- NATO – Strategic Asset Or Liability?
NATO – Strategic Asset Or Liability?
Is the territorial integrity of Ukraine a cause worth America’s fighting a war with Russia?
No, it is not. And this is why President Joe Biden has declared that the U.S. will not become militarily involved should Russia invade Ukraine.
Biden is saying that, no matter our sentiments, our vital interests dictate staying out of a Russia-Ukraine war.
But why then does Secretary of State Antony Blinken continue to insist there is an “open door” for Ukraine to NATO membership — when that would require us to do what U.S. vital interests dictate we not do: fight a war with Russia for Ukraine?
NATO’s “open door policy” is based on Article 10, which declares that NATO members, “may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State … to accede to this Treaty.”
Moreover, membership is open to “any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.”
Note that NATO admission requires “unanimous” consent of all 30 present members.
Blinken has often stated this as U.S. policy:
“From our perspective, NATO’s door is open and remains open, and that is our commitment.”
What Blinken is saying is this:
While America will not fight for Ukraine today, America remains open to Ukraine’s accession to NATO, in which event we would have to fight for Ukraine tomorrow, were it attacked by Russia.
What the U.S. needs to do is to say with clarity that while Ukraine is free to apply to NATO, NATO is free to veto that application, and the enlargement of NATO beyond its present eastern frontiers is over, done.
In this crisis, we need to recall how and why NATO was created.
In 1949, the year China fell to Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin exploded an atom bomb, we formed NATO as a defensive alliance to prevent a Russian drive west, from the Elbe to the Rhine to the Channel.
Of the original 12 members of NATO, the U.S. and Canada were on the western side of the Atlantic. Iceland and the U.K. were islands in the Atlantic. France and Portugal were on the Atlantic’s eastern shore.
Denmark, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg were astride the avenue of attack the Red Army would have to take to reach the Channel.
Norway was the lone original NATO nation that shared a border with the USSR itself. Italy was the 12th member.
Clearly, this was a defensive alliance to prevent a Soviet invasion of Western Europe such as Hitler had executed in the spring of 1940, when Nazi Germany overran Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France, and threw the British off the continent at Dunkirk.
Nations that joined NATO during the Cold War were Greece and Turkey in 1952, Germany in 1955, and Spain in 1982.
But, with the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the overthrow of Soviet Communism, and the breakup of the USSR into 15 nations by 1991, NATO, its goal — the defense of Central and Western Europe — achieved, its job done, did not go out of business.
Instead, NATO added 14 new members and moved almost 1,000 miles east, into Russia’s front yard and then onto Russia’s front porch.
The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined in 1999. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia became NATO nations in 2004. Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020.
Understandably, Russian President Vladimir Putin asked himself: To what end, and for what beneficent purpose, was this doubling in size of an alliance that was formed to contain us, and, if necessary, fight a war against Mother Russia?
Alliances, which involve war guarantees, commitments to fight in defense of the allied nations, invariably carry costs and risks as well as rewards and benefits in terms of strengthened security.
But when we brought Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia into NATO, what benefits in added strength did we receive to justify the provocation this would be to Russia, and the risk it might entail if Moscow objected and, one fine day, walked back into these Baltic states?
If we will not fight for the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine, the second largest nation in Europe with a population of over 40 million people, why would we go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia over Estonia, a tiny and almost indefensible nation with a population of 1.3 million?
Besides Ukraine, two nations have been considering membership in NATO: Finland and Georgia. Accession of either would put NATO on yet another border of Russia, with the usual U.S. bases and forces.
While this would enrage Russia, how would it make us stronger?
Perhaps, instead of adding new nations on whose behalf we will go to war with a great power like Russia, we consider reducing the roster of NATO and restricting the number of nations for whom we must fight to those nations that are vital to our security and bring added strength to the alliance.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 23:40 - US Grocery Shoppers Have Their Eyes On The Price
US Grocery Shoppers Have Their Eyes On The Price
Norwegian online grocer Oda has reportedly seen a drop in sales of carbon-intensive products after introducing sustainability scores to its receipts. As Statista’s Felix Richter reports, each product is given a rating based on its carbon footprint, aiming to raise awareness among customers, who are responding well to the initiative, according Oda’s sustainability director Louise Fuchs.
“Our customers told us that they find it close to impossible to know what is climate-friendly. We thought it was an important challenge to solve so we started looking for easy ways to communicate emissions,” she said.
Would a similar model be an option for the U.S. as well? According to findings from Statista’s Global Consumer Survey, it seems unlikely.
A December 2021 survey among grocery shoppers found that U.S. consumers have their eyes on the price first, revealing that sustainability criteria (e.g. buying seasonal, regional, fairtrade) play a smaller role in the purchase decision.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Raising awareness of products’ different carbon footprints could certainly be a first step towards creating more conscious shoppers, but for the millions of families just trying to make ends meet, price will always trump conscience.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 23:20 - George Soros Outlines Dangers Posed By CCP Authoritarian Rule In 2022
George Soros Outlines Dangers Posed By CCP Authoritarian Rule In 2022
Authored by Michael Washburn via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The year 2022 will be a turning point where much of the world will pivot sharply in the direction of either authoritarianism and repression or openness, and events in China will play a decisive role, said billionaire financier George Soros at a virtual event hosted by the Hoover Institution think tank on Jan. 31.
“2022 will be a critical year in the history of the world. In a few days, China, the most powerful authoritarian state, will be hosting the Winter Olympics, and like Germany in 1936, it will attempt to use the spectacle to score a propaganda victory for its system of state controls,” Soros, 91, said.
George Soros, founder and chairman of the Open Society Foundations, arrives for a meeting in Brussels, Belgium, on April 27, 2017. (Olivier Hoslet/AFP/Getty Images) Along other political contests such as the French elections and the Hungarian elections in April, and the U.S. mid-term elections in November, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) 20th Party Congress—an all-important twice-a-decade Party meeting —in October makes 2022 a year with few parallels in history, Soros said.
But he made a clear distinction between the CCP congress and elections in open societies with democratic legitimacy. Unlike the elections in France, Hungary, or the United States, the outcome of the CCP congress is seen as a fait accompli. Xi Jinping is widely expected to gain a third term as CCP leader through heavy-handed, coercive means.
The stakes could not be higher as tensions between the CCP and Taiwan veer ever more in the direction of a military showdown. The reason this geopolitical crisis is different from another one dominating the headlines at the moment—Vladimir Putin’s designs on Ukraine—has partly to do with President Joe Biden’s reaction to these respective crises, Soros emphasized.
“Biden has generally pursued the right policies. He has told Putin that Russia will pay a heavy price for invading Ukraine, but that the U.S. will not go to war,” Soros said.
China’s leader Xi Jinping gives a speech during the 8th Ministerial Meeting of China-Arab States Cooperation Forum at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on July, 10, 2018. China will provide Arab states with 20 billion USD in loans for economic development, as Beijing seeks to build its influence in the Middle East and Africa. (Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images) By contrast, Biden has sent a strong message to Xi that the use of military force against Taiwan will come up against an alliance of pro-Taiwan nations including the United States, the UK, Australia, India, and Japan, along potentially with a number of not-yet fully committed nations such as South Korea and the Philippines, Soros said. But the formidable array of defenders does not lessen the gravity of the crisis given Xi’s stated willingness to assert China’s claims over Taiwan by force if necessary, Soros warned.
“He is devoting enormous resources to armaments. He surprised the world by introducing a hypersonic missile. The U.S. has nothing comparable,” Soros said.
Xi’s aggressiveness on the global stage would be quite enough by itself to make 2022 a year unlike any other. Complementing this foreign policy stance is a dictatorial approach at home that has progressively undone the tentative market reforms ushered in by earlier CCP leaders, Soros noted. Economic reforms initiated by then-leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s invited foreigners to invest in China and fostered economic growth that spilled over, for a brief time, into the reign of the current leader, he added.
In contrast to his predecessor, Xi Jinping has brought companies firmly under state control, come down heavily in favor of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) over private companies, and generally pursued what Soros called “total control.”
“This has had disastrous consequences. In contrast to Deng, Xi Jinping is a true believer in communism. Marx and Lenin are his idols,” Soros stated.
Chinese citizens have gotten the worst of both worlds under Xi’s rule, as authoritarianism has stifled many enterprises even while troubles in the real estate sector have swelled to dangerous levels based on what Soros called an unsustainable model. It is a system based excessively on credit, where people are now forced to start paying for apartments not yet even built, and subcontractors who have not been paid are simply ceasing to work.
Matt Pottinger, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and deputy national security advisor during the Trump administration, said he agreed with Soros that Xi wants total control and is unlikely to concede power peacefully. “I think he will do everything he can to stay in power for life,” Pottinger said.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 23:00 - Whoopi Goldberg Suspended From 'The View' After Doubling Down On Holocaust Comments
Whoopi Goldberg Suspended From ‘The View’ After Doubling Down On Holocaust Comments
Liberal ‘The View’ commentator Whoopi Goldberg (born Caryn Elaine Johnson) has been suspended for two weeks after claiming twice that the Holocaust was “not about race.”
On Tuesday evening, ABC President Kim Godwin called Goldberg’s comments “wrong and hurtful,” and that the suspension would be “effective immediately,” according to Variety.
“While Whoopi has apologized, I’ve asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments. The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family and communities,” the statement continues.
Goldberg’s comments on “The View” reached the highest level of decision makers at Disney, Variety can confirm. According to sources, Peter Rice, the chairman of Disney General Entertainment Content, was consulted on the public fallout for Goldberg.
Goldberg’s remarks emerged during a conversation on Monday’s broadcast of “The View,” in which the co-hosts discussed a Tennessee school board’s ban of “Maus,” a nonfiction graphic novel about cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s father’s experience surviving the Holocaust. -Variety
Goldberg apologized in a Monday evening statement, saying “On Today’s show, I said the Holocaust ‘is not about race, but about man’s inhumanity to man.’ I should have said it is about both.”
“As Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League shared, ‘The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people—who they deemed to be an inferior race.’ I stand corrected.”
Except then she went on Stephen Colbert and effectively doubled down.
#BREAKING: Whoopi Goldberg Appears To Double Down On Her Comments That The Holocaust “Wasn’t About Race” Following Attempted Apology On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. She Later Apologized Again On This Morning’s Episode Of The View. #BreakingNews pic.twitter.com/JBzA5NHH0j
— BREAKING NEWS (@Breaking_4_News) February 1, 2022
Would you like to know more?
The Epoch Times‘ Bill Pan expounds:
Goldberg first argued that the Holocaust went beyond race during a discussion on “The View” about a Tennessee school district’s decision to pull from its 8th-grade curriculum the graphic memoir “Maus,” which depicts author Art Spiegelman learning his Polish Jew parents’ experiences in the Auschwitz death camp, and famously portrays the Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs.
Although the removal has been widely reported as a permanent ban on the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, members of the McMinn County School Board explicitly said during the board meeting (pdf) that they wanted to find a better book to teach the Holocaust, and that they would reinstate Maus to the required reading list for 8th graders if they don’t find a good alternative.
Despite the fact that neither Maus nor any other Holocaust book has been actually banned at McMinn County Schools, the discussion turned to an alleged conservative-led effort to prevent certain parts of history about race and racism from being taught in classrooms.
“If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it because the Holocaust isn’t about race,” Goldberg asserted, to which co-host Ana Navarro disagreed, saying that the Holocaust was about “white supremacy” and “going after Jews and Gypsies.”
“But these are two groups of white people,” Goldberg told Navarro. “You’re missing the point. The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white because black, white, Jews, Italians, everybody eats each other.”
Goldberg’s comments drew immediate backlash, including from Anti-Defamation League CEO Greenblatt, whom Goldberg addressed in her apology.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazi regime did define Jews as a “race.” Embracing a social Darwinist “survival of the fittest” view on human society, the Nazis attributed a wide variety of negative stereotypes about Jews to an unchanging, biologically determined heritage that supposedly drove the “Jewish race” to struggle to survive by expansion at the expense of other races.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 22:46 - Meatflation To Stick Around As US Cattle Herds Drop Amid Severe Drought
Meatflation To Stick Around As US Cattle Herds Drop Amid Severe Drought
A severe drought grips the Western U.S. has caused an unexpected plunge in the cattle herd, indicating ‘meatflation’ will be sticking around this year as consumers pay near record-high beef prices.
U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) biannual cattle inventory report for the second half of 2021 shows that the U.S. herd fell 2% a year ago. Bloomberg’s survey estimated a 1% decline.
“Plains squeezed supplies of hay and feed for cattle, prompting some ranchers to sell to slaughterhouses animals usually held for breeding. Now, deepening drought in the southern part of the Plains — where most cattle in the U.S. are raised — could force another round of herd reductions later this year,” Bloomberg said.
Derrell Peel, an extension livestock marketing specialist at Oklahoma State University, warned a “drought is looming large.”
“The cycle we are in right now is a liquidation phase,” Peel said. He means that worsening drought conditions will likely lead to more herd reductions.
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the Western U.S. is plagued with a severe drought, reminiscent of the 1930s Dust Bowl era. The unrelenting drought will likely worsen in the months ahead.
Declining herd count is a significant concern for beef packers who face tighter markets that could send meat prices even higher. Consumers are already paying near-record high prices and could result in another price shock ahead of summer.
Meanwhile, the misguided Biden administration is approaching the meat crisis entirely wrong, blaming greedy meat processors for meatflation. But the fact is, there’s a lot more to the story than the White House admits. From declining herds, labor shortages, soaring shipping costs, snarled supply chains, and rising commodity costs, many of these inputs are increasing costs than greedy meat processors.
As shown below, Americans pay some of the highest costs ever for ground beef at the supermarket. Still, under President Biden’s plan to tame meatflation, prices have yet to come down.
Worst comes to worst, the Biden administration could just tell Americans who can no longer afford beef just to eat protein-packed bugs. Ultimately, that’s what the elites want us peasants to eat.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 22:41 - AOC Takes Break From Twitter After Mean Tweets Trigger Anxiety
AOC Takes Break From Twitter After Mean Tweets Trigger Anxiety
Say it ain’t so!
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) announced on Monday that she’s taking a break from Twitter due to the amount of “negativity” on the platform.
When asked on Monday night when she’ll come back, the 32-year-old Rep. responded via Instagram – saying she had turned off all her devices and wasn’t active on social media while recovering from Covid-19 earlier this month.
“…I found that when I went to open Twitter up again, it just like wasn’t making me feel. So I mean literally I would go to open the app and almost felt like anxious,” she said, adding “People kinda fight and gossip and all sort of stuff so much. And there is a lot of negativity on there.”
Screenshot via the Independent That said, AOC won’t be gone forever!
“But I’ll be back, don’t worry. Just feel like a break,” she told her nearly 9 million followers.
The Democrat announced earlier on 16 January that she had contracted Covid-19 has experienced debilitating symptoms even given the added protection provided by her vaccine.
“Welp, so it happened. Got COVID, probably omicron. As of today I am thankfully recovered and wrapping up quarantine, but COVID was no joke,” she had written.
Since then her response on her own Twitter account has been sparse and was last seen retweeting her interview with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan on 27 January. -Independent
Hopefully we won’t have to wait long for more entertainment, AOC style. In December, AOC interpreted criticism of hypocritical photos of her maskless in Miami as Republicans expressing their ‘sexual frustrations.’
If Republicans are mad they can’t date me they can just say that instead of projecting their sexual frustrations onto my boyfriend’s feet.
Ya creepy weirdos https://t.co/Z7bZCgXpWJ
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 31, 2021
Hilarious!
Still thinking about how @AOC’s response to being a hypocrite was, “Ooh I bet he wants to sex me up.” https://t.co/hmqz1CEv4p
— Raheem J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) December 31, 2021
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Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 22:21 - Natural Immunity Lasts For At Least 18 Months: Study
Natural Immunity Lasts For At Least 18 Months: Study
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The protection people experience after recovering from COVID-19, known widely as natural immunity, lasts for at least 18 months, according to a recently published study.
A 3D print of a spike protein of SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19—in front of a 3D print of a SARS-CoV-2 virus particle. (Courtesy of NIAID/RML) Researchers in Italy analyzed the level of antibodies in 36 patients who were documented as contracting COVID-19 in March 2020. About half of the patients went on to get COVID-19 vaccines, but the rest remained unvaccinated. Samples from all but two were tested at timed intervals, ending in September 2021, using assays that have received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“At 18 months, 97% participants tested positive for anti-NCP, hinting towards the persistence of infection-induced immunity even for the vaccinated individuals,” researchers wrote in the preprint paper, which was published on the medrxiv website.
NCP stands for nucleocapsid, a part of SARS-CoV-2. Antibodies are believed to protect people against against infection from the virus.
“Antibodies against nucleocapsid will be present only in recovered individuals and not vaccinated,” Dr. Asiya Zaidi, a research fellow at the Associazione Naso Sano and one of the authors, told The Epoch Times in an email.
That means even the people who got vaccinated received protection from natural immunity.
Researchers did find that vaccination with Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines gave those with prior infection a significant boost, but that the increase in protection waned relatively quickly.
“Our study findings demonstrate that while double dose vaccination boosted the IgG titers in recovered individuals 161 times, this “boost” was relatively short-lived. The unvaccinated recovered individuals, in contrast, continued to show a steady decline but detectable antibody levels. We do believe that further studies are required to re-evaluate the timing and dose regimen of vaccines for an adequate immune response in recovered individuals,” Zaidi said.
Limitations of the longitudinal observational study include the small number of patients.
The researchers, who fund their own research, said the limited sample size was due to a lack of funding because repeated serology tests for each patient for 18 months was expensive and because following up with all the patients and reminding them of the testing was difficult.
Its strengths include the remarkable length of time.
“This is the longest observation (March 2020-September 2021) for the presence of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in recovered individuals along with the impact of 2 dose-BNT162b2 vaccination on the titers,” the researchers wrote.
SARS-CoV-2, also known as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, causes COVID-19. BNT162b2 is the trade name for the Pfizer jab.
Previous studies have demonstrated the powerful effect of natural immunity against the virus, including a study published in Nature in mid-January that found that the response of memory B cells, a marker of protection against severe COVID-19, evolved in the months following infection “in a manner that is consistent with antigen persistence.”
Other markers of protection were observed in studies in 2021 to last at least over 7 months, at least 8 months, at least 10 months, at least 11 months, at least 13 months, and at least 14 months. The studies were completed before the emergence of the Omicron virus variant, which early data indicate is better at evading both natural immunity and vaccine-derived protection.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 22:20 - Buzzfeed Freezes Hiring As Investors Flee Following Rocky Market Debut
Buzzfeed Freezes Hiring As Investors Flee Following Rocky Market Debut
After going on an ill-advised shopping spree that saw it gobble up the Huffington Post and Complex, it appears Buzzfeed is being forced to tighten the belt, the latest signal that the company’s last-ditch effort to spend its way to profitability is backfiring.
As Axios reported Tuesday, the company is under serious financial pressure after high levels of redemptions by investors. The firm’s journalists greeted Buzzfeed’s post-SPAC debut with a walkout, and looking back, it’s too bad the company doesn’t have any business reporters to lecture management on the pitfalls of SPAC financing – though its rivals did try to warn them.
Investor redemptions have occurred concurrently with a massive and broad-based drawdown in shares of (mostly unprofitable) companies that went public via the SPAC route.
The drawdowns are particularly troubling for Buzzfeed because the share price is its stock in trade, and without a robust valuation, Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti’s planned-for buying binge can’t continue.
So, if Buzzfeed doesn’t find a way to turn things around today, not tomorrow, and – more importantly – convince investors to buy in, it’s in real trouble. For now, the result is cutbacks: the company has reportedly frozen hiring for all but “essential” positions. And it’s pretty hard to grow if you can’t hire anybody.
Hilariously, Peretti tried to blame the company’s losses as the result of his acquisition-focused strategy, and blamed “integration”-related troubles. Bizarrely, he also found a way to blame “supply chain issues”. Apparently, “commerce” is now an important part of Buzzfeed’s business.
What’s worse is that some of Buzzfeed’s investors were apparently taken aback by the news. One told an Axios reporter that it “[didn’t] track with anything else we have been told.”
Shares of the company have barely budged off their all-time post-debut low below $4 a share.
Turns out, Buzzfeed employees have plenty to complain about. Many are stuck with shares they currently can’t sell, and some who joined before it became a unicorn are even underwater on their investments in the firm, according to Axios. Buzzfeed has yet to release quarterly earnings, or even set a date for release of its first round of financials as a public company.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 22:00 - 150 Meat Trucks Stranded At US-Canada Border As Protests Continue
150 Meat Trucks Stranded At US-Canada Border As Protests Continue
The U.S. is Canada’s largest export buyer for beef and Canada’s largest importer supplier. Any disruption to the meat trade between both countries would have severe consequences for meat processors in Canada and consumers in the US.
Days after the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers protesting vaccine mandates in Ottawa, the country’s capital, protests are spreading to US-Canadian border crossings and furthering logistical headaches.
Bloomberg reports 150 trucks packed with beef, bound for the US, are stuck in a traffic jam at the border at Coutts, Alberta, the Canadian Meat Council said. Since the weekend, a convoy of truckers has slowed processing times between Alberta and Montana.
We reported as of Monday, more than 100 truckers blocked the US-Canadian border between Alberta and Montana.
BREAKING: Massive convoy of truckers have blockaded the US-Canada border crossing in Alberta pic.twitter.com/A4KHrzETbv
— Truckistan Amb. Poso 🏁 (@JackPosobiec) January 31, 2022
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On Sunday, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney called for an end to the blockade, stating: “Canadians have a democratic right to engage in lawful protests. I urge those involved in this truck convoy protest to do so as safely as possible, and not to create road hazards that could lead to accidents or unsafe conditions for other drivers.”
“It is not yet clear what the provincial or federal government is doing to facilitate a resolution. The longer this takes, it will cause more supply chain issues and this will affect everyone from producer to consumer,” Marie-France MacKinnon, a spokesperson for the council, said.
What sparked convoys across border crossings and the capital is a new measure imposed by the Canadian government on Jan. 15 requiring unvaccinated cross-border truckers to quarantine upon returning home, making it virtually impossible for them to work.
Trucker convoys are so disruptive to trade between the US-Canada that local officials are expected to take action to resolve the
protestrevolt.Every truck taken out of the supply chain is one less truck that can haul goods. This comes as virus-related worker absenteeism and labor shortages have prolonged supply chain woes. Snarling chains, even more, has been an answer by the people to band together against medical tyranny by the government. There’s just one problem, blocking cross-border trade or at least slowing it down will further supply chain issues and could spark meat shortages in the US.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 21:55 - 'Someone Opened The Doors From The Inside,' Jan. 6 Defense Attorney Says
‘Someone Opened The Doors From The Inside,’ Jan. 6 Defense Attorney Says
Authored by Joseph M. Hanneman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Kelly Meggs and other members of the Oath Keepers couldn’t have done one of the major things of which they’re accused by federal prosecutors: forcing their way into the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 6, 2021, through the famous Columbus Doors, a defense attorney says.
The two sets of historic doors that lead into the Rotunda were opened by someone on the inside and not his client, according to defense attorney Jonathon Moseley.
Protesters begin streaming into the U.S. Capitol through the historic Columbus Doors on Jan. 6, 2021. (Video Still/U.S. Department of Justice) Department of Justice video widely circulated on Twitter since last week shows a man trying to open the inner doors by leaning against them, before turning around as if listening to someone, then returning to the entrance and opening the left door for protesters.
“The outer doors cast from solid bronze would require a bazooka, an artillery shell, or C4 military-grade explosives to breach,” Moseley wrote in a letter to federal prosecutors. “That of course did not happen. You would sooner break into a bank vault than to break the bronze outer Columbus Doors.”
The 20,000-pound Columbus Doors that lead into the Rotunda on the east side of the U.S. Capitol are secured by magnetic locks that can only be opened from the inside by using a security code controlled by Capitol Police, Moseley wrote in an eight-page memo.
‘Impossible and Cannot Be Done’
“Imagine how the prosecution will prove at trial what cannot be proven because it is not true,” Moseley wrote to prosecutors Jeffrey S. Nestler and Kathryn Leigh Rakoczy of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. “Who is going to testify that the defendants entered the Columbus Doors when the U.S. Capitol Police will begrudgingly testify that that is impossible and cannot be done?”
In a superseding indictment on Jan. 12, Meggs and 10 other members of the Oath Keepers were charged with seditious conspiracy, destruction of government property, obstruction of an official proceeding, civil disorder, tampering with documents, and other counts related to the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
The indictment charges that Meggs led a “stack formation” up the Capitol steps and to the entrance at the Columbus Doors. At 2:39 p.m., the doors were breached, and stack one entered the Capitol with the mob, according to the indictment.
Moseley said there’s one big problem with that accusation: It’s impossible to force entry from the outside. Only someone with the security code could release the locks—and only from the inside.
Video evidence submitted in the case shows the glass panes in the inner doors were cracked, but intact, so no one accessed the building through the windows or by reaching for the inside door handles, he said.
“Therefore, nobody opened the Rotunda doors from the outside,” Moseley wrote. “Someone opened the doors from the inside.”
Video footage shot by multimedia journalist Michael Nigro shows the outer bronze doors were partially retracted before a large crowd gathered outside of the entrance. The inner doors were closed, and U.S. Capitol Police were stationed outside. Protesters sprayed police with pepper spray, threw items at them, and hit them with flagpoles.
A short time later, the inner doors were opened and hundreds of protesters streamed into the Rotunda, the video footage shows. A protester in the Rotunda is heard shouting, “Don’t vandalize the property!”
Capitol Tour Confirms Door Security
U.S. sculptor Randolph Rogers designed the solid-bronze doors to depict scenes from the life of explorer Christopher Columbus. The doors were first installed in 1863, moved in 1871 to the central east entrance, and moved to their current location in 1961.
The doors are 17 feet high and weigh 20,000 pounds, according to the Architect of the Capitol. Once opened, the giant doors retract into pockets in the walls via built-in tracks.
Moseley asked federal prosecutors for “any and all specifications, details and operational information about the so-called Columbus Doors.”
He and an assistant took a tour of the Capitol on Jan. 22, along with other attorneys and investigators. The U.S. Capitol Police officers on duty were emphatic that the doors couldn’t be opened from the outside, he said.
“These are facts that in the supposedly largest nationwide investigation in the history of the U.S. since the kidnapping of the Charles Lindbergh baby or the search for Al Capone could easily have been investigated, [checked], and determined before the U.S. Attorney’s Office presented false information to the grand jury,” Moseley wrote.
“For these purposes, I don’t care who opened the Columbus Doors from the inside, or why, or who they worked for. History will reveal all of that. History will care very much. But all I care about is that it wasn’t my client or any of these defendants, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office knows that or should have discovered it upon reasonable investigation.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia didn’t respond to a request for comment on Moseley’s letter by press time.
The superseding indictment states that Meggs and four other Oath Keepers became part of a mob that “aggressively advanced toward the Rotunda Doors, assaulted the law enforcement officers guarding the doors, threw objects and sprayed chemicals toward the officers and the doors and pulled violently on the doors.”
The mob breached the Rotunda entrance at about 2:39 p.m., according to the indictment.
Nigro’s video footage from outside the entrance shows a group of Oath Keepers near the Columbus Doors, which are clearly open at the time the men got near the threshold. By the time they entered the Capitol, dozens if not more than 100 people had flowed into the building, the footage shows.
‘Baseless Prosecution’
Moseley accused prosecutors of crafting a “fabricated case” against the Oath Keepers that’s “false and reprehensible.”
“This baseless prosecution is the greatest threat to the Republic since 1812. This prosecution is not about an attack on our Republic. This prosecution IS the attack on our Republic,” Moseley wrote, “seeking to criminalize political dissent, free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of political association, and the right to petition government for the redress of grievances.”
Moseley criticized federal authorities for “dishonestly trying to deceive the public” for eight months by concealing the fact that six demonstration permits had been issued for the U.S. Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, 2021. Implicit in those permits is the permission for people to have ingress and egress across the grounds to reach each event, he said.
This baseless prosecution is the greatest threat to the Republic since 1812.Moseley proposed a stipulation that both sides in the case agree that none of the demonstrators or the defendants opened the Columbus Doors on Jan. 6, 2021, and that the government strike three paragraphs of the indictment that refer to the defendants entering the Capitol because they’re “untrue and withdrawn.” Prosecutors refused that proposal, he said.
News of the Columbus Doors issue comes as more video footage released from protective court seal shows large groups of Jan. 6, 2021, protesters peacefully streaming into the U.S. Capitol through wide-open doors. Among them was Rabbi Mike Stepakoff, who spent about five minutes inside the Capitol, doing nothing more than looking around and taking photos.
On his way out, Stepakoff stopped to shake hands with a police officer and “told him ‘thank you for his service, we love you, and God bless you,’” according to his attorney, Marina Medvin.
Stepakoff was charged with entering and remaining in a restricted building, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building, violent entry and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building, and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building, all misdemeanors.
Stepakoff pleaded guilty to the parading charge and received 12 months of probation. The other charges were dismissed, Medvin said in a statement. The government sought to punish him with a jail term “for events he did not partake in, for destruction and violence he did not witness, for severity he did not experience, and for an effect he did not cause nor could foresee,” she said.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 21:40 - COVID Testing Company Faked Results, Lied To Patients And Improperly Stored Samples: Lawsuit
COVID Testing Company Faked Results, Lied To Patients And Improperly Stored Samples: Lawsuit
An Illinois-based Covid-19 testing company which operates at least 13 sites in Washington state has been accused of faking, delaying, or failing to provide test results, lying to patients, and improperly storing test samples, according to a lawsuit filed in King County Superior Court by Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, the Seattle Times reports.
A testing site run by the Center for Covid Control, in Cincinnati in January. Liz Dufour / The Enquirer via USA Today Network The defendant is the Center for COVID control, which has expanded to roughly 300 locations across the Untied States – taking advantage of residents when frequent Covid-19 testing was in high demand as a “critical tool in the fight against COVID-19,” the filing reads.
“Center for COVID Control contributed to the spread of COVID-19 when it provided false negative results,” said Ferguson in a statement, adding “These sham testing centers threatened the health and safety of our communities. They must be held accountable.“
The suit also alleges the Center for COVID Control stored tests in garbage bags for more than a week, rather than properly refrigerating them; backdated sample-collection dates so stale samples would still be processed; and instructed its employees to “lie to patients on a daily basis” when Washingtonians asked about delayed results.
Ferguson also named Akbar Syed, Aleya Siyaj and Doctors Clinical Laboratory in the lawsuit.
Syed and Siyaj, who are married, co-founded the testing company and live in Illinois, according to the suit. Doctors Clinical Laboratory is also based in Illinois and tests samples collected in Washington, though it’s not registered with the Washington Secretary of State’s Office, the suit says. -Seattle Times
For the last several weeks, customers across the country have been complaining about delayed or missing test results, causing health authorities in multiple states – including CA and IL, to launch investigations.
According to the Washington AG’s office, the company failed to procure a license to operate in Washington (aside from Yakima), and plans to file for a preliminary injunction to stop them “soon,” the statement reads.
One former Illinois-based employee quit the Center for COVID Control after they said they saw “trash bags of tests piled up and (their) team was instructed to lie to patients on a daily basis.”
As the company fell further behind on processing samples, the statement said, they were “flooded” with calls asking about results — leading to hourslong wait times. Employees were then told to tell patients to expect results in 24 hours, even if there was no information about the particular sample, or that their results were inconclusive, which would require the patient to get another test.
As of Monday, the company had also billed the federal government $124 million for tests for “uninsured” patients, the statement said. -Seattle Times
“The company frequently marked patients as ‘uninsured,’ even if they were insured,” said Ferguson’s office. “Employees were instructed to mark patients as ‘uninsured’ if the patient didn’t provide their insurance information by the time of testing or if their insurance company wasn’t listed on the company’s data entry form.”
Read the rest of the report here.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 21:20 - "Ill-Founded" Lockdowns Had "Little To No Public Health Effect"; Analysis Of 24 Studies Concludes
“Ill-Founded” Lockdowns Had “Little To No Public Health Effect”; Analysis Of 24 Studies Concludes
Authored by Ivan Pentchoukov via The Epoch Times,
Lockdown measures used by governments worldwide to reduce the death toll from the pandemic had little or no impact on COVID-19 mortality, according to three researchers who analyzed 24 studies.
The researchers, led by Steve Hanke, the co-founder of The Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise, screened 18,590 studies to select the 24 papers used for the final analysis.
They concluded that lockdowns in Europe and the United States reduced the mortality from COVID-19 by 0.2 percent on average. Shelter-in-place orders reduced mortality by 2.9 percent on average, they found.
“While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted,” the researchers wrote.
“In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”
The study specifically looked at mandated government measures, including mask mandates and travel bans, rather than voluntary measures.
Of all the lockdown measures analyzed, the closure of non-essential business appeared to have the largest impact, reducing COVID-19 mortality by 10.6 percent on average, the study found. The researchers speculate that this is largely due to the closure of bars.
“Only business closure consistently shows evidence of a negative relationship with COVID-19 mortality, but the variation in the estimated effect is large. Three studies find little to no effect, and three find large effects. Two of the larger effects are related to closing bars and restaurants,” the study states.
The study found that lockdowns and limiting gatherings slightly increased COVID-19 mortality by 0.6 percent and 1.6 percent respectively.
“Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the researchers wrote.
The finding of the meta-analysis is in line with an analysis of 100 COVID-19 studies published in September last year, which concluded “that lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid-19 deaths.”
Meanwhile, the conclusion contrasts with a late 2020 meta-analysis that found that lockdowns successfully reduced COVID-19 mortality. The researchers in the Johns Hopkins study point out that the 2020 analysis used several modeling studies “which we have explicitly excluded.”
While having little to no impact on COVID-19 mortality, lockdowns had a significant effect on people suffering from other ailments.
Lockdowns led to some 40 percent of American adults delaying or avoiding getting urgent medical care in June 2020. In the U.K., lockdown-related delays to lung cancer diagnoses could lead to 2,500 extra deaths, according to an analysis by the UK Lung Cancer Coalition.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 21:00 - Taibbi: The British Medical Journal Story That Exposed Politicized "Fact-Checking"
Taibbi: The British Medical Journal Story That Exposed Politicized “Fact-Checking”
Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,
In February of 2010, the New York Times released a front-page story entitled, “Research Ties Diabetes Drug to Heart Woes.” The lede read:
Hundreds of people taking Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine, needlessly suffer heart attacks and heart failure each month, according to confidential government reports that recommend the drug be removed from the market.
The Times piece quoted an internal F.D.A. report that said the GlaxoSmithKline diabetes drug Avandia, also known as Rosiglitazone, was “linked” to 304 deaths in 2009, adding the conclusion of the two doctors who authored the report: “Rosiglitazone should be removed from the market.” The story was released in advance of a Senate Finance Committee study that produced a series of damning internal documents, including one in which an FDA safety officer expressed concern that Avandia presented such serious cardiovascular risks that “the safety of the study itself cannot be assured, and is not acceptable.”
One of the chief investigators on that study was Paul Thacker, at the time a committee aide under Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley. Multi-year document hauls like the Avandia report were Thacker’s stock in trade. I first met him around then because his committee frequently dealt with financial crisis issues I covered. Thacker, who went on to work at ProPublica and contribute to a number of commercial and academic journals, was trained in a tradition of bipartisan committee reporting that relies heavily on documents and on-the-record testimony, i.e. the indisputable stuff both sides are comfortable backing.
Paul Thacker Thacker has an in-your-face style and a dark sense of humor, and talking to him can feel like being lost in a Bill Hicks routine, but his information is good. Both in his years in the Senate and in his time with ProPublica, his job was publicizing damaging information about the world’s most litigious companies. Certain Washington jobs require a healthy fear of the $1000-an-hour lawyers that every Fortune 500 company has on speed dial, and Thacker has always retained the Beltway investigator’s usefully paranoid approach to publishing.
“I know how to do these things,” he says. “I know how to work with whistleblowers.”
It was more than a little surprising, then, when Thacker’s name appeared in the middle of a bizarre international fact-checking controversy. In an article for one of the world’s oldest academic outlets, the British Medical Journal, Thacker wrote a piece entitled, “Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial.” He did what he’d done countless times, shepherding into print the tale of an apparent whistleblower with an unsettling story. Brook Jackson worked for a Texas firm called Ventavia that conducted a portion of the research trials for Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. This is the same vaccine that Thacker himself, who now lives in Spain and is married to a physician, had taken.
After going through both legal and peer review, but without contacting Ventavia — apparently, they feared an injunction — the BMJ published Thacker’s piece on November 2nd, 2021. The money passage read:
A regional director who was employed at the research organization Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial.
Beginning on November 10th, 2021, the editors began receiving complaints from readers, who said they were having difficulty sharing it. As editors Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbassi later wrote in an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg:
Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about “Missing context … Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share “false information” might have their posts moved lower in Facebook’s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were “partly false.”
Facebook has yet to to queries about this piece. Meanwhile, the site that conducted Facebook’s “fact check,” Lead Stories, ran a piece dated November 10th whose URL used the term “hoax alert” (Lead Stories denies they called the BMJ piece a hoax). Moreover, they deployed a rhetorical device that such “checking” sites now use with regularity, repeatedly correcting assertions Thacker and the British Medical Journal never made. This began with the title: “The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials.”
The British Medical Journal never said Jackson’s story revealed “disqualifying flaws” in the vaccine. Nor did it claim the negative information “calls into question the results of the Pfizer clinical trial.” It also didn’t claim that the story is “serious enough to discredit data from the clinical trials.” The BMJ’s actual language said Jackson’s story could “raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight,” which is true.
The real issue with Thacker’s piece is that it went viral and was retweeted by the wrong people. As Lead Stories noted with marked disapproval, some of those sharers included the likes of Dr. Robert Malone and Robert F. Kennedy. To them, this clearly showed that the article was bad somehow, but the problem was, there was nothing to say the story was untrue.
In a remarkable correspondence with BMJ editors, Lead Stories editor Alan Duke explained that the term “missing context” was invented by Facebook:
To deal with content that could mislead without additional context but which was otherwise true or real… Sometimes Facebook’s messaging about the fact checking labels can sound overly aggressive and scary. If you have an issue with their messaging you should indeed take it up with them as we are unable to change any of it.
“Missing context” has become a term to disparage reporting that is true but inconvenient. As Thacker notes in the Q&A below, “They’re checking narrative, not fact.”
The significance of the British Medical Journal story is that it showed how easily reporting that is true can be made to look untrue or conspiratorial. The growing bureaucracy of “fact-checking” sites that help platforms like Facebook decide what to flag is now taking into account issues like: the political beliefs of your sources, the presence of people of ill repute among your readers, and the tendency of audiences to draw unwanted inferences from the reported facts. All of this can now become part of how authorities do or do not define reporting as factual.
“But that’s not a fact check,” says Thacker. “You just don’t like the story.”
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Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 20:20 - Ford To Invest Up To $20 Billion To Accelerate Shift To Electric Vehicles
Ford To Invest Up To $20 Billion To Accelerate Shift To Electric Vehicles
Ford has announced today it plans to spend as much as $20 billion to accelerate its shift to electric vehicles.
The company’s newest reorganization efforts are being spearheaded by Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley and Doug Field, the former head of Apple’s car project.
Under the plane, Ford will spend $10 billion to $20 billion over the next 5 to 10 years to convert factories from traditional ICE production infrastructure to buildings with EV production capabilities, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
The report said that Farley wants to “challenge Tesla’s dominance in EVs”. Already, investors have rewarded Ford’s initiative, with its stock touching multi-decade highs near $25 per share and a $100 billion market cap earlier this month.
The reorganization is also going to result in a hiring binge, according to the Bloomberg report, which said that the company will sport “a reworked Ford organizational chart, including the hiring of an unspecified number of engineers specializing in disciplines relatively new to the company, such as battery chemistry, artificial intelligence and EV software.”
Ford has also considered spinning off some of its EV business in order to capture some of the valuations that the market is assigning to EV companies. The spin-off would involve lower-volume EVs while the legacy company would continue its focus on mass market EVs.
A Ford spokesman said Tuesday: “We are executing our Ford Plus plan to transform the company and thrive in this new era of electric and connected vehicles. We would not comment on speculation.”
The shift doesn’t necessarily portend a quick exit from ICE vehicles, however. Bloomberg wrote:
Farley sees gasoline-fueled vehicles as a core part of the company for many years to come and still intends to invest enough to keep it competitive with rivals, he said in a seperate
interview last week. One way is to boost the services Ford sells to car owners — a business that could generate $20 billion a year in revenue. That could include selling drivers software to upgrade their car’s performance or enhance dashboard touchscreens. Or it may involve getting more business in the service bays at Ford’s dealers, which see 90% of owners go elsewhere for maintenance after their warranties expire, Farley said.In addition to Apple, Field was also a former executive at Tesla. Farley has overseen Ford tripling its output of its electric Mustang Mach-E and doubling production of its coming F-150 Lightning.
“I really admire, frankly, the difficulties they had and the way they managed those difficulties into the success they had,” Farley has previously said of Tesla. “They are now making more than $10,000 a vehicle, because of their scale. I like that kind of business.”
The CEO commented last week: “What it takes to succeed in this digital, connected, electric product are talents and know-how and a way of managing the business that’s different than what we’ve done in 118 years. It’s kinda like snowboarding and skiing. We both share the lift, but as soon as you get off the lift the intuitions are wrong between both businesses. You have to really relearn to how to get down the slope.”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 20:00 - 500 Dead In Northeast Syria "Major ISIS Comeback Plot"
500 Dead In Northeast Syria “Major ISIS Comeback Plot”
Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,
The latest statement from the Kurdish SDF on over a week of fighting against ISIS in Hasakeh put the overall death toll at nearly 500, including 77 prison staff and 374 prisoners.
The prison was holding ISIS detainees, so the labels of prison staff and prisoners could be meant to include SDF forces defending the prison, and ISIS attackers trying to help prisoners escape. The SDF arrested a number of attackers, and has also captured 27 in nearby Raqqa, suggesting that they are worried about a growing ISIS presence.
Illustrative file image: Syrian troops in northeast Syria town, AFP/Getty The US is praising the SDF, but also crediting America’s own involvement in the fighting. This was seen as a “major ISIS comeback plot,” and indeed this was the biggest ISIS fight in Syria since 2019.
According to the Associated Press account of the nearly two week-long ordeal: “The Syrian Democratic Forces said more than 120 of their fighters and prison workers died in the 10-day standoff at the Gweiran prison, also known as al-Sinaa prison, which houses at least 3,000 Islamic State group detainees. Some 374 IS militants, including the initial attackers, were also killed, it added.”
“The Jan. 20 assault on one of the largest detention facilities in Syria has turned the city of Hassakeh into a conflict zone and forced thousands of residents to flee,” the report added. “The fighting drew in the U.S.-led coalition, which carried out airstrikes and deployed American personnel in Bradley Fighting Vehicles to the scene.”
Via AP: Islamic State militants surrender after clashing with Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, at Gweiran Prison. Where the ISIS situation goes from here remains to be seen, but the group is probably not going to give up after one failed raid, and has shown that it has recovered some of its power.
Up to hundreds of ISIS terrorists may have escaped the prison which was located in a US-occupied area of Syria.
NEW – #SDF announce initial, more reliable numbers from #ISIS’s attack on al-Sina Prison:
– 400 #ISIS “missing”
– 374 #ISIS killed
– 77 #SDF-linked prison staff killed
– 40 #SDF killedFWIW, if 400 #ISIS escaped, that’s a big deal for NE #Syria dynamics.
— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) January 31, 2022
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That said, the Raqqa arrest raids show the SDF is also going to be proactive in trying to stamp down any ISIS presence.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 19:40 - Quebec Scraps Planned Tax On Unvaccinated Residents Amid Growing Backlash
Quebec Scraps Planned Tax On Unvaccinated Residents Amid Growing Backlash
Perhaps seeing the massive response to the Canadian truckers’ “Freedom Convoy” this weekend – and, more importantly, their prime ministers’ cowering response before he conveniently tested positive for COVID himself just weeks after receiving his booster – was enough to make the provincial government in Quebec rethink its plans to tax any adult who refuses the vaccine.
Plans for the “health tax” have reportedly been scrapped, according to Francois Legault, the premier of the French-speaking province, who made the announcement during a news conference earlier on Tuesday. Even Legault acknowledged that the planned tax had “deeply divided Quebecers.”
“Right now we have to build bridges,” he added. “To move Quebec forward in a calm social climate, I am announcing that the government will not introduce this bill on the health contribution.”
In early January, Legault had announced plans to tax residents who had not yet taken the COVID vaccine, citing a “burden” they were placing on the province’s health-care networks.
“Those who refuse to receive their first dose in the coming weeks will have to pay a new health contribution,” Legault said at the time. “I know the situation is tough, but we can get through this together. We need to focus our efforts on two things: Getting the first, second, and third doses of vaccine and reducing our contacts, especially with older people.”
As a reminder, Quebec has faced levels of oppression and encroachment on personal liberty that are unmatched anywhere outside of China. /p>
Last week, Quebec’s Health Ministry required “anyone without a vaccination passport must be accompanied at all times by a store employee and cannot purchase products other than those related to the pharmaceutical service they are receiving.”
While MSM reports didn’t mention them until lower in the story, it’s clear the reaction to the Canadian truckers, who held a “Freedom rally” in Ottawa over the weekend, likely contributed to the governor’s decision.
Of course, public opinion polling has shown that a majority of Canadians want all COVID restrictions removed, as the Epoch Times has reported.
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Meanwhile, RCMP units have reportedly been called in to arrest truckers blocking the border between the US and Canada in Alberta, according to the CBC. Police are reportedly moving in ready to make arrests and seize equipment.
Update (1600ET): The RCMP has reportedly started with “enforcement actions
Although some local towing companies have reportedly refused service.
Alberta towing companies reject requests to supply trucks to RCMP to Tow Truckshttps://t.co/5KXH7Btow8#CouttsCrisis #BorderCrisis #abpoli #AbLeg #truckers
— KHAN 🇨🇦🇺🇲🇮🇱 (@WrathOfRed) February 1, 2022
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Monday’s announcement marked the second time the Quebec government has walked back public health measures meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus. It also nixed compulsory inoculations for all health care workers last year fearing it would lead to thousands of nurses quitting their jobs, worsening an already severe worker shortage in the sector.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 19:20 - Bill Maher Is Right: It's The Left That Has Gotten More Radical
Bill Maher Is Right: It’s The Left That Has Gotten More Radical
Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance
The left is increasingly growing angry with Bill Maher for the comedian’s accurate, common sense take that Covid has become a hysteria in the country.
For Bill, it’s a case of “better late than never” – he certainly wasn’t around criticizing the hysteria a year ago, as Adam Corolla pointed out this weekend:
But hey, at least we know he has a learning curve.
On his show last week, Maher stunned many on the left by publicly reading off facts that are inconvenient to those pushing the Covid hysteria narrative.
“I asked for the COVID deaths by state, this is per 100,000 people,” Maher said, according to The Daily Wire. “The worst is Mississippi. My home state New Jersey, four, fourth worst. New York, sixth worst. West Virginia and Massachusetts are 10 and 11, right together. Could there be two states who are more unalike than West Virginia and Massachusetts? And the poster boy for keeping s*** open was Florida, they’re down at 17. So New York and New Jersey did worse than Florida.”
He continued: “Florida is home to all the old people in America. What this is saying – Florida, like, stayed open. I mean, I was just in Florida. I’ve been there a few times since this started. The atmosphere is just different. I’m not moving to Florida, I’m not promoting Florida. I’m just saying AOC just went to Florida and had a good time without a mask.”
In fact, in proving that most of the right just seeks out common sense, Maher has said that “he’s become a ‘hero’ at Fox News because he’s willing to call out progressive leftists, who he says ‘have their head up their ass,’” according to The Daily News.
Maher then accurately stated that it is the left that has changed, not him.
“Let’s get this straight. It’s not me who changed — it’s the left, who is now made up of a small contingent who’ve gone mental, and a large contingent who refuse to call them out for it. But I will. That’s why I’m a hero at Fox these days. Which shows just how much liberals have their head up their a–, because if they really thought about it, they would have made me a hero on their media.”
Today’s blog post has been published without a paywall because I believe the content to be far too important to deny to anyone. However, if you have the means and would like to support my work by subscribing, I’d be happy to offer you 22% off for 2022:
And you know Maher is really onto something because he prompted this indignant meltdown by Whoopi Goldberg, who, by the end of her exasperated diatribe, doesn’t really even seem to remember what she was complaining about in the first place.
Goldberg even places special emphasis on children, either knowingly or unknowingly trying to shoehorn her argument in, in favor of “the kids”, who are disproportionately not affected by Covid.
But the facts, relative to the hysteria, once again don’t hold water. No one wants to trivialize the death of children, but the fact of the matter is that this hysteria we are trying to blanket 350 million Americans with is unwarranted.
In 2018, the last year this data was made available by the CDC (I wonder why), almost 2,700 kids aged 1-14 (not 18) died of “unintentional injuries”. About 640 died from homicide and about 240 died from influenza and pneumonia. Another 6,800 people between the age of 10-24 died from suicide.
Meanwhile, the American Academy of Pediatrics has said this year between 0.00%-0.02% of all child COVID-19 cases have resulted in death. That means that 99.98% to 100% of all child COVID-19 cases do not result in death.
Throughout the entire pandemic – the millions and millions of cases logged over the course of almost two years, not one – 789 total children since the beginning of 2020 (and this counts up to 18 years old) have been counted as Covid deaths.
From them, the amount of children that have died with Covid versus from Covid – and those who unfortunately had preexisting conditions – remains to be seen.
“Little kids under the age of 5!” Goldberg screamed in her rant.
But CDC data updated last week shows that just 280 deaths have occurred in children “under the age of 5” in the last two years as Goldberg crows about.
That’s an average of 140 deaths per year: less than all of the above mentioned causes of death from 2018.
Meanwhile, overall childhood deaths in total were actually lower in 2020, despite the pandemic.
Look, deaths are a terrible tragedy and deaths of children are even more devastating. No one wants children to die. No one wants anyone to die. But we must come to terms with the fact that it’s a part of the sacred gamble that is life and we must look at this data relative to the drastic steps we are taking.
When considering the hysteria relative to the narrative being pushed on 350 million Americans, it just doesn’t make common sense – and that’s why Maher is starting to “get it” and catch on, while the hysterical fringe of his left-wing audience sits at home sketching up ways of how they’re now going to cancel him.
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—
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Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 19:00 - San Francisco Residents Flocking To Montana As Demand Has "Exploded"
San Francisco Residents Flocking To Montana As Demand Has “Exploded”
The great exodus out of California continues!
Specifically, in today’s episode we note that people from San Francisco are flocking to Montana, which has seen a 140% increase from Fog City when comparing total moves from 2018-2019 and 2020-2021, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
“I have a vacation rental [in Bozeman],” said Bozeman real estate broker Cancis Dorsch, who’s spent years selling vacation homes to Bay Area residents and says that demand from the Bay Area has ‘exploded.’
“It became slam-booked for the entire summer. Buyers were making phone calls, buyers were buying properties, sight unseen, to get out of the Bay Area. It really happened in the very beginning, and never really stopped.”
During the same time period as above, overall moves from the Bay Area to Montana increased by 51% according to data on migration patterns produced by the California Policy Lab based out of the University of California.
The data tracks movements of all Californian adults with active credit information. In order to analyze moves over the same time periods, we looked at data from the first seven quarters of 2020-2021 and compared them to the same period in 2018-2019. -SF Chronicle
That said, while the percentage increase from SF to Montana may have jumped – in terms of raw numbers, there were only 360 total moves from San Francisco to Montana in 2020 and the first three quarters of 2021. Still, “while San Francisco saw the biggest pandemic-era percent increase to Montana, all 10 of California’s most populous counties saw move-outs to the state increase significantly,” according to the report, which notes that based on the 32 counties with enough data to track movements, at least 13,000 Californians moved to Montana over the last two years.
Fewer people moving to California
During the pandemic, the rate of people migrating out of the Golden State accelerated – contributing to a decade-long trend of out-migration, according to California Policy Lab Executive Director, Evan White.
“There’s been a slow decline in net entrances for a long time,” he said, adding “What appears to have happened in the pandemic was the slope of the line changed.”
This statewide trend is driven largely by a decrease in moves into California, not moves out of it. Moves into California decreased by about 35% between the pre-pandemic period we looked at and the pandemic period, while moves out increased by only about 7% during that same period. -SF Chronicle
According to the report, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara saw the biggest net move-outs as a percentage of the population during the pandemic.
Of course, the state which takes the cake when it comes to ex-Californians in general is Texas, one of nine states which doesn’t have an individual income tax.
Will it be enough to eventually turn these red states blue?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 18:40 - Fidelity Explains Why We Live In A Bitcoin-First World, Plain & Simple
Fidelity Explains Why We Live In A Bitcoin-First World, Plain & Simple
Authored by Eduardo Próspero vias Bitcoinist.com,
Fidelity, the multinational brokerage giant, released a paper on Bitcoin titled Bitcoin First.
The asset manager thinks “bitcoin should be considered first and separate from all other digital assets that have come after it.” This is huge, considering the Fidelity Digital Assets division’s website opens with “We envision a future where all types of assets are issued natively on blockchains or represented in tokenized format.” That multichain-focused company recognized Bitcoin’s inherent superiority in their latest report.
According to Fidelity, “Bitcoin is best understood as a monetary good” and not as a technology.
This is key.
They also “believe it is highly unlikely for bitcoin to be replaced by an “improved” digital asset for several reasons.”
The rest of the document, more or less, consists of stating and analyzing those reasons.
The Fidelity report is exactly what Paul Krugman needs to understand the difference between Bitcoin and the rest of crypto. It starts with a fairly basic and non-technical overview of how the Bitcoin network works. It explains its “enforceable scarcity,” and how Bitcoin’s “monetary network effects” are unbeatable. It goes as far as claiming that “any subsequent monetary good would be “reinventing the wheel.”
It explains classic Bitcoin-related concepts like “The blockchain trilemma” and its trade-offs. It goes into “The Lindy Effect, also known as Lindy’s Law, is a theory that the longer some non-perishable thing survives, the more likely it is to survive in the future.” And more, much more.
How Did Fidelity Arrive At A Bitcoin-First Stance?
This paragraph summarizes the report’s main thesis:
“Investors should hold two distinctly separate frameworks for considering investment in this digital asset ecosystem.
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The first framework examines the inclusion of bitcoin as an emerging monetary good,
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and the second considers the addition of other digital assets that exhibit venture capital-like properties.”
A question arises, why does Fidelity consider Bitcoin a monetary good in the first place? They list four reasons:
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A monetary good is something that has value attributed to it above and beyond its utility or consumption value. Although Bitcoin’s payment network certainly has utility value, people are also ascribing a monetary premium value to the bitcoin tokens.
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One of the primary reasons investors attribute value to bitcoin is its scarcity. Its fixed supply is the reason it has the ability to be a store of value.
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Bitcoin’s scarcity is underpinned by its decentralization and censorship-resistant characteristics.
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These characteristics are hardcoded into bitcoin and almost certainly will never be changed because the same people that ascribe value to bitcoin and own it have no incentive to do so. In fact, network participants are incentivized to defend these very characteristics of a scarce asset and an immutable ledger.
Risks And Possible Scenarios
The report doesn’t go deep into any subject, but it’s comprehensive.
Fidelity covers the blocksize war and even does an Ethereum case study.
They say ETH’s monetary policy “has changed and is expected to change again.”
The report considers two possible scenarios; “A multi-chain world” and “A winner-take-all or most world.”
In both of those, Bitcoin is perfectly positioned to dominate.
On the risks side, they consider a few, but they make clear that they plague every digital asset.
Fidelity considers “Protocol Bugs,” “Nation-State Attacks,” “Growth of the Digital Asset Ecosystem,” and “Potential Instability of Traditional Macro Conditions.”
In the end, Fidelity concludes:
“Bitcoin’s proof of work algorithm, governance structure, and fair launch created the grounds for a decentralized project with minimal trust required. Other tokens have alternative consensus mechanisms, governance structures and token launches, which often reduce their level of decentralization.”
Fidelity’s Actual Conclusion
We have to reproduce the report’s last paragraph, the actual conclusion, in its entirety:
“Traditional investors typically apply a technology investing framework to bitcoin, leading to the conclusion bitcoin as a first-mover technology will easily be supplanted by a superior one or have lower returns. However, as we have argued here, bitcoin’s first technological breakthrough was not as a superior payment technology but as a superior form of money. As a monetary good, bitcoin is unique. Therefore, not only do we believe investors should consider bitcoin first in order to understand digital assets, but that bitcoin should be considered first and separate from all other digital assets that have come after it.”
Mic drop.
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Read the full Fidelity note below:
Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/01/2022 – 18:20 -
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