Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Great Resetters

 Unresettled,


John Ward looks at the "Great Resetters":  Precisely what defines a Resetter?
​  Starting from a database of 37 million companies (he likes a challenge) Glattfelder used multivariate criteria to boiled off the number to just 1,318 (1) had ties to two or more other companies (2) had an average connection to 20 and (3) collectively owned huge chunks, through shares, the majority of the world’s large blue chip firms – accounting for 60 per cent of global business income.
​  ​The more one boils, the smaller the numbers get…with a top ten controlling four-fifths of everything everywhere. They are:
1. Barclays plc 2. Capital Group Companies Inc. 3. FMR Corporation 4. AXA 5. State Street Corporation 6. JPMorgan Chase & Co. 7. Legal & General Group plc 8. Vanguard Group Inc. 9. UBS AG 10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc.
​  ​Also present in the top 25 are Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs.
Yup, they’re all engaged in bancassurance, and they’re mainly Anglo-American. There are no big manufacturing, energy or pharmafia corporations in the Top 49. There is just one distributor in the shape of Wal-Mart at N° 15.
T​  ​his is the key insight I offer on this data today: if you want to know what marks out a Great Resetter from the rest, it’s this: they don’t make anything – they simply move stuff around – but they do control the ownership of everything
​  ​This makes them incredibly vulnerable to a global va​l​uation crash….but the only people truly able to engineer a ‘Reset’.
That’s what I call money, means and motive. But would they ever try such a dastardly thing?
https://therealslog.com/2021/02/17/explosive-string-pullers-audited/

Critics Must Be Silenced for Billionaires to Keep Profiting From Pandemic, Robert F Kennedy Jr.​
​  ​On Feb. 15, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post published a Feb. 11 Associated Press article applauding the censorship of those who criticize the government’s pandemic response policies.
​  ​The lockdown has netted Bezos $70 billion since its start. If you are Bezos, a permanent lockdown is a goldmine.
​  ​Bill Gates, meanwhile, has made $20 billion from the lockdown he previously war-gamed and then cheer-led. His strategy has included emasculating the independent media — the most likely sources of the sort of vigorous journalism that might otherwise scrutinize his self interest in the polices he helped successfully engineer for the rest of us.
​  ​Gates used millions in grants to transform the once proudly unbridled The Guardian into his personal newsletter. With $250 million, he purchased immunity from criticism by news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde and the Center for Investigative Reporting...
​  ​The mainstream network news shows, including CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox have put COVID Terror, Vaccines Salvation and the obligatory shaming of dissidents on a 24-hour loop with each segment (and I use this term in every sense of the word) with pharmaceutical advertisements.
​  ​These outlets have turned their weekly talk shows into fawning hagiographies for Gates’ regular satellite tours in which credulous, obsequious Sunday morning talk show hosts lob softball medical questions to a billionaire with no public health training.
​  ​Nobody ever asks Gates or his mini-me, Tony Fauci, why they chose to spend tens of billions in taxpayer dollars on speculative vaccines and zero dollars investigating the many off-the-shelf, off-patent medications that have demonstrated extraordinary success in the hands of private doctors — medications that might have ended the pandemic a year ago.
​  ​The media, which has enabled this global hostage crisis, is arguably the most consequential criminal enterprise in human history. As Rahm Emmanuel observed, “never let a good crisis go to waste.”
​ ​Gates and Fauci have demonstrated that by controlling the media, billionaires and their government cronies can prolong a crisis forever and accumulate unprecedented wealth and power over humanity.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/billionaires-profiting-pandemic/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=2b9af66c-cba0-4577-b22e-491d5cbe62b0

​Glenn Greenwald:​ (Military-industrial-billionaire-deep-state-social-media-complex is threatened by inadequate censorship)
​  ​For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.”
​  ​The Committee’s Chair, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of the Subcommittees holding the hearings, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), said in a joint statement that the impetus was “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud.” They argued that “these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety,” adding: “This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation.”...
​  ​The power to control the flow of information and the boundaries of permissible speech is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. It is a power as intoxicating as it is menacing. When it comes to the internet, our primary means of communicating with one another, that power nominally rests in the hands of private corporations in Silicon Valley.
​  ​But increasingly, the Democratic-controlled government and their allies in the corporate media are realizing that they can indirectly and through coercion seize and wield that power for themselves. The First Amendment is implicated by these coercive actions as much as if Congress enacted laws explicitly mandating censorship of their political opponents.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure-on-tech

​Tom sends this historical parallel about the threat to Roman oligarchs by a populist Tribune, Tiberius Gracchus (RIP).
​  ​Tiberius Gracchus was a Roman politician and official in the Second Century BC. Gracchus was a member of the populares, a faction that sided with the plebian – the common people – against the conservative aristocratic patricians who had traditionally held power in Rome. At the time of Gracchus the small independent farmers of the Roman Republic were increasingly feeling economic pressure from the concentration of public lands into giant estates held by aristocrats. Rome, a nation whose strength had also been built on a class of free, independent men was now increasingly owned and controlled by a strata of oligarchs.
  Tiberius Gracchus proposed reforms to break up the giant estates and redistribute the land to average Romans. He was vehemently opposed to the aristocrats and made no secret of his intention to destroy their power. He was aggressive. He was loud. He threatened the entire power structure of those who believed the Republic belonged to them.
​https://andmagazine.com/talk/2021/02/09/killing-the-republic-trump-as-tiberius-gracchus/

White House Enlists Social Media Giants to Suppress Vaccine ‘Misinformation’
​  ​As concerns about vaccine safety grow, the Biden administration is enlisting Big Tech’s help in removing social media posts that deviate from “officially distributed” COVID-19 information.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/white-house-enlists-social-media-suppress-vaccine-misinformation/

We have already seen COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths declining for 6 weeks.
 It's not from vaccines, or lockdowns, and it's not from vitamin-D. 
The  "second wave" is burning out. Over half of the people in the US have had COVID (private communication from medical epidemiologists), most with no test performed.
Johns Hopkins Prof Sees US Herd Immunity By April
​  ​"Experts should level with the public about the good news..." exclaims Makary (who is likely on the verge of getting canceled), as he cites the "miracle" 77% drop in cases over the past 6 weeks and that testing likely only captured about 10% - 25% of infections; he extrapolates that to saying 55% of Americans have natural immunity (and add to that the 15% of Americans that have been vaccinated). Additionally, he cites Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, who believes that 250mm doses of the vaccine will have be delivered to 150mm people by the end of March.
"There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection.
As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected.
At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life."
​  ​Critically, Makary explains the recent plunge in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths is not policy-related (no matter how much the politicians and their media lackeys push that narrative):
 "...the consistent and rapid decline in daily cases since Jan. 8 can be explained only by natural immunity. Behavior didn’t suddenly improve over the holidays; Americans traveled more over Christmas than they had since March. Vaccines also don’t explain the steep decline in January. Vaccination rates were low and they take weeks to kick in."
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/johns-hopkins-prof-sees-us-herd-immunity-april-fauci-fearmongers-2022-return-normality

​Finally the answer to why Gardasil reactions are so inexplicably bad, an "unlisted" ingredient. ("Contamination" is such an ugly word.)​
New Study: Gardasil HPV Vaccine Contains Chemical Used in Biological Warfare
PMSF, a nerve agent, is used to manufacture HPV vaccines, but it is not supposed to be in the final product. 
However, new research documents its presence in Merck’s Gardasil and Gardasil 9 HPV vaccines.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/gardasil-hpv-vaccine-contains-chemical-biological-warfare/

There is loss of faith in "authoritative" institutions for good reason, and those reasons must be stamped out!​
​Cook includes details of how Brazilian vitamin-D treatment study was assured to "fail", based upon design and facts already known.​
By putting Big Pharma’s patents before patients, doctors will further erode trust in experts​,  Jonathan Cook
​  ​In this regard, let us consider my own area of specialist interest: Israel and Palestine. Jewish settlers in the West Bank have been beating up and shooting at Palestinian farmers trying to work their land or harvest their olives for more than half a century. It is one of the main practical means by which the settlers implement an ethnic cleansing policy designed to drive Palestinians off their farmland.
​  ​The settlers have thereby expanded their “municipal jurisdictions” to cover more than 40 per cent of the West Bank, territory under Israeli occupation that was supposed to form the backbone of any future Palestinian state. This settler violence is part of the reason why Palestinian statehood looks impossible today.
​  ​But until a decade or so ago – when phone cameras meant that recorded visual evidence became commonplace and irrefutable – you would rarely have had a way to know about those attacks. Correspondents in Jerusalem had decided on your behalf th​​at you did not need to know.​..
  All this is by way of a very long introduction to a follow-up post on an article I wrote last week about the failure of doctors to press governments to finance proper, large-scale studies on the treatment of hospitalised Covid patients with Vitamin D – an important immunological hormone created by sunlight on our skin.The role of Vitamin D on our general wellbeing and health has come under increasing scrutiny over the past two decades after it was discovered that it is the only vitamin for which there is a receptor in every cell in our body.
​  ​Long before Covid, researchers had begun to understand that Vitamin D’s role in regulating our immune systems was chronically under-appreciated by most doctors...
​  ​Today we know that many people in northern latitudes, especially the elderly, are deficient or severely deficient in Vitamin D, even those taking these low-level supplements. In fact, it would be true to say there is a global plague of Vitamin D deficiency, even in many sunny countries where people have lost the habit of spending time outdoors or shield themselves from the sun.
​  ​The doctors and researchers who have been gradually piecing together the critically important role of Vitamin D are the medical equivalent of the dissident journalists who try to present a realistic picture of what goes on in Israel-Palestine.
​  ​Because Big Pharma can make no serious money from Vitamin D, researchers into the sun hormone have struggled to raise funds for their work and have mostly been denied corporate platforms from which to publicise the stunning findings they have made.​..
   Rather, the opportunity for Big Pharma to develop a magic bullet to treat Covid has led to an intensified campaign to discredit Vitamin D research.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2021-02-22/doctors-vitamin-d-erode-trust/

​Resettling​

Monday, February 22, 2021

Texas Warmed Up

 Warm Well Wishers,


  Jenny and I are fine. I guess the news cycle ended Thursday, because Texas warmed up Friday, and we hit the road to Yoakum that afternoon when the roads were safe from being driven on for several hours. Our duplex in Austin did not have water when we left, or when we returned after a big Saturday workday in Yoakum, but we took showers in Yoakum. That modest town was almost unscathed, though it had not gotten the initial ice storm 2/10 - 2/11/21. One outside pipe burst, but was heard to burst Friday by the electrical work crew. That was quickly dealt with, capped off by the plumber they called, who had done a lot of work on the house last year. 

  Our sons Steve and Jim came down from Dallas and Ft. Worth late Friday night, and we did a lot of tree work and cleaning up of the grounds..
Jim cut down lots of big limbs and we dut them up into firewood and brush piles laid out neatly by the street.

  The avocado trees were hit really hard. I've never had somebody tell me their avocado tree survived 8 degrees F. We unwrapped the plastic tents we had created around them and put that neatly away in the shop.
We will see over the next month if any of them shows signs of life sprouting out from below.

  The Mexican avocado seedlings I have been growing for a little over a year got covered in ice by the initial ice storm, and stayed in it for a few days, but 

we put them in the garage before the temperatures dropped down below the mid 20s, and they are doing pretty well. 6 to 8 of them are looking like we could just put them in the ground, though I did just pot them up into big pots a few weeks ago. I have ordered at least one replacement avocado tree, and will likely order another variety, and get as many other replacement varieties as I can from Texas growers.
The roster might shift a bit. We'll see over the next month or so.

  The Texas power grid was seconds to minutes from collapse, which is estimated would have taken at least 8 days to bring back online. That sure would have been worse. A very few professionals had to act quickly and decisively. They did. They will never be thanked, I suspect.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/texas-was-seconds-and-minutes-complete-disaster

  Clarity came to Texans last week. It was clear that things were much worse with power, water and gas infrastructure than people realized, and everybody was affected. It all needs major fixing which will take a long time and be expensive. It may be politically unifying, for awhile...
​  ​Hardship like what Texas is going through right now can bring clarity. And in the teeth of this winter storm, the entire energy industry, with its high-powered lobbyists and its billions in taxpayer subsidies, is beginning to look like every other elite institution in America: a corrupt and parasitic enterprise whose failures come at the expense of ordinary Americans—in this case, people who are now trying to stay alive in their own homes.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/18/the-failure-of-the-texas-power-grid-is-worse-than-you-think/

Cold Truth: The Texas Freeze is a Catastrophe of the Free Market
By James K. Galbrait​h​
​  ​Under New Deal-style regulations, electric utilities got a rate-of-return on their investment, governed by a utility commission that set and stabilized prices. It was (in principle) enough to cover construction and maintenance and a fair profit, not so much as to amount to monopoly profits; utilities were a stable but dull business, municipal socialism. Economists complained: there was an incentive, they said, for such utilities to over-invest. The bigger their operations, the higher their total costs, the more they could extract from the rate-setters.
​  ​What to do? Economists proposed a free market: let generating companies compete to deliver power to the consumer through the common electrical grid...
​...​Electricity isn’t like that. Supply has to exactly equal demand every single minute of every single day. If it doesn’t, the entire system can fail.
This system, therefore, had three vulnerabilities. 
First, it created an incentive for cut-throat competition, to provide power in the cheapest possible way, which meant with machinery, wells, meters, pipes, and also windmills that were not insulated against extreme cold – a rarity but not unknown, even in Texas. 
Second, it left prices free to fluctuate. 
Third, it assured that when prices rose the most, that would be at exactly those moments when the demand for power was the greatest.
In 2002, under Governor Rick Perry, Texas deregulated its electricity system.​..
 Enter the deep freeze of 2021. 
Demand went up. Supply went down. Natural gas froze up at the wells, in the pipes, and at the generating plants. Unweatherized windmills also went off-line, a small part of the story. Since Texas is disconnected from the rest of the country, no reserves could be imported, and given the cold everywhere, there would have been none available anyway. 
​ ​There came a point, on Sunday, February 14 or the next day, when demand so outstripped supply that the entire Texas grid came within minutes of a collapse that, we are told, would have taken months to repair.
​  As this happened, the price mechanism failed completely. Wholesale prices rose a hundred-fold – but retail prices, under contract, did not, except for the unlucky customers of Griddy, who got socked with bills for thousands of dollars each day.​..
  When the lights go off and the heat goes down, water freezes and that was the next phase of the calamity. For when water freezes, pipes burst, and when pipes burst the water supply cannot keep up with the demand.​...
  Rick Perry (no longer Governor)has reassured us that as Texans we’re prepared to sacrifice ourselves to avoid the curse of socialism. But it’s too late now. In the aftermath of this debacle, we will return to New Deal-style municipal socialism, or this disaster of power, water, and gas will happen again. 
​https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/cold-truth-the-texas-freeze-is-a-catastrophe-of-the-free-market

Feeling Neighborly

Thursday, February 18, 2021

Real Threats In Fake World

 Brainwashed,


Opening The CIAs Can of Worms, Edward Curtain  Thanks Wiggs [attacks and deplatforming on RFK Jr, self-limiting journalistic dissenters]
​T​he CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime.​..We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.
​  ​Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.
​  ​For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks, among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in “courting the Compatible Left” since right wingers were already in the Agency’s pocket.
https://off-guardian.org/2021/02/14/opening-the-cias-can-of-worms/

​After being deplatformed on Instagram, and libeled by the New York Time:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Chairman of Children’s Health Defense, said:
“Every statement I put on Instagram was sourced from a government database, from peer-reviewed publications and from carefully confirmed news stories. None of my posts were false. Facebook, the pharmaceutical industry and its captive regulators use the term ‘vaccine misinformation’ as a euphemism for any factual assertion that departs from official pronouncements about vaccine health and safety, whether true or not. This kind of censorship is counterproductive if our objective is a safe and effective vaccine supply.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/robert-kenney-jr-instagram-removal-account/

​  ​Conspiracies for good and for evil do exist now, as they have from time immemorial, Matthew Ehret writes. The only question is which intention do you want to devote your life towards?
​  ​If you are starting to feel like forces controlling the governments of the west are out to get you, then it is likely that you are either a paranoid nut job, or a stubborn realist.
​  ​Either way, it means that you have some major problems on your hands.​..
Nancy Pelosi’s official biographer Molly Ball, recently penned a scandalous Time Magazine article entitled 
‘The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Elections’ which admitted to this conspiracy saying:
​  “Even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream- a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” (Lest you think that this was a subversion of democracy, Ball informs us that “they were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”)
​  ​Another conclusion you might come to is that many of the political figures whom you believed were serving those who elected them into office, actually serve the interests of a clique of technocrats and billionaires lusting over the deconstruction of western civilization under something called “a Great Reset”.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/02/15/how-conspiracy-theorizing-may-soon-get-you-labelled-a-domestic-terrorist/

​  The "incompetence defense"; (These guys/gals just do as they are told, and are comfortable saying their lines with straight faces, no matter how inane.)​ Thanks Wiggs, and Our Girl Helen of DesTroy
America’s future is in the hands of woefully inept cretins at a time when creativity and innovation are needed more than ever
​  ​The US’ future looks grim indeed in the face of a ‘Great Reset’ proposed by the same powers that steered it into a deadly economic quagmire. Why are Americans allowing those who broke their world the privilege of ‘fixing’ it?
​  ​Americans with more power and connections than sense have rushed forward over the last year, attempting to seize the right to ‘fix’ a society broken by shockingly stupid responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entire generations are being rendered suicidally depressed, unemployable, hopelessly alienated, and worse, while the likelihood that the current generation of children will mature into functional adults is rapidly shrinking. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for such a heterogenous population, and this moment calls for an unprecedented degree of creativity and imagination if we are to survive as a society.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/515745-wef-biden-failures-future-destruction/

​Uh, so protesters did not kill that capital cop with a fire extinguisher? That was just made up? 
He was fine at home that night, then died mysteriously? (Did he have a COVID vaccine?)
The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot  , Glenn Greenwald
Insisting on factual accuracy does not make one an apologist for the protesters. False reporting is never justified, especially to inflate threat and fear levels.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims

No "conspiracy" here, nothing to see. Those people were well enough to be discharged and the nursing homes were the only place they could go to free up hospital beds. The governor had to order it. Nobody could have known this would happen. You'd have done the same thing...
Cuomo blames ‘politics,’ fails to address nursing home cover-up admission
An unapologetic Gov. Cuomo doubled down on a litany of past excuses Monday as he blamed “politics” for the spiraling scandal that’s engulfed his administration since The Post revealed his top aide admitted they hid from elected officials and the public the true number of nursing-home residents killed by COVID-19
https://nypost.com/2021/02/15/cuomo-fails-to-address-nursing-home-cover-up-admission/

​Well, maybe...
​  ​The biggest political scandal in America right now is playing out in New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo is in a lot of trouble — and rightly so. The Democratic governor did not merely wildly mismanage his state’s response to the COVID emergency, while netting himself a lucrative book deal and an Emmy. He did something worse.
​  ​In the middle of a public health emergency, he used his office to help one of his largest political donors shield itself from legal consequences as 15,000 nursing home residents died from COVID — and then he and his administration underreported that death toll, helping the same donor.

https://www.dailyposter.com/p/cuomo-gate-a-nixonian-scandal-is

​Texas' one nuclear power plant, the always-ill-fated South Texas Nuclear Project, which usually powers 2 million homes, is shut down for winter weather, because it would never face winter weather on the Texas Gulf Coast, so it was never winterized.​ (Our Fukushima?)
https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/texas-failed-winterize-nuclear-plant-leading-reactor-shut-down

Texas Freeze Raises Price ofCharging a Tesla to $900 
(Well, it would be funny if it really did, tee, hee, hee...)
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Texas-Freeze-Raises-Cost-Of-Charging-A-Tesla-To-900.html

Facebook vs Australia. What are the odds on this showdown? Are there some odds? 
Facebook seems to feel it has the upper hand, but does it? 
Australia wants to indict executives, not the faceless corporation. 
Maybe the executives are just acting out of desperation.
https://meanjin.com.au/blog/the-deplatforming-of-australia/

​It's about time, time to get finished with COVID-phobia.
The cheap, generic anti-parasite drug Ivermectin finally is to undergo rigorous clinical trials in a first-world nation for use in fighting COVID-19.  Japan has been hit with a second wave of COVID cases, and as a result, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (population: 13.8 million) is looking for approaches that could minimize stress on available hospital beds.​..
​  The Tokyo government hopes to support the trials using some beds at metropolitan and public hospitals. Ivermectin will be given to patients with mild symptoms, comparing their response with those receiving a placebo...
​  ​Japan has a large and thriving pharmaceutical industry as well as a respected medical research capability.  In fact, Ivermectin was developed in Japan by Kitasato University professor emeritus Satoshi Omura, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his feat.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/tokyo_metropolitan_government_plans_clinical_testing_of_ivermectin_for_covid_therapy.html

Why politicians and doctors keep ignoring the medical research on Vitamin D and Covid​ , Jonathan Cook​
​  ​It is probably not a good idea to write while in the grip of anger. But I am struggling to suppress my emotions about a wasted year, during which politicians and many doctors have ignored a growing body of evidence suggesting that Vitamin D can play a critically important role in the prevention and treatment of Covid-19.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2021-02-15/lives-lost-covid-vitamin-d/

​Brad and Jeremy bith sent versions of this molecular biology analysis of plausible effects of the COVID-19 spike protein, and also the m-RNA based "vaccines" designed to stimulate immune response against the virus. Spike protein​ segments are the critical factor. They seem to be able to cause abnormal folding of intracellular proteins into "prion" configurations. "Prions", abnormally folded proteins, are what cause "Mad Cow Disease" and the Jacob-Kreuzfeld human equivalent. These configurations cause other pieces of the same protein to also fold abnormally, and this shows up as protein clogs , "amyloid plaques" building up, and making nerve cells and regions of the nervous system malfunction and gradually worsen, as in Alzheimers. 
I am not endorsing this hypothesis, but merely considering it, keeping it in mind.
  The initial binding could be between spike proteins on the surface of the cell transfected by the vaccine and ACE2 on the surface of an adjacent cell. The resulting complex may become internalized. Alternatively, the interaction could initially take place in the cytoplasm of a cell that makes ACE2 and has been transfected with the vaccine RNA coding for the spike protein. The interaction is quite concerning given the belief that the virus causing COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, is a bioweapon [10,11] and it is possible that the viral spike protein may have been designed to cause prion disease​...
​  ​Finally, others working in the field have published additional support that COVID-19 vaccines could potentially induce prion disease. Authors [18] found prion related sequences in the COVID-19 spike protein which were not found in related coronaviruses. Others [19] have reported a case of prion disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, initially occurring in a man with COVID-19.
https://scivisionpub.com/pdfs/covid19-rna-based-vaccines-and-the-risk-of-prion-disease-1503.pdf

​Brain-Freezed​

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

Texas Freezing Blackout

 Sharing Space Blankets,


​  Texas is cold, colder than anything on record, overall, for this time of year, and snowed-in, which never happens for more than a day here in central Texas. This combination, and the long duration, 6 days already, and counting, make this event an order of magnitude or more beyond the parameters that engineers considered when designing safety measures. Something similar, but milder and more localized happened in the Dallas, Fort Worth area during super bowl 2011, I hear, but I don't recall it. I didn't live there.
  The cost to keep a temperature differential from inside to outside matters in several ways. Texas houses and businesses often pump something like 35 degrees, between 105 outside and 70 inside during the summer, with AC units, which are heat pumps. Heat pumps are pretty efficient. They might use 1 unit of electricity to pump 9 equal energy units of heat outside. Gas burning furnaces and stoves are pretty good. Stoves don't waste any heat. They are unvented heaters. CO2 does build up with lots of burning over a long time. Lots of us lived with unvented heaters for many years in the old days. Gas furnaces won't work when the electricity is out. Stoves will. You may need a match.
  Electric heating is different. It does not pump 9 units of heat for every equal unit of electricity. 
Resistive electric heaters make 1 unit of heat for 1 unit of electricity. Resistive electric heaters take 9 times as much electricity to cover that 35 degree differential, and a lot of us are trying to get 65 degrees inside with 15 degrees outside this week. 
A lot of people need 12 times as much electricity as during summer peak load.
  About 40% of Texas households are currently without electricity. We just had about 20 hours without electricity, after 8 hours without last Thursday evening and night. We are fortunate to have a gas stove, and an older one with a gas pilot light, so we used it and blanketed up overnight, and sweatered up in the daytime. 
We have been able to cook. We have nice fresh produce we harvested ahead of the deadly cold. 
We gave some away, too. Not the spinach. Jenny cooked lovely Saag paneer 2 days ago, and I made spinach omelets with mushroom and cheese sauce today. Still tasting it...
  I carried in frozen rainwater buckets to put in the refrigerator and freezer, which became "the icebox", which was fun to say. 
I put them back outside a while ago when the power came on. They are "recharging". 
​  Without internet, I read most of Charles Hugh Smith's latest book, print version, by a window, A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet. I have other books I still need to read...
  There is a lot of blame being cast in Texas, for political purposes, but the fact is that nobody would have budgeted for something this extreme. Now they will need to. 
  Many natural gas wellheads are frozen and some of the pipelines are not working right in the extreme cold. Remaining natural gas power plants are burning all the gas they can get, and competing with residential users for it. 
A lot of natural gas plants have been shut down in recent years, but they are the only kind of power plant that can ramp up fast to meet changes in electrical generation requirements. Some plants will need to be renovated and brought back online. 
It will cost more most days, but it will provide resilience for times of severe need. Texas has the gas...
  There is no wind or solar electric  power currently online, due to ice storms last week and no thaw since then.
  We got down to 8 degrees F, with a wind, yesterday morning, and 6 F this mo​rning. I've never experienced it getting below 16, and that was the winter of 1983-1984, when every palm tree in Houston died. 
  All of our "cold tolerant" Mexican avocado seedlings, now over a year old, are in the garage in their pots. The coating of ice from Thursday has melted. We put them in there before the temperature dropped below the mid 20s. That's too cold. 
No point killing them all. I just want to see which ones do better.  
  We're not sure at all if any of the 15 Mexican avocado trees in Yoakum will live, though we cut up a roll of white plastic to wrap them with in sub freezing wind Saturday (Thanks Jenny!). We have been making deer-deterrence cages of chicken wire for a month, so that helps hold the wraps, but makes them harder to do and to tie. Jenny and I drove back to Austin after that chore, and harvesting the vegetables. 
The "ghost trees" are pictured below. 
We hope some live, but people are proud of the few that lived through 1983-1984, very proud.


  I'm actually very hopeful for Texas, because this is a big adversity, unanticipated and overwhelming for all Texans, a shared hardship. Political unity of purpose is exceedingly rare these days, and organizations are locked into status-quo procedures and protocols. That's terrible, and only serves a few insulated power elites. 
  This event provides a platform for practical initiatives to be taken by (politicians in) the State of Texas, in the interests of all Texans. 
Washington can only get in the way of Texas reinforcing it's power grid backup-capacity for severe events. 
Run with that Ball, Texas!

Mike Shedlock is politically incorrect, but factual here. Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel, and still abundant. Combustion = Real Economy.
Hello Clean Energy Advocates, What Do We Do When the Wind Turbines are All Frozen?
https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/hello-clean-energy-advocates-what-do-we-do-when-the-wind-turbines-are-all-frozen

"Extremely Dangerous" Weather, Grid Chaos Sparks Outages Across 15 US States, Spreads To Mexico

https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/4-million-texans-without-power-amid-grid-collapse-second-storm-nears

Presidents Day: Carter's Prescient Farewell Address in 1981​,​  Charles Hugh Smith​  (We took this good man for granted. Watch a little.)
​  ​Regardless of our opinions about President Carter and his legacy, his Farewell Address is worthy of our attention and study.
On Presidents Day 2021, I invite you to read/watch President Carter's Farewell Address from 40 years ago. As a Washington outsider, Carter was relentlessly mocked and undermined by the Establishment, as insiders' loathing of outsiders knows no bounds.
​  ​In a similar fashion, the loathing of the corrupt and self-absorbed for the faithful aspiring to better world despite our weaknesses and flaws also knows no bounds, and so the establishment insiders that run the nation had no use for Carter other than as a handy whipping post.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2021/02/presidents-day-carters-prescient.html

The Thirty Tyrants​  (Jimmy Carter's foundation and others have determined that the USA is an oligarchy.)​ Thanks Eleni in Athens.​
The deal that the American elite chose to make with China has a precedent in the history of Athens and Sparta​,  by Lee Smith​  (Thanks Eleni)
... ​But if Donald Trump saw decoupling the United States from China as a way to dismantle the oligarchy that hated him and sent American jobs abroad, he couldn’t follow through on the vision. After correctly identifying the sources of corruption in our elite, the reasons for the impoverishment of the middle classes, and the threats foreign and domestic to our peace, he failed to staff and prepare to win the war he asked Americans to elect him to fight.
​  ​And because it was true that China was the source of the China Class’ power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.​..
​  What seems clear is that Biden’s inauguration marks the hegemony of an American oligarchy that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against their own countrymen. Like Athens’ Thirty Tyrants, they are not simply contemptuous of a political system that recognizes the natural rights of all its citizens that are endowed by our creator; they despise in particular the notion that those they rule have the same rights they do. Witness their newfound respect for the idea that speech should only be free for the enlightened few who know how to use it properly. Like Critias and the pro-Sparta faction, the new American oligarchy believes that democracy’s failures are proof of their own exclusive right to power—and they are happy to rule in partnership with a foreign power that will help them destroy their own countrymen.
​  ​What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-thirty-tyrants

​Ron Paul on the second Impeach Trump show-trial:​
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2021/february/15/trump-acquitted-again-but-trump-hatred-continues/

​Jim Kunstler is irreverent again:
...in a telephone parley between Mr. Biden and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over the governor’s refusal to lockdown his state. The world-famous Dr. Fauci was also on the call, in which Mr. Biden threatened to curtail American citizens travel to Florida by road and air — since an offshoot of Covid-19 policy has been to drive a huge demographic exodus from the economically failing states of New York, Illinois, and California down there. He also threatened to withhold federal funding to Florida and deny the state access to Covid-19 vaccines. Dr. Fauci chimed in, “Governor, do you want to be responsible for reinfecting the nation? Truth is, we don’t even know how effective current vaccines are against the UK strain.”
​  ​DeSantis told Dr. Fauci he trusted his own state health authorities over financially incentivized federal officials. The conclusion of the conference call went like this:
  ​"​How much do you stand to earn from these vaccines, Dr. Fauci? And, Joe, if you continue with this course of action, I will authorize the state National Guard to protect the movement of Floridians,” DeSantis said.
​  ​“Address me as Mr. President or President Biden,” Biden said.
“I will not, and you can go fuck yourself,” DeSantis said before hanging up.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/unity/

John Glubb and Avoiding the Fate of Empires​ Thanks again to Charles for sending this. 
  Glubb was an English army officer who spent the best part of his career serving the newly-independent governments of Iraq and Jordan. An avid—if amateur—historian, he developed a theory on hegemonic orders that he called the “Fate of Empires.” Comparing a series of ancient and modern empires, he concluded that their average lifespan was 10 generations—about 250 years—and that, despite great geographic, technological, religious, and cultural differences, all empires follow a general pattern as they expand, develop, and finally decline and collapse. Although Glubb himself was the first to acknowledge the risks of over-simplification in his generalised model, his observations aptly describe, in broad-brushstrokes, not only the fate of past empires, but the contemporary situation in global politics today, particularly regarding the West and China.
  Glubb was agnostic on whether the “laws” of history he claimed to uncover were at all deterministic, but hoped that, by understanding how empires decline and collapse, modern citizens stood a chance of avoiding their typical fate...
​  ​Glubb’s account therefore makes uneasy reading for a modern, cosmopolitan intellectual. Although we can question his generalisations and his selection of examples, his broad picture holds true not only for the periods he discusses, but also seems applicable to modern empires, such as China, which appears to be somewhere in the transition from the “Age of Commerce” to the “Age of Affluence,” and the North Atlantic liberal hegemony, which—depending on your vantage point—is in either the later stages of the “Age of Intellect” or entering the “Age of Decadence.” His questioning of intellectualism, immigration, and the welfare state is also challenging for the progressive project, casting the attainment of its goals as symptoms of its impending collapse.​..
​  But a more careful reading of Glubb reveals that such a strategy treats only the symptoms of the decline, not its cause. Glubb was quite clear—it is greed, and the transition of a culture from “service to selfishness” that marks a nation’s tipping point into decadence and decline. The rise of intellectualism can be better understood as an early reaction to this decline... ​ 
  Be that as it may, the political class of the West remains undeniably in the hands of the decadent generation of Affluence. The language of commerce is everywhere—politicians talk of “the UK plc” or “Australia Inc.”—and honesty is certainly not a guiding virtue. Through lobbyists and direct consultation, business leaders influence all aspects of state policy, and yet give as little as possible in return, avoiding tax and moving capital and jobs away as soon as it is in their interests to do so...
​  ​What lessons can we draw, then, from Glubb’s account of the Fate of Empires? Two things stand out. First, the need for a value higher than money. Second, the need for a spirit of service and self-sacrifice to a cause of which we are all a part. We need to stop thinking like businesspeople, and to stop treating the acquisition of wealth as the measure of success, both as individuals and as a society. And we need to actively replace it, with something that binds a community together and gives it meaning.​..
​  ​Communities should decide for themselves what such activities might be. But I believe that an emphasis on connection to the natural world, and self-reliance, should fall at the centre of them. A respect for the natural world is vital in these times of climate emergency, and may help us to become less materialistic and more appreciative of the simpler comforts we take for granted. An education system that teaches self-reliance through character-building would be an invaluable aid in forming citizens who could resist the frivolity that marks the decaying empire.
https://quillette.com/2020/09/30/pasha-glubb-and-avoiding-the-fate-of-empires/

​Pepe Escobar has a long and thought provoking essay about what the failing western empire might be able to patch together if it does not get us all killed.
 ​ ​The West’s hostile strategy to Russia is conditioned on the idea that Russia has nowhere else to go, and must accept whatever the West offers in terms of “partnership”. The rise of the East fundamentally alters Moscow’s relationship with the West by enabling Russia to diversify its partnerships”.
​  ​We may be fast approaching the point where Great Eurasia’s Russia will present Germany with a take it or leave it offer. Either we build the Heartland together, or we will build it with China – and you will be just a historical bystander.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-why-russia-driving-west-crazy​.

Acting Locally​

Thursday, February 11, 2021

Enemy Of Life

 Facing Reality,


  Thank you all for the positive response to Treat Your Own COVID, and for sharing it around to friends and colleagues. 
I have had somewhat less time to blog recently, due to having a lot of gardening and "prepping" work to do and arrange, at gardens in Austin and at the homestead in Yoakum. 
  This has been a big 2 years of work on the homestead project, now in its third winter, which has been mild and somewhat dry until now, so I got a lot of work done while the sun shined. 
Now the "big chill" is here for a week. We are expected to have cold into the low teens in Austin and mid teens in Yoakum next Monday.
That will be a severe test to all of the Mexican avocado trees. Some varieties probably won't survive. 
Occasional big things happen in life, completely changing plans and forcing revisions to work already done.
We will bring the Mexican avocado seedlings in from the patio in Austin for the hard freeze..

  One big, yet basic lesson we have been learning in Yoakum is that it is really hard to get things done, to get basic work done, in a rural setting, when you are not from there. We have engaged as many "bad" contractors (thieves) as good ones at this point. 
It seems like local law enforcement doesn't actually investigate things under $3000, involving contractors. 
I did not know that before. They likely did. 
Sometimes it's a mixed bag, a guy who wants to be good, but has drug and alcohol problems. 
Contractors seem to have meth and alcohol problems, for some reason.

  Since fall of 2018 it seems like the economy and people everywhere have gotten shakier and less certain. 
If one is getting a homestead in a rural area now, it's good to get one that really does not need any work done, that you can tell. It's good to get the names of contractors who already did work on it in recent years. We just don't know what the progression of economic, financial and societal dysfunctions will be this year, next year, or the years ahead. I expect the current arrangements to keep degrading until they are just not the arrangements anymore. I can't be more specific. History keeps rhyming on this. 
  The Great Depression and WW-2, the USSR break-up, and Chinese Cultural Revolution are all recent examples of this kind of degrading of an economic order until something new can be formed by the participants. That's us. Start working or keep working. That's all I can see.

RFK, Jr. Interviews Vandana Shiva: The Gates Empire ‘Will Own Everything’​  ,  Thanks Bill​ , transcript, too​...
​ This is my meditation for today. This is life wisdom.  
"New Feudalism" is the aggressor. It will own all life. Life will die without chemical inputs. We are made weak, sick and dependent.
Vaccines-only for COVID, ignoring ivermectin and vitamin-D benefits, are the Gates/WHO gameplan to own our living bodies...
In an interview with CHD Chairman RFK, Jr., Vandana Shiva warns listeners that if we don’t fight back against Gates and his empire, 
“They will own everything. You will own nothing ... no commons, no public good, no shared values.”
​  ​Vandana Shiva discusses how Bill Gates, along with Big Ag, Big Chemical, Big Food, Big Tech and Big Pharma are destroying Earth’s ecosystem and with it, our health.
​  ​Shiva, who has a Ph.D. in quantum physics, is founder of Navdanya International, an organization dedicated to protecting seed and food sovereignty, and small farmers around the world.
​  ​Bobby, I wasn’t a leader. I was a student, and I was volunteering, and the leaders were the women and they were my professors. I always say, I went to University of Western Ontario for my Ph.D. to figure out quantum theory better, but I went to the Chipko University to figure out biodiversity. And Bobby, just the other day, the mafia has taken hold of David Attenborough to launch portfolio management on biodiversity, like portfolios on land ownership, as if value to biodiversity was not recognized by the Chipko women. I think that is the clash we are living through. The billionaires wanting to turn everything into their portfolio, and the ordinary people saying, “No, we want to protect our land.” Our farmers have been protesting now for six months for the land. That’s what they’re saying.​..​
​"We are fighting for the soul and soil of India."​

​  A​ ​now-deleted fact sheet published by the U.S. State Department on January 15, 2021, claimed that for over a year, “the Chinese Communist ​  ​Party (CCP) has systematically prevented a transparent and thorough investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin.” The official release of that fact sheet focuses on the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV); a controversial research lab in the Hubei province of China which has been the target of well-earned suspicions over its work on bat-borne zoonotic diseases like SARS-CoV-2, better known as the COVID-19 coronavirus.
​  Missing from the State Department’s missive is the intimate bond that this particular laboratory has to American scientific institutions and to a tight-knit group of individuals with direct links to the U.S. intelligence apparatus and the biodefense establishment. National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci’s funding of gain-of-function (GoF) research in 2014 at the Chinese lab is just one example. The highly polarizing GoF studies, which entail turbo-charging a pathogen’s virulence through the “generation of viruses with properties that do not exist in nature” present considerable biosafety hazards, which led the Obama administration to issue a federal moratorium on GoF research. The study Fauci funded at the WIV in 2014 was done so in contravention to the moratorium then in effect.
​  ​Deeper and more disturbing ties to outfits like USAID-funded Ecohealth Alliance have been covered by independent journalists like Same Husseini and others, revealing the WIV’s close relationship to people like David R. Franz – former commander of Fort Detrick, the pre-eminent biowarfare and biodefense facility in the U.S. and the source of the anthrax spores used in the infamous 2001 anthrax attacks. In July 2020, this author carried out an investigation into the nexus between the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), USAID and zoonotic disease research in Asia.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/disarticulation-china-pandemic-war-propaganda/275182/

​Gail Tverberg, Our Finite World, Where Energy Modeling Goes Wrong
Summary: The economy is approaching near-term collapse, not peak oil. The result is quite different.
​  ​The modeling that comes closest to being correct is that which underlies the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows and others. This modeling was based on physical quantities of resources, with no financial system whatsoever. The base model, shown here, indicates that limits would be reached a few years later than we actually seem to be reaching them. The dotted black line in Figure 1 indicates where I saw the world economy to be in January 2019, based on the limits we already seemed to be reaching at that time.
(I think that line is ​drawn ​at 2010, myself.)


1) ​F​ear Thy Neighbor. 
2) Report Thy Neighbor, to be dealt with accordingly.
CIA Counterterror Chief Suggests Going To War Against ‘Domestic Insurgents’
Compares dissenting Americans to Taliban, Al Qaeda; Compares President Trump to Saddam Hussein.​  ​Grenier, also a former CIA station chief in Pakistan and Afghanistan, grouped together “the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, ‘Christian’ national chauvinists, white supremacists and QAnon fantasists” and claimed they are all “committed to violent extremism.”
​  ​Grenier labeled dissenters an “insurgency” and called for them to be “defeated” like an enemy army.

​ It’s just like the original Global War on Terror, except that this time the “Terrorists” are all “Domestic Violent Extremists” (“DVEs”), “Homegrown Violent Extremists” (“HVEs”), “Violent Conspiracy-Theorist Extremists” (“VCTEs”), “Violent Reality Denialist Extremists” (VRDEs”), “Insurrectionary Micro-Aggressionist Extremists” (“IMAEs”), “People Who Make Liberals Feel Uncomfortable” (“PWMLFUs”), and anyone else the Department of Homeland Security wants to label an “extremist” and slap a ridiculous acronym on.
​  According to a “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin” issued by the DHS on January 27, these DCEs, HVEs, VCTEs, VRDEs, IMAEs, and PWMLFUs are​  "​ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority [and] perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”
​  ​They are believed to be “motivated by a range of issues, including anger over Covid-19 restrictions, the 2020 election results, police use of force,” and other dangerous “false narratives” (e.g., the existence of the “deep state,” “herd immunity,” “biological sex,” “God,” and so on).
​ “Inspired by foreign terrorist groups” and “emboldened by the breach of the US Capitol Building,” this diabolical network of “domestic terrorists” is “plotting attacks against government facilities,” “threatening violence against critical infrastructure” and actively “citing misinformation and conspiracy theories about Covid-19.”

​Helen​ Buyniski (Hmmmm, sounds Russian, but she's a New Yorker, and this seems right-on.)
​  ​Certainly, it’s not clear what sets the alleged “extremism” on display during last month’s demonstration at the Capitol apart from business as usual in the military. The former and current service members charged in relation to the riot are being demonized as seditious fake-patriots with no respect for Our Democracy, unlike those truly devoted bastions of tolerance willing to give 110 percent in defense of God and Country, etcetera, eagerly kicking in doors in the middle of the desert, guarding patriotic poppy fields in Afghanistan, and perhaps getting their legs blown off by an IED for their trouble.
​  ​The Pentagon, for all its exhortations to “support our troops,” categorically refuses to do the same, instead sending those troops to war after war against countries that pose no real threat to the US, yet happen to be occupying some choice real estate or sitting on top of some natural resources Uncle Sam would really like access to.
​  ​Meanwhile, they’re turning entire generations of young people into monsters – extremists – capable of killing a stranger just because someone they’ve been taught to obey at all costs orders it. A culture that fetishizes mass murder in order to steal natural resources from halfway around the world – while pretending to make the world safe for democracy, no less! – is long overdue for some changes, starting with using some of that $717 billion in Pentagon dollars on something useful.
​  ​The real question, then, is not who in the US military is a domestic extremist. It’s who isn’t.

​Revising the mission statement and expanding the mission. It's NOT COLONIALISM!
US SHIFTS OFFICIAL JUSTIFICATION OF ITS ILLEGAL PRESENCE IN SYRIA FROM ‘GUARDING OIL’ TO ‘FIGHTING ISIS’

Ivermectin is bad, because it is safe, effective COVID treatment that competes with big pharma products in the pipeline. Thanks Jeremy.
  FLCCC Alliance Response to Merck’s public statements on ivermectin’s efficacy in COVID-191  

You just need a newer, better vaccine. Stay home and WAIT FOR IT! 
DON'T TAKE VITAMIN-D, Zinc, OR IVERMECTIN!
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa will put on hold use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 shot in its vaccination programme, after data showed it gave minimal protection against mild-to-moderate infection caused by the country’s dominant coronavirus variant.

AstraZeneca says vaccine against new Covid variants may take six months

​Look, immune thrombocytopenia is not what killed Hank Aaron, even though his "massive stroke" was a little more than 2 weeks after his Moderna vaccine for COVID. 
It's a coincidence that it's exactly what happened to that unfortunate doctor in Florida, and those other nice people. 
The Coroner said "Natural Causes", so put those fears to rest!​
Doctors Link Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines to Life-Threatening Blood Disorder
A second New York Times article quotes doctors who say the mRNA technology used in COVID vaccines may cause immune thrombocytopenia, a blood disorder that last month led to the death of a Florida doctor after his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

Budes​onide is Pulmicort steroid inhaler for chronic asthma. It is used twice daily. It helps when COVID is inflaming the lungs. Thanks Jeremy.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-02-09-common-asthma-treatment-reduces-need-hospitalisation-covid-19-patients-study

​"​BTW - the Indian Pharmacy suggested by SWPRS is able to provide Budecort 200. This is the equivalent of Pulmicort.​"​ Says Jeremy.
https://www.ciplamed.com/content/budecort-inhaler

​Dancing Shiva​

Monday, February 8, 2021

Treat Your Own COVID

 Concerned Parties,


  The question that I, as a COVID-19 Early Treating Physician, blogger, and human being with friends and family, get asked about COVID is "What can I do myself, because my doctor says there's no treatment outside the hospital".

  There are multiple effective supplements and repurposed medicines to treat COVID outside the hospital, which people should take to avoid having to go inside the hospital and get IVs and breathing machines.

  As a Public Health Physician (MD), acting in the interest of the good of other human beings, with no anticipation of reward, I would like to give advice to all readers, to reduce their risk of mortality and morbidity during this pandemic. 
This is the advice I give my patients.
I won't accept any payment for this advice. 
Give your neighbor a bottle of vitamin-D. Don't try to give me anything of value.

An Ounce of Prevention:
  Vitamin D deficiency is a major risk factor for catching COVID-19, being sick enough to need hospitalization, and dying from it.
Don't take that risk, please. Vitamin-D comes from sunshine entering superficially into the skin, and causing a photochemical reaction that creates vitamin-D. The great majority of people who do not work outdoors are deficient in vitamin-D, mildly, moderately or severely. Black people in New York and in Northern Europe, rich and poor alike, were some of the most deficient in vitamin-D last spring. Do you recall how that went?
Above and below the sub-tropics, the winter sun is too weak to produce vitamin-D, even if you can bare your skin at midday.
  Vitamin-D supplementation is cheap, safe and effective. Somebody may have already screamed, "Don't take too much" at you. I agree.
What's a good dose and what's "too much". The dose I have taken for over a decade is 1/8 of 1 milligram per day. That is 125 micrograms, or 5000 units. 
 1 mg of vitamin-D3 is 40,000 units. Weird, right? 1 mg sounds like nothing, and 40,000units sounds like WAY TOO MUCH.
I have been checking pre-treatment and treatment vitamin-D levels on people since 2006 and I'll say that if you weigh 100# or more, you can safely take 5000 units per day of vitamin-D for as long as you may live. I have seen a couple of people get slightly high levels after years of 10,000 units per day, not any sign of toxicity, and they backed off to 5000 units after a month off. Levels normalized.
  You can take 10.000 units (1/4 mg) per day for the first 2 months, to get your level up into the normal range. 
I recommend it, especially if you have extra fat. Vitamin-D distributes into fat, slowing the rise in blood level.
Upper mid normal blood level appears to be ideal.

  Zinc has been known since the 1990s to shorten the severity and duration of  "some common colds", namely those caused by coronaviruses.
The studies used ttreatment dosages of roughly 150 to 250 mg per day of zinc, usually as lozenges, spread out through the day in divided doses. 
What zinc does inside a cell, infected by a coronavirus, is to reduce its ability to make more coronaviruses. That is ideal in the period of exposure and early infection, to reduce viral replication enough to let the innate immune system keep the virus from getting the better of you.

  Take 50 mg per day of oral zinc, as a tablet or lozenge, together with 250 mg of Quercetin, also readily available, a natural product of onions and other vegetables. Quercetin helps zinc get into cells, which is where zinc is effective. (It's really hard to eat enough onions to get that much.)

  Prescription antiviral prophylaxis may also be appropriate for some people with weaker immune systems and higher risk of severe COVID-19, such as those with diabetes, obesity, sleep apnea, heart disease, kidney disease and cancer. Almost no western doctors will prescribe hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin for this purpose, after the politicization of hydroxychloroquine last spring when then President Trump advocated for it. 
The science of its efficacy in prophylaxis has been born out. 
In medical workers, both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin weekly prophylaxis are about 75% effective, reducing infections by 75% in the group taking either, compared to the similar groups not taking weekly prophylaxis.
  You likely just heard the unfair bad press, not things like The Lancet admitting later that its anti-HCQ data from "Surgisphere", compiled from all of those hospitals, was actually not compiled from hospitals, but fabricated. Big headline; small retraction much later.
  Hydroxychloroquine prophylaxis would need to be prescribed, and is dangerous enough in overdose to have killed the poor guy who took the fish tank product last year. I'm not advising you to try to get any, nor to take it. (It is preferable as prophylaxis in pregnancy, an uncommon need.)

  Ivermectin has a remarkably broad safety profile, and has been served up about as many times as McDonald's hamburgers, to man and beast alike, for various forms of worms and parasites. It does cause birth defects in rats, when given at high doses, so don't use it in pregnancy, please.
Like most medicines to treat coronavirus illness, ivermectin does different things against the virus, than it does on regular days. Ivermectin inhibits the transport of the viral RNA into the cell nucleus, where it would be transcribed, manufacturing new viruses. It does other things, like reduce inflammation during cytokine-storm, in the second and third weeks of illness, helping the people who get really badly sick. Ivermectin is effective in prophylaxis, in early illness and also in later, severe illness, and through multiple mechanisms. Ivermectin is what I prescribe since last August.

  Ivermectin is now available mail-order from India, and from a reliable source. 
The preventive, "prophylactic" dose of ivermectin is based upon body weight, and it can be taken weekly, once an initial level inside of the cells is established. Ivermectin leaves the cells very slowly, so it can just be topped-off once per week. There are some slight variations on this, but I'll describe the one I prescribe. It uses the same body-weight dosing that you will find wherever you look up ivermectin dosing for humans or animals. For every 5 kg, or 11 pounds of body weight, a person takes 1 mg of ivermectin at that dose.
For most people I treat, that is 12 to 18 mg of ivermectin per dose.
For COVID-19 prophylaxis, this dose is taken Day #1, Day #2 and then every seventh day after that. 
If you forget, take it when you remember, and get back to the original schedule after that.

The Pound of Cure:
  I'm sorry if you have to do this, but it is mostly the same, with higher doses, and some more additions, to help avoid systemic damage.

  If you have not been taking vitamin-D3 for long, increase your dose to 5000 units 3 times per day for 10 days. 
The best thing is if you can get calcifediol, an immediately bioavailable form of vitamin-D, which does not need slow activation in the liver, and which saved lives and reduced ICU admissions in a Spanish hospital study. We can't get it in the US.

  Increase your dosing of 50 mg zinc and 250 mg quercetin to 3 times per day, also.

  Add 1000 mg of vitamin-C 3 times per day to the vitamin-D, zinc and quercetin.

  Aspirin is sometimes added in treatment of active disease, because SARS-CoV-2 inflames the lining of arteries and arterioles, causing clotting in small and large blood vessels. Aspirin is used as an anti-clotting agent. If you have mild illness, related to nasal symptoms, some fatigue, headaches and body aches, but no fever, no diarrhea, and no breathing problems, you probably don't need aspirin.
  However, if you have systemic illness, including fever, breathing problems and/or gut problems like diarrhea and vomiting, you stand to benefit from 1 to 2 tablets of 325 mg aspirin per day. The sicker you are the more likely that 325 mg twice per day is for you. 
Clotting issues persist, so this should continue 30 days. If you have been taking 2 per day, and feel pretty well after 10 days, then it is good to back down to 1 per day. A lot of lung problems come from the blood-vessel side, not the air side. This is a weird infection.

  Ivermectin dose for treatment is the same for the first 2 days, the cellular loading dose of 1 mg per 5 kg or 11# on days #1 and 2 of treatment.
This is followed with that same dose on days #4 and 6 of treatment, and that is the full course. 
Many physicians dose for fewer than 4 days, and so have I, but this seems to reduce the number of days of feeling bad in my experience.

  I typically also treat with 10 days of 100 mg doxycycline twice per day, which is Dr Borody's protocol, as widely used in India, to very good effect. Doxycycline is a broad spectrum antibiotic, which will treat any secondary bacterial infection on top of COVID Pneumonia, and which also has some antiviral benefits. It is also anti-inflammatory, which is of benefit.

  You would be well served to have an accurate thermometer and pulse oximetry devices at home. You need to know if you have a fever. You can presume that you have systemic illness at that point. You need a decision point and a fever over 100.5 degrees F is a good one. Temps between 99.5 and 100.5 might mean early/mild illness. Early experience in China was that people fared worse with things like ibuprofen and naproxen. I have not seen good follow up on that in the west. Still, I'd choose acetaminophen for symptoms.

  The pulse oximeter shows pulse and calculates blood oxygenation. It's good for measuring heart rate. 
Sicker people's hearts beat faster. I see it all the time. A heart rate over 110 means you are getting much sicker. 
Don't ignore it!
It is good to buy an inexpensive pulse oximeter and get to know what your usual baseline is. For most people it is 97% to 99% saturation. It will be lower if you live at high altitude. Dropping 2 points from normal means your lungs are not working right. It likely means COVID Pneumonia, if you have a positive test, already. Some people will read a little higher than they really are, so if you read a little low (95%), and feel short of breath, you may actually need oxygen. You may need to go to a hospital. 
If your pulse oximeter reads 93% or below, you really should be promptly evaluated at a hospital. 
You might need to check in.

  One dramatically important feature of COVID-19 is just how fast people can go from not-too-bad to choosing between ICU and the morgue.
Really fast. An hour or two. 
Rising heart rate and falling oxygen mean that it is time to go to the nearest real hospital ER. 
Don't drive yourself, please. You may become confused or pass out at the wheel.

Resources:

Swiss Policy Research has a very good list of medical articles about all the treatments I have listed, except doxycycline here. (Thanks Bill)

Swiss Policy Research has information about how ivermectin works here, and it is also the group who arranged for the delivery of ivermectin from India to those abroad who place orders. Jeremy in Devon informed me of this link, and he also informed me that his shipment came in, "enough to treat his whole village". I think that was a little under 2 weeks for him, but it might have been a little over that. (Brexit notwithstanding...)

Yours In Service,

John Day MD

Thursday, February 4, 2021

Investing In Life

 Davos Rejects,


Xi, Putin Make The Case For Win-Win, Not Zero-Sum, Pepe Escobar
​  Predictably, the two really crucial events at Davos received minimal or non-existent coverage across the wobbly West: the speeches by President Xi and President Putin.
​  ​We have already highlighted Xi’s essentials. Aside from arguing a powerful case for multilateralism as the only possible road map to deal with global challenges, Xi stressed nothing substantial may be achieved if the inequality gap between North and South is not reduced.
​  ​The best in-depth analysis of Putin’s extraordinary speech , hands down, was provided by Rostislav Ishchenko, whom I had the pleasure to meet in Moscow in 2018.
​  ​Ishchenko stresses how, “in terms of scale and impact on historical processes, this is steeper than the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk combined.” The speech, he adds, was totally unexpected, as much as Putin’s stunning intervention at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, “the crushing defeat” imposed on Georgia in 2008, and the return of Crimea in 2014.
​  ​Ishchenko also reveals something that will never be acknowledged in the West: “80 people from among the most influential on the planet did not laugh in Putin’s face, as it was in 2007 in Munich, and without noise immediately after his open speech signed up for a closed conference with him.”
​  ​Putin’s very important reference to the ominous 1930s – “the inability and unwillingness to find substantive solutions to problems like this in the 20th century led to World War 2 catastrophe” – was juxtaposed with a common sense warning: the necessity of preventing the takeover of global policy by Big Tech , which “are de facto competing with states”.
​  ​Xi and Putin’s speeches were de facto complementary – emphasizing sustainable, win-win economic development for all actors, especially across the Global South, coupled with the necessity of a new socio-political contract in international relations.
​  ​This drive should be based on two pillars: sovereignty – that is, the good old Westphalian model (and not Great Reset, hyper-concentrated, one world “governance”) and sustainable development propelled by techno-scientific progress (and not techno-feudalism).
​  ​So what Putin-Xi proposed, in fact, was a concerted effort to expand the basic foundations of the Russia-China strategic partnership to the whole Global South: the crucial choice ahead is between win-win and the Exceptionalist zero-sum game.

The Insiders' Game​  (You must have noticed)
GameStop was a warning: Elites are weaponizing censorship to keep the outsiders out

Media Runs Defense for Amazon After Retail Giant Caught Stealing Millions From Workers
Amazon just got caught stealing millions from its workers, but instead of grilling the retail giant, the media appear to be working hard to run defense for it.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-bias-defense-amazon-caught-stealing-millions-workers/275057/

Tessa Fights Robots:  
The Last Squeeze: Digital Colonization as Manifest Destiny 2.0  
Beware of billionaires bearing gifts of efficient management.

Indian Farmers Fight Robots, too...
India Restricts Internet, Twitter Complies With Blockage Request As Farmers Protest Grows
​ ​Parts of India are facing extended government-ordered internet blackouts as the Indian farmers protest movement has grown. The farmers allege Prime Minister Narendra Modi's farming law, which ends the government's programs to keep commodity prices at fixed levels, therefore allowing free markets to dictate prices, favors large corporations over smaller mom and pop farmers.​ 
(most Indians)
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/india-restricts-internet-twitter-complies-blockage-request-protesting-farmers-clash

Jeremy sent this:  The Science is Broken
​  ​"If we don’t address gross over-population and the real carrying capacity of the planet, along with unlimited consumption and endless greed, our waste streams (greenhouse gasses and pollution) will continue to accelerate biosphere collapse, leading to our (soon) extinction. It’s just that simple. The civilization that we embraced refused to consider finite limits on any of the Earth systems that sustain life, and we deliberately designed economic models based upon this gross miscalculation.
​  ​This is probably one of the biggest mistakes in our entire history, and it is being ignored by scientists, researchers, academics and policy makers. An economic model based upon consumption and endless growth was always destined to destroy Earth’s habitability and human survival. Religions that fail to recognize that the Earth is now way over-full and over-used have violated their core teachings.
​  ​Scientists that continue to insist that growth is still desirable are doing the entire world a great disservice. We look to these experts to give us expert guidance, but I’m still not seeing it and have been looking for decades now. If they can’t actually tell us “like it is”, then we need to find those who will and can, fast. Otherwise, you might as well embrace the hopium and the suck that will come with it, because it’s going to really suck to watch your own children die from something that we should have all prevented."  

​I replied:
​  Who does this author address? He expresses frustration that human population is not being dealt with and that public statements of the science are sugar-coated, not honest.
  Our owners are well aware of the situation and are already acting to reduce our numbers, especially those of us who live over the cheap oil, like in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, and so on... The rest of us in the "developed" countries are now in draconian lockdowns, promised that some novel vaccines will fix everything. We know that they can't fix anything that they are supposed to fix, and that there are generic medicines that will do the job, that are doing the job when they are used, so what is the real agenda? 
  This author may be unaware of what's going on. He appears unaware. 
The power structure above industrial society supports the powerful human "owners". That's the purpose. 
They are slowly negotiating a transition for their power structure, out of necessity. 
We are not at that table, and that table will have to have some losers, so negotiations are not proceeding well, but we get culled. That's a given. Be useful...  

More cheerful  :-)   
(Russian, UGH!)
‘Deadly carrot’-derived antiviral could be magic bullet against Covid-19, the flu and future pandemics

​Experimental Gardener​