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Attention

Best of the Web: Is it true that the new variants are very dangerous?

Rosemary Frei, MSc
rosemaryfrei.ca
Wed, 03 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC
Coronamutate
© Unknown/KJN
According to what we hear from officials and the mainstream media, the new variants are the most dangerous and unpredictable beings since Osama bin Laden.

Everyone needs to stay safe from these invisible but murderously mighty microbes by shunning contact with the unwashed, unmasked and unvaccinated. But is that drastic approach — which is accompanied by severe curtailment of civil liberties and constitutional rights — warranted?

It turns out that the case for the variants' contagiousness and dangerousness centres largely on the theoretical effects of just one change said to stem from a mutation in the virus's genes. And, as I'll show in this article, that case is very shaky. I also have an accompanying nine-minute 'explainer' video.

That one change is known as N501Y — scientific shorthand for the substitution of one protein building block (amino acid) for another at position 501 in the part of the virus called the spike protein. Specifically, position 501 lies in the portion of the spike protein that's responsible for the intimate coupling between the virus and cells that lets the virus slip inside and multiply.

[Note that any such amino-acid switcheroo is correctly called a change, not a mutation. Mutations occur only in genes. For some reason many scientists and scribes who ought to know better are mistakenly calling N501Y and other amino-acid changes 'mutations.' ]

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Burka

Best of the Web: Mandalorian actress Gina Carano, hated by Woke Left for her political views, fired from Star Wars franchise... for making anti-Nazi comment

Hayley Williams
gamespot.com
Thu, 11 Feb 2021 19:27 UTC
gina carano mandalorian
After months of controversy, Lucasfilm has confirmed that Mandalorian actress Gina Carano is not currently employed at the company, and that there are no plans for her to return in the future. The statement comes after Carano made an Instagram post comparing the persecution of Jewish people in Nazi Germany to "hating someone for their political views."


Comment: By firing her, they have of course just proved her point, on every level: they hate her for her political views, are persecuting her accordingly, are today's fascists, and their behavior will likely worsen on a similar trajectory to the Nazis'.


A statement by Lucasfilm was obtained by io9, reading: "Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable."


Comment: That's utter BS, as we'll see from her actual post below.


Carano's post about Nazi Germany caused the hashtag #FireGinaCarano to trend widely on Twitter. She later deleted the post, but screenshots of it continued to be shared online. The actress' controversies go back months, however, to before the premiere of The Mandalorian's second season, in which she featured prominently.

Comment: If Carano had suggested that anyone pro-Trump, pro-freedom of speech and anti-lockdown was behaving like Nazis, she'd have been promoted. Instead, the media is flat-out lying to everyone's face, telling them her post was anti-Semitic!!!

Here is the 'offending' post:

carano nazis
As you can see, a correct reading of her brief comment - which is only the first two lines - is that, far from "denigrating," Carano was in fact underscoring the extent to which Jews were abused under the Nazi regime, and hinting at how it happened. She then quoted something which fleshed out her point.

The Woke Left apparently found this offensive because they inferred from her comment that she was placing them in the role of the Nazis today. Carano herself never actually made this comparison, but the Woke Left is highly sensitive to the truth being exposed: the racialist and genocidal motives they project onto others... actually emanate from them.

They are so exquisitely tuned to 'detecting and deleting WrongThink' that the reason Carano first came on their radar back in the summer of 2020 was because - like sentinels for The Borg - they had noticed that the actress had not been actively voicing support for the BLM riots street parties.

Carano's response to all this?

Priceless:


And this from the day before she was fired for WrongThink:




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Wall Street

Best of the Web: Who are the ultimate war profiteers? Wall Street, that's who

Christian Sorensen
CovertAction Magazine
Wed, 10 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC
Wall Street

Comment: After reading the following one may be forgiven for wanting to add the word 'Financial' to the term "Military-Industrial-Complex" given the foundational way that Wall Street's "services" help prop up the very business of war.


While war corporations, or so-called "defense contractors," make billions in profits, Wall Street is the ultimate beneficiary of today's nonstop wars. The prosaic nature of war profiteering — far from the work of a shadowy cabal — is precisely why the collusion is so destructive and should be outlawed.

The U.S. ruling class deploys the military for three main reasons: (1) to forcibly open up countries to foreign investment, (2) to ensure the free flow of natural resources from the global south into the hands of multinational corporations, and (3) because war is profitable. The third of these reasons, the profitability of war, is often lacking detail in analyses of U.S. imperialism: The financial industry, including investment banks and private equity firms, is an insatiable force seeking profit via military activity.

The war industry is composed of corporations that sell goods and services to the U.S. government and allied capitalist regimes around the world. Investment banks and asset management firms hold most shares of every major public war corporation.
The best-known financial firms holding the stock of war corporations include: Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Wellington Management.

Comment: Having no new wars over the past four years must have had many of these characters worried. It was time to help usher in a new leader - with new policies - that could be relied upon to massively increase the coffers.

See also:

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People

Best of the Web: Will American 'woke' ideas tear France apart? Some of its leaders think so

Norimitsu Onishi
The New York Times
Tue, 09 Feb 2021 00:01 UTC
french protest #metoo
© Francois Mori/Associated PressWomen’s rights activists protesting last year against Mr. Macron’s appointment of an interior minister who has been accused of rape and a justice minister who has criticized the #MeToo movement.
Politicians and prominent intellectuals say social theories from the United States on race, gender and post-colonialism are a threat to French identity and the French republic.

The threat is said to be existential. It fuels secessionism. Gnaws at national unity. Abets Islamism. Attacks France's intellectual and cultural heritage.

The threat? "Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,'' said President Emmanuel Macron.

French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. "There's a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,'' warned Mr. Macron's education minister.

Comment: Much of this article reads as a defense of 'wokism,' hardly surprising given that it's from the New York Times. But what's notable is the number and rank of those French politicians decrying the ideology. The Times can brush it off as 'pandering to the right,' but even that is notable - they wouldn't need to pander if the number of voters against regressive leftism didn't out-number those who support it.

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Stock Down

Best of the Web: Study: Lockdowns had largest impact in destroying economic activity

Jon Miltimore
Foundation for Economic Education
Thu, 04 Feb 2021 07:29 UTC
business closed lockdown
The world may be nearing the end of the coronavirus pandemic (at least we can hope), but the post mortems are just beginning.

A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found important correlations between sales losses and lockdowns across counties in California.

Economists Robert W. Fairlie and Frank M. Fossen used state data from all taxable sales in California during the first two quarters of 2020, finding a drop of $152 billion in the second quarter alone, a 17.5 percent decline from the previous quarter.

Not all businesses experienced losses, of course. Some businesses deemed "essential" saw gains, such as pharmacies, liquor stores, supermarkets, agriculture, and building material & garden equipment stores.

Many economic sectors were not so lucky, the authors found.

Comment: See also:

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Cow Skull

Best of the Web: Greenwald: The journalistic tattletale and censorship industry suffers several well-deserved blows

Glenn Greenwald
greenwald.substack.com
Sun, 07 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC
Taylor Lorenz and Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen
New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz and Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen
The NYT's Taylor Lorenz falsely accuses a tech investor of using a slur after spending months trying to infiltrate and monitor a new app that allows free conversation.

A new and rapidly growing journalistic "beat" has arisen over the last several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is half adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power. Though its epicenter is the largest corporate media outlets, it is the very antithesis of journalism.

I've written before about one particularly toxic strain of this authoritarian "reporting." Teams of journalists at three of the most influential corporate media outlets — CNN's "media reporters" (Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy), NBC's "disinformation space unit" (Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel) — devote the bulk of their "journalism" to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention). These hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies, which (for reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the responsibility to censor, now do so with abandon and seemingly arbitrary blunt force: they are shamed by the world's loudest media companies when they do not.

Comment: And scorn them we do - and will - to the very best of our ability. They should be called out every time they spew their pathological (and sometimes very damaging) nonsense - because they create nothing - and seek to tear down everyone and everything that doesn't fall into their very narrow and skewed parameters of acceptable thought and behavior.

But this won't last forever. These things never do. And these empowered pathologicals will no doubt be learning this the very hard way. If at all.

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V

Flashback Best of the Web: Elon Musk says he WON'T get a coronavirus vaccine because he's 'not at risk'

Marlene Lenthang
MailOnline
Mon, 28 Sep 2020 08:19 UTC
Elon Musk
© APElon Musk, 49, said he won't get a coronavirus vaccine when they're available because he's 'not at risk', in a Monday interview on the NYT podcast Sway
He said the pandemic has 'questioned my faith in humanity' because people have become 'irrational'

Elon Musk has revealed he will not get a coronavirus vaccine when they're available because he's 'not at risk' and defends keeping his Tesla factories up and running amid the pandemic.

The 49-year-old tech giant defended opening up Tesla factories in defiance of lockdowns - a lengthy saga that has seen him sue Alameda County, launch a profanity-laden rant about how lockdowns are 'unethical' and allegedly fire employees who didn't feel safe enough to return to work.

The Tesla and SpaceX founder said Monday in an interview with Kara Swisher on the New York Times' podcast Sway that even when vaccines are readily accessible, he won't take one.

When asked 'Will you get a vaccine? What will you do with your own family?' he curtly replied, 'No, I'm not at risk for COVID. Nor are my kids.'

Comment: We can see clearly the "big players" like Elon Musk and many other known and unknown billionaires, bankers, politicians, probably know the truth behind the Corona madness and the psychopathic elites' obsession to vaccinate the population.

Even they can't fully resist the deep, dark centers of power that created this plandemic in order to completely enslave and control humanity.

They can avoid dangerous vaccines for themselves and their families, but they still have to show they obey the decisions of dark centers of power that rule this world.

See also:

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Microscope 1

Best of the Web: Sigh, yes, the 'COVID virus' is real

Ian M Mackay, PhD
Virology Down Under
Tue, 06 Oct 2020 16:24 UTC
There has been talk out thar in the wildlands of Twitter from people who don't believe the evidence that the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is real.

Has the 'the COVID virus' ever been isolated in cell culture, visualised by electron microscopy, reacted with antibodies, genetically sequenced and otherwise characterised in many samples collected from people with coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) all over the world during the past nine months?

Sigh, yes, and yes the 'COVID virus' is real. Here are a few of the scientific endeavours that show this virus has been isolated from clinically diagnosed, ill and laboratory-confirmed human COVID-19 cases.
coronavirus 3d model
© CDC.govThe spikes that adorn the outer surface of the virus, which impart the look of a corona surrounding the virion, when viewed electron microscopically. These spikes determine which animal it can infect.
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Red Flag

Best of the Web: COVID-19 has been used as a psychological coup d'etat

Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null
Global Research
Sat, 06 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC
temperature gun covid testing
We have almost reached a full year since the spread of SARS-Cov2 was proclaimed a pandemic. If we are to believe the World Health Organization's and individual governments' official statistics, the number of confirmed cases is reaching 100 million with over 2 million deaths. Indeed, if these numbers can be relied upon, we can surely acknowledge there is a real pandemic.

It would be common sense, therefore, to expect, in fact demand, international health agencies and governments to make every effort to identify the virus' origin. Suspicions that the virus, now responsible for the spectrum of medical symptoms known as Covid-19, may have been bioengineered and escaped from a maximum security BSL-4 lab in Wuhan, China, were already voiced within a month after its identification was first reported. Several highly respected medical experts, including Dr. David Relman at Stanford University, have suggested there is a strong likelihood that the virus escaped the Wuhan facility. To date, early queries about its origins remain unanswered and new questions are mounting.


Comment: How about from the US itself: Compelling Evidence That SARS-CoV-2 Was Man-Made


Recently, Jamie Metzl, a WHO advisor who earlier served under Biden in the Senate and in Bill Clinton's National Security Council and State Department, told the Toronto Sun that the hypothesis of the virus' natural origin in a Wuhan wet market is "a lie." It is no secret, Metzl noted, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was heavily engaged in "gain of function" research to "amplify the virility of viruses."

That there is very reasonable evidence that coronaviruses were being engineered in a laboratory goes back to 2003 and perhaps earlier. That year, many Russian medical scientists, including Moscow's head epidemiologist Dr. Nikolai Filatov, shared their opinions that the first SARS outbreak originated from a bioweapons lab.
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Attention

Best of the Web: World hammered by record 50 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2020

Jeff Masters
Yale Climate Connections
Mon, 25 Jan 2021 08:56 UTC
National Guard troops respond in the aftermath of Hurricane Laura in Lake Charles, Louisiana
© Josiah PughNational Guard troops respond in the aftermath of Hurricane Laura in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Laura was Earth’s most expensive tropical cyclone of 2020, with $18.2 billion in damage.
Earth was besieged by a record 50 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2020, the most such disasters ever recorded after adjusting for inflation, said insurance broker Aon (formerly called Aon Benfield) in its annual report issued January 25. The previous record was 46 billion-dollar weather disasters, set in 2010 and 2011. The annual average of billion-dollar weather disasters since records began in 1990 is 29.

The combined economic losses (insured and uninsured) from all 416 weather and earthquake disasters cataloged by Aon in 2020 was $268 billion (2020 USD). Most of the 2020 total, by far, came from weather-related disasters ($258 billion), 29% above the 2001-2020 inflation-adjusted average. Those numbers make 2020 the fifth costliest year on record for weather-related disasters.

The year was the most expensive ever for severe weather (including severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hail), with $63 billion in damage (previous record: $53 billion in 2011). More than 80% of the severe weather damage occurred in the U.S. in 2020, including the costliest severe weather outbreak in world history, according to Aon: an August 2020 event that featured a violent derecho in the U.S. midwest that caused $11 billion of the $12.6 billion in damage of the outbreak, the balance caused by tornadoes, hail, and other severe thunderstorms.

Insured damage from wildfires in 2020 was $12 billion - the third highest on record, behind only 2017 and 2018. The year 2020 marked the third time in the past four years that global insured losses from wildfires exceeded $10 billion - a threshold never crossed prior to 2017. Remarkably, wildfire has caused more than $70 billion in insured losses since 2000, 75% of that in the past five years alone.

Comment: It is becoming more apparent that erratic seasons, extreme weather patterns and natural disasters are increasing, which is not a consequence of "human-caused climate change" (formerly known as man-made 'global warming') as parroted relentlessly by the MSM, but part of a natural cycle.

See also:

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