scott and the CIA had already been exploring other plans to steal the spacecraft. On November 19, six miles up the Panuco River from the Gulf of Mexico, two American spies watched the Soviet ship carrying the Luna arrive at the Port of Tampico. 

The first was Robert Zambernardi, an Italian-American CIA officer from Massachusetts. With tan skin and a droopy black mustache, he could pass for a local during covert operations, and was an expert in photography, secret writing, disguise, and womanizing. Zambernardi also controlled a team of mercenaries he called Rudos—“tough guys”—from Mexico’s corrupt and violent Federal Judicial Police. They made treasonous Americans “disappear,” according to Mexican journalist and TV personality Jaime Maussan, who interviewed Zambernardi for a 2017 book about the mission, Operación LightFire. 

The second man was Warren L. Dean, Winston Scott’s deputy chief of station. A tall and dashing martini man, Dean had joined the FBI and chased Nazis in Bolivia and Chile, before serving under Scott in London and then joining him in Mexico City. Dean watched workers load the cargo from the Soviet boat onto a train, and asked his colleague if they could somehow grab it during its journey to the auditorium.

“We can delay it a few hours,” said Zambernardi, but he dissuaded Dean from staging a Mexican great train robbery, according to Operación Lightfire. “Moving photos are always very blurry,” Zambernardi told him. “We need the train to stop.”

The freight cars were slowly loaded with objects from Russian life—everything from hammer and sickle postage stamps, to fur coats, and instruments that displayed the might of Soviet science: cutting-edge microscopes that revealed the invisible, and world-beating telescopes that scanned the great beyond. Under the unflinching stares of armed KGB agents, workers lifted the Luna onto the train. 

“There are too many loose ends here,” Dean conceded, according to Maussan’s account. “We will do the kidnapping with Silveti.”

My, My, My..., Does The Great Reset Have Its Sights Set On The Global Electronic Infrastructure?

unlimitedhangout |  The devastating hack on SolarWinds was quickly pinned on Russia by US intelligence. A more likely culprit, Samanage, a company whose software was integrated into SolarWinds’ software just as the “back door” was inserted, is deeply tied to Israeli intelligence and intelligence-linked families such as the Maxwells.

In mid-December of 2020, a massive hack compromised the networks of numerous US federal agencies, major corporations, the top five accounting firms in the country, and the military, among others. Despite most US media attention now focusing on election-related chaos, the fallout from the hack continues to make headlines day after day.

The hack, which affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds, was blamed on Russia on January 5 by the US government’s Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement asserted that the attackers were “likely Russian in origin,” but they failed to provide evidence to back up that claim.

Since then, numerous developments in the official investigation have been reported, but no actual evidence pointing to Russia has yet to be released. Rather, mainstream media outlets began reporting the intelligence community’s “likely” conclusion as fact right away, with the New York Times subsequently reporting that US investigators were examining a product used by SolarWinds that was sold by a Czech Republic–based company, as the possible entry point for the “Russian hackers.” Interest in that company, however, comes from the fact that the attackers most likely had access to the systems of a contractor or subsidiary of SolarWinds. This, combined with the evidence-free report from US intelligence on “likely” Russian involvement, is said to be the reason investigators are focusing on the Czech company, though any of SolarWinds’ contractors/subsidiaries could have been the entry point.

Such narratives clearly echo those that became prominent in the wake of the 2016 election, when now-debunked claims were made that Russian hackers were responsible for leaked emails published by WikiLeaks. Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds quickly brought on the discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks and investigating the hack. CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication, and subsequently it was central in developing the false declarations regarding the involvement of “Russian hackers” in that event.

There are also other parallels. As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel, not Russia. Indeed, many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed collusion with Israel, yet those instances received little coverage and generated little media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was in fact Israelgate.

Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of SolarWinds’ acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore, Samanage’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange’s integration with the Orion software at the time of the back door’s insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds’ Czech-based contractor.

 

Parasitically Fsucked Your Economy, Your Daughters, And Your Way Of Life - Yet - Free As A Jaybird

nytimes |  Apollo grew out of the ashes of Drexel Burnham Lambert, the investment bank that collapsed in 1990 amid a trading investigation that sent the since-pardoned Michael Milken to prison.

Although Mr. Black started Apollo with his younger partners — Mr. Harris is 56 and Mr. Rowan 58 — he has been long been the face and voice of the firm.

In building Apollo into a global financial powerhouse, Mr. Black has made himself and his co-founders immensely rich: His personal fortune is estimated at more than $8 billion, and he owns a massive private art collection — including a version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” — and is the chairman of the Museum of Modern Art.

But when Apollo held its most recent earnings call in late October, there were already signs his dealings with Mr. Epstein were causing ripples, both in the firm and among investors. In an unusual move, Mr. Black read a brief statement about the Epstein matter before handing over the meeting to Mr. Harris and Mr. Rowan.

Apollo has long specialized in buying up distressed companies and retooling them, but it also boasts large credit, infrastructure and real estate businesses. Mr. Rowan was the driving force behind Apollo’s thriving insurance business and its insurance subsidiary, Athene Holding, which has fueled the Wall Street’s firm earnings in recent years.

At one time, both Mr. Rowan and Mr. Harris were seen as the heirs apparent to Mr. Black. But with Mr. Rowan’s decision to pull back from day-to-day affairs, many on Wall Street assumed the job would fall to Mr. Harris, who has the run the nuts and bolts of Apollo’s vast buyout operation.

Mr. Harris, who is an owner of the Philadelphia 76rs basketball team and the New Jersey Devils hockey team, said he would “fully support” Mr. Rowan as chief executive. “I will focus on expanding our global search for investor returns, which is at the core of our success,” he said in a statement.

As the only three members of Apollo’s executive committee, the founders hold considerable sway over the company. As of now, the decision to name Mr. Rowan as Mr. Black’s successor does not need approval of the company’s board. And all three men — who have much of their net worth tied up in the company — have a vested interest in the stability of the firm.

 

What DID The Nephilim Find So Appealing In These Nasty Rascals?

nypost |  A federal judge ripped into Jeffrey Epstein cohort Ghislaine Maxwell for misleading the court on her marriage and wealth in a scathing decision denying her release on a $28.5 bail package.

“The defendant now argues that her newly revealed relationship with her spouse signals her deep affective ties in the country, but at the time she was arrested, she was not living with him and claimed to be getting divorced,” wrote US District Judge Alison Nathan of Maxwell’s mysterious marriage to tech CEO Scott Borgerson in newly unsealed court papers.

After Maxwell’s July bust, she was denied release to home confinement on a $5 million bond and had refused to disclose the name of her secret husband.

But in the 58-year-olds’s renewed motion for bail, her attorneys argued that the couple had lived an idyllic and devoted life in an oceanfront mansion in Manchester, Mass., supporting her claim of strong family ties to the country.

Prosecutors countered that she told pretrial services that she and Borgerson, 43, planned to split up.

The judge pointed out in the new papers that at the time of Maxwell’s arrest, she was hiding out on a sprawling compound in New Hampshire — not holed up with her hubby. Nathan’s denial of Maxwell’s bail proposal was disclosed Monday but the full 22-page ruling wasn’t unsealed until Wednesday.

Further, Nathan said, were Maxwell to be released, the British socialite proposed living with a friend, not Borgerson “undercutting her argument that that relationship would create an insurmountable burden to her fleeing.”

In another blow to Maxwell’s bid for freedom, the judge called her out for a “pattern of providing incomplete or erroneous information to the court or to pretrial services.”

The accused child abuser claimed at the time of her arrest she was worth just $.3.5 million — leaving out Borgerson’s assets and those that had been transferred to a trust. In her latest financial disclosures, she admitted that she and Borgerson’s net worth was about $22.5 million.

The vast disparity between the two figures “makes it unlikely that the misrepresentation was the result of the defendant’s misestimation rather than misdirection,” Nathan wrote.

“That lack of candor raises significant concerns as to whether the court has now been provided a full and accurate picture of her finances.”

 

These Dark Curly-Headed J'sesses Be Shysty As Fsuck.......,

thecut |  Christine is just one of Maxwell’s seven living siblings (her sister Karine and brother Michael died at ages 3 and 15). A brother, Philip, and the eldest daughter, Anne, have not been heard from publicly for at least a decade. But tracing the four others — Christine and her twin sister, Isabel; Kevin; and Ian — along with Ghislaine, who, at 57, is the youngest, is like watching a real-life season of Succession, as these heirs to their disgraced media-mogul father’s empire have strived toward their own ambitions. Twin sisters Christine and Isabel are the most fascinating of the bunch, and have their own ties to entrepreneurial, unorthodox (and, in some cases, shady) men.

Christine and Isabel had more freedom to strike out on their own after the demise of the Maxwell empire. In the 1980s, they decamped to Silicon Valley and in 1993 they helped co-found Magellan, an early search engine, with Isabel’s then-husband, David Hayden. According to the Daily Beast, the sisters appear in Michael Wolff’s book on dot-com startups, Burn Rate. Wolff describes Christine as “more commanding than her sister,” but both Maxwells are memorable characters — early Winklevoss prototypes. In a 1997 interview, Isabel credits her sister with coming up with “the idea of reviewing and rating.”

The twins made millions when Magellan was sold to another company, Excite, but — according to Isabel — it cooled the relationship between the two of them. “When McKinley [Magellan’s parent company] didn’t make it, our relationship changed,” Isabel said in 2002. “And I changed, in terms of my relationship with my family. Before then, I was completely in sync with the family. When something got to them, it got to me, too.”

Since then, both sisters seem to have remained in the software and technology spheres. Christine is a doctoral candidate in the humanities department at the University of Texas at Dallas, and continues to consult for internet companies. Her UTD website lists a personal website, ChristinesWorld.com, which is no longer active, but it does have the brief personal statement that she “came to the University in January 2012 and am enjoying academia and the associated activities of ‘big city’ life very much; it’s much different from the French countryside where I was working on my own Internet content projects!” After Magellan, Isabel was the president of an Israeli email venture called Commtouch, and has continued to work in the country. She has used the title “Technology Pioneer of the World Economic Forum.” In a 2000 interview, she displays a Zuckerbergian enthusiasm for the internet: “The wonderful thing about email is it’s not sexist,” she said. “It’s democratizing.”

The Maxwell twins’ husbands have truly bizarre histories, which has led observers to point out that they share Ghislaine’s association with powerful and unconventional men. Christine is married to Roger Malina, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas, whose father, Frank Malina, was also a scientist. Malina, the Daily Beast reveals, hung out in California with the likes of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and rocket engineer Jack Parsons, occultists and transhumanists (a strange echo of Jeffrey Epstein’s friends in similar academic and business circles).

And Isabel’s romantic history might be the strangest. First, she married the son of Carl Djerassi, a scientist who invented the birth-control pill. Her third husband, Al Seckel, was a con man and “optical illusionist” who befriended scientists and academics despite not having a degree in those fields himself (sound familiar?); he co-founded a group called the Southern California Skeptics that investigated science’s relationship to the paranormal. Seckel and Isabel moved to France at some point in 2010, according to reports, where they lived in a château and “acquired thousands of stone-age tools to sell in the U.S.” That same year, Seckel hosted a “scientific conference” on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, where Epstein also allegedly held underage girls for sex (presumably, the connection was Isabel’s little sister, Ghislaine). 

America Is Now Ruled By A Single Elite Class And Wokeness Is Its Protocol Of Exclusion

Why the embodiment of il33t, suave, 1% panache like George Sanders - tryna get at Lucy's ravishing young fire-cro*** - have Mumm decanted into martini glasses? jes dayyum....,

tablet |  More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter. America’s working-class majority of all races pays far less attention than the elite to the media, and is highly unlikely to have a kid at Harvard or Yale to clue them in. And non-college-educated Americans spend very little time on Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which they are unlikely to be able to identify—which, among other things, proves the idiocy of the “Russiagate” theory that Vladimir Putin brainwashed white working-class Americans into voting for Trump by memes in social media which they are the least likely American voters to see.

Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. The rationale is supposed to be that this shows greater respect for particular groups. But there was no grassroots working-class movement among Black Americans demanding the use of “enslaved persons” instead of “slaves” and the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American descent—a wildly homogenizing category created by the U.S. Census Bureau—reject the weird term “Latinx.” Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters.

Mrs. Astor would approve.

White Nationalism Worse Than A Disease!!!

wired |  Our chimeric infectious cancer analogy for white nationalism might require something related but more focused: a war on white nationalism that is much lower on empathy than we’ve ever treated it, and higher on an appreciation for how large and disruptive a menace it truly is. Such a war would include the same administrative and legislative heft that has been given to the wars on drugs and foreign terrorism. (The latter served as the motivation for an entirely new executive department.) It would involve an intersection of experts from the intelligence, legal, criminal justice, and scholarly communities. And these experts would be charged with identifying all of the places that the infectious cancer hides in society, addressing the vulnerabilities in the American immune system, and cutting off the communication channels that serve as a bloodstream (e.g., social media) for white nationalism to further propagate, causing disseminated destruction. The Biden administration has already outlined formal plans for improved surveillance of emerging infectious disease in response to Covid-19. A similar process to address domestic terrorism could just as easily be activated.

Cancer analogies also have limits that oversimplify the blight of white nationalism. For one, cancer is driven by an undirected process driven by the laws of natural selection: Cancerous cells don’t know they’re disrupting anything. The 2021 strain of white nationalism, however, is engineered specifically for destruction. It is not a set of ideas that undermine the laws of the land by happenstance. Their purpose is to undermine them actively and directly.

These distinctions are more than just semantic: Too many narratives of white nationalism incorrectly depict its actors as exclusively low-class and uneducated. This trope says that the white nationalists aren’t really all that bad but are misguided, acting on ignorance, alienation, or economic anxiety.

This ragtag caricature of white nationalism evokes a cancerous cell blindly fomenting catastrophe through directionless meandering. The reality of white nationalism is closer to the opposite: It is a well-oiled machine, driven by nefarious actors with very specific goals in mind. And in this way, white nationalism isn’t much like cancer at all. There are no innocent, guileless actors, guilty only of being short-sighted. The purveyors of white nationalism live by a wicked creed that explicitly dehumanizes others.

If white nationalism isn’t a birth defect, a virus, or a cancer, should we dispense with disease analogies altogether? Why bother with explanatory vehicles at all?

The answer is that disease, in the abstract sense, does effectively capture the rot of white nationalism in important ways (many people even felt physically ill after seeing images of Charlottesville and the Capitol insurrection).

The challenge resides in identifying the right pathology. Finding one has no necessary allegiance to any existing class of disease—we’re free to cut and paste features of different diseases, even use our science-fiction mind to dream up one better fit to describe this unique blight.

The chimeric, hypothetical disease most like white nationalism resembles an infectious cancer—a rare class of diseases where malignant cells can be transmitted between people. The most famous of these is the devil tumour facial disease of Tasmanian devils. A grotesque illness typified by large tumors on the face that eventually spread throughout the body, killing the animal, the problem is so rampant it threatens the species with extinction.

Like an infectious cancer, white nationalism offers mutant, bastardized forms of American ideals and institutions like liberty, states’ rights, freedom of speech, and the right to bear arms. And they prey on and amplify existing white resentment, anti-Blackness, and xenophobia. And most frustratingly, these sentiments are allowed to grow and fester because of privilege: Law enforcement never treated white domestic terrorism as aggressively as it has Black radicals or international terrorists.

Deprogram Trumpian Conspiracy Theorists?!?! Bring Jeffrey Epstein's Clientele To Justice!!!!

WaPo |  For the past four years, the United States was governed by a conspiracy theorist in chief. Whether by retweeting QAnon accounts from the Oval Office or painting himself as the victim of shadowy “deep state” plots at rallies, President Donald Trump injected the toxin of baseless conspiratorial thinking straight into America’s political bloodstream. On Jan. 6, America saw how far that venom had spread, as a ragtag group of militias, racist extremists and flag-waving disciples of Trumpism stormed the Capitol.

The insurrectionists were unified by their support for Trump. But many of them shared another crucial trait: They were conspiracy theorists. And while hundreds of people stormed the Capitol, there are millions of Americans who share their views. There is no doubt: The United States has a serious problem with pathological political delusions.

So, do we have any hope of deprogramming the millions of Americans who are devoted to dangerous lunacy? Don’t hold your breath.

Psychologists and political scientists have been interested in conspiracy theories for decades, but their research has taken on new urgency. And what is clear from their findings is this: Once people have gone far enough down the rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking, it can be nearly impossible to get them back out.

There are a few reasons conspiracy theories are so “sticky” once they’re in someone’s head. First, conspiracy theorists are far more likely to have a Manichaean worldview, meaning they interpret everything as a battle between good and evil. That makes it harder for dispassionate evidence-based arguments to break through. (For QAnon believers, Trump is the central superhero in an epic saga to vanquish a shadowy cabal.)

Second, those who seek to debunk conspiracy theories are precisely the people that true believers distrust. If someone believes the media is controlled by sinister but unseen puppet masters, fact checks from CNN will never convince them they’re wrong.

A Step Too Far In Government Intrusions...,

WaPo | Months-long lockdowns. Entire city populations herded through the streets for mandatory testing. The people of China could be forgiven for thinking they had seen it all during the coronavirus pandemic.

But now they face a new indignity: the addition of anal swabs — yes, you read that right — to the testing regimen for those in quarantine.

Chinese state media outlets introduced the new protocol in recent days, prompting widespread discussion and some outrage. Some Chinese doctors say the science is there. Recovering patients, they say, have continued to test positive through samples from the lower digestive tract days after nasal and throat swabs came back negative.

Yet for many, it seemed a step too far in government intrusions after a year and counting of a dignity-eroding pandemic.

“Everyone involved will be so embarrassed,” one user in Guang­dong province said Wednesday on ­Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. In a Weibo poll, 80 percent of respondents said they “could not accept” the invasive method.  Fist tap Dale.

Diagnosing Critical Race Theory, Diversity Training, And Social Justice...,

On Left Bitches w/ @ggreenwald, Glenn explains why Trump scared ruling elites and why we should oppose the new dangerous domestic “war on terror”

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— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) January 24, 2021

pitt.edu |  For a long time, philosophers of science have expressed little interest in the so-called demarcation project that occupied the pioneers of their field, and most now concur that terms like “pseudoscience” cannot be defined in any meaningful way. However, recent years have witnessed a revival of philosophical interest in demarcation. In this paper, I argue that, though the demarcation problem of old leads to a dead-end, the concept of pseudoscience is not going away anytime soon, and deserves a fresh look. My approach proposes to naturalize and down-size the concept, anchoring it to real-life doctrines and fields of inquiry. First, I argue against the definite article “the” in “the demarcation problem”, distinguishing between territorial and normative demarcation, and between different failures and shortcomings in science apart from pseudoscience (such as fraudulent or faulty research). Next, I argue that pseudosciences can be fruitfully regarded as simulacra of science, doctrines that are not epistemically warranted but whose proponents try to create the impression that they are. In this element of imitation of mimicry, I argue, lies the clue to their common identity. Despite the huge variety of doctrines gathered under the rubric of “pseudoscience”, and the wide range of defects from which they suffer, pseudosciences all engage in similar strategies to create an impression of epistemic warrant. The indirect, symptomatic approach defended here leads to a general characterization of pseudosciences in all domains of inquiry, and to a useful diagnostic tool.

If Teachers Are A Fallen Professional Class, What Does That Make Diversity Trainers?

jeanettecespinoza |  I grew up in a predominately white suburb and as a child and teenager, I wasn’t immediately aware of the racism I was experiencing. On the surface, it appeared we were all on a level playing field. I lived next door to white people, had white friends, was a cheerleader along-side white girls, acted in plays with white people, and even had sleep-overs at white people’s homes. To me, I was welcomed into white spaces so my exposure to white supremacy was minimal.

But this bubble of protection was broken during my sophomore year when I began to reflect on my high school experience.

I was a cheerleader, but I was the only Black girl on the squad.

I was an actor, but the roles I played were designed for white characters.

I was invited to sleep-overs but was often either the only Black girl or one or two out of the fifteen or twenty girls in attendance.

Of the white friends I had, I could probably be counted as their only Black friend. While I knew many white people, for most of them I was their only exposure to someone of a different ethnic background on a regular basis.

The playing field was anything but level.

When this became evident to me, I approached our guidance counselor to ask about creating a Black studies group where Black students could come together and share experiences and white students could come to learn more about our culture and world views. The counselor, who was a white woman, welcomed my suggestions and offered to facilitate the group. I was beyond excited that we would be doing something to make a positive difference and couldn’t wait to get started.

But when the group began, only a few Black people showed up, and no white people came at all. It was great getting together with my Black friends to discuss our experiences, but this was something we did all the time when we got together. My objective was to help create a space where white people would begin to understand our stories and use their privilege to create more all-inclusive spaces, but there was zero desire to make this happen.

After one meeting, I stayed after to talk to the counselor about my frustration with the lack of white participation and her answer has stayed with me for decades:

“It’s a brave effort, Jeanette, but realistically, it's hard for white people to reckon with racial disparity. It’s a lot to ask young white people who have been sheltered from adversity to talk about the difficulties Black people have to deal with. Most probably aren’t equipped to deal with that much pain and trauma.”

Even as a fifteen-year-old I remember thinking if it's too much for them to just discuss it, what about those of us who have to deal with it and will experience it for the rest of our lives? That day it became clear to me that the feelings of white people took precedence over my actual pain and suffering, and at that moment, my innocence and open view of the world was forever compromised.