© CDN
SOTT
SIGNS
OF THE
TIMES
OF THE
TIMES
Welcome to Sott.net
The World for People who Think
Society's ChildS
Best of the Web: Millionaire 'Democrat' Nancy Pelosi 'relates to the suffering masses' by showing off $24,000 dollar fridge stocked with $13 pots of ice cream
Marie Antoinette didn't actually say "Let them eat cake" but you won't believe who is saying "Let them eat ice cream." Join James for this edition of #PropagandaWatch as he explores the latest fad among the celebrities and political puppets: Shaming poor people!
© AP Photo/Marcio Jose SanchezMichael Moore
The film, directed by Jeff Gibbs, exposes the solar and wind energy industries as scams that pretend to be saving the planet from climate change while consuming more fossil fuels than they save, and causing ecological damage.
The film reserves particular scorn for the biomass industry, which touts itself as a "renewable" alternative to fossil fuels, while chopping down trees and even consuming animals in pumping yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Moore released the 100-minute documentary for free on YouTube, with a warning: "[W]e are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road — selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America."
© Jeff Reintz/The Courier via APTyson Fresh Meats plant in Waterloo, Iowa.
The Arkansas-based company said the closure of the plant in Waterloo would deny a vital market to hog farmers and further disrupt U.S. meat supply. Tyson had kept the facility, its largest pork plant, open in recent days over the objections of alarmed local officials.
The plant can process 19,500 hogs per day, accounting for 3.9% of U.S. pork processing capacity, according to the National Pork Board.
More than 180 infections have been linked to the plant and officials expect that number to dramatically rise. Testing of its 2,800 workers is expected to begin Friday. Cases and hospitalizations in Black Hawk County have skyrocketed in recent days and local officials say the plant is the largest source of infections.
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio
Photos of extended middle fingers, the mayor dropping the Staten Island groundhog and news coverage of him going to the gym have all been texted to a special tip line that de Blasio announced Saturday, according to screenshots posted on Twitter.
One user sent the message "We will fight this tyrannical overreach!" to the service and got an automated message that in part said, "Hello, and thank you for texting NYC311."
The title of the bank's latest report says it all: The Fed can't print gold.
BofA analysts have ramped up their already bullish tone about the yellow metal with a new 18-month target of US$3,000 per ounce for the gold price. That's a 50% gain on the bank's previous 18-month target of US$2,000/oz.
And the bank predicts an average gold price for 2021 of US$2,063. At the current rate of exchange, that's an Australian dollar gold price of A$3,215/oz — a figure that would super-charge profitability for local producers.
© Getty
Several weeks ago, one of the USA's better quantitative scientists, John Ioannidis of Stanford, made a critically important point. During the coronavirus pandemic, 'we are making decisions without reliable data', he said.
As Ioannidis and others have pointed out, we do not even know the actual death rate for Covid-19. Terrifying and widely cited case-fatality rates like 'three per cent' come from comparing known fatalities to the small pool of people who have officially been tested. Those test cases are mostly made up of sick and symptomatic people or those who had direct contact with someone known to have had Covid-19 - rather than to the far larger pool of people who may have had a mild version of the disease. Because of the same denominator problem, we also don't know the true infection rate. A recent German study indicates this could be as high as 15 per cent.
Finally, we do not seem to know the effectiveness of the various strategies adopted by national and regional governments to respond to the disease - ranging from the advocacy of social distancing to full-on lockdowns.
© Kit Karzen
The results are from the first round of an ongoing study by USC researchers and county health officials. They will be conducting antibody testing over time on a series of representative samples of adults to determine the scope and spread of the pandemic across the county.
Based on the results of the first round of testing, the research team estimates that approximately 4.1% of the county's adult population has an antibody to the virus. Adjusting this estimate for the statistical margin of error implies about 2.8% to 5.6% of the county's adult population has an antibody to the virus — which translates to approximately 221,000 to 442,000 adults in the county who have been infected. That estimate is 28 to 55 times higher than the 7,994 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported to the county at the time of the study in early April. The number of COVID-related deaths in the county has now surpassed 600.
"We haven't known the true extent of COVID-19 infections in our community because we have only tested people with symptoms, and the availability of tests has been limited," said lead investigator Neeraj Sood, professor of public policy at the USC Price School for Public Policy and senior fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. "The estimates also suggest that we might have to recalibrate disease prediction models and rethink public health strategies."
Comment: As more time passes, more stats come out, painting a clearer picture (which is still murky, however). More people are infected, the death rate is lower than previously believed. Voice of America reports that perhaps 25% of Americans may already have it, the vast majority showing mild or no symptoms. And up to 70% of the military may already have had it. Another study suggests something similar for Sweden, where at least 11% of the population are believed to have contracted the virus. Iceland screened 6% of its population and only 0.7% tested positive. Yet here's an anomaly: a French boy who had the virus somehow didn't manage to pass it on to any of the 172 people he came into contact with.
As for deaths, there are contradictory bits of information. On the one hand, doctors are being encouraged to list Covid-19 as the cause of death for practically anyone (if they're dead and test positive, count it as a Covid-19 death). This suggests the death numbers are inflated. Yet many hard-hit areas (like NYC, London, Bergamo, etc.) have seen a large spike in mortality over the past month or two, and not all of these excess deaths have been attributed to Covid-19. Official numbers released by the UK government don't even include all deaths attributed to Covid-19 - just those who die in hospital.
It will be a while before we can say anything with certainty about the extent of Covid-19 and unrelated deaths in said areas.
Best of the Web: Criminal! NY issues do-not-resuscitate guideline for cardiac patients amid induced coronavirus panic
Comment: This is exactly what they've rolled out in Europe too. The premise is supposedly that the virus is so deadly, it will kill medics if they try to resuscitate people 'suspected' of having it. As everyone should be able to see by now, the virus is not deadly to 99.99% of people, which means that this protocol is going to ramp up deaths-by-medical malpractice...
© Taidgh Barron/NY PostAn FDNY ambulance responds to a call in the East Village.
While paramedics were previously told to spend up to 20 minutes trying to revive people found in cardiac arrest, the change is "necessary during the COVID-19 response to protect the health and safety of EMS providers by limiting their exposure, conserve resources, and ensure optimal use of equipment to save the greatest number of lives,'' according to a state Health Department memo issued last week.
First responders were outraged over the move.
"They're not giving people a second chance to live anymore,'' Oren Barzilay, head of the city union whose members include uniformed EMTs and paramedics, fumed of state officials.
Comment: No, these changes are orders handed down from the One World Govt.
© Reuters / Andrew Kelly
Shake Shack announced on Sunday it is returning a $10 million loan received through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) - the government bailout fund for "small and medium-size" businesses that ran dry last week after handing out $350 billion in low-interest loans to foundering enterprises suffering amid the coronavirus economic shutdown.
But the chain didn't give the money back out of the goodness of its heart - it did so only after the media exposed it as one of many large chain restaurants, hotels, and other large corporations to receive the coveted "small business" loans before the fund ran dry, even as countless actual small businesses were unable to access it. Giving back the money is little more than virtue signaling from a well-heeled business caught with its hand in the proverbial cookie jar.
Comment:
- 'It was Hunger Games': Small-business loan program ran out of money within minutes
- US small business bailout program doomed as banks balk at terms
- US Federal Reserve props up zombie companies that should have collapsed - RT's Keiser Report
- Who CARES about debt? Covid-19, corporate plunder, & the US plan of unlimited bank bailouts
- Harvard, richest US university, nabs a near $9M in taxpayer CARES aid
- Harvard refuses calls to return $8.6mn bailout money, despite sitting on endowment worth more than 100 COUNTRIES' GDP
© Getty Images / rohojamagic
Daniel Defoe's 'The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York. Mariner', celebrated its tercentenary last year, but who could have predicted that the centuries-old book would become so relevant to our lives just one year later?
For in a sense, we're all Robinson Crusoe now. By and large we're in the same boat as he was.
Comment: A healthy civic response to bureaucratic overreach that threatens the social bonds of the city. Nothing like 'New Yawkers"!