RTWed, 11 Mar 2020 00:24 UTC
© Pixabay / succo
Democrat and Republican House leaders have paused their partisan sniping to do the real work of governing:
keeping unpopular surveillance programs, including roving NSA wiretaps and access to metadata, alive indefinitely.With just four days to go before congressional authorization for the controversial provisions expires, a bipartisan contingent has swooped in to save the NSA from experiencing one second of separation anxiety from Americans' private communications.
Committee heads from both sides of the aisle wrangled enough votes within their own parties to deliver a reauthorization bill on Tuesday night which they believe will pass the entire House on Wednesday.
Lawmakers reportedly sweated for months over the legislation, which extends key elements of the USA Freedom Act, the 2015 replacement for the NSA's "StellarWind" program exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden - even though the NSA itself no longer uses the program. Indeed, it was the Trump administration, not Congress, that pleaded for its reauthorization, on the offchance it might be needed again in the future.
Dr. Richard Cheng claims high-dose Vitamin C has been officially included in the Shanghai Government Covid-19 treatment plan and that initial results from the IVC trial on Covid-19 is positive.
Does vitamin C cure Coronavirus? No? Can vitamin C treat Coronavirus? We can't say it does, but at the same time, we can't say it doesn't either. This is why
multiple clinical trials are underway in China to investigate whether or not vitamin C infusion has any effect against Coronavirus and those infected with it. The idea that vitamin C may help in treating the Coronavirus, at least here in the west, seems to be dubbed as 'fake news,' which is odd given the fact that authorities should be mentioning that at this point it's inconclusive.
There remains to be a clear yes or no answer but researchers are hypothesizing that it might have a positive effect which is why in Shanghai, China,
vitamin C is being named as part of their overall treatment plan, with official clinical trials underway.
Last month, the US National Library of Medicine posted the information about
their clinical trials on their website. The title of one of the trials is "Vitamin C Infusion for the Treatment of Severe 2019-nCoV Infected Pneumonia." The sponsor is ZhiYong Peng, and the responsible party is Zhongnan Hospital in Wuhan University (ZNWU).
Great find by
Joe L:
...new study ... claims that of the 1,099 Chinese people who contracted 2019-nCoV which were studied, 85.4% (927 people) were never-smokers, while only 12.6% (137 people) were current smokers and only 1.9% (21 people) were ex-smokers.
Here's
a link to the pdf study. And here's part of Table 1 from the study (click to enlarge):
Comment: It's probably not as high a figure as that because the rate of smoking in China - across both sexes - is around 25%. It's certain that way more men than women smoke in China, but as we saw above, figures vary.
Using a different assumption then than the author used above, that just 25% of the population of Wuhan are smokers, then the sample of clinical data from this study suggests that
non-smokers are nearly 3 times more likely than smokers and ex-smokers to become infected.
However, something else to be factored back into this is that the above clinical data from Wuhan shows that
just 41.8% of the case studies in the study sample were female. It's early days, but if this outbreak plays out
like MERS and SARS did, then it too will affect (that is, infect and make ill) more men than women.
Depending on the extent to which it does so, this sex difference would increase our assumption of the percentage of smokers in Wuhan and thus push the figure back up to
3 or >3 times more likely than smokers and ex-smokers to become infected.
By the way, an even more interesting
study of clinical data from Wuhan - though from a much smaller sample of 140 patients - found that
just 1.4% of people hospitalized by the virus were current smokers...
For more on the health benefits of smoking tobacco, see:
We've had a couple of people BTL take issue with us regarding the case fatality rate (CFR) of the 1918 Spanish Flu. Citing Wikipedia and the CDC we gave that rate as being between 10-20%. A couple of commenters, however, insisted the actual CFR was 2-3%, and this led us to look further.
What we found was quite interesting.
This is the
pre-February 22 2020 opening paragraph of the 'Mortality' section on the Wiki page for the Spanish flu (our emphasis):
The global mortality rate from the 1918-1919 pandemic is not known, but an estimated 10% to 20% of those who were infected died (case-fatality ratio). About a third of the world population was infected, and 3% to 6% of the entire global population of over 1800 million[51] died.[2]
Comment: These changes to the Wikipedia page clearly show a manipulation for the purpose of making the coronavirus appear more dangerous than it actually is. Now why would they want to do something like that?
See also:
© Alan Light – CC BY 2.0
"America deserves a Commander-in-Chief who knows what that sacrifice means and who will honor the sacred promise we make to our veterans."
- Pete Buttigieg January 6, 2020
#CIAPete has been trending on social media this past month as stories and commentaries have emerged telling and re-telling Pete Buttigieg's role as a naval intelligence officer in Afghanistan, his duties in his assignment in Kabul as a member of the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, and his relationship to CIA colleagues. This would be all rather amusing and just another dust speck of non-sense in the vast universe of inanity that is the US presidential race, if it were not for Buttigieg's
own use of his time in uniform and in Afghanistan as a cudgel to
silence others from both an
informed and
moral perspective on issues of foreign policy and war.
Buttigieg worked alongside CIA officers in a multi-agency organization in Kabul, hence the hashtag #CIAPete. According to his own autobiography he didn't spend much time working on intelligence and fighting the Taliban,
but rather worked as a driver, chauffeuring other officers during an admitted eight hour work day in Kabul. As someone who did three deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, I know very few military officers who experienced 8 hour work days in either country, nearly all officers I knew, including myself, worked 12-18 hour days - and there were plenty of times, especially during my second deployment, that 20 hour days were common. That Buttigieg was a driver in Afghanistan is more telling than anything else about Buttigieg's time in Afghanistan, more so since he speaks so assuredly and confidently of his time in Afghanistan as he runs for president and uses that experience to pronounce himself as personally informed about matters of war and peace.
With the commodity world still smarting from the Nov 2014 Saudi decision to (temporarily) break apart OPEC, and flood the market with oil in (failed) hopes of crushing US shale producers (who survived thanks to generous banks extending loan terms and even more generous buyers of junk bonds), which nonetheless resulted in a painful manufacturing recession as the price of Brent cratered as low as the mid-$20's in late 2015/early 2016, on Saturday,
Saudi Arabia launched its second scorched earth, or rather scorched oil campaign in 6 years. And this time there will be blood.Following Friday's shocking collapse of OPEC+, when Russia and Riyadh were unable to reach an agreement during the OPEC+ summit in Vienna which was seeking up to 1.5 million b/d in further oil production cuts, on Saturday Saudi Arabia kick started what
Bloomberg called an all-out oil war, slashing official pricing for its crude and
making the deepest cuts in at least 20 years on its main grades, in an effort to push as many barrels into the market as possible.
My father, a well-educated lawyer with a very sophisticated mind, used to advise me to "keep it simple." By simple he didn't mean simplistic. He meant fundamentally logical and to the point. So I will do that here and stick to some simple realities, now that understanding what is going on in the world has become an idiot's game played by the corporate mass media to confuse people.
I have been writing about the dangers of technology for many years. Not all technology, of course, for the pencil I am writing this with is a technology, and an amazing and underappreciated one. I am referring to the techno-scientific, digital, high-tech sort, the world of computers, cell phones, genetic engineering, biological weapons development, etc. You know, all the stuff that has made our lives better and easier.
Two of the major problems the world faces - world destruction with nuclear weapons and the poisoning of the earth's ecology and atmosphere - are the result of the marriage of science and technique that has given birth to the technological "babies" (Little Boy and Fat Man) that were used by the U.S. to massacre hundreds of thousands of Japanese and now threaten to incinerate everyone, and the chemical and toxic inventions that have despoiled the earth, air, and water and continue to kill people worldwide through America's endless war-making and industrial applications.
Hilo Glazer
HaaretzFri, 06 Mar 2020 22:09 UTC
© Eliyahu HershkovitzIsraeli snipers on the Gaza border
I know exactly how many knees I've hit, says Eden, who completed his service in the Israel Defense Forces as a sniper in its Golani infantry brigade six months ago. For much of the time, he was stationed along the border with the Gaza Strip. His assignment: to repel Palestinian demonstrators who approached the fence.
"I kept the casing of every round I fired," he says. "I have them in my room. So I don't have to make an estimate - I know: 52 definite hits."
But there are also "non-definite" hits, right?"There were incidents when the bullet didn't stop and also hit the knee of someone behind [the one I aimed at]. Those are mistakes that happen."
While navigating through today's propaganda-heavy world of misinformation, spin and outright creative writing which appears to have replaced conventional journalism, it is most important that two qualities are active in the mind of any truth-seeker. The first quality is the adherence to a strong top down perspective, both historic and global. This is vital in order to guide us as a sort of compass or North Star used by sailors navigating across the ocean. The second quality is a strong power of logic, memory and discernment of wheat vs. chaff to process the mountains of data that slaps us in the face from all directions like sand in a desert storm.
As the second anniversary of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal has arrived, it is a useful time to take these qualities and revisit this bizarre moment of modern history which took place on a park bench in Salisbury UK and which led to one of the greatest frauds of the modern era derailing all attempts to repair relations between Russia and the west.
To do this, I decided to plunge myself into a new book called
Skripal in Prison written by Moscow-based journalist John Helmer and published in February 2020.
This incredible little book, which features 26 chapters written between March 2018 to February 2020 originally published on the author's site
Dances with Bears, unveils an arsenal of intellectual bullets which Helmer skillfully uses to shoot holes into every inconsistency, contradiction and outright lie holding up the structure of the narrative that
"there is no alternative conclusion other than that the Russian State was culpable for the attempted murder of Mr. Skripal and his daughter". This line was asserted without a shred of actual evidence by Theresa May in the House of Commons on March 16, 2018 and in the months that followed, western nations were pressured to expel Russian diplomats (23 in Britain, 60 in the US, 33 across the EU), close down consulates (one Russian consulate in San Francisco and one American consulate in St Petersburg) and impose waves of sanctions against Russia.
© Keystone / Andrea FasaniA man in Casalpusterlengo, one the northern Italian towns placed under lockdown, and not far from the Swiss border
Quarantined Italian towns are buckling under the strain, major cities are emptying out and some of those infected say they are being stigmatised as Europe's worst outbreak of coronavirus takes hold.
As of Thursday night, 3,916 cases had been detected as Italy aggressively tests for the virus. Out of that number, 197 people have died.
Eleven towns are under lockdown - 10 in Lombardy and one in Veneto - and schools have been closed across the country as the government tries to contain
a virus about which there are still many unknowns.
Stories that have emerged since the outbreak began reflect the contrasting nature of the virus's impact, from the reassuring accounts of people cured to the suffering of those who have died or are in a critical condition. The heavily pregnant wife of "patient one", the 38-year-old man who was Italy's first confirmed locally transmitted case, was dismissed from hospital on Thursday; her husband, a marathon runner and amateur footballer, remains in intensive care.
Comment: What a barmy spectacle this has all been. We blame the media, but only partially. It's just doing what it always does, selling newspapers - attracting clicks, these days. Besides the impetus from governments, international bodies and Big Pharma, public figures of every hue - including those usually critical of mass media - have been harping on since the very beginning in early January about how what is essentially just another round of flu is in fact 'The Plague'.
Then, when governments gradually, tentatively roll out quarantine and testing measures, they rant about 'muh freedoms' and 'kommie-ism'. Hang on a minute! YOU actively co-created this mess. YOU helped bring this hysteria and government control down on everybody's heads. YOU are participants in this, not observers or - with a few exceptions - critics.
The thing is; the hysteria-mongers are - unwittingly - correct. 'We' are all pro-actively dooming each other because the species mass unconscious knows, at some level, that 'we' are all doomed. Self-isolation is, in some respects, the way to go from here on out. The masses, especially in larger urban areas - after two decades of spooking them with false-flag terrorism, combined with the increasingly extreme planetary and cosmic weather - are a freaky, freaked-out herd, and you do not want to be around that when a pandemic takes off for real.
If you're wondering what makes us so 'chill' about all this, it's because we've seen this coming for many years. The population is gradually being weakened by crap diet, EM smog, propaganda, and terrible health advice (not least dangerous, untested vaccines). Because of this, we will not be surprised when what might otherwise be just another innocuous 'seasonal flu' comes around and wipes out much of the population. This Coronavirus aint it, but you can be sure that the vaccines they push as a result of it will do their part to contribute to, down the road, an actual pandemic.
In the meantime, we've been strengthening our resistance to viruses - of both the biological and psychological kinds - by optimizing our diet, expanding our knowledge base, and applying EM counter-measures. Together with 'communing with like minds' and networking about issues and events, thereby disentangling from the frequency fence that corrals the wider body politic, this all serves to build faith and resilience against whatever's coming down the pipeline...
Comment: See also: