The Islamic Emirate Of Afghanistan

asiatimes  |  Geopolitically, what matters now is how the Taliban have written a whole new script, showing the lands of Islam, as well as the Global South, how to defeat the self-referential, seemingly invincible US/NATO empire.

The Taliban did it with Islamic faith, infinite patience and force of will fueling roughly 78,000 fighters – 60,000 of them active – many with minimal military training, no backing of any state – unlike Vietnam, which had China and the USSR – no hundreds of billions of dollars from NATO, no trained army, no air force and no state-of-the-art technology.

They relied only on Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades and Toyota pick-ups – before they captured American hardware these past few days, including drones and helicopters.  

Taliban leader Mullah Baradar has been extremely cautious. On Monday he said: “It is too early to say how we will take over governance.” First of all, the Taliban wants “to see foreign forces leave before restructuring begins.”

Abdul Ghani Baradar is a very interesting character. He was born and raised in Kandahar. That’s where the Taliban started in 1994, seizing the city almost without a fight and then, equipped with tanks, heavy weapons and a lot of cash to bribe local commanders, capturing Kabul nearly 25 years ago, on September 27, 1996.

Earlier, Mullah Baradar fought in the 1980s jihad against the USSR, and maybe – not confirmed – side-by-side with Mullah Omar, with whom he co-founded the Taliban. 

After the American bombing and occupation post-9/11, Mullah Baradar and a small group of Taliban sent a proposal to then-President Hamid Karzai on a potential deal that would allow the Taliban to recognize the new regime. Karzai, under Washington pressure, rejected it. 

Baradar was actually arrested in Pakistan in 2010 – and kept in custody. Believe it or not, American intervention led to his freedom in 2018. He then relocated to Qatar. And that’s where he was appointed head of the Taliban’s political office and oversaw the signing last year of the American withdrawal deal.

Baradar will be the new ruler in Kabul – but it’s important to note he’s under the authority of the Taliban Supreme Leader since 2016, Haibatullah Akhundzada. It’s the Supreme Leader – actually a spiritual guide – who will be lording over the new incarnation of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. 

The collapse of the Afghan National Army (ANA) was inevitable. They were “educated” the American military way: massive technology, massive airpower, next to zero local ground intel.

The Taliban is all about deals with tribal elders and extended family connections – and a peasant guerrilla approach, parallel to the communists in Vietnam. They were biding their time for years, just building connections – and those sleeper cells.

Afghan troops who had not received a salary for months were paid not to fight them. And the fact they did not attack American troops since February 2020 earned them a lot of extra respect: a matter of honor, essential in the Pashtunwali code.

It’s impossible to understand the Taliban – and most of all, the Pashtun universe – without understanding Pashtunwali. As well as the concepts of honor, hospitality and inevitable revenge for any wrongdoing, the concept of freedom implies no Pashtun is inclined to be ordered by a central state authority – in this case, Kabul. And no way will they ever surrender their guns. 

In a nutshell, that’s the “secret” of the lightning-fast blitzkrieg with minimal loss of blood, inbuilt in the overarching geopolitical earthquake. After Vietnam, this is the second Global South protagonist showing the whole world how an empire can be defeated by a peasant guerrilla army.

And all that accomplished with a budget that may not exceed $1.5 billion a year – coming from local taxes, profits from opium exports (no internal distribution allowed) and real estate speculation. In vast swaths of Afghanistan, the Taliban were already, de facto, running local security, local courts and even food distribution.  

Taliban 2021 is an entirely different animal compared with Taliban 2001. Not only are they battle-hardened, they had plenty of time to perfect their diplomatic skills, which were recently more than visible in Doha and in high-level visits to Tehran, Moscow and Tianjin.

They know very well that any connection with al-Qaeda remnants, ISIS/Daesh, ISIS-Khorasan and ETIM is counter-productive – as their Shanghai Cooperation Organization interlocutors made very clear.

Biden Is A Pathetic, Expendable, Crash-Test Sock-Puppet...,

michael-hudson  |  After Carter, George W. Bush and Barack Obama funded Al Qaeda (largely with the gold looted from destroying Libya) to fight for U.S. geopolitical aims and oil in Iraq and Syria. The Taliban for its part fought against Al Quaeda. The real U.S. fear therefore is not that they may back America’s Wahabi foreign legion, but that they will make a deal with Russia, China and Syria to serve as a trade link from Iran westward.

Biden’s second myth was to blame the victim by claiming that the Afghan army would not fight for “their country,” despite his assurances by the proxies whom the U.S. installed – that they would use U.S. money to build the economy. He also said that the army did not fight, which became obvious over the weekend.

The police force also did not fight. Nobody fought the Taliban to “defend their country,” because the U.S. occupation regime was not “their country.” Again and again, Biden repeated that the United States could not save a country that would not “defend itself.” But the “itself” was the corrupt regime that was simply pocketing U.S. “aid” money.

The situation was much like what was expressed in the old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto finding themselves surrounded by Indians. “What are we going to do, Tonto,” asked the Lone Ranger.

“What do you mean, ‘We,’ white man?” Tonto replied. That was the reply of the Afghan army to U.S. demands that they fight for the corrupt occupation force that they had installed. Their aim is to survive in a new country, while in Doha the Taliban leadership negotiates with China, Russia and even the United States to achieve a modus vivendi.

So all that Biden’s message meant to most Americans was that we would not waste any more lives and money fighting wars for an ungrateful population that wanted the U.S. to do all the fighting for it.

President Biden could have come out and washed away the blame by saying: “Just before the weekend, I was told by my army generals and national security advisors that it would take months for the Taliban to conquer Afghanistan, and certainly to take control of Kabul, which supposedly would be a bloody fight.” He could have announced that he is removing the incompetent leadership engrained for many years, and creating a more reality-based group.

But of course, he could not do that, because the group is the unreality-based neocon Deep State. He was not about to explain how “It’s obvious that I and Congress have been misinformed, and that the intelligence agencies had no clue about the country that they were reporting on for the last two decades.”

e could have acknowledged that the Afghans welcomed the Taliban into Kabul without a fight. The army stood aside, and the police stood aside. There seemed to be a party celebrating the American withdrawal. Restaurants and markets were open, and Kabul seemed to be enjoying normal life – except for the turmoil at the airport.

Suppose that Biden had said the following: “Given this acquiescence in support for the Taliban, I was obviously correct in withdrawing the American occupation forces. Contrary to what Congress and the Executive Branch was told, there was no support by the Afghans for the Americans. I now realize that to the Afghan population, the government officials that America installed simply took the money we gave them and put it into their own bank accounts instead of paying the army, police and other parts of civic society.”

Instead, President Biden spoke about having made four trips to Afghanistan and how much he knew and trusted the proxies that U.S. agencies had installed. That made him seem gullible. Even Donald Trump said publicly that he didn’t trust the briefings that he was given, and wanted to spend money at home, into the hands of his own campaign contributors instead of abroad.

Biden could have picked up on this point by saying, “At least there’s a silver lining: We won’t be spending any more than the $3 trillion that we’ve already sunk over there. We can now afford to use the money to build up domestic U.S. infrastructure instead.”

But instead President Biden doubled down on what his neocon advisors had told him, and what they were repeating on the TV news channels all day: The Afghan army had refused to fight “for their country,” meaning the U.S.-supported occupation force, as if this was really Afghan self-government.

The media are showing pictures of the Afghan palace and one of the warlord’s office. I did a double-take, because the plush, wretched-excess furnishings looked just like Obama’s $12 million McMansion furnishings in Martha’s Vineyard.

MSDNC On Behalf Of The MIC Slapped The Taste Out Of Cornpop's Lying Mouth...,

Greenwald  |   Last month, the independent journalist Michael Tracey, writing at Substack, interviewed a U.S. veteran of the war in Afghanistan. The former soldier, whose job was to work in training programs for the Afghan police and also participated in training briefings for the Afghan military, described in detail why the program to train Afghan security forces was such an obvious failure and even a farce. “I don’t think I could overstate that this was a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or losing equipment,” he said. In sum, “as far as the US military presence there — I just viewed it as a big money funneling operation”: an endless money pit for U.S. security contractors and Afghan warlords, all of whom knew that no real progress was being made, just sucking up as much U.S. taxpayer money as they could before the inevitable withdraw and takeover by the Taliban.

Virtuous Presidential SoftHeadedness: Any Genuine C-in-C Would've Fired These Two AssClowns..,

 exiledonline |  Was there ever a plan there?

So what was supposed to happen back in October 2001, when the US forces invaded? I’ve been going through the papers of record, the NYT and WaPo, to see what the official line was, year by year. The first years of an occupation are the most important, so I’ve focused on the first five full years of US occupation, 2002-2007. You can find a good timeline of these years here, but it’s much harder to find any trace of a plan.

The US invaded both Afghanistan (October 2001) and Iraq (March 2003), but not all invasions are equal. For the DC elite, Iraq was a war of choice, while Afghanistan was just a grim preliminary chore. They had to invade Afghanistan quickly after the WTC attacks, because it was all over the news that Al Qaeda had its HQ there and the voters were angry. Public support for invading Afghanistan was higher than for invading Iraq.

But those in the know, in the three-letter agencies and the DC elite, knew Afghanistan was hopeless. They knew this because the Taliban, officially the enemy in Afghanistan, was sponsored and protected by the Pakistani armed forces. And Pakistan was never going to hand over Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, to the Americans. The Pakistani intel elite, one of the scariest, murkiest groups in the world, cherished its pet jihadis as its one reliable weapon against the hated Indians. It was never going to help destroy them, or even cooperate in any serious pruning operation.

A decade after the US invaded with the supposed help of Pakistan, Osama was found in a big compound inside Pakistan, a few hundred meters from a Pakistani military. At that point even us rubes knew that the Pakistani government had never intended to betray its Taliban allies. (Note: “Taliban” here means the “Afghan Taliban,” as opposed to the later “Pakistani Taliban,” which the Pakistani gov’t, or at least some elements of that gov’t, really does dislike. Like I said, it’s murky.)

Nobody at the CIA or the 16 other US intel agencies really thought the Pakistani gov’t would give up their friends. And nobody in DC really thought that Afghans, as they imagined Afghans, would welcome American troops. So from the start, this was the poor stepchild invasion, while Iraq was coddled.

They had high hopes for Iraq. Iraqis, in the neocon dream, were really proto-Americans, just waiting for a Shock and Awe Apocalypse to free their inner Republican. Afghans, OTOH, were scary and alien. Brave, yes; remember all those Reagan-era movies on the glorious Afghan resistance?

Maybe too brave, in fact. The DC elite had heard that cliché about “Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires” and believed it. Who wants to invade a dirt-poor country full of brave warriors who don’t seem like good candidates for transformation into suburban Americans?

The DC blob had no real hopes or plans for Afghanistan — and the stories from NYT and WaPo reflect that. These stories use several different models, which I’ll try to characterize here. They overlap, over the years 2002-2007, but they’re not in any strict chronological order. It’s more that those whose unlucky job it was to explain the invasion used whichever model retained a figleaf of plausibility at the time.

 

Illinois Brings You Vaxx Verify Mark Of The Beast Verification Portal (By Experian)

The CDC, and the entire federal public health apparatus in the United States, has been an absolute disaster for the entire duration of this pandemic. It's embarrassing how incompetent they are. A pandemic is an emergency and requires proactive action. The CDC has been anything but proactive. As stated in the article, it seems as if they're reacting to every event that occurs with a month-long delay.

Data Collection--It's an absolute disgrace that there is no federal central repository of COVID-19 breakthrough infection data. We are navigating this mess completely blindfolded. Instead, we have to rely on individual state reporting, and sometimes data is only available on a county-level.

Wide-scale Home Testing--It took the FDA an entire year and a half to approve a lateral assay antigen test. Yet, they're on retail for $20 at CVS. That's far too expensive for a simple piece of nitrocellulose paper with immunofluorescent antibodies. If we were serious about curtailing the spread of Delta, we would invest funds in a federal effort to mass-produce these tests at a $1 price point, and distribute them to all households for daily testing.

Mutations--It seems as if everyone forgot the concept of a "derivative" from entry-level calculus. Everyone is focused on Delta without exerting the slightest effort in thinking about the future. We need to get proactive, folks. Immune evasion to Delta may be low, but what about future variants? We need to model the rate of mutations in the spike protein based on the magnitude of transmissions. This is possible if effort is put into it. Doing such, we can forecast antibody evasion in future variants based on current cases.

Booster Doses--I truly hope that the boosters that are being planned are not simply a third dose of the same Spike encodement. The spike region has mutated since the Alpha iteration of the virus. Current vaccines encode for that old version of the Spike protein. The boosters should have the mRNA encoding of the Delta spike. Giving senior citizens a booster of the old Spike sequence would be extremely short-sighted.

Treatments--Why is the United States investing so little in COVID-19 infection treatment? Why are we hedging all our bets on prophylaxis? We must invest far more into Coronavirus inhibitors.

In short, I have lost all faith in our federal public health apparatus. The CDC is nowhere near as agile as it needs to be to deal with a pandemic.

Jamelle Bouie: Conspiracism Of Smug Virtue Signaling With No Factual Underpinning...,

NYTimes |  When asked if he had gotten a Covid-19 vaccine, Lamar Jackson, a quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens, declined to answer. “I feel it’s a personal decision,” he said. “I’m just going to keep my feelings to my family and myself.”

Jackson echoed another N.F.L. quarterback, Cam Newton of the New England Patriots, who said much the same a few days earlier. “It’s too personal to discuss,” Newton replied, when asked if he was vaccinated. “I’ll just keep it at that.”

Jackson and Newton are not the only prominent people to say hey, it’s personal when asked about the vaccine. It is a common dodge for public-facing vaccine skeptics or those using vaccine skepticism for their own ends. “I don’t think it’s anybody’s damn business whether I’m vaccinated or not,” Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, told CNN last month. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, wrote similarly (albeit less abrasively) in May that vaccination was a “personal and private decision” and that “no one should be shamed, coerced or mandated to take Covid-19 vaccines that are being allowed under an emergency use authorization.”

Johnson and all the others are wrong. Wearing a helmet while bike riding, strapping on your seatbelt in a car — these are personal decisions, at least as far as your own injuries are concerned. Vaccination is different. In the context of a deadly and often debilitating contagion, in which the unchecked spread of infection has consequences for the entire society, vaccination is not a personal decision. And inasmuch as the United States has struggled to achieve herd immunity against Covid-19 through vaccination, it is because we refuse to treat the pandemic for what it is: a social problem to solve through collective action.

Fall Of Afghanistan: Cornpop Hiding, Blinken Eating Shit Sandwiches, Kamala Devi Looking Good...,

Talked to a buddy who was an Embedded Tactical Trainer with the ANA in Afghanistan for a few tours.

Some of his observations as to why the Afghan National Army is folding so quickly were quite interesting to me, so here goes

1. The Taliban has had 20 years to build lists. pic.twitter.com/5Q05xqV7rg

— TheHuntForTomClancy (@HuntClancy) August 14, 2021

In addition to not being paid, fed, or resupplied by leadership that fled the country with cars full of embezzled $$$ - the Afghan National Army folded quick, fast, and in a hurry for the following reason(s):

1. The Taliban has had 20 years to build lists.

2. So, the Taliban knows who the ANA Kandak commanders are. Everyone's got a cousin in the Taliban and a cousin in the ANA/ANP/ABP/CTPT whatever. The ANA Kandak commanders get a phone call from the Taliban commanders: we've got your family in X province under our protection now.

3. When the American ETT's lost operational control over their advisors, the ANA officers and NCOs had no one to put a check on the tendency to abuse new Askars, and also the tendency to steal the new Askars' money (Here's $100, we'll take $90 back now for your food and uniform).

4. Morale within the units is shit, and the trust and mutual respect needed for effective small-unit combat actions to actually work doesn't really exist. Corruption runs wild, drug abuse is a big problem, and again, everyone's got a cousin on the other side, so fuck it, right?

5. Plus, the US concentrated on developing combat forces in their own image, supplying the ANA with surplus Flag of United States arms, vehicles, uniforms & commo gear. The US spent thousands upon thousands of dollars training and equipping each ANA Askar, but forgot something: they didn't issue eyeglasses.

6. I have shit uncorrected eyesight, like, I really need glasses to do just about anything, certainly to shoot an M4 or an M203 accurately enough to kill the person I'm aiming at. Don't you reckon there might be myopic askars? None of the Askars had eyeglasses.

7. Afghanistan was a complete, total, and epic fuckup by the Administration, the Intelligence Community, the American Deep State. Sheer and utter incompetence played out over 20 years to the nth degree. For any of us looking, all I got is that we should now understand our Vietnam veterans better. And, man, every administration since Jimmy Carter (or hell, you can go back to Eisenhower and Morrison-Knudsen's dam building efforts) fucked up afghanistan.

p.s. the Talibs also have cousins who are Askars in the army. The difference is that the Talibs believe they're right and the Askars don't. That's the biggest difference. Weapons and big spending can't buy that.

This may become the most infamous — and devastating — press conference ever held by an American President. pic.twitter.com/j4kKwyPDVm

— BDW (@BryanDeanWright) August 15, 2021

Despite His Having Called Her The "Best Looking AG" Kamala Devi Is Not An Obama Protege...,

taibbi  |  Cast out, the Times said, were “the majority of former Obama administration officials… who generally credit themselves with helping create the Obama legacy,” including former top aide David Axelrod, who’d just called Obama an “apostle of hope” in the Washington Post and sat for a three-hour HBO documentary deep-throat of his ex-boss. Remaining on the list were celeb couples Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, as well as Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union, along with Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Questlove, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Don Cheadle, and other Fabulous People, who drank “top shelf liquor,” puffed stogies, and hit the links at the Vineyard Golf Club (membership fee: $350,000). An early report that Pearl Jam had been hired to perform was later refuted. Eddie Vedder would just be there, but not to play.

One attendee called it the “party of all parties,” while another added, “Y’all never seen Obama like this,”  There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of politician, when either because their careers are over, or because they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.

He extended middle fingers in all directions: to his Vineyard neighbors, the rest of America, Biden, the hanger-on ex-staffers who’d stacked years of hundred-hour work weeks to build his ballyhooed career, the not quite A-listers bounced at the last minute for being not famous enough (sorry, Larry David and Conan O’Brien!), and so on. It’d be hard not to laugh imagining Axelrod reading that even “Real Housewife of Atlanta” Kim Fields got on the party list over him, except that Obama giving the shove-off to his most devoted (if also scummy and greedy) aides is also such a perfect metaphor for the way he slammed the door in the faces of the millions of ordinary voters who once so desperately believed in him.

Obviously, getting rich and not giving a shit anymore is the birthright of every American. But this wasn’t supposed to be in the script for Obama, whose remarkable heel turn has been obscured by the Trump years, which incidentally were at least partly his fault. The history books and the still-starstruck press will let him skate on this, but they shouldn’t.

Obama was set up to be the greatest of American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great political liars of all time — he fooled us all. Moreover, his remarkably vacuous post-presidency is proving true everything Trump said in 2016 about the grasping Washington politicians whose only motives are personal enrichment, and who’d do anything, even attend his wedding, for a buck. Trump’s point was that he, Trump, was already swinishly rich, while politicians have only one thing to sell to get the upper class status they crave: us.

Sick Of Covid - Let's Look At Kamala Devi For A Minute...,

alicefromqueens |  Harris opposed legalization as recently as 2014, in her re-election campaign for attorney general of California, even as her Republican opponent supported it. Incidentally, the answer Harris gave a local reporter on the subject that year was the first time her laugh got her in real trouble. Hold onto that for bar trivia-night.

TO BE CLEAR: I HAVE NO PROBLEM with Kamala’s personality type as such. But before she dropped out of the primaries, it amazed me that no one else found her fish-out-of-waterness worth remarking on. Surely it’s not problematic to discuss frankly whether any politician as feminine as Kamala can win a presidential election.

The nearest thing to a high-profile criticism of Harris’s personality was delivered unwittingly in The Washington Post. In an Opinion piece titled, “Vogue got too familiar, too fast,” the paper’s former fashion critic, Robin Givhan, blamed Vogue for making Harris look relatable: “The cover did not give Kamala D. Harris due respect. It was overly familiar. It was a cover image that, in effect, called Harris by her first name without invitation.”

Givhan goes on to suggest that the cover reflected solely the preferences of Vogue’s editor and Hollywood-villain Anna Wintour, and that Wintour’s cluelessness exemplified Vogue’s ongoing problems with race. Astonishingly, this all came after Givhan acknowledged, “Harris styled herself. She chose her ensembles.” 

No one inflicts relatability on Kamala, and no one needs an invite to call her by one name. There’s an invitation in every smile and word from her mouth. Whether Americans want such an invitation from their president is a different question, one we’ll be returning to in this series

What Was Up A Month Ago When Kamala Harris Couldn't Catch A Break?

independent |  The response from the office of Kamala Harris to reports that her office was a mess of dysfunction and distrust is to say the anonymous critics are "cowards".

An incendiary story in Politico based on leaks from within and around the vice president’s orbit describes her office as chaotic, tense, dour, abusive, and an unhealthy work environment where "people feel treated like s***".

The report quotes 22 current and former vice presidential aides, administration officials and associates of both Ms Harris and Joe Biden to paint a picture of a toxic and incompetent operation from the top-down, with particular ire aimed at the VP’s chief of staff Tina Flournoy.

“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” said a person with direct knowledge of how Ms Harris runs her office.

The report claims Ms Flournoy created an insular environment where ideas are ignored and she refuses to take responsibility for delicate issues and blames staffers for negative results that follow, like the bungled trip to the Mexico border that blindsided members of the vice president’s own office.

In response to Politico, Ms Harris’ chief spokeswoman said people criticizing Ms Flournoy "are cowards to do this this way".

“We are not making rainbows and bunnies all day. What I hear is that people have hard jobs and I’m like ‘welcome to the club,’” Ms Sanders said.

“We have created a culture where people, if there is anything anyone would like to raise, there are avenues for them to do so. Whoever has something they would like to raise, they should raise it directly.”

Does This Video And This Write-Up Make Dr. Dan Stock A "Domestic Violent Extremist"?

DHS – The Secretary of Homeland Security has issued a new National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin regarding the current heightened threat environment across the United States. […] These threats include those posed by domestic terrorists, individuals and groups engaged in grievance-based violence. […] Such threats are also exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing global pandemic, including grievances over public health safety measures and perceived government restrictions. 

Indystar |  The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that K-12 schools adopt universal masking for all students, teachers and staff members, regardless of vaccination status. The Indiana State Department of Health has recommended that schools follow the CDC guidance. 

But the decision has been left to local school boards, the very people that Stock is telling not to listen to the CDC or the state health officials.

State health officials have pushed back on Stock’s video, while maintaining the position that Indiana is a "home rule state" and decisions around masking and more are up to local officials.

“Throughout this pandemic, we have relied on data and science to make recommendations, and we will continue to do so,” said Megan Wade-Taxter, a spokesperson for the Indiana State Department of Health. “The COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths, as evidenced by the fact that more than 98% of Hoosiers who have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since mid-January are unvaccinated."

That’s true even as the delta variant drives a surge of new cases. More than 97% of Hoosiers who have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since June 1 have not been vaccinated, she said.

"Decisions about school protocols rest with school boards and local leaders," she said, "including local health departments and elected officials."

The Hancock County Health Department has also advised all schools in the county, including Mt. Vernon, to follow the CDC and state health recommendations.

"You’ve got so many things coming at you," said Kellie Freeman, a member of the Mt. Vernon Community Schools board that heard from Stock last week. "It’s difficult to know."

At that meeting of the Mt. Vernon board, members were considering parameters that would require individual school buildings to increase cleaning and move toward a mask mandate, based on the percentage of students out due to illness or quarantine. Currently, the district is mask-optional.

Ultimately, the board decided to table the discussion after hearing Stock's comments. 

"I think we have an obligation to… find the facts that were shared today," said board member Shannon Walls.

 

Covid-21 Continues To Evolve EXACTLY The Way VandenBossche Said It Would...,

geertvandenbossche |  The WHO’s mass vaccination program has been installed in response to a public health emergency of international concern. As of the early days of the mass vaccination campaigns, at least a few experts have been warning against the catastrophic impact such a program could have on global and individual health. Mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic is prone to promoting selection and adaptation of immune escape variants that are featured by increasing infectiousness and resistance to spike protein (S)-directed antibodies (Abs), thereby diminishing protection in vaccines and threatening the unvaccinated. 

This already explains why the WHO’s mass vaccination program is not only unable to generate herd immunity (HI) but even leads to substantial erosion of the population’s immune protective capacity. As the ongoing universal mass vaccination program will soon promote dominant propagation of highly infectious, neutralization escape mutants (i.e., so-called ‘S Ab-resistant variants’), naturally acquired, or vacinal neutralizing Abs, will, indeed, no longer offer any protection to immunized individuals whereas high infectious pressure will continue to suppress the innate immune defense system of the non-vacinated. This is to say that every further increase in vaccine coverage rates will further contribute to forcing the virus into resistance to neutralizing, S-specific Abs. 

Increased viral infectivity, combined with evasion from antiviral immunity, will inevitably result in an additional toll taken on human health and human lives. Immediate action needs, therefore, to be taken in order to dramatically reduce viral infectivity rates and to prevent selected immune escape variants from rapidly spreading through the entire population, whether vaccinated or not. This first critical step can only be achieved by calling an immediate halt to the mass vaccination program and replacing it by widespread use of antiviral chemoprophylactics while dedicating massive public health resources to scaling early multidrug treatments of Covid-19 disease. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Worst Public Health Fiasco In History

epochtimes |   Dr. Kulldorff: First of all, we expected that we would have good natural immunity from a virus like this. So it’s not a surprise that we do have it. There have been studies showing that we have good immunity from having COVID before. People can be reinfected and test positive, but there’s very few cases where somebody had it and then they get the serious disease afterwards. There are millions of people who have had COVID.

So if this was a common thing, it would have shown up all over the place, but it hasn’t. So it’s very rare. Once you’ve had it, you have good protection from your immune system for a serious disease or for mortality. There has been some direct comparison.

There was some data from Israel that came out recently showing that if you have had a vaccine, you’re 6.7 times more likely to be reinfected than if you have had the COVID disease itself. So we would expect that you get better immunity from the disease than you do from the vaccine. And of course, there’s only that one study.

We don’t know exactly, but we can confidently say that having had the disease at least gives you as good and probably better immunity than the vaccine. Empirically, we know that if you have a disease, you have at least one-and-a-half years of good immunity, because the virus has been with us for that amount of time. So we know that there’s long lasting immunity from having had COVID disease.

From the vaccine, we have less information because it only came in December. So it’s a bit over half-a-year. So we know that there’s good immunity for six months. Hopefully it’s longer, but we don’t have the same amount of data, the same evidence as we do for a natural immunity from actually having the disease naturally.

But for public health scientists, it’s very surprising that this is not recognized. We are forcing people who had the disease, who have good immunity to take a vaccine, even though they have an immunity that’s better than, or at least as good as those who have only had the vaccine.

At the same time, there are a lot of people who need these vaccines who are not getting them. People in India, Nigeria and Brazil, where a lot of older and especially poor people do not get the vaccine because they don’t have enough doses.

So those are the ones we should emphasize being vaccinated. Then we should view this as a global effort to vaccinate the old everywhere in the world, instead of vaccinating people that already have very good immunity against the disease.

Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that people are being forced to take a vaccine. I don’t know of anyone in the U.S. actually being forced to take it directly. Tell me what you mean when you say that.

Dr. Kulldorff: There’s a push both for vaccine passports and vaccine mandates. If people want to have a job and stay at the job, they are required to take the vaccine or they’ll be fired. If they want to study at the university, many universities are requiring vaccines for all the students.

So there are these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. In New York City, for example, now they’re requiring restaurants to require vaccinations for people who go to the restaurants.

That is a very coercive way to get people to vaccinate. And that’s very bad for public health. One question is, “Why do you coerce people who are immune or people who are young, who have very small risk, when the vaccines are much more needed in for older people in other places?” So that’s an ethical aspect of it. I think it is very unethical to do so.

The other aspect is that if you force something on people, if you coerce somebody to do something, that can backfire. Public health has to be based on trust. If public health officials want the public to trust them, public health officials also have to trust the public. I’ve been working on vaccines for almost two decades now. One thing that we’ve always tried to do is to maintain good confidence in the vaccines.

For example, measles vaccines are very important, as well as polio vaccines. There is a small group of people who are very vocal, who don’t like vaccines, but they haven’t really been able to put any dent in the confidence in vaccines. It’s very high in the U.S. So we’ve been very successful in maintaining that confidence.

But right now with these vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports, this coercive thing is turning a lot of people away from vaccines, and not trusting them for very understandable reasons. “Why do you have to force somebody to take the vaccine, if it’s so beneficial to you?” That’s one rationale.

Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports—vaccine fanatics, I would call them—to me they have done much more damage during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades. I would even say that these vaccine fanatics, they are the biggest anti-vaxxers that we have right now. They’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else.

Even if they manage to coerce somebody to get the COVID vaccines, because of people saying, “Okay, I have to take it because I need to go to a university or I have to, because I want that job, or I want to go to restaurants,” even if they manage to get those people to take the COVID vaccine, it will turn them off from public health. It will make them distrust public health and turn them off from other vaccines that are not mandatory.

So it has ripple effects in other aspects of public health that are very unfortunate. I’m a native of Sweden. so I know a little bit about Sweden. Sweden has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, and the highest confidence in vaccines in the world.

But there’s absolutely no mandate. It just doesn’t do it that way. It’s completely voluntary. If you want to have high confidence in vaccines, it has to be voluntary. There shouldn’t be any mandates.

Ohhh SNAP!!! These Are NPR People Breaking With The Official Public Health Narrative!

peoplespharmacy |  What Does the Delta COVID Variant Mean for You?

First, let me be absolutely clear. I believe the vaccines help prevent serious illness, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19. And I am not just implying that a few people are protected. The data that I have reviewed suggest that the vaccines are still around 90% effective in preventing bad things from happening even if people catch COVID.

That’s the very good news. Here’s the very bad news. I suspect that a lot of vaccinated people are behaving as if they are fully protected against the coronavirus. They have given up their masks and are shopping in grocery stores, big box discount emporiums and hardware and garden retailers, to name just a few locales. They are getting their hair cut, going to banks and bars and trying to get back to a normal existence.

I suspect that a great many of these folks are going to catch the Delta COVID variant. They might not get very sick. They might not end up in the hospital. They probably won’t die. But they will catch COVID. They will spread COVID. And they could end up with Long COVID!

Why Long COVID Matters:

You have heard of “long haulers.” These are people who recover from COVID-19. Some had mild symptoms. Others were asymptomatic. Some were pretty darn sick. What they all have in common is continuing symptoms. And those symptoms can be life changing!

We now know that people who were fully vaccinated and caught COVID anyway can have persistent symptoms after they recover (New England Journal of Medicine, July 28, 2021). No one yet knows how many vaccinated people who catch COVID-19 will go on to develop long COVID (aka post COVID syndrome [PCS], Post-acute sequelae of SARS-COV-2 [PASC], chronic COVID, etc.). It could be a small number or it could go as high as 30% to 40%. That is the estimate of how many people develop this condition if they catch the virus without being vaccinated.

How Bad Is Long COVID?

Bad! Symptoms can include unrelenting fatigue, breathing difficulties and/or shortness of breath, cough, chest pain, muscle aches and joint pain, brain fog, insomnia, head pain, loss of taste or smell, dizziness upon standing, rapid heart rate, etc. You can read more about other symptoms and the prognosis at this link. 

If you want to learn what it’s like to have this condition, here is a link to our podcast with two health professionals who themselves have experienced Long COVID. 

The Bottom Line:

If you have been vaccinated, you are not guaranteed protection against the Delta COVID variant! You probably won’t get terribly ill and you probably won’t die if you get sick, but if you develop long COVID you will be sorry. That is why you need to be careful. I do not like wearing a tight-fitting N95 mask when I am out and about, but I do!

 

More And More Mainstream Scientific Authorities Abandoning The Official Pandemic Narrative..,

NYMag |  “The message that breakthrough cases are exceedingly rare and that you don’t have to worry about them if you’re vaccinated — that this is only an epidemic of the unvaccinated — that message is falling flat,” Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina told me in the long interview that follows below. “If this was still Alpha, sure. But with Delta, plenty of people are getting sick. Plenty of transmission is going on. And my personal opinion is that the whole notion of herd immunity from two vaccine shots is flying out the window very quickly with this new variant.”

“We’re seeing a lot more spread in vaccinated people,” agreed Scripps’s Eric Topol, who estimated that the vaccines’ efficacy against symptomatic transmission, which he estimated to be 90 percent or above for the wild-type strain and all previous variants, had fallen to about 60 percent for Delta. “That’s a big drop.” Later, he suggested it might have fallen to 50 percent, and that new data about to be published in the U.S. would suggest an even lower rate. On Wednesday, a large pre-print study published by the Mayo clinic suggested the efficacy against infection had fallen as far as 42 percent.

“The breakthrough problem is much more concerning than what our public officials have transmitted,” Topol continued. “We have no good tracking. But every indicator I have suggests that there’s a lot more under the radar than is being told to the public so far, which is unfortunate.” The result, he said, was a widening gap between the messaging from public-health authorities and the meaning of the data emerging in real time. “I think the problem we have is people — whether it’s the CDC or the people that are doing the briefings — their big concern is, they just want to get vaccinations up. And they don’t want to punch any holes in the story about vaccines. But we can handle the truth. And that’s what we should be getting.”

The central distortion reflected in the Kaiser report — and echoed by communicators elsewhere, including in the Times — is the result of a basic error of comparison, one that should have been obvious to anyone familiar with the shape of the pandemic. Almost all of these calculations about the share of breakthrough cases have been made using year-to-date 2021 data, which include several months before mass vaccination (when by definition vanishingly few breakthrough cases could have occurred) during which time the vast majority of the year’s total cases and deaths took place (during the winter surge).This is a corollary to the reassuring principle you might’ve heard, over the last few weeks, that as vaccination levels grow we would expect the percentage of vaccinated cases will, too — the implication being that we shouldn’t worry too much over panicked headlines about the relative share of vaccinated cases in a state or ICU but instead focus on the absolute number of those cases in making a judgment about vaccine protection across a population. This is true. But it also means that when vaccination levels were very low, there were inevitably very few breakthrough cases, too. That means that to calculate a prevalence ratio for cases or deaths using the full year’s data requires you to effectively divide a numerator of four months of data by a denominator of seven months of data. And because those first few brutal months of the year were exceptional ones that do not reflect anything like the present state of vaccination or the disease, they throw off the ratios even further. Two-thirds of 2021 cases and 80 percent of deaths came before April 1, when only 15 percent of the country was fully vaccinated, which means calculating year-to-date ratios means possibly underestimating the prevalence of breakthrough cases by a factor of three and breakthrough deaths by a factor of five. And if the ratios are calculated using data sets that end before the Delta surge, as many have been, that adds an additional distortion, since both breakthrough cases and severe illness among the vaccinated appear to be significantly more common with this variant than with previous ones.

PhD's Comprise The Most Strongly mRNA Neo-Vaccinoid Resistant Demographic

unherd |  There has been much debate over how to get the unvaccinated to get their jabs — shame them, bribe them persuade them, or treat them as victims of mis- and disinformation campaigns — but who, exactly, are these people?

Most of the coverage would have you believe that the surge in cases is primarily down to less educated, ‘brainwashed’ Trump supporters who don’t want to take the vaccine. This may be partially true: the areas in which the delta variant is surging coincide with the sections of red America in which vaccination rates are lowest.

But according to a new paper by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, this does not paint the full picture. The researchers analysed more than 5 million survey responses by a range of different demographic details, and classed those people who would “probably” or “definitely” not choose to get vaccinated as “vaccine hesitant.”

In some respects the findings are as predicted — for example the paper finds that there is a strong correlation between counties with higher Trump support in the 2020 presidential election and higher hesitancy in the period January 2021 — May 2021. 

But more surprising is the breakdown in vaccine hesitancy by level of education. It finds that the association between hesitancy and education level follows a U-shaped curve with the highest hesitancy among those least and most educated. People with a master’s degree had the least hesitancy, and the highest hesitancy was among those holding a Ph.D. 

What’s more, the paper found that in the first five months of 2021, the largest decrease in hesitancy was among the least educated — those with a high school education or less. Meanwhile, hesitancy held constant in the most educated group; by May, those with Ph.Ds were the most hesitant group. 

So not only are the most educated people most sceptical of taking the Covid vaccine, they are also the least likely the change their minds about it…

Why Don't Data and Statistics Bear Out The Benefits Of Lockdowns?

 covidchartsquiz |  Welcome!

Welcome to the COVID Charts Quiz!

In 2020 people were told that business closures, stay-at-home orders, lockdowns, and mask mandates were necessary to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

Some people expected that places where these measures were absent or implemented half-heartedly would have drastically worse results.

With more than a year of these measures behind us, it's time to evaluate the results.

Preliminary academic studies have already been published, and they deserve our attention. This quiz is intended for the layman, because if these radical measures were truly justified the results should be clear and unambiguous in the data.

So let's take a look.

Covidstates Is An NSF Funded Multi-Institutional Network Propaganda Program

covidstates | Researchers from the COVID States Project developed an interactive dashboard to explore public behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic, support for restrictive measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus, and approval for state governors’ and the president’s handling of the pandemic.

The dashboard presents data from a series of large-scale monthly surveys with approximately 20,000-25,000 participants each. 

 

Users can engage with state and national data in the following ways:

 

Health Behaviors: This tab presents public health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has three separate panels. The first shows core activities such as going to work, church, or the gym. The second shows whether respondents were in close proximity with people living outside their household. Finally, the third panel presents data on public adherence to health recommendations aimed at curtailing the spread of the pandemic. These recommendations include mask wearing, hand washing, avoiding contact with other people, and staying away from crowds and public spaces. Users can select their state of interest and the three panels will automatically update to reflect the selected state. 

Restrictive Measures: Restrictive Measures: The second tab presents data on public support for federal, state and local governments to implement restrictive measures meant to curtail the spread of the virus, such as limiting restaurants to carry-out service only or requiring businesses to close.

Executive Approval: This tab tracks public approval of state governors and the president. A vertical line indicates the transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration on January 20, 2021. Prior to that point, presidential approval numbers refer to Donald Trump, while subsequent data points refer to Joe Biden. Users can select the state and the official (Governor/President) they would like to view.

Maps: This tab generates state-level choropleth maps for the data presented in the dashboard. The  tab contains two subpanels: one for health behavior and another for  restrictive measure support. Within each panel, users should also specify  the month that they are interested in viewing. Below these maps, users will find bar charts comparing the data from each state and ranking states in the context of the behavior or measure of interest. 

All graphics in this app can be downloaded in a PDF or PNG format using the “Download” buttons in the respective tab. Users who are interested in downloading the underlying data can find it in a CSV format at the bottom of the Overview tab.

Team "Live My Life In Peace" vs Team "Can't Mind My Own Business"

consentfactory  |  People can tell themselves that they didn’t see where things have been heading for the last 17 months, but they did. They saw all the signs along the way. The signs were all written in big, bold letters, some of them in scary-looking Germanic script. They read …

“THIS IS THE ROAD TO TOTALITARIANISM.”

I’m not going to show you all those signs out again. People like me have been pointing them out, and reading them out loud, for 17 months now. Anyone who knows anything about the history of totalitarianism, how it incrementally transforms society into a monstrous mirror image of itself, has known since the beginning what the “New Normal” is, and we have been shouting from the rooftops about it.

We have watched as the New Normal transformed our societies into paranoid, pathologized, authoritarian dystopias where people now have to show their “papers” to see a movie or get a cup of coffee and publicly display their ideological conformity to enter a supermarket and buy their groceries.

We have watched as the New Normal transformed the majority of the masses into hate-drunk, hysterical mobs that are openly persecuting “the Unvaccinated,” the official “Untermenschen” of the New Normal ideology.

We have watched as the New Normal has done precisely what every totalitarian movement in history has done before it, right by the numbers. We pointed all this out, each step of the way. I’m not going to reiterate all that again.

I am, however, going to document where we are at the moment, and how we got here … for the record, so that the people who will tell you later that they “had no clue where the trains were going” will understand why we no longer trust them, and why we regard them as cowards and collaborators, or worse.

Yes, that’s harsh, but this is not a game. It isn’t a difference of opinion. The global-capitalist ruling establishment is implementing a new, more openly totalitarian structure of society and method of rule. They are revoking our constitutional and human rights, transferring power out of sovereign governments and democratic institutions into unaccountable global entities that have no allegiance to any nation or its people.

That is what is happening … right now. It isn’t a TV show. It’s actually happening.

The time for people to “wake up” is over. At this point, you either join the fight to preserve what is left of those rights, and that sovereignty, or you surrender to the “New Normal,” to global-capitalist totalitarianism. I couldn’t care less what you believe about the virus, or its mutant variants, or the experimental “vaccines.” This isn’t an abstract argument over “the science.” It is a fight … a political, ideological fight. On one side is democracy, on the other is totalitarianism. Pick a fucking side, and live with it.

Anyway, here’s where we are at the moment, and how we got here, just the broad strokes.