Julian Assange has served more time in prison then the whole of Jeffrey Epstein’s client list put together… his crime.? Exposing criminals.pic.twitter.com/w9eyAgZr8R
[Gateway] Dr. Zeke Emanuel, father of Obamacare and death panels, appeared on MSNBC this week to discuss the new Covid variant spreading across the US.
XBB 1.5, a new subvariant of Omicron, is now infecting Americans according to the CDC.
Zeke Emanuel said the Covid vaccines don’t work against the XBB 1.5 subvariant of Omicron so the only thing that reliably works are "really high quality masks."
"XBB 1.5 is spreading rapidly which means it can evade and outcompete the other subvariants," he said. "It seems to avoid the antibodies but also bind more tightly to cells and that gives it the competitive advantage it needs.
"The best thing [people] can do at the moment... is masks! N95, really high quality masks...you can protect yourselves with these very high quality masks and that’s what I recommend."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
01/03/2023 8:10 Comments ||
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#7
Well,ole XBB 1.5 caught me a couple of weeks ago...I certainly wasn't trying to catch it. Still recovering from the lingering respiratory symptoms (week 4). It was much milder than the 2021's Covid version which was very rough.
#9
So Dr. Emanuel cares about the elderly? Wasn't he the guy who was basically saying that everyone over 70 should voluntarily walk into a gas chamber a few years ago?
#10
That’s the one, Secret Master. He’s a professor of medical ethics, so he’s vastly more sophisticated than “First do no harm.” His brother is Rahm Emanuel.
This is the first time I’ve seen his name given as Zeke instead of the formal Ezekiel. Perhaps that confused you, too.
#13
Well. Anyone still wearing a mask thinks they're smarter than you. They think you are a dirty creature who is threatening their good health just by existing.
They are advertising their innate odiousness as a person. Probably not a good idea overall.
So, insane? Maybe. Tone deaf weapons grade stupid? All the way...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
01/03/2023 11:47 Comments ||
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#14
I saw a couple of masks made out of Seagrams pouches. Is that the level of quality that is needed?
Posted by: Super Hose ||
01/03/2023 12:42 Comments ||
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#15
Super, those should work as long as you keep the Seagram’s level in your blood correspondingly high.
[FoxNews] Lower earnings will result in up to 2.9% of lost GDP for states.
They’d turn us into beggars, ‘cause beggars are easier to please.
National test scores reveal a sharp falloff in school progress.
A Stanford University study showed that learning loss suffered by students during pandemic restrictions could result in lower incomes throughout their lifetime.
"The pandemic has had devastating effects in many areas, but none are as potentially severe as those on education," the study's author, Eric A. Hanushek, wrote in its conclusion. "There is overwhelming evidence that students in school during the closure period and during the subsequent adjustments to the pandemic are achieving at significantly lower levels than would have been expected without the pandemic."
The study, entitled "The Economic Cost of the Pandemic," analyzed National Assessment of Educational Progress data and found that between 2019 and 2022, test scores in math and English dropped an average of eight points across the country. The drastic drop came after nearly two decades of progress, the study noted, erasing all the gains in test scores made between 2000 and 2019.
Hanushek notes that while most policymakers and the media have focused solely on the pandemic's impact on test scores, the loss in student achievements could have severe economic repercussions. According to the study, students enrolled in schools during pandemic restrictions will face an average of a two to nine percent drop in lifetime earnings, resulting in states facing a 0.6 to 2.9 percent drop in total GDP.
"At the extreme, California is estimated to have lost $1.3 trillion because of learning losses during the pandemic. These losses are permanent unless a state’s schools can get better than their pre-pandemic levels," the study reads.
Unless schools are able to make up for the declines, students enrolled in schools during the pandemic will enter the workforce with lower cognitive skills needed to succeed in a constantly evolving economy.
"Extensive research demonstrates a simple fact: those with higher achievement and greater cognitive skills earn more," the study reads. "The evidence suggests that the value of higher achievement persists across a student’s entire work life."
The study notes that the "United States rewards skills more than almost all other developed countries," something that will hamper current students' ability to navigate a "technologically driven economy where workers are continually adjusting to new jobs and new ways of doing things."
Hanushek concludes that while the responsibility for the losses does not solely fall on schools, it will be up to them to lead the effort towards recovering lost skills. However, the study warns that efforts so far have been insufficient to make up the gap.
#3
No mention about the home-schooled; Mrs. Ret’s dance instructor and his wife home-school both of their kids; by his own admission after watching videos of similarly-aged kids/grandkids of 2 of his students he was floored at the huge gap between his kids and the others. Of note: his wife insists on keeping their kids isolated from everybody; even grandparents who live only a couple miles away. Unless fully masked. Yeah she is also hard core vegan. I think her six pack is missing a few bottles.
Kids will suffer forever.
[ZeroHedge] An earthquake rattled parts of Northern California on Sunday for the second time in two weeks. The 5.4-magnitude quake was centered about 30 miles south of Eureka. On Dec. 20, a 6.4-magnitude earthquake also struck near Eureka.
Now one quake prediction research firm warned that the next big one could be imminent.
On Monday morning, Quake Predictions published a warning that read for the next two days -- there is a "dangerous situation" of the likelihood of a 7.0-magnitude "in the San Francisco Bay to NW of Los Angeles area."
The warning comes after two sizeable quakes hit Northern California in less than two weeks.
Sunday morning's earthquake was described as "more violent this time," Rio Dell Mayor Debra Garnes told CNN in an interview.
"It was shorter but more violent. My refrigerator moved two feet. Things came out of the refrigerator. There's a crack in my wall from the violence of it," Garnes said.
California has an average of five earthquakes per year with magnitudes between 5 and 6, according to LATimes. And the latest shakings might suggest a long overdue big quake could be nearing.
48 hour warning - (Dangerous situation) - WARNING: 7.0 earthquake is likely in the San Francisco Bay to NW of Los Angeles area 01/02 to 01/03- (huge quake signal just hit California) https://t.co/VMyuA1uw32pic.twitter.com/goGyalmLFc
#2
Jury is still out on prediction. Some experts also say that lots of minor quakes actually increase the probability of a larger event as a "grease the skids" type of mechanism.
About the best anyone can do is have a good plan in mind and resources aimed at the plan knowing that this is a "when" not "if" scenario.
Oh..and move out of CA for a host of reasons...this is but one
#7
The "Your luck is due to change" argument makes professional g@mbl3rs cringe. Trained statisticians nod in agreement but don't have the emperical experience to wince.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
01/03/2023 15:25 Comments ||
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#8
Maybe that ocean front property I bought in the 1980s will finally pay off.
#9
I worked in Richmond from 2007 til 2015. It seems like there were a couple of noticeable ones per year. The worst I ever felt was on the 7th floor of a hotel in LA. I was asleep and thought that the magic fingers on my bed had been turned on. I then realized that it wasn’t that type of hotel.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
01/03/2023 20:36 Comments ||
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Posted by: M. Murcek ||
01/03/2023 10:07 Comments ||
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#2
The problem I have with ZH and similar sites is that they're saying three things:
1- The dollar is doomed
2- Therefore you should buy gold and
3- We happen to have some gold lying around that we would be willing to sell you for only $50 over spot.
In other words, it's a sales pitch.
Posted by: Matt ||
01/03/2023 16:51 Comments ||
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#3
ZH has lots of commenters who are poor in everything except antisemitism and blaming America for everything wrong with their own crappy countries.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
01/03/2023 17:05 Comments ||
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It’s generally useful to know that the important people ae telling each other.
[KhaamaPress] Based on the central economic and business research centre, the world economy is headed for a recession in 2023. Similar research by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that one-third of the global economy will be in recession this year.
Kristalina Georgieva, IMF Chief, in an interview with CBS on Sunday morning, said that the world would face a challenging year as the three major world economies are experiencing a slowdown, the United States, China and Europe.
"We expect one-third of the world economy to be in recession. even in countries that are not in a recession, it would feel like a recession for hundreds of millions of people," she added.
REASONS FOR GLOBAL ECONOMIC RECESSION
The reasons for a global recession have been enumerated, like the COVID-19 Pandemic, the Geopolitical contests among great powers, the Ukraine war, and the rise in interest rates in response to higher inflation.
First, the spread of the novel Corona Virus has been considered a significant damage to the world economy despite humanitarian losses and desperation. The COVID-19 Pandemic has spread with alarming speed, infecting millions and bringing economic activity to a near-standstill as countries imposed tight restrictions on movement to control the spread of the Virus.
Such a scenario led to the most significant economic shock the world has experienced in decades.
Second, the growing geopolitical competition between the world’s great powers diverted their attention away from working together and toward competing instead, which further hampered the state of the global economy. As a result, increased geopolitical risk has been a consistent characteristic of international politics throughout the past two decades. Consequently, the global economy and financial markets have completely ignored it.
Even though there is competition between China and the United States, the development of populist rulers in Latin America, and tensions in the Middle East, businesses and investors have continued their operations because they believe the economic repercussions will be contained.
Third, Russia-Ukraine is another major factor. This pattern is expected to be broken due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which will cut off the world’s 11th-biggest economy and one of the largest producers of commodities from the global market. The immediate worldwide ramifications of tighter sanctions will be more outstanding prices, slower GDP, and some disruption in financial markets. These effects will be seen immediately.
Fourth, the ratio between inflation and interest rates is inversely proportional. People tend to borrow more from banks and put less money away when interest rates are low. The supply and demand for money in the economy will increase. Consequently, the commodities’ prices go up, contributing to overall price inflation.
The COVID-19 Pandemic, geopolitical rivalry among the great powers, the war between Russia and Ukraine, and inflation are thought to be the primary causes of the global economic crash.
[ZeroHedge] Samuel Greg, a Distinguished Fellow in Political Economy at the American Institute for Economic Research and author, most recently, of The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World, has written a good piece for the Spectator about the WEF on the eve of Davos 2023.
He argues that if you care about liberty, democracy and national self-determination, it’s perfectly rational to be concerned about the influence of Klaus Schwab and his followers. Not because they are the puppeteers controlling politicians across the West, but because their ideas permeate the upper echelons of the global elite. In particular, Schwab’s belief in the top-down, technocratic form of government exemplified by the EU.
It wields no formal political power and can’t make anyone do anything. Nonetheless, since its founding in 1971, the WEF has become an organisation which embodies supreme confidence in the imperative of a particular type of person running the world from the top-down. In his famous 2004 essay entitled ‘Dead Souls’, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called this prototype ‘Davos Man’.
A clever moniker that neither Schwab nor the WEF have ever succeeded in shaking off, Davos Man was Huntington’s short-hand description of “academics, international civil servants and executives in global companies, as well as successful high-technology entrepreneurs” who thought alike and tended to view national loyalties and boundaries “as residues from the past”. Davos Man also looked with undisguised disdain, Huntington suggested, upon those who weren’t getting with the programme – whatever the content of the programme happened to be.
Therein lies the deepest problem with the WEF. It’s one thing for people to come together in international settings to discuss problems, share insights, and network. Business leaders, politicians, and NGO-types do this all the time.
It’s another thing for an outfit such as the WEF to decide that the time has come to rearrange the world from the top-down and remake the planet in a corporatist image. The ideal for which Schwab is aiming, judging from his speeches and writings, is something akin to a globalised EU, with its supranational and ingrained bureaucratic ways being transposed to an international level, and the levers of power vested in the hands of reliable Davos men and women.
In short, it’s easy to caricature the WEF and Schwab as something akin to Ian Fleming’s fictious Spectre and its criminal-mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Yet the agenda now being pursued at settings such as Davos is sufficiently alarming that anyone who believes in preserving things like liberty, sovereignty, and the decentralisation of power should be concerned.
[WSJ] Are Vaccines Fueling New Covid Variants? The virus appears to be evolving in ways that evade immunity.
Prior to Omicron’s emergence in November 2021, there were only four variants of concern: Alpha, Beta, Delta and Gamma. Only Alpha and Delta caused surges of infections globally. But Omicron has begotten numerous descendents, many of which have popped up in different regions of the world curiously bearing some of the same mutations.
“Such rapid and simultaneous emergence of multiple variants with enormous growth advantages is unprecedented,” a Dec. 19 study in the journal Nature notes. Under selective evolutionary pressures, the virus appears to have developed mutations that enable it to transmit more easily and escape antibodies elicited by vaccines and prior infection.
The same study posits that immune imprinting may be contributing to the viral evolution. Vaccines do a good job of training the immune system to remember and knock out the original Wuhan variant. But when new and markedly different strains come along, the immune system responds less effectively.
Bivalent vaccines that target the Wuhan and BA.5 variants (or breakthrough infections with the latter) prompt the immune system to produce antibodies that target viral regions the two strains have in common. In Darwinian terms, mutations that allow the virus to evade common antibodies win out—they make it “fitter.”
XBB has evolved to elude antibodies induced by the vaccines and breakthrough infections. Hence, the Nature study suggests, “current herd immunity and BA.5 vaccine boosters may not efficiently prevent the infection of Omicron convergent variants.”
A New England Journal of Medicine study published last month provides more evidence of the vulnerability caused by immune imprinting. Neutralizing antibodies of people who had received the bivalent were 26 times as high against the original Wuhan variant as they were against XBB and four times as high as they were against Omicron and the BA.5 variant.
Similarly, a study this month in the journal Cell found that antibody levels of people who had received four shots were 145 times as high against the original Wuhan strain as the XBB variant. A bivalent booster only slightly increased antibodies against XBB. Experts nevertheless claim that boosters improve protection against XBB. That’s disinformation, to use their favored term.
A Cleveland Clinic study that tracked its healthcare workers found that bivalent vaccines reduced the risk of getting infected by 30% while the BA.5 variant was spreading. But, as the study explained, the reason might be that workers who were more cautious—i.e., more likely to wear N95 masks and avoid large gatherings—may have also been more likely to get boosted.
Notably, workers who had received more doses were at higher risk of getting sick. Those who received three more doses were 3.4 times as likely to get infected as the unvaccinated, while those who received two were only 2.6 times as likely.
“This is not the only study to find a possible association with more prior vaccine doses and higher risk of COVID-19,” the authors noted. “We still have a lot to learn about protection from COVID-19 vaccination, and in addition to a vaccine’s effectiveness it is important to examine whether multiple vaccine doses given over time may not be having the beneficial effect that is generally assumed.”
Two years ago, vaccines were helpful in reducing severe illness, particularly among the elderly and those with health risks like diabetes and obesity. But experts refuse to concede that boosters have yielded diminishing benefits and may even have made individuals and the population as a whole more vulnerable to new variants like XBB.
It might not be a coincidence that XBB surged this fall in Singapore, which has among the highest vaccination and booster rates in the world. Over the past several weeks a XBB strain has become predominant in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts, making up about three-quarters of virus samples that have been genetically sequenced. The variant has been slower to take off in other regions, making up only 6% of the Midwest and about 20% in the South. The Northeast is also the most vaccinated and boosted region in the country.
Hospitalizations in the Northeast have risen too, but primarily among those over 70. One reason may be that the T-Cell response—the cavalry riding behind the front-line antibodies—is weaker in older people. The virus can’t evade T-Cells elicited by vaccines and infections as easily as it can antibodies. Because of T-Cells, younger people are still well-protected against new variants.
Another reason may be that monoclonal antibodies are ineffective against XBB, and many older people who catch Covid can’t take the antiviral Paxlovid because they have medical conditions such as severe kidney disease or take drugs that interfere with it.
The Biden administration’s monomaniacal focus on vaccines over new treatments has left the highest-risk Americans more vulnerable to new variants. Why doesn’t that seem to worry the experts?
Posted by: NoMoreBS ||
01/03/2023 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[15 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
[FoxNews] The Border Patrol had more than 2.2 million encounters with illegal crossers between ports of entry on the Southwest border in fiscal 2022.
A recent report from the DHS Inspector General indicates that most of the illegal crossers are not put in detention facilities or expelled under Title 42, but rather are processed for outcomes allowing them to be released into the United States to wait for immigration hearings. This has overwhelmed the immigration courts.
The immigration court backlog was 1,262,765 cases at the end of fiscal 2020, which was the last full fiscal year of the previous administration. Under the current administration, it has risen to 2,023,441 cases as of the end of November 2022.
Almost 800,000 of them have submitted asylum applications and are waiting for an asylum hearing. The average wait from when an application is filed to when an applicant’s case will be heard is 1,572 days, or 4.3 years.
Moreover, many others have been allowed to enter the United States to wait for an asylum hearing but have not filed an asylum application yet. And the number of asylum seekers is likely to increase greatly when Title 42 is terminated.
The administration seems to want to deal with this problem by finding faster ways to adjudicate the applications instead of admitting fewer asylum seekers to give the immigration court a chance to catch up.
For instance, on May 28, 2021, the administration announced a new Dedicated Docket which is supposed to expeditiously and fairly make decisions on the immigration cases of newly arrived families who are apprehended between ports of entry at the Southwest Border. INA §1325(a) provides that such entries are crimes subject to imprisonment for up to two years.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says in the announcement that, "Families who have recently arrived should not languish in a multi-year backlog; today’s announcement is an important step for both justice and border security."
He is referring to newly arriving families, not the families who already are languishing in the multi-year backlog.
The announcement concludes that while "the goal of this process is to decide cases expeditiously, fairness will not be compromised."
Dedicated Dockets are not new or fair.
The Obama and Trump administrations also had Dedicated Dockets for newly arriving migrants to prevent them from having to wait a long time for a hearing.
The Vera Institute of Justice claims that as prior efforts to use expedited dockets have demonstrated, Dedicated Dockets do not provide due process. Court records for a two-year period during the Obama administration show that it was rare for an unrepresented family in Dedicated Docket proceedings to file the papers needed to seek asylum or other forms of relief from deportation. Only 1 in 15 (6.5 percent) managed to do this without representation.
According to a recent TRAC report, more than 110,000 cases have been assigned to the current administration’s Dedicated Docket, and nearly 40,000 of them have been completed. The vast majority (83%) of the completed cases were closed within 300 days from the date of receiving a Notice to Appear in removal proceedings.
But a price must be paid for doing this. Georgetown Law School Professor Paul Schmidt points out that when Dedicated Docket judges are not available to hear cases on the general docket, it places extra burdens on their judicial colleagues who are handling the general docket cases.
And taking judges away from the general docket to serve on the Dedicated Docket also reduces the number of judges who are available for doing cases that would reduce the backlog.
TRAC found that only 34% of the families whose cases have been completed had representation, and few families without representation have been able to complete the paperwork required for filing an asylum application.
Overall, only 2,894 out of 39,187 families who had hearings in fiscal 2022 were granted asylum. The cases in which asylum was granted represent just 7.4% of the completed cases.
The Vera Institute of Justice would address this problem by providing representation for every migrant in Dedicated Docket proceedings.
Is that even possible? And if it is possible, who is going to pay for it? INA §1229a(b)(4), which provides that migrants have the "privilege of being represented" in removal proceedings, specifies that it must be "at no expense to the Government."
Frankly, I think the main problem is that the administration is flooding our already overwhelmed immigration court with a tsunami of illegal crossers who claim that they are asylum seekers.
The attempt to relieve the immigration court's backlog crisis with a Dedicated Docket didn’t work for the Obama administration and it isn’t working for the current administration either.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Gateway] Dr. Zeke Emanuel, father of Obamacare and death panels, appeared on MSNBC this week to discuss the new Covid variant spreading across the US.
