Cornpop's A Pathetic Mouthpiece For Elite U.S. Disdain For Russia

mtracey  |  Deliberately vague weasel-word terms like “election interference” and/or “influence” gained such purchase in the past four-to-five years for a simple reason: the deliberate vagueness allowed people in power — elected officials, pundits, Intelligence Community functionaries — to claim unspecified expertise on a supposedly emerging range of threats. 

The threats were portrayed as particularly scary because of their alleged potential to Undermine Our Democracy. Consequently, these power-wielding people acquired a potent tool in their arsenal to accuse political enemies, whether foreign or domestic, of contributing to the proliferation of new and scary threats. The accusations were so deliberately vague that it was almost impossible to ever rebut them; sometimes even retweeting a meme was sufficient to be implicated in a foreign plot to destroy the very foundations of America. If an act so trivial as clicking one’s mouse on a social media post could be spun as abetting a foreign-backed “interference” or “influence” scheme, then that created an endless number of booby-traps for you to walk into.

So there was nothing new about the suite of anti-Russia charges promulgated Thursday by the US federal government, and parroted as usual with maximum credulity across the US media ecosystem. The charges were again predicated on the idea that Russian “interference” and/or “influence” is an extremely foreboding test for the survival of US Democracy. Taking bold action, the Treasury Department levied sanctions against a bunch more Russians for their claimed nefarious behavior in carrying out this interference/influence — a fulfillment of Joe Biden’s oft-stated campaign pledge that under his watch, Russia would finally “pay a price” for allegedly engaging in such activities. Donald Trump, it was thought, had been appallingly lax in his resolve to confront this threat; now, a new sheriff is in town.

Leaving aside the question of whether it’s prudent to assume that Janet Yellen is suddenly in possession of a foolproof methodology for attributing the provenance of “cyber operations” to specific foreign individuals and nation-states, it’s worth emphasizing what exactly is being alleged in the statement. The Treasury Department document reads: “Outlets operated by Russian Intelligence Services focus on divisive issues in the United States, denigrate US political candidates, and disseminate false and misleading information.” 

Noting that these same characteristics could be just as easily applied to US corporate media outlets is so blindingly self-evident as to almost be redundant. Were there not “outlets” during the 2020 election that were “focused” on “denigrating” Donald Trump? Or for that matter, Joe Biden? Do “divisive issues” not tend to be “focused on” by these same outlets as a basic precept of their core business model? Controversy = clicks/views, which equals revenue. Everyone knows this. Yet when scary Russian outlets are said to employ this same logic in their own content-production enterprises, it magically becomes dangerous enough to justify all manner of punitive government and corporate action. Including but not limited to: censorship purges, tighter regulation of online speech, and, as Biden announced Thursday, sanctions and expulsion of diplomats. “Disseminating false and misleading information”? The entire US media just got caught “disseminating” a fake story about Russians putting bounties on the heads of US soldiers in Afghanistan. If you’re truly concerned about the dissemination of “false and misleading information” having deleterious effects on the health of US political culture, your first target should be CNN.

 

Solarwinds Hack: NPR Publishes Thousands Of Words, Gives No Evidence, Yet Blames Russia...,

npr |  "This release includes bug fixes, increased stability and performance improvements."

The routine software update may be one of the most familiar and least understood parts of our digital lives. A pop-up window announces its arrival and all that is required of us is to plug everything in before bed. The next morning, rather like the shoemaker and the elves, our software is magically transformed.

Last spring, a Texas-based company called SolarWinds made one such software update available to its customers. It was supposed to provide the regular fare — bug fixes, performance enhancements — to the company's popular network management system, a software program called Orion that keeps a watchful eye on all the various components in a company's network. Customers simply had to log into the company's software development website, type a password and then wait for the update to land seamlessly onto their servers.

The routine update, it turns out, is no longer so routine.

Hackers believed to be directed by the Russian intelligence service, the SVR, used that routine software update to slip malicious code into Orion's software and then used it as a vehicle for a massive cyberattack against America. 

"Eighteen thousand [customers] was our best estimate of who may have downloaded the code between March and June of 2020," Sudhakar Ramakrishna, SolarWinds president and CEO, told NPR. "If you then take 18,000 and start sifting through it, the actual number of impacted customers is far less. We don't know the exact numbers. We are still conducting the investigation."

On Thursday, the Biden administration announced a roster of tough sanctions against Russia as part of what it characterized as the "seen and unseen" response to the SolarWinds breach. 

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You have to click through to NPR to read its TLDR chindribble agitprop and entirely evidence-free Russian attribution. However, what little we saw and could opine about wrt that event is compiled right'chere with Whitney Webb's vastly more persuaive and internally consistent attribution to the Israeli IT company acquired by Solarwinds in 2019 SAManage.

Ay-Oh-No, Maybe These Ukrainian Nazis Shouldn't Have Nuclear Weapons?

antiwar |  Today Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seconded a statement by Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili that “it is time for concrete proposals for Ukraine and Georgia to obtain a NATO MAP and a plan to join the EU.” The two countries have been paired as partners for future NATO membership, with both being promised membership in the global military bloc at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania in 2008.

Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, seconded Zelensky’s demand that NATO admit Ukraine as a full member, stating that only that move would prevent a Russian invasion: “The only possibility for this [to prevent alleged invasion plans] is for Ukraine to finally become a NATO member.” He also claimed that had his country been in NATO in 2014 the secession of Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea would not have occurred; neither would the now seven-year was in the Donbass. He neglectd to state whether the U.S.-engineered uprising and overthrow of an internationally-recognized government would also have occurred. Most likely not, as the populations of NATO nationsare not allowed to elect, or if elect, keep any government Washington and Brussels view with disapprobation.

The envoy then made this provocative statement:

“Ukraine has no other choice: either we are part of an alliance such as NATO and are doing our part to make this Europe stronger, or we have the only option – to arm by ourselves, and maybe think about nuclear status again. How else can we guarantee our defense?”

He also claimed there were 90,000 Russian military personnel deployed to the Donbass border and to Crimea; in his words, “We are dealing with the largest troop movement in Russia since the Second World War.” Which is arrant nonsense.

When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 a third of total Soviet nuclear weapons were in Ukraine; with 1,700 warheads in the country it had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world after the U.S. and Russia. In 1994 Ukraine joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear-weapon nation. It’s that decision the above-cited ambassador suggested be reversed. In fairness, this isn’t the first time the question of Ukraine developing its own nuclear weapons capacity has been broached. Over the past twenty years NATO-trained military leaders have raised the issue. But never before, and never during a crisis remotely comparable to the present one, has the issue been phrased so brutally: either place Ukraine under NATO Article 5 mutual military assistance status – and NATO acknowledges itself a nuclear alliance – or Ukraine will reassert itself as a nuclear power.

The shelling of the Donbass will be mild in comparison to what an armed conflict between a nuclear Ukraine and nuclear Russia would portend.

Imagine Mexico Be Like "Hey U.S. Withdraw Your Military From San Diego!"

thesaker  |  A terrible war is about to erupt on Russia's border with the Ukraine—or not—but there is some likelihood of a significant number of people getting killed before project Ukraine is finally over. Given that around 13 thousand people have been killed over the past seven years—the civil war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine has gone on for that long!—this is no laughing matter. But people get desensitized to the mostly low-level warfare that has killed over ten thousand people. Just over the past couple of weeks a grandfather was shot by a Ukrainian sniper while feeding his chickens and a young boy was killed by a bomb precision-dropped on him from a Ukrainian drone.

But what's about to happen now is forecasted to be on a different scale: the Ukrainians are moving heavy armor and troops up to the line of separation while the Russians are moving theirs up to their side of the Ukrainian border, a position from which they can blast any and all Ukrainian troops straight out of the gene pool without so much as setting foot on Ukrainian territory—should they wish to do so. The Russians can justify their military involvement by the need to defend their own citizens: over the past seven years half a million residents in eastern Ukraine have applied for and been granted Russian citizenship. But how exactly can Russia defend its citizens while they are stuck in the crossfire between Russian and Ukrainian forces?

The rationale of defending its citizens led to conflict in the briefly Georgian region of South Ossetia, which started on August 8, 2008 and lasted barely a week, leaving Georgia effectively demilitarized. Russia rolled in, Georgia's troops ran off, Russia confiscated some of the more dangerous war toys and rolled out. Georgia's paper warriors and their NATO consultants and Israeli trainers were left wiping each others' tears. Any suggestion of arming and equipping the Georgians since then is met with groaning and eye-rolling. Is the upcoming event in eastern Ukraine going to be similar to the swift and relatively painless defanging of Georgia in 2008? Given that the two situations are quite different, it seems foolish to think that the approach to resolving them would be the same.

Is it different this time and is World War III is about to er upt with eastern Ukraine being used as a trigger for this conflagration? Do the various statements made at various times by Vladimir Putin provide a solid enough basis for us to guess at what will happen next? Is there a third, typically, infuriatingly Russian approach to resolving this situation, where Russia wins, nobody dies and everyone in the West is left scratching their heads?  Fist tap Dale.

How Does A Jewish President Govern A Nakedly Nazi Ukraine?

forward |  The election of America’s first African-American president certainly didn’t end racism in the U.S. The same goes for Ukraine.

Poroshenko came to power as a result of an uprising that ousted his corrupt predecessor. Five years later, Zelensky was brought in as a rejection of Poroshenko. Zelensky, too, will soon be issued a verdict. And that can cut both ways.

It’s clear Zelensky must crack down on corruption, bringing much-needed justice to Ukraine. He’s already promised to work on steps such as stripping immunity from members of parliament. If he succeeds, an entire generation of Ukrainians will be raised under a Jewish president who finally managed to shed the country’s corrupt past, take it on a democratic Western trajectory, and deliver on the promises of Maidan. If he succeeds, it’ll be a tremendous victory for Ukraine and Judaism, especially at a time when anti-Semitism is surging globally.

The flip side is that Zelensky’s election will fuel Ukraine’s deepest anti-Semitic stereotype: the Jewish yoke.

The core tragedy of Ukraine, as seen by the darker strains of ultranationalism, is that it isn’t controlled y Ukrainians (i.e. ethnic Ukrainians). Instead, the country has always languished under the yoke of Poles, Russians, and especially Jews. This infestation is what prevented – and continues to prevent – the nation from achieving greatness. The solution is, of course, obvious.

Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytskyi’s 1648 uprising led to the torture and slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews in the name of cleansing Ukraine. So did the uprising of nationalist Symon Petliura in the early 20th century. So did the campaigns of WWII-era paramilitaries who had collaborated with the Nazis as well as butchered Jews of their own accord.

Indeed, if you’re an American Jew with Ukrainian roots, chances are your ancestors fled to the U.S. on the heels of an initiative to ‘shed the Jewish yoke’.

Today, as Ukraine continues to suffer economic misery, talk of the yoke has risen.

In 2017, member of parliament Nadiya Savchenko exploded in anti-Semitic tirade on live television. “Good question,” replied Savchenko to a caller who asked about the yoke. “Yes, our government has non-Ukrainian blood, shall we say. What should be done about it? We must think and take action.”

In a follow-up interview, Savchenko claimed 80% of those running Ukraine are Jews.

Savchenko isn’t alone. There have been numerous instances of similar rhetoric hurled by politicians, especially since Groysman became prime minister.

Now, for better or worse, that blood-stained stereotype has gained some credibility. Ukraine is about to be run by Zelensky – a Jewish president backed by Jewish oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskyi – and Groysman, a Jewish prime minister. For ultranationalists, every failure can now be cast at the feet of the Jewish trio. As one of Ukraine’s chief rabbis pointed out, this could have dangerous repercussions.

It's That Pesky American Principle That "Property Rights Are Human Rights"

alt-market |  It might sound like “US exceptionalism” to point this out (…and how very dare I), but even if the globalist Reset is successful in every other nation on Earth, the globalists are still failures if they can’t secure and subjugate the American people. As I’ve noted many times in the past, most of the world has been sufficiently disarmed, and even though we are seeing resistance in multiple European nations against forced vaccination legislation and medical tyranny, it is unlikely that they will have the ability to actually repel a full on march into totalitarianism. Most of Asia, India and Australia are already well under control. Africa is almost an afterthought , considering Africa is where many suspect vaccines are tested.

America represents the only significant obstacle to the agenda.

Conservative Americans in particular have been a thorn in the side of the globalists for generations, and it really comes down to a simple matter of mutual exclusion: You cannot have an openly globalist society and conservative ideals at the same time in the same place. It is impossible.

Conservatives believe in limited government, true free markets, individual liberty, the value of life, freedom of speech, private property rights, the right to self defense, the right to self determination, freedom of religion, and the non-aggression principle (we won’t harm you unless you try to harm us). None of these ideals can exist in a globalist world because globalism is at its core the pursuit of a fully centralized tyranny.

There are people on this planet that are not satisfied to merely live their lives, take care of their families and make thei mark peacefully. They crave power over all else. They desperately want control over you, over me, over everything, and they will use any means at their disposal to get it. I would compare it to a kind of drug addiction; globalists are like crack addicts, they can never get enough power, there is always something more to take.

They tell themselves and others that they are “philanthropists”, that “they know what is best” for the rest of us. They believe themselves superior and therefore it is their “destiny” to dictate and micro-manage society for the “greater good” of us all. But really, when we witness their methods it becomes clear that they have no noble aspirations. They have no empathy or honor. They don’t care about the average human being, or the environment, or the economy or society in general. They only care about themselves and their delusions of grandeur. These people are a cancer on the rest of civilization.

They seem to be particularly obsessed with deconstructing and sabotaging America in the pursuit of their global Reset. Real philanthropists would not have a problem if someone didn’t want to accept their “charity”, but psychopaths cannot abide a group of people rejecting them and their ideology. You are not allowed to walk away from them. You are not allowed to do things your own way. You must be forced to comply. The agenda only works if EVERYONE submits.

Unfortunately for the globalists, the Reset is not working out for them everywhere. In the US, the agenda is failing miserably compared to Asia and parts of Europe.

As the head of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, is so fond of reminding us, the Covid pandemic is the “perfect opportunity” to push forward the globalist plans for a total Reset of human economy and society. To the globalists, the crisis is a panacea, a doorway to their version of a better world. They love the pandemic, they are not distressed by it.

The problem is, it’s not doing enough damage or terrifying enough people.

Why Wasn't The Ongoing Third Worldization Of America Simply Allowed To Play Out?

theorganicprepper |  Thirdworldization is a slow-burning SHTF for those living in developed countries, used to comfort, convenience, and security.

Thirdworldization is the gradual and inevitable impoverishment of a rich country. It is the visible effect of major crises hitting square on the population, institutions, corporations, and even the government. It spreads insidiously in every aspect of daily life and our small circles. 

Less growth means less wealth, less money circulating for everyone to take care of necessities and obligations. This shrinking economy brings all sorts of declines that affect services, infrastructure, the supply chain, institutions, and changing the population’s lives and routines.

The economy has a direct impact on the structure and foundation of social order. As an engineer, I tend to analyze structures and foundations by force of my work before assessing other factors. If those are in bad shape, the rest can’t be good. That holds true for a family, a company, a city, or a country.

The standard of living is dropping significantly everywhere

Even though the rich are getting richer, they will be affected by the destruction of the middle class and the poor becoming miserable. The wealthy don’t build their own houses, grow their own food, nor collect their own trash. But like rich countries and corporations, they’re much less affected because wealth can soften the blow and pay for a lot during hard times – or should I say, especially during hard times. 

For the rest (the great majority of society), there’s SHTF as the unfolding of the economic decline is reflected in various aspects as described below.

What Must Be Covered And What Must Be Revealed..,

sovereignman |  Even when we aren’t sick, we should cover our faces in public, just to make the mask-wearers feel better.

Masks Forever

“It no longer signals that a person is sick, or that a person is strange… It is no longer scary or felt to be an imposition on our rights. Mask-wearing can simply signal that we care about others’ health, and about our own.”

Let’s keep an uncomfortable, dehumanizing, air-restricting custom of masking in public, just as a little signal of our empathy. And conversely, if you aren’t willing to mask up for no good reason, you’re a selfish aggressor.

But there’s one more benefit that Dr. Ranney adds in case you’re not sold.

“[Masks have] become a form of self-expression or a marker of being part of the in-group.”

University locks students out for missing weekly Covid test

The University of Michigan announced to students that 718 of them would have their access cards deactivated for all non-residential campus buildings.

These students had failed to take the required WEEKLY Covid-19 test. So now they cannot access cafeterias, classrooms, gyms, and other campus amenities.

Evacuation from deadly volcano eruption is only for the vaccinated

The Prime Minister of St. Vincent ordered an emergency evacuation from areas of the Caribbean island last week as a deadly volcano began erupting.

Cruise ships responded to the emergency to help evacuate residents, and neighboring countries like St. Lucia, Grenada, and Barbados agreed to give shelter to those in need.

But according to the Prime Minister, there was one condition.

Only those already vaccinated against Covid-19 would be eligible for the emergency cruise ship evacuation, and relocation to other islands.

Australian government could require ID for social media use

The Australian parliament released a report called “Inquiry into family, domestic and sexual violence.”

In it, the government recommends forcing social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and even dating apps like Tinder to require government ID in order to use the services.

YouTube censors panel of medical experts over Covid-19 “misinformation”

The Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis recently held a panel discussion to discuss recent research findings related to Covid-19.

The expert panel included four professors of medicine from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford Universities, who are all PhDs and experts in a field of disease research. And that just scratches the surface of their credentials relevant to being considered Covid-19 experts.

 And you can watch the follow up conference here (on YouTube alternative Rumble).

 

 

The Lies Are Conspicuously Obvious To The Casual Observer...,

themostimportantnews |   Don’t you hate it when what you get turns out to be far different from what you were promised?  In this article, I am only going to share facts that have been documented by corporate media sources.  These facts are going to upset a lot of people, because they prove that much of what we had been promised didn’t turn out to be true.  So many people that I know were convinced that if they just got their two shots they would be 100 percent protected for the rest of their lives and they would never have to be concerned about getting COVID ever again.  In addition, most Americans still seem to believe that if a high enough percentage of the population gets their shots COVID will be defeated and the pandemic will be brought to an end.  Unfortunately, all of those assumptions have turned out to be dead wrong.

If you don’t want to believe me, perhaps you will believe the CEO of Pfizer.  This week, he admitted that “fully vaccinated” people will need a third shot of the vaccine within 12 months…

And of course lots of people are still getting sick after being fully vaccinated.  According to the CDC, so far there have been almost 6,000 documented cases of people being infected after getting two shots, and dozens of them have died…

At this point we just don’t know how effective the vaccines will be, but the New York Times is assuring us that we don’t have anything to be concerned about…

“I use the term ‘scariants,’” said Dr. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif., referring to much of the media coverage of the variants. “Even my wife was saying, ‘What about this double mutant?’ It drives me nuts. People are scared unnecessarily. If you’re fully vaccinated, two weeks post dose, you shouldn’t have to worry about variants at all.”  

 To me, Dr. Eric Topol’s statement was exceedingly irresponsible, especially considering some of the studies that have come out lately.  Here is just one example…

 In this article, I haven’t even discussed all of the side effects that we have been witnessing.  A few days ago, the FDA issued an unprecedented order regarding the Johnson and Johnson vaccine because it was causing blood clots in a number of cases…

I am glad that the FDA decided to step in, but the order came too late for this guy…

Kwestins About The Panic-demic Got Asked - But Went Entirely Unanswered

thewrap  |  On Tuesday, Tucker talked about what he argued has been a severe miscommunication problem from medical science leaders regarding the vaccines, in particular messaging that suggests people’s lives cannot meaningfully change even after they’ve received the vaccine — which actually we’ll concede is a good point. Tucker also brought up the pause in distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine following a tiny fraction of people who developed a blood clot disorder after taking it.

This led him to say, “It is possible, in fact, that this vaccine is more dangerous than they’re indicating it is.”

And then later in the rant, he appeared to suggest that the vaccines may not work at all, and that it’s possible that a conspiracy of some sort might be covering that up. If you don’t believe us, here is what he said, verbatim:

“Experts say it is not entirely clear when it will be considered okay for people who are fully vaccinated to stop wearing masks. At some point, no one is asking this but everyone should be, what is this about? If vaccines work, why are vaccinated people still banned from living normal lives? Honestly, what’s the answer to that, it doesn’t make any sense at all. If the vaccine is effective there’s no reason for people who’ve received a vaccine to wear masks or avoid physical contact. So maybe it doesn’t work and they’re simply not telling you that. Well you’d hate to think that especially if you’ve gotten two shots but what’s the other potential explanation? We can’t think of one.”

Yes, Tucker actually said this. Perhaps it was just a rhetorical device, but if so, he didn’t say that was the case.

 

 

Representative Jim Jordan asked Dr. Fauci when the COVID mitigation would be considered successful? When exactly would Americans be permitted to recapture the rights the government has taken away? What exactly are the metrics that define success?…. 

 

 

Jordan continued to press him for a specific number. But, as Fauci started to give a response, the next committee member began to speak, thanking Clyburn. “I’d like my question answered!” Jordan shouted, in response to which Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) yelled: "You need to respect the chair and shut your mouth!”

 

WHO Finally Gave Up The Aerosol Transmission Booty - Will Truth Now Enter Permissible Discourse?

nature |  On 28 March 2020, two months after the WHO had declared COVID-19 a global health emergency, the agency broadcast a public-health message on Twitter and Facebook. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne,” it said, labelling claims to the contrary as misinformation. But evidence quickly established that the virus is transmitted by air, and researchers roundly criticized the agency.

The WHO updated its advice on SARS-CoV-2 transmission three months later, acknowledging the possibility that airborne transmission might occur in some community settings. Airborne transmission in “crowded and inadequately ventilated spaces over a prolonged period of time with infected persons cannot be ruled out”, the updated advice says.

Yuguo Li, a building environment engineer at the University of Hong Kong, says that he is disappointed it took the WHO and other health authorities so long. “We would have saved a lot of people” if airborne transmission was recognized earlier, he says.

A WHO spokesperson says the agency has mentioned the importance of ventilation since early in the pandemic.

Others say that the WHO’s position still doesn’t go far enough. “Airborne transmission is dominant,” says environmental epidemiologist Joseph Allen at Harvard University’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. That’s why building controls such as ventilation and air filtration make sense, he says.

The WHO and other health authorities have failed to clearly prioritise measures to improve indoor air quality to reduce the chance of catching COVID-19, says Jose-Luis Jimenez, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “They don’t emphasize how important it is,” he says. What the WHO needs to say is “fact, it goes through the air,” says Jimenez, “we breathe it in.”

A stark message from the WHO would ensure that national health authorities take notice, says Jimenez. Australia, the Netherlands and some other nations still do not acknowledge in their public statements that airborne transmission has a significant role in spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

By the start of this year, concerns over ventilation had reached boiling point. Hundreds of health-care workers, scientists, engineers and occupational health-and-safety experts signed open letters calling on government officials in Canada, the United States, Australia, Colombia and the United Kingdom to address, among other things, poor indoor air quality. These concerted campaigns all urged local or national governments to take steps to reduce airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

One of the problems is that governments and businesses are still spending millions of dollars on surface disinfection, says Jimenez, despite evidence that it is rare for SARS-CoV-2 to pass from one person to another through contaminated surfaces. By contrast, few countries have invested in measures to improve indoor air quality.

 

mRNA Therapeutics Useless For Immunosuppressed Mubab (Biologics) Users

NYTimes |  For more than a year, Dr. Andrew Wollowitz has mostly been cloistered inside his home in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

As medical director of emergency medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, Dr. Wollowitz, 63, was eager to help treat patients when the coronavirus began raging through the city last spring. But a cancer treatment in 2019 had obliterated his immune cells, leaving him defenseless against the virus, so he instead arranged to manage his staff via Zoom.

A year later, people in Dr. Wollowitz’s life are returning to some semblance of normalcy. His wife, a dancer and choreographer, is preparing to travel for work at Austria’s National Ballet Company. His vaccinated friends are getting together, but he sees them only when the weather is nice enough to sit in his backyard. “I spend very little time in public areas,” he said.

Like his friends, Dr. Wollowitz was vaccinated in January. But he did not produce any antibodies in response — nor did he expect to. He is one of millions of Americans who are immunocompromised, whose bodies cannot learn to deploy immune fighters against the virus.

Some immunocompromised people were born with absent or faulty immune systems, while others, like Dr. Wollowitz, have diseases or have received therapies that wiped out their immune defenses. Many of them produce few to no antibodies in response to a vaccine or an infection, leaving them susceptible to the virus. When they do become infected, they may suffer prolonged illness, with death rates as high as 55 percent.

Most people who have lived with immune deficiencies for a long time are likely to be aware of their vulnerability. But others have no idea that medications may have put them at risk.

“They’ll be walking around outside thinking they’re protected — but maybe they’re not,” said Dr. Lee Greenberger, chief scientific officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, which funds research on blood cancers.

The only recourse for these patients — apart from sheltering in place until the virus has retreated — may be to receive regular infusions of monoclonal antibodies, which are mass-produced copies of antibodies obtained from people who have recovered from Covid-19. The Food and Drug Administration has authorized several monoclonal antibody treatments for Covid-19, but now some are also being tested to prevent infections.

 

Global Panicdemic Teaches Nurses They're Expendable Resources For Corporate Profit

FT |  When Silvia, a 33-year-old Italian nurse, received a bonus worth less than €500 after months battling one of Europe’s worst coronavirus outbreaks, she wondered if it “was a joke”. She had worked on a busy Covid-19 ward of a hospital in the city of Genoa throughout the crisis, putting her health on the line and missing out on time with her young daughter “from a sense of duty and love for the job”. The one-off bonus from the Italian health ministry announced late last year was “almost insulting for those of us who had spent months on the frontline risking our lives”, said Silvia, who declined to give her full name. Silvia’s disillusionment points to the scale of the challenge for pandemic-hit governments around the world as they grapple with the question of how, and whether, to reward staff who endured the most searing experience of their professional lives. In many cases, the discussions have forced governments to acknowledge longstanding grievances from healthcare workers about their pay and conditions. The ability to retain and recruit staff will also play a vital role in determining how strongly not just health systems, but national economies, emerge from the crisis.

Chris James, senior OECD health economist, said the focus had already shifted from worries over the availability of hospital beds and ventilators in the early phase of the pandemic to anxieties over staffing levels. “Moving forward, one of the big discussion points among OECD countries is how do we make sure health systems can be stronger in future waves of Covid and meet any other emerging threat,” he said. “The health workforce is at the centre of that.” Demand for healthcare workers exceeded supply long before the pandemic struck, said Anita Charlesworth, chief economist for the Health Foundation, a UK-based charity. This was fuelled by a global commitment to achieve universal health coverage and the rapid spread of diseases such as cancer and diabetes as nations industrialise and prosper. Charlesworth pointed to a World Health Organization estimate that Europe would have a shortfall of 1.5m nurses by the end of the decade. The global estimate would be 13.5m. “If we’re going to be more resistant to the shocks of emerging infectious diseases we’re going to need a bigger buffer,” she said.

Does Nikole Hannah-Jones Channel Ronald McDonald Or Pennywise?

wsws |  The wealth and privilege of the leading proponents of racialism demonstrate the reactionary character of identity politics. It is entirely divorced from the real concerns and experiences of the working class. Fearful of a unified workers’ movement, the ruling class seeks to sow artificial racial divisions among workers through the promotion of identity politics. Additionally, middle class layers seeking a bigger slice of the pie see identity as a means of advancing their own wealth and social position.

The American ruling class is terrified of the growth of a working-class movement. The fight against police violence, racism, and poverty can only be waged through the building of a socialist movement, independent of the capitalist parties, that unifies workers on their common class interests.

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, lead author of the Times’s “1619 Project,” was paid $25,000 for an online Zoom lecture given to the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.

Through a Freedom of Information request, the right-wing news outlet Campus Reform obtained documentation detailing Hannah-Jones’s terms of compensation for the February 19 lecture. Additionally, the documents revealed that Hannah-Jones was partnered with the Lavin Agency, a talent agency that is “the world’s largest intellectual talent agency, representing leading thinkers for speaking engagements personal appearances, consulting, and endorsements,” according to its website. Hannah-Jones’s relationship with the agency suggests she regularly schedules events and is paid for them.

Part of the agreement between Hannah-Jones and the University of Oregon dictated that the lecture, titled “1619 and the Legacy That Built a Nation,” could not be recorded and redistributed. However, a promotional flyer advertised a discussion on “the lasting legacy of Black enslavement on the nation—specifically, how Black Americans pushed for the democracy we have today.”

News of the lecture came days after Hulu announced that it partnered with production studio Lionsgate and billionaire Oprah Winfrey to create a docuseries based on the 1619 Project. In a statement, Hulu said the project was a “landmark undertaking…of the brutal racism that endures in so many aspects of American life today.”

Patrisse Khan-Cullors "Works" As Corporate Woke Makeup - Why Surprised She Lives That Way Too?

jonathanturley |   We recently discussed the move by Twitter to block the tweet of sports journalist Jason Whitlock criticizing the BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors for purchasing a $1.4 million home in a secluded area of Los Angeles.  A self-professed Marxist, Cullors has reportedly purchased four homes worth more than $3 million and has looked at real estate investments in places like the Bahamas.  As with the censoring of a New York Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop story, Twitter was criticized for the censoring of the story and later said it was a mistake. Now, Facebook has reportedly blocked the underlying New York Post report about the controversy.  In the meantime, BLM itself insists that the controversy is little more than terrorism from white supremacists.

Various conservative sites reported this week that Facebook users could not share the link to a story that shed light on Cullors’ multi-million-dollar splurge on homes. Fox News reported that “an error message appears whenever users try sharing the article on their personal Facebook page or through the Messenger app.”

Cullors has not denied the purchase or the real estate investments, including in her statement below to the controversy. The story was widely circulated because Cullors has long insisted that she and her BLM co-founder “are trained Marxists. We are super versed on, sort of, ideological theories.”  She has denounced capitalism as worse than Covid-19.

Critics like Nick Arama of RedState pointed out: “[I]t’s interesting to note that the demographics of the area are only about 1.4% black people there. So not exactly living up to her creed there.”

Moreover, the head of New York City’s Black Lives Matter chapter called for an independent investigation into the organization’s finances in the wake of the controversy.

The New York Post and other publications reported that Cullors is eyeing expensive properties in other locations, including the Bahamas.  However, I noted earlier that there is no evidence that this money came from BLM, which has reportedly raised almost $100 million in donations from corporations and other sources. Indeed, Cullors seems to have ample sources of funds. She published a best selling memoir of her life and then a follow up book.  She also signed a lucrative deal with Warner Bros to develop and produce original programming across all platforms, including broadcast, cable and streaming. She has also been featured in various magazines like her recent collaboration with Jane Fonda.

Politics Restructured So Corporations CanTreat Citizens As Natural Resources To Be Used For Profit

TCH |  The people behind the JoeBama administration do not need to step on the hot-button issue of ‘vaccine passports’ because they already have ideological allies working on the issue.  Remember that phone call with 100 multinational corporations a few days ago?  Why would a Marxist government need to engage in an issue highly charged with politics, when they can just farm-out the same outcome to their Marxist corporate allies?

Hopefully people can see what is happening here.

There are trillions at stake.  Those trillions need to engage in control mechanisms to retain their position.  The multinational corporations know how financially lucrative COVID compliance is.  Those same multinationals are setting up the parameters for control in the exact same manner the U.S. government would.  The ideological multinationals and the ideological JoeBama administration are working in concert.

Multinationals do not like capitalism because within the process of capitalism they do not have control over the financial outcomes.  Capitalism breeds competition; multinationals abhor competition, they are totalitarian in ideology and want the entire pie under their control.  Multinational corporations do not like capitalism; underline it, emphasize it, do not forget it.

Capitalism is based on the principles of a free market.  Multinationals do not want a free market, they want a controlled market.  Their efforts toward a vaccine passport are an example of yet another control they can manipulate for maximum financial benefit.  It really is that simple…..

…. Meanwhile the crew of totalitarians behind JoeBama know they can benefit from their corporate allies.  The multinationals will pay the politicians for control and the politicians will construct defensive legislative outcomes that protect the multinationals.  That is what is happening in exponentially increasing sunlight.

Unfortunately the multinationals are also the funding mechanism for the UniParty.  Democrats and Republicans both benefit from the financial process of payments by the multinationals for control of legislative outcomes.   This is the entire purpose of K-Street.   In third-world countries we call bribery of elected officials “corruption”; however, in the United States we call bribery of elected officials “lobbying”, the process is exactly the same.

In a slightly nuanced outline of the same type of Government and Multinational merging, Glenn Greenwald has a solid article explaining why and how the corporate world is using “false wokeness” as a tool for expanded financial benefit.

Bill Gates The World's Public Health Czar Staunchly Defends Big Pharma Pandemic Profits

TNR  |  In April, Bill Gates launched a bold bid to manage the world’s scientific response to the pandemic. Gates’s Covid-19 ACT-Accelerator expressed a status quo vision for organizing the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of treatments and vaccines. Like other Gates-funded institutions in the public health arena, the Accelerator was a public-private partnership based on charity and industry enticements. Crucially, and in contrast to the C-TAP, the Accelerator enshrined Gates’s long-standing commitment to respecting exclusive intellectual property claims. Its implicit arguments—that intellectual property rights won’t present problems for meeting global demand or ensuring equitable access, and that they must be protected, even during a pandemic—carried the enormous weight of Gates’s reputation as a wise, beneficent, and prophetic leader.

How he’s developed and wielded this influence over two decades is one of the more consequential and underappreciated shapers of the failed global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entering year two, this response has been defined by a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side.

Gates’s marquee Covid-19 initiative started relatively small. Two days before the WHO declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced something called the Therapeutics Accelerator, a joint initiative with Mastercard and the charity group the Wellcome Trust to identify and develop potential treatments for the novel coronavirus. Doubling as a social branding exercise for a giant of global finance, the Accelerator reflected Gates’s familiar formula of corporate philanthropy, which he has applied to everything from malaria to malnutrition. In retrospect, it was a strong indicator that Gates’s dedication to monopoly medicine would survive the pandemic, even before he and his foundation’s officers began to say so publicly.  

This was confirmed when a bigger version of the Accelerator was unveiled the following month at the WHO. The Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator, or ACT-Accelerator, was Gates’s bid to organize the development and distribution of everything from therapeutics to testing. The biggest and most consequential arm, COVAX, proposed to subsidize vaccine deals with poor countries through donations by, and sales to, richer ones. The goal was always limited: It aimed to provide vaccines for up to 20 percent of the population in low-to-middle-income countries. After that, governments would largely have to compete on the global market like everyone else. It was a partial demand-side solution to what the movement coalescing around a call for a “people’s vaccine” warned would be a dual crisis of supply and access, with intellectual property at the center of both.

Gates not only dismissed these warnings but actively sought to undermine all challenges to his authority and the Accelerator’s intellectual property–based charity agenda. 

“Early on, there was space for Gates to have a major impact in favor of open models,” says Manuel Martin, a policy adviser to the Médecins Sans Frontières Access Campaign. “But senior people in the Gates organization very clearly sent out the message: Pooling was unnecessary and counterproductive. They dampened early enthusiasm by saying that I.P. is not an access barrier in vaccines. That’s just demonstratively false.”

Few have observed Bill Gates’s devotion to monopoly medicine more closely than James Love, founder and director of Knowledge Ecology International, a Washington, D.C.–based group that studies the broad nexus of federal policy, the pharmaceutical industry, and intellectual property. Love entered the world of global public health policy around the same time Gates did, and for two decades has watched him scale its heights while reinforcing the system responsible for the very problems he claims to be trying to solve. The through-line for Gates has been his unwavering commitment to drug companies’ right to exclusive control over medical science and the markets for its products.

 

Wokeism Seems Parasitic To Hard Won Black Civil Rights In America...,

andrewsullivan  |  If we were going to construct a test-case for how dysfunctional our politics have become, it would be hard to beat the transgender issue. It profoundly affects a relatively minuscule number of people in the grand scheme of things, and yet galvanizes countless more for culture war purposes. It has become a litmus test for social justice campaigners, who regard anyone proposing even the slightest qualifications on the question as indistinguishable from a Klan member. It has seized the attention of some of the most extreme elements among radical feminists, who in turn regard any smidgen of a compromise on the rights of women as a grotesque enforcement of patriarchy. 

Worse, it has now excited the Christianist right, who see the recognition of trans rights as an effort to destroy the sexual binary that is at the core of almost all orthodox faith. And it has become a Twitter phenomenon, where all reasonable arguments go to die. If you are an opinion writer, you really do have to be a masochist to even want to dabble in the debate. And the mainstream media is, at this point, completely unreliable as a source of balance or information. They openly advocate the most extreme critical theory arguments about sex and gender as if they were uncontested facts and as if the debate can be explained entirely as a function of bigotry vs love. (A recent exception to this, though tilted clearly from the start in one direction, is this explainer from the NYT last night.)

Big global stories — for example, a high court case in Britain that found that minors under 16 are not developmentally capable of making the decision to take puberty blockers — are routinely ignored. Check out this video from the Washington Post. It doesn’t even gesture at fairness: no presentation of counter-argument; instant attribution of bigotry for anyone deemed in disagreement.

And the issue has recently become, even more emotively, about children — how they are treated, how the medical world deals with them, amid complicated arguments about specific treatments, their long-term effects, and genuine scientific disputes. And all of this is taking place with far too few reliable, controlled studies on transgender individuals, as children and adults, or on medical interventions. A lot of the time, we’re flying blind.

I’ve been trying to think these things through for the past few years. I used to think trans rights were a no-brainer. Of course I supported them. And I still do. I believe trans people when they tell the stories of their lives; I empathize because I’m human, and the pain and struggle of so many trans people is so real; and perhaps also because being gay helps you see how a subjective feeling can be so deep as to be an integral part (but never the whole) of your identity. 

Equally, however, I have some reservations. I trust biology on the core binary sexual reproductive strategy of our species, without which we would not exist, and which does not cease to exist because of a few variations on the theme (I’m one of those variations myself). I do not believe that a trans woman or a trans man is in every way indistinguishable from a woman or a man. If there were no differences, trans women and trans men would not exist as a separate category. I do not buy the idea that biological sex is socially constructed, or a function of “white supremacist” thought, for Pete’s sake. I further believe that no-one should be excluded from this or any debate; and that “lived experience” cannot replace “objective reality”, although it can often help complicate and explain it.  

In our current culture, this somewhat complicated stance is anathema. For some trans activists, especially the younger more thoroughly woke ones, I am simply evil, beset by phobias, and determined to persecute and kill trans people, or seek their genocide. I wish this were a caricature of their views, but it isn’t. For some radical feminists, my empathy for trans women, and concern for their welfare, is regarded as a function of my misogyny and hatred of women, often wrapped up in some anti-gay, misandrist bile. I wish I were exaggerating here as well. The proportion of people in this debate who seem psychologically unstable, emotionally volatile and personally vicious seems larger than usual.

But we can no longer avoid the subject. There is now a flood of bills in state legislatures designed to ban medical procedures for minors who appear to be trans, and to ensure fairness between trans girls and girls in school sports, and a few that are even more extreme. Lines have been drawn. The woke establishment — all major corporations, the federal government, the universities, all cultural institutions, the mainstream media and now the medical authorities — are unequivocally on the side of anything the trans activists want. Amazon won’t even sell some books presenting one side of the case, while they still sell Mein Kampf. K thru 12 education now routinely tells children that biological sex is a spectrum (it isn’t) and they can choose where to fit.

 

Paying Woke-Tax To Read About Press Disintermediation By Substack

NYTimes  |  Danny Lavery had just agreed to a two-year, $430,000 contract with the newsletter platform Substack when I met him for coffee last week in Brooklyn, and he was deciding what to do with the money.

“I think the thing that I’m the most looking forward to about this is to start a retirement account,” said Mr. Lavery, who founded the feminist humor blog The Toast and will be giving up an advice column in Slate.

Mr. Lavery already has about 1,800 paying subscribers to his Substack newsletter, The Shatner Chatner, whose most popular piece is written from the perspective of a goose. Annual subscriptions cost $50.

The contract is structured a bit like a book advance: Substack’s bet is that it will make back its money by taking most of Mr. Lavery’s subscription income for those two years. The deal now means Mr. Lavery’s household has two Substack incomes. His wife, Grace Lavery, an associate English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who edits the Transgender Studies Quarterly, had already signed on for a $125,000 advance.

Along with the revenue the Laverys will bring in, the move is good media politics for the company. Substack has been facing a mutiny from a group of writers who objected to sharing the platform with people who they said were anti-transgender, including a writer who made fun of people’s appearances on a dating app. Signing up two high-profile transgender writers was a signal that Substack was trying to remain a platform for people who sometimes hate one another, and who sometimes, like Dr. Lavery, heatedly criticize the company.

Feuds among and about Substack writers were a major category of media drama during the pandemic winter — a lot of drama for a company that mostly just makes it easy to email large groups for free. For those who want to charge subscribers on their email list, Substack takes a 10 percent fee. “The mindshare Substack has in media right now is insane,” said Casey Newton, who left The Verge to start a newsletter on Substack called Platformer. Substack, he said, has become a target for “a lot of people to project their anxieties.”

Substack has captivated an anxious industry because it embodies larger forces and contradictions. For one, the new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers, even as journalists turn increasingly to labor unions to level out pay scales.

This new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about “cancel culture” — for instance, in New York Magazine’s firing of Andrew Sullivan — are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once were. (Only Twitter retains that power.) Big media cancellation is often an offramp to a bigger income. Though Substack paid advances to a few dozen writers, most are simply making money from readers. That includes most of the top figures on the platform, who make seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers — among them Mr. Sullivan, the liberal historian Heather Cox Richardson, and the confrontational libertarian Glenn Greenwald.

This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn’t just transforming journalism. It’s also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it’s marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels. And Silicon Valley investors, eager to disrupt and angry at their portrayal in big media, have been gleefully backing it. Substack embodies this cultural shift, but it’s riding the wave, not creating it.

 

When Keeping It Woke Goes Wrong: Threatening Merriweather's Job Got Jane Doe's Ass Kicked

I'm gonna use discrimination to get what I want. from r/trashy

slate  |  Last month, a conservative panel of judges on the 6^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the First Amendment grants professors a right to intentionally misgender trans students in class. The decision, authored by Donald Trump-nominee and Mitch McConnell protégé Amul Thapar, had a triumphant tone: Thapar depicted himself as a champion of free speech combatting the “classroom thought police” at modern universities who seek to turn their campuses into “enclaves of totalitarianism” by prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ students.

The facts tell a much more nuanced story than Thapar’s simplistic tale of academic freedom versus totalitarianism. The case centers on professor Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio. In 2018, Meriwether misgendered a trans student, known in litigation as Jane Doe, in class; she asked that use her correct pronouns and honorifics in the future, but he refused. The university found Meriwether in violation of its nondiscrimination policy, which requires professors to use students’ preferred pronouns. Meriwether refused to comply with the policy, and following an investigation, the university placed a “written warning” in his file noting his noncompliance. The professor, backed by the viciously anti-trans law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, then sued—dragging Jane Doe into the center of a years-long legal dispute that she desperately wished to avoid.

I recently corresponded with Doe over email about the case, including its effect on her own freedom of expression and academic experience. We spoke on the condition that I use the pseudonym Jane Doe to preserve her privacy. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mark Joseph Stern: How did you feel when professor Meriwether first misgendered you?

Jane Doe: At first, I thought it was a mistake, either mix-up of words or a miscue based on my clothes or appearance. When it is the latter, it is particularly painful; it makes you feel ugly or that your body is broken. But, at the time, there was no way for professor Meriwether to know that I am transgender. All my documents and school records reflect my correct name and female gender marker.

The 6^th Circuit wrote the following about your reaction to professor Meriwether’s refusal to acknowledge your gender identity because of his religious beliefs: “Doe became hostile—circling around Meriwether at first, and then approaching him in a threatening manner: ‘I guess this means I can call you a cunt.’ Doe promised that Meriwether would be fired if he did not give in to Doe’s demands.” Is this account accurate?

This account is only partially accurate. I approached professor Meriwether after the first class session to let him know that he mistakenly referred to me as male and ask that he refer to me as female in the future. He refused. I showed him my driver’s license to further prove that I am female. He refused again. It was degrading to have to debate with my professor whether I am female and entitled to the same treatment as my peers simply because professor Meriwether believed that I was transgender (it was not until I filed an internal complaint with Shawnee that I disclosed that I am transgender). Professor Meriwether’s persistent refusal to treat me with the same respect he afforded other students was upsetting. Although I made the remark quoted in the opinion, I was not threatening or hostile.