Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 402
June 29, 2023
Riots Break Out in France After Deadly Police Shootings
Peaceful march in Nanterre, France, June 29, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/ @realmarcel1
NewsletterIn an attempt to contain the protests, the Interior Ministry has decided to deploy 40,000 agents to the streets.
On Thursday, thousands of French people took to the streets of Nanterre to protest the death of 17-year-old teenager Nahel, who was killed by a police officer who shot him in the chest during a traffic check.
The Prosecutor’s Office formally charged the policeman with voluntary manslaughter and he is currently under provisional detention. Meanwhile, in this Paris suburb, the streets woke up littered with anti-police graffiti and the remains of cars on fire.
During the last two nights, the situation in Nanterre has been very tense as hundreds of young people kept protesting and launched fireworks against the police and public buildings.
Although the memorial march started peacefully, anti-riot officers used tear gas to disperse the crowd as people approached the Prefecture. Then they violently confronted the citizens.
[
FRANCE ]
Dans la ville de Nanterre où était organisée une marche blanche pour rendre hommage à Nahel, tué par un policier lors d'un contrôle routier, la situation s'est considérablement tendue. Les policiers procèdent à des charges.pic.twitter.com/tLdiWOoKIv
— (Little) Think Tank (@L_ThinkTank) June 29, 2023
The tweet reads, “In the city of Nanterre, where a peaceful march was organized to pay tribute to Nahel, who was killed by a policeman during a traffic control, the situation has become quite tense. The police are lashing out.”
Interior Ministry spokesperson Camille Chaize acknowledged that the march had started peacefully; however, she justified the actions of the police by stating that the protesters had set fire to several vehicles and urban furniture such as containers.
During the march, which was organized by Nahel’s mother, who carried a banner with the slogan “Police Kills,” thousands of people chanted phrases such as “Killer Police” and demanded the resignation of Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin.
Politicians from the La France Insoumise (LFI) party, such as Raquel Garrido, Clementine Autain, Alexis Corbiere, and Manon Aubry, were present at the march. The presence of Fabien Roussel, the secretary of the French Communist Party (PCF), was also notable.
SCANDALE : LA POLICE GAZE LA MARCHE BLANCHE POUR NAHEL
Alors que le cortège était arrivé devant la Préfecture de #Nanterre, à proximité du lieu où Nahel est mort, la police a massivement gazé le cortège de la marche blanche. pic.twitter.com/ZZLU7OXmHi
— Révolution Permanente (@RevPermanente) June 29, 2023
The tweet reads, “Scandal: The police guard the Nahel white march. When the procession arrived in front of the Nanterre Prefecture, near the place where Nahel died, the police massively launched tear gas against the white march.”
During the initial investigations, the police officer who killed Nahel claimed that he had used his weapon because he believed that the teenager posed a threat to him and his partner.
However, videos recorded by witnesses showed that even a potential escape of the vehicle would not have endangered the police officers. In fact, the videos demonstrate that the officer made threats and racist insults before shooting the young man.
In the last 24 hours, over 180 people have been arrested during riots accompanied by the burning of schools, police stations, courthouses, and vehicles. In an attempt to contain the situation, the Interior Ministry has decided to deploy 40,000 agents to the streets.
#FromTheSouth News Bits | France: Riots break out in Paris after deadly police shootings. pic.twitter.com/bufvbAhmLo
— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) June 28, 2023
[…]
The Gold Mafia
The Gold Mafia
Al Jazeera (2023)
Film Review
This film series was made by undercover Al Jazeera reporters posing as gangsters seeking to launder illicit earnings from Hong Kong and Macau.
Episode 1 – The laundry service
The undercover gangsters interview a number of competing money launderers in Zimbabwe:
Kamlesh Pattni – Africa’s most prominent money launderer, Pattni was first charged with money laundering in Kenya. After the trial collapsed, he relocated to Zimbabwe and founded a new evangelical church, where he’s known as Brother Paul.Uebert Angel – described as the head of the “diplomatic mafia,” Angel’s presently Zimbabwe’s ambassador at large (to 85 countries), as well as a prophet who predicts football scores and heals the sick. Very instrumental in funding President Mnangagwa’s election campaigns.Ewan Mcmillan – white gold trader first charged (along with father) for money laundering at age 21.Simon Rudland – also launders gold dollars (also with the approval of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe) through his company Gold Leaf Tobacco.The money laundering scheme described to the undercover reports involves converting illicit foreign funds to Zimbabwean gold, which is then transported by couriers to Dubai in exchange for US dollars. Dubai also launders gold tax free (with approval from the Dubai central bank) for Russia, Ghana, Zambia, Ghana, Mozambique, Angola, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and DRC.
Pattni’s and McMillan’s gold money laundering schemes to Zimbabwean gold are officially authorized by the (privately owned) Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, largely because US sanctions make it impossible for Zimbabwe to access US dollars or other foreign currencies by legal means. In fact, Pattni is licensed to buy gold on behalf of Zimbabwe’s central bank. He then delivers the gold to Fidelity Printers and Refiners, which is owned by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe.
The Gold Mafia obtain gold either from small scale miners (the source of 40% of Zimbabwean gold) or from President Mnangagwa’s niece Henrietta Rushwaya, who heads the Zimbabwe Miners Federation. She sells money launderers gold at a 4% discount and launders the money through Fidelity Printers and Refiners.
Couriers transport billions of dollars of gold via Zimbabwe’s airport in Harare because security professionals are bribed to look the other way.
Episode #2 Smoke and Mirrors
This episode features meetings between undercover reporters and Angel regarding a personal meeting with Mnangawa, who they refer to as Number One in the Gold Mafia. Required before the money laundering deal can be approved, this will require a $US 200,000 “appreciation” fee.
This episode also explores the role Rudland and Gold Leaf Tobacco plays in selling illicit cigarettes on the black market in South Africa and using the proceeds to invest in gold to export to Dubai.
Another key player in South Africa is Mohamed Khan (aka Mo Dollars), who uses South Africa’s Sasfin Bank and Standard Bank to help gangsters launder illicit funds. He does so via regular bribes to their foreign exchange banks and to Sasfin IT technicians who wipes Mo’s illicit transactions from official bank records.
At a second meeting, Angel suggests the undercover reporters they launder some of their illicit funds by investing in a new hotel near Victoria Falls.
We learn Rutland also owns Vantage Leaf in Mauritius, which also uses gold to launder dirty money, selling the gold for US dollars, which he deposits in a Swiss bank account.
Episode 3 – El Dorado
We now learn that Pattni also owns the company in Dubai that buys his gold. After arriving in Dubai, the Zimbabwean gold is melted down to be exported to London and Swtizerland, where it’s officially stamped as British or Swiss gold.
The filmmakers interview a United Arab Emirates (UAE) auditor who reported Dubai’s Kaloti refinery* as being 50% non-compliant with UAE laws about sourcing gold from Zimbabwe and other countries under sanction. After UAE authorities fobbed him off, he filed suit in a British court against the British financial services company AY (responsible for importing Kaloti gold) and won $11 million in damages.
After the UAE suspended Kaloti’s license, the company simply rebranded themselves as MTM&O Gold.
Gold Leaf Tobacco owns its own refinery in South Africa. Pattni owns 500+ companies in 12 countries and also smuggles diamonds and works as a securities trader for numerous trusts who hold offshore accounts.
We also earn the appreciation fee to meet with Mnanagawa has increased to $1 million US dollars.
*Kaloti refines 50% of the gold imported from Zimbabwe (which makes up 40% of the UAE’s GDP).
Episode 4 – Have the King with You
The final episode explores Mo Money’s relationship with the late Zulu king Zulatini during Jacob Zuma’s presidency. Zulatini had a lot of influence over Zuma, who relied on the king to deliver Zulu votes. Mo Money also had close ties with Thandan Mbetse, a nephew of South Africa’s former finance minister, as well as South Africa’s UBS Bank, HSBC Bank and the Gupta family (whose links to Zuma resulted in his resignation in 2018). According to whistleblowers the undercover reporters interview, the Gupta family directed a number of state contracts to Mo and his brothers.
The journalists also learn Africa’s gold mafia also launders money via Hong Kong and the Ganzhou district. In general, once funds enter the Republic of China they can no longer be traced.
In the final scenes, we learn that Rudland and Mo Dollars are being investigated in South Africa; that Pattni is setting up gold operations in Venezuela (after helping Madura circumvent US sanctions); and that the whistleblowers interviewed in the series have gone into hiding.
June 28, 2023
‘Star Power’ Helps Malibu Residents in Battle Over 5G Small Cell Transmitters
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. Malibu, California, City Council on Monday voted to add the issue of small cell 5G wireless facilities to their agenda for future discussion after residents, including Hollywood celebrities Ed Harris and Mel Gibson, expressed concerns about the proliferation of the facilities in their neighborhoods.
Small cells are individual wireless transmitters distributed roughly every 100-450 meters that can be mounted on utility poles or other structures, such as a fence. Before 5G, most wireless networks were built using a system of macro transmitters in the form of cellular towers. The 5G network uses both cellular towers and small cells.
During Monday’s public hearing, Malibu’s mayor and city councilmembers heard live testimony from multiple Malibu residents, including Vanessa Garcia and Lynn Dornhelm who live on Carbon Mesa Road.
Harris and Gibson, who also live on Carbon Mesa Road, submitted letters outlining their concerns about the small cells technology.
Scott McCollough, Children Health Defense’s (CHD) chief litigator for the organization’s electromagnetic radiation cases who is representing the Malibu residents in opposing the wireless facilities, called the Malibu City Council’s vote a “big win.”
According to McCollough, this was the first time Harris and Gibson spoke out publicly about the 5G wireless rollout. He said he believed their willingness to do so helped get the city councilmembers’ attention.
“Ed Harris and Mel Gibson — on behalf of the residents of Malibu — convinced city officials that they need to update their ordinance and they need to address how this onslaught of current applications is going to be dealt with,” McCollough told The Defender.
‘If these towers were safe…why do workers have to come in unmarked trucks in the middle of the night?’
In his letter, Harris told city authorities “right now you have some unhappy residents on your hands.”
He wrote:
“My neighbor was awakened during the middle of the night by some loud clanging, so she went out to investigate. Several men in an unmarked truck were working on the utility pole 40 feet from her front door, right across the street from my house. They said they were putting up a ‘small cell’ and from what I’ve learned that’s a 5G cell tower.
“If these towers were safe on any level, why do workers have to come in unmarked trucks in the middle of the night? I thought the city of Malibu had passed an ordinance that was supposed to keep the cell towers out of residential areas, put them along the main arteries through town, and take extra precautions in our city that has been gutted by fire a couple times in recent memory.
“As I talk to my neighbors and we learn more about the health and fire risks associated with these cell towers, I am amazed the city has left us so defenseless.”
Harris concluded that this situation reflects “unacceptable planning on the part of the city of Malibu” that “must be remedied.”
Garcia — who handed the councilmembers the letters written by Harris and Gibson — told Malibu Mayor Bruce Silverstein and city councilmembers that she and her family, including two children in special education, are sensitive to electromagnetic radiation and opposed having a small cell installed on their fence.
Gibson — whose property is near two planned wireless facilities — said he opposed 5G wireless installments and urged the council to “do what you can to slow, limit, and where possible, stop their deployment.”
According to Gibson, the wireless facilities near his home stand to “mar the beautiful view, impact my family’s quality of life, lower our property value, and increase insurance costs.”
[…]
Dornhelm — a real estate agent who also lives on Carbon Mesa road near Garcia, Harris and Gibson — told the council that property values go down by 20% if a cell tower or wireless facility is nearby.
She also pointed out that it is becoming increasingly difficult for California residents to obtain fire insurance and the proliferation of telecommunication infrastructures exacerbates fire risks.
‘The city is literally playing with fire to allow these in our residential areas’
The council also heard comments from other Malibu residents — including Jenny Rusinko and Stephanie Sunwoo — and the executive director of Malibu For Safe Tech, Lonnie Gordon.
Gordon told The Defender she and the others who spoke asked the city council “to finish the job that should have been done two years ago,” referring to the fact that in 2021 the council intended to include more protection for residential areas — but failed to put the language for that in the ordinance.
[…]
Gordon said she and other concerned residents — guided by the legal expertise of McCollough and fire risk expert Susan Foster — succeeded in getting the council, in 2020, to pass an “urgency” ordinance.
Foster — co-founder of the nonprofit California Fires & Firefighters — is a fire and utility consultant and an honorary firefighter with the San Diego Fire Department who authored a 2022 white paper, “Protecting LA County’s Future: How Fire Risks from Telecommunications Equipment, Climate Challenges & A Dangerous Shift Away from Environmental Review Threaten Los Angeles County’s Future.”
Malibu’s 2020 “urgency” ordinance dealt with wireless facilities installed in the public “rights-of-way” — meaning along roads and on utility poles — rather than wireless facilities installed on residents’ property and was much less thorough than the 2021 ordinance.
In crafting the 2021 ordinance, the council “took more time in doing it right,” McCollough said, by requiring that all applications submitted by telecommunications companies seeking approval to build wireless facilities had to include eight detailed engineering and design documents that illustrated the engineering specifications of the proposed wireless structure.
The 2021 ordinance stipulated that these eight documents were to be reviewed, sealed and signed by a professional engineer as a way to ensure that the design of the wireless facility did not pose a significant fire risk.
The City of Malibu now requires all wireless companies to provide these eight documents as part of the “electrical and structural safety information” on the wireless permit application.
McCollough and Foster called this requirement the “fire protocol.” McCollough said, “We are proud that Malibu was the first city in the U.S. to institute the ‘fire protocol.’ The protocol reduces fire risk — you can never entirely eliminate risk, but you can reduce it.”
Before the city authorities codified the 2021 ordinance into law, wireless carriers came in, starting in December 2022, with “tons of wireless applications,” McCollough said.
McCollough pointed out that many Malibu residents displaced due to prior fires in the city have yet to be able to return home.
“We’re trying to make sure that when people get home, that they are safe in their homes. We want to be sure there aren’t Roman candles on the utility poles in front of everybody’s houses,” he said.
When residents requested to see the “fire protocol” documents for the wireless facilities being installed on their property, they have been denied access, McCollough said.
[…]
McCollough said the council voted on June 26 to “take both ordinances back up” by bringing the 2020 ordinance into conformance with the more extensive 2021 ordinance and by considering inserting more protection for residential areas into both ordinances.
Additionally, McCollough said Silverstein asked McCollough to provide a written briefing on the fire protocol document access issue. “Presumably, the council will resolve that, too,” McCollough said.
[…]
Audio of Classified War Plans Show Trump Refused Decades-Long Push to Attack Iran
© NICHOLAS KAMM
Fantine Gardinier
A veteran of the US state apparatus told Sputnik that the most significant part of the story about former US President Donald Trump holding onto still-classified plans for war with Iran after he left office is that Trump refused to give in to pressure to launch such a conflict, which Washington has sought for decades.
US media has obtained the audio of an alleged conversation between Trump and his aides in which prosecutors said he described showing them files he knew were still classified. The conversation, which allegedly occurred in the summer of 2021, was previously reported based on a partial transcript cited in a criminal complaint against Trump that was filed in a federal court earlier this month.
In the two-minute-long audio clip, Trump can seemingly be heard referencing top secret plans regarding an attack against Iran that he says were prepared by Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has become a sharp critic of Trump after the former president’s term ended.
“These are the papers,” Trump is heard saying. “This was done by the military and given to me.”
“See as president I could have declassified it,” Trump continues as others in the room laugh, adding: “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
Trump faces 37 charges related to the classified files, which the FBI seized in a raid last August at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Many of the charges each carry a potential 20-year prison sentence, if Trump were to be convicted.
Larry Johnson, a retired CIA intelligence officer and US State Department official, told Sputnik that Trump’s administration was by no means the first to consider a war against Iran, and that the focus on the war plans conceals a greater truth: that Trump didn’t want to launch such an attack.
“The war plans against Iran have existed since 1980, since the mullahs took power. And those plans exist and have been revised and updated over time. So I wouldn’t read too much into his discussing one plan.”
I think the key point is that Trump did not act on these plans,” Johnson asserted. “He resisted the pressure from advisors who wanted to start a war with Iran, but he refused. He refused to go along with them. And that’s I think that’s really part of the anger directed at him as well.”
However, Johnson said there was actually a greater chance of war with Iran under Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama.During the presidency of Barack Obama, the United States was more actively engaged in supporting intelligence operations that were leading to the assassination of Iranian scientists. They were backing this terrorist group, the MEK, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq. So, Trump is really sort of a problem for the defense establishment in Washington, DC, who were eager for that conflict. Trump tried to avoid conflict. He was always looking to cut a deal as opposed to go to war.”
Johnson predicted that if Trump manages to dodge the charges against him and win the 2024 US election, for which he has already declared his candidacy, that Trump would “cut a deal” with Tehran.
“He would find a way to de-escalate the tensions. But unfortunately, you’ve got a war party. There’s not just one political party. It’s bipartisan. We’ve got Republicans and Democrats alike who are promoting conflict, insisting on conflict. [US President Joe] Biden is not keen upon actually getting a real agreement with these guys. Trump was. I think Trump genuinely believed in and tried to promote those kinds of agreements,” the former CIA officer said.
Drug And Food Shortages Are Here, And Will Get A Lot Worse…
Michael Snyder
End of the American Dream
A lot of the experts didn’t think that this would happen. Once the pandemic subsided, global supply chains were supposed to return to normal. But now “hundreds of drugs” are in short supply in the United States, and even CNN is admitting that we are in the midst of “the worst food crisis in modern history”. As I did research for this article, I was stunned by what I discovered. Things are worse than I realized. I knew that a lot of drugs were in short supply, but it turns out that there have been shortages of many of our most basic antibiotics since last October, and now Pfizer is telling us that several types of penicillin will completely run out later this year…
Pfizer will run out of several doses of penicillin, which treat syphilis, strep throat, and other infections, later this year as shortages ripple across the US supply chain.
The company anticipates running out of the children’s dose of the syphilis drug Bicillin L-A by the end of June, according to a letter Pfizer posted Tuesday on the Food and Drug Administration’s website. The company says it’s prioritizing production of larger doses of Bicillin L-A, which is recommended for pregnant people with syphilis because it is the only drug that can pass through the placenta and also treat the fetus.
A different Pfizer penicillin, Bicillin C-R that treats other bacterial infections but not syphilis, is expected to run out in the third quarter, which ends Sept. 30. Pfizer’s penicillin has been in shortage since April.
Of course there are growing shortages of many other commonly used drugs.
For example, one recent survey discovered that most cancer centers in the U.S. “are reporting shortages of commonly used chemotherapy drugs”…
A recent survey found that a majority of cancer centers are reporting shortages of commonly used chemotherapy drugs used to treat a wide variety of cancers.
Much of the current shortage stems from the temporary closure of a drug manufacturing facility in India that happened after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found issues in the plant’s quality control.
After I first read that, I immediately had one burning question come to mind.
Why in the world are we having our chemotherapy drugs manufactured in India?
Once the war between the U.S. and China starts, it is going to be exceedingly difficult to get things shipped across the Pacific.
So what are we going to do then?
Already, certain chemotherapy drugs are in such short supply that some doctors are being forced to ration care…
Cancer drugs, including widely used cisplatin and carboplatin, are in such short supply that doctors are rationing care, asking patients to drive long distances for treatment, or turning to alternative treatments with riskier side effects.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
But it is happening.
In fact, the New York Times is telling us that there are shortages of “hundreds of drugs” in the United States right now…
Hundreds of drugs are on the list of medications in short supply in the United States, as officials grapple with an opaque and sometimes interrupted supply chain, quality and financial issues that are leading to manufacturing shutdowns.
The shortages are so acute that they are commanding the attention of the White House and Congress, which are examining the underlying causes of the faltering generic drug market, which accounts for about 90 percent of domestic prescriptions.
Meanwhile, global supplies of food just continue to get even tighter, and this is going to greatly affect consumers here in this country.
According to Zero Hedge, global cocoa supplies are becoming extremely tight and this could push chocolate prices to dizzying heights…
Cocoa prices have soared 44% over the last nine months to seven-year highs as the global cocoa bean deficit worsens for the second consecutive year.
“The cocoa market has experienced a remarkable surge in prices … This season marks the second consecutive deficit, with cocoa ending stocks expected to dwindle to unusually low levels,” S&P Global Commodity Insights’ Principal Research Analyst Sergey Chetvertakov told CNBC via email.
If you love chocolate, I would stock up now while you still can.
In addition, Zero Hedge is also reporting that there are very serious concerns about global supply levels of sugar and coffee…
With cocoa consumption at record highs in some Western countries, a worsening global bean deficit will only support higher prices.
Meanwhile, sugar prices hit decade highs on global shortage fears in April. And robusta coffee prices hit a record high days ago on supply fears.
There are just some grocery store aisles where inflation looks exceptionally sticky.
Most of us could live without chocolate, sugar and coffee.
But what about the basics?
One food bank in southern Georgia is warning that they are facing a severe shortage of food and they are desperate for help…
“We’re just, we’re experiencing the biggest food shortage we have in the 40 years of food banking,” CEO of Feeding the Valley Food Bank Frank Sheppard said. “And it’s pandemic related. It’s really a number of causes our federal government and state governments provided a plentiful amount of food during the pandemic to help so many more people in need. And those supply lines are just a little slow to replenish. Then you have the whole supply chain issue. Things are just taking 3, 4, 5, 10 times as long to get to us as they used to and rapid inflation is affecting a lot of people, a lot of our donors as well. So it’s really just a perfect storm, unfortunately of circumstances that has got our inventories at record low levels.”
Hopefully some people will step up and help them out.
But the truth is that supplies of food are only going to get tighter and tighter in the months ahead.
In a previous article, I discussed the following facts…
-The winter wheat harvest in Kansas this year is going to be the smallest since 1957.
-U.S. corn prices are expected to soar because the Corn Belt is being hit by the worst drought in 30 years.
-The size of the U.S. beef cow herd has fallen to the lowest level since 1962.
-The orange harvest in Florida in 2023 will be approximately 56 percent smaller than it was in 2022.
-Thanks to absolutely crazy weather patterns, approximately 90 percent of Georgia’s peach crop for this year has been wiped out.
On top of everything else, now millions of Mormon crickets have invaded Nevada, and they are eating everything in sight…
According to the University of Nevada in Reno, Mormon crickets eat native, herbaceous perennials (forbs), grasses, shrubs, and cultivated forage crops, reducing feed for grazing wildlife and livestock. In large numbers, their feeding can contribute to soil erosion, poor water quality, nutrient-depleted soils, and potentially cause damage to range and cropland ecosystems.
Drought encourages Mormon cricket outbreaks, which may last several years (historically 5 to 21 years) and cause substantial economic losses to rangeland, cropland, and home gardens. This is particularly true as adults and nymphs of Mormon crickets migrate in a band, eating plants along their path.
And of course all of this is happening in the context of a horrific global food crisis.
According to one recent report, the number of people around the globe that are facing “acute food insecurity” increased by a whopping 34 percent last year…
The report concluded that the number of people facing acute food insecurity in 58 countries and territories in 2022 was 258 million, and this was the highest in the seven-year history of the report, signifying a deteriorating trend in global acute food insecurity. In 2021, 193 million people in 53 countries and territories faced acute hunger, so the figure for 2022 reflected a 34 percent jump within just one year.
A global famine has begun.
And it will eventually get a whole lot worse.
[…]
Via http://endoftheamericandream.com/drug-and-food-shortages-are-here-and-they-will-get-a-lot-worse/
Pfizer Vaccine Batches in the EU Were Placebos, Say Scientists
by Robert Kogon
The Daily Sceptic
Scientists have uncovered startling evidence that a substantial portion of the batches of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine deployed in the European Union may in fact have consisted of placebos – and that the German regulator knew this and did not subject them to quality-control testing.
The scientists, Dr. Gerald Dyker, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Ruhr University Bochum, and Dr. Jörg Matysik, Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Leipzig, are part of a group of five German-speaking scientists who have been publicly raising questions about the quality and safety of the BioNTech vaccine (as it is known in Germany) for the last year and a half.
They recently appeared on the Punkt.Preradovic online programme of the German journalist Milena Preradovic to discuss batch variability. Their starting point was the recent Danish study showing enormous variation in the adverse events associated with different batches of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, or BNT162b2 per its scientific codename. The below figure from the Danish study illustrates this variation.
It shows that the batches used in Denmark, which are represented by the points in the graph, essentially break down into three groups.
The ‘green batches’ clustered around the green line have a moderate or moderately-high level of adverse events associated with them. In the discussion with Preradovic, Gerald Dyker takes the example of the green point furthest to the right.
As he explains, it represents the batch that was the used the most in Denmark, with somewhat over 800,000 doses having been administered. These 800,000 doses are associated with around 2,000 suspected adverse events, which gives a reporting rate of one suspected adverse event per approximately 400 doses. As Dyker puts it, “That’s not a small amount if we compare to what we know otherwise from influenza vaccines.” According to Dyker’s calculation, the green batches account for more than 60% of the Danish sample.
There are then the ‘blue batches’ clustered around the blue line, which are obviously associated with an extraordinarily high level of adverse events. As Dyker notes, no more than 80,000 doses of any of the blue batches were administered in Denmark – suggesting that these especially bad batches may perhaps have been quietly pulled from the market by public health authorities.
Nonetheless, these batches had as many as 8,000 suspected adverse events associated with them. Eight thousand out of 80,000 doses would give a reporting rate of one suspected adverse event for every 10 doses – and Dyker notes that some of the blue batches are indeed associated with a reporting rate of as high as one suspected adverse event for every six doses!
On Dyker’s calculation, the blue batches represent less than 5% of the total number of doses included in the Danish study. Nonetheless, they are associated with nearly 50% of the 579 deaths recorded in the sample.
Finally, we have the ‘yellow batches’ clustered around the yellow line, which, as can be seen above, barely gets off the x-axis. On Dyker’s calculation, the yellow batches represent around 30% of the total. Dyker notes that they include batches comprising some 200,000 administered doses which are associated with literally zero suspected adverse events.
As Dyker puts it, “malicious” observers might note that “this is how placebos would look”.
And malicious observers might be right. For Dyker and Matysik compared the batch numbers contained in the Danish study with publicly available information on the batches approved for release, and they made the startling discovery that almost none of the harmless batches, unlike the very-bad and not-so-bad batches, appear to have been subject to any quality-control testing at all.
Unbeknownst to most observers, it is precisely the German regulatory agency, the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI), which is, in principle, responsible for quality control of all the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine supply in the EU. (The institute is named after the German immunologist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Ehrlich, not, of course, the Stanford biology professor of the same name.)
This reflects the fact that the actual legal manufacturer of the vaccine, as well as the marketing authorisation holder in the EU, is the German company BioNTech, not its more well-known American partner Pfizer.
Dyker and Matysik found that the PEI had tested and approved for release all the very bad ‘blue’ batches, the overwhelming majority of the not-so-bad ‘green’ batches, but almost none of the harmless ‘yellow’ batches – as if the PEI knew in advance that these batches were unproblematic.
This is shown in the below slide from Dyker’s presentation during the Punkt.Preradovic interview. The title reads: ‘Which batches from the Danish study did the Paul Ehrlich Institute test and approve for release?’
In the PEI column of each of the tables, “ja” means, of course, that the batch was tested, “nein” means that it was not. Note that only the first batch in the ‘yellow’ table was tested.
The caption under that table reads: “The PEI did not generally regard testing of the harmless ‘yellow batches’ as necessary.”
As Dyker put it, with notable restraint, “this would support the initial suspicion that they are maybe in fact something like placebos”.
Or, in short, to paraphrase the German scientists’ findings on the variability of the Pfizer-BioNTech batches, it would appear that the good was bad, the bad was very bad, and the very good was saline solution.
[…]
Via https://dailysceptic.org/2023/06/28/pfizer-vaccine-batches-in-the-eu-were-placebos-say-scientists/
June 27, 2023
From Merck To Microsoft: These Companies BlackRock ‘Controls’ The Most Of
Zero HedgeA week after an employee of the world’s largest asset management company, BlackRock, described how the company attempts to stay out of the media spotlight while buying politicians and profiting off of war (according to undercover footage obtained by the O’Keefe Media Group), we thought it worth a look at just what companies does the 34-year-old company have the most control of.
As a reminder, in footage secretly recorded by undercover journalists in New York, a BlackRock recruiter named Serge Varlay explains how the investment company is able to “run the world.”
“They [BlackRock] don’t want to be in the news. They don’t want people to talk about them. They don’t want to be anywhere on the radar,” Varlay said.
Varlay told a OMG journalist in the footage that BlackRock manages $20 trillion worldwide (it’s actually around $9 trillion). “It’s incomprehensible numbers,” he said.
“You can take this big f***ton of money and buy people, I work for a company called Black Rock… It’s not who is the president it’s who is controlling the wallet of the president.
You could buy your candidates. First, there is the senators these guys are f***in cheap. Got 10 grand you can buy a senator. I’ll give you 500k right now. It doesn’t matter who wins, they’re in my pocket.”
– Serge Varlay
Top 25 Data
BREAKING: @BlackRock Recruiter Who “Decides People’s Fate” Spills Info on Company’s World Impact
“It’s not who the president is- it’s who’s controlling the wallet of the president”
“You got $10K? You can buy a senator"
“War is real f***ing good for business” #BlackRockExposed pic.twitter.com/DZIy1DuZKF
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) June 20, 2023
The following table shows the data we used to create the above infographic. These figures come from BlackRock’s latest 13F filing, which was released on May 12.
The 13F is a mandatory, quarterly report that is filed by institutional investment managers with over $100 million in AUM.
As expected, BlackRock’s top equity holdings include America’s most established tech companies: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
BlackRock also has large positions in Nvidia and Broadcom, which happen to be America’s two largest semiconductor companies. Given Nvidia’s incredible YTD performance (198% as of June 19th), this position has likely grown even bigger.
Altogether, tech stocks make up 39% of this top 25 list. The next biggest sector would be healthcare, at 13% of the total value.
Ownership StakesHow much of a controlling stake does BlackRock have in these companies? We answer this question in the following table, which again uses Q1 2023 data.
Name% OwnershipQuarter 1st OwnedMerck & Co8.24%Q3 2007UnitedHealth Group8.02%Q4 2008Berkshire Hathaway (Class B)7.98%Q3 2007PepsiCo7.96%Q3 2007AbbVie7.86%Q1 2013Home Depot7.60%Q3 2007Nvidia7.44%Q3 2007Microsoft7.22%Q3 2007Coca-Cola Co7.20%Q3 2007Broadcom7.16%Q3 2009Google (Class A)7.09%Q3 2007Chevron7.02%Q3 2007Eli Lilly And Co6.90%Q3 2007Mastercard6.89%Q3 2007Procter & Gamble Co6.86%Q3 2007Exxon Mobil6.83%Q3 2007JPMorgan Chase & Co6.59%Q3 2007Visa6.55%Q2 2008Apple6.54%Q3 2007Johnson & Johnson6.46%Q3 2007Google (Class C)6.13%Q2 2014Amazon5.93%Q4 2008Tesla5.70%Q3 2010Meta5.69%Q2 2012[…]
Via https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/merck-microsoft-these-are-companies-blackrock-controls-most
Secret Plan Put Biodefense Industry — Not Public Health Leaders — in Charge of Pandemic Response
By Debbie LermanBrownstone InstituteGovernment documents show that the National Security Council and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretly took over the helm of COVID-19 pandemic policy and planning.
Scandalous incompetence. Profound stupidity. Astounding errors. This is how many analysts — including Dr. Vinay Prasad, Dr. Scott Atlas and popular Substack commentator eugyppius — explain how leading public health experts could prescribe so many terrible pandemic response policies.
And it’s true. The so-called experts certainly have made themselves look foolish over the last three years: Public health leaders like Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Dr. Anthony Fauci make false claims, or contradict themselves repeatedly, on subjects related to the pandemic response, while leading scientists, like Dr. Peter Hotez in the U.S. and Dr. Christian Drosten in Germany, are equally susceptible to such flip-flops and lies.
Then there are the internationally renowned medical researchers, like Dr. Eric Topol, who repeatedly commit obvious errors in interpreting COVID-19-related research studies.
All of these figures publicly and aggressively promoted anti-public health policies, including universal masking, social distancing, mass testing and quarantining of healthy people, lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
It seems like an open-and-shut case: Dumb policies and dumb people in charge of those policies.
This might be true in a few individual cases of public health or medical leaders who really are incapable of understanding even high school-level science.
However, if we look at leading pandemic public health and medical experts as a group — a group consisting of the most powerful, widely published and well-paid researchers and scientists in the world — that simple explanation sounds much less convincing.
Even if you believe that most medical researchers are shills for pharmaceutical companies and that scientists rarely break new ground anymore, I think you’d be hard-pressed to claim that they lack basic analytical skills or a solid educational background in the areas they’ve studied.
Most doctors and scientists with advanced degrees know how to analyze simple scientific documents and understand basic data.
Additionally, those doctors and public health professionals who were deemed experts during the pandemic were also clever enough to have climbed the academic, scientific and/or government ladders to the highest levels.
They might be unscrupulous, sycophantic, greedy, or power-mongering. You might think they make bad moral or ethical decisions. But it defies logic to say that every single one of them understands simple scientific data less than, say, someone like me or you.
In fact, I find that to be a facile, superficial judgment that does not get to the root cause of their seemingly stupid, incompetent behavior.
Returning to some specific examples, I would argue that it is irrational to conclude, as Prasad did, that someone like Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who has published over 1,300 peer-reviewed articles and is one of the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine cannot read research papers “at a high level.”
And it is equally unlikely that Fauci, who managed to ascend and remain atop the highest scientific perch in the federal government for many decades, controlling billions of dollars in research grants, was too dumb to know that masks don’t stop viruses.
There must, therefore, be a different reason why all the top pro-lockdown scientists and public health experts — in perfect lockstep — suddenly started (and continue to this day) to misread studies and advocate policies that they had claimed in the past were unnecessary, making themselves look like fools.
Public health experts were messengers for the biodefense response
The most crucial single fact to know and remember when trying to understand the craziness of COVID-19 times is this:
The public health experts were not responsible for pandemic response policy. The military-intelligence-biodefense leadership was in charge.
In previous articles, I examined in great detail the government documents that show how standard tenets of public health pandemic management were abruptly and secretly thrown out during COVID-19.
The most startling switch was the replacement of the public health agencies by the National Security Council (NSC) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at the helm of pandemic policy and planning.
As part of the secret switch, all communications — defined in every previous pandemic planning document as the responsibility of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — were taken over by the National Security Council under the auspices of the White House Task Force. The CDC was not even allowed to hold its own press conferences!
As a Senate report from December 2022 notes:
“From March through June 2020, CDC was not permitted to conduct public briefings, despite multiple requests by the agency and CDC media requests were ‘rarely cleared.’ HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] stated that by early April 2020, ‘after several attempts to get approvals,’ its Office of Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs ‘stopped asking’ the White House ‘for a while.’” (p. 8)
When public health and medical experts blanketed the airwaves and Internet with “recommendations” urging universal masking, mass testing and quarantining of asymptomatic people, vaccine mandates and other anti-public health policies — or when they promoted obviously flawed studies that supported the quarantine-until-vaccine biodefense agenda — they were not doing so because they were dumb, incompetent, or misguided.
They were performing the role that the leaders of the national security/biodefense response gave them: to be the trusted public face that made people believe quarantine-until-vaccine was a legitimate public health response.
Why did public health leaders go along with the biodefense agenda?
We have to imagine ourselves in the position of public health and medical experts at top government positions when the intelligence-military-biodefense network took over the pandemic response.
What would you do if you were a government employee, or a scientist dependent on government grants, and you were told that the quarantine-until-vaccine policy was actually the only way to deal with this particular engineered potential bioweapon?
How would you behave if an unprecedented event in human history happened on your watch: an engineered virus designed as a potential bioweapon was spreading around the world, and the people who designed it told you that terrifying the entire population into locking down and waiting for a vaccine was the only way to stop it from killing many millions?
More mundanely, if your position and power depended on going along with whatever the powers-that-be in the NSC and DHS told you to do — if your job and livelihood were on the line — would you go against the narrative and risk losing it all?
And, finally, in a more venal vain: what if you stood to gain a lot more money and/or power by advocating for policies that might not be the gold standard of public health, but that you told yourself could bring about major innovations (vaccines/countermeasures) that would save humanity from future pandemics?
We know how the most prominent COVID-19 “experts” answered those questions. Not because they were dumb, but because they had a lot to lose and/or a lot to gain by going along with the biodefense narrative — and they were told millions would die if they failed to do so.
Making such claims contributes to the coverup of the much more sinister and dangerous transfer of power that their seemingly foolish behavior was meant to hide.
[…]
Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/homeland-security-secret-plan-covid-pandemic-response/
Prosecutor Reportedly Told Six Witnesses He Was Not Permitted To Charge Hunter Biden
Posted BY: | NwoReport
U.S. Attorney David Weiss wanted to bring charges against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden in Washington, D.C., IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley said on Friday — and when he was reportedly barred from doing so, he told six witnesses.
Shapley testified on the matter last month, telling the House Oversight Committee that Weiss revealed in October 2022, meeting that he had actually wanted to charge Hunter Biden in two federal districts but that he had been denied — and when Attorney General Merrick Garland denied that had ever happened, Shapley publicly named the witnesses he said Weiss had told.
“He surprised us by telling us on the charges, ‘I’m not the deciding official on whether charges are filed,’” Shapley told the committee when he testified in late May. “He then shocked us with the earth-shattering news that the Biden-appointed D.C. U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves would not allow him to charge in his district.
Shapley explained that by not allowing Weiss to file charges in D.C., Graves had effectively barred Weiss from seeking charges on crimes allegedly committed during 2014 and 2015 — including “foreign income from Burisma [Holdings] and a scheme to evade his income taxes through a partnership with a convicted felon … The purposeful exclusion of the 2014 and 2015 years sanitized the most substantive criminal conduct and concealed material facts.”
It was at that same meeting in October 2022 that Weiss said his request for special counsel authority had been denied, Shapley said. He was instead told to go through the regular process — which would have once again pitted him against a Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney.
Attorney General Merrick Garland responded to Shapley’s testimony with a statement on Friday flatly denying his allegations.
Garland claimed on Friday that Weiss would have been “permitted to continue his investigation and to make a decision to prosecute any way in which he wanted to and in any district in which he wanted to,” adding, “I don’t know how it would be possible for anybody to block him from bringing a prosecution, given that he has this authority.”
Just hours later, Shapley’s legal team went public with the names of four of the six witnesses he’d said Weiss told about the situation.
“Those six witnesses include Baltimore FBI Special Agent in Charge Tom Sobocinski and Assistant Special Agent in Charge Ryeshia Holley, IRS Assistant Special Agent in Charge Gary Shapley, and Special Agent in Charge Darrell Waldon, who also independently and contemporaneously corroborated Mr. Shapley’s account in an email, now public as Exhibit 10, following p. 148 of his testimony transcript,” the statement read. “Mr. Shapley would have no insight into why Mr. Weiss’s [sic] would make these statements at the October 7, 2022 meeting if they were false. That Mr. Weiss made these statements is easily corroborated, and it is up to him and the Justice Department to reconcile the evidence of his October 7, 2022 statements with contrary statements by Mr. Weiss and the Attorney General to Congress.”
[…]
Wind Costs Will Remain High
Gordon HughesNet Zero Watch
The crash in Siemens Energy’s share price on Friday has admirably highlighted an issue with wind costs that colleagues and I have been examining for more than a decade. The painful facts are that (i) wind generation, both onshore and offshore, is more expensive than we are being told and (ii) the performance of wind turbines tends to deteriorate with age, in significant part because of the kind of failures reported by Siemens Energy. There is strong evidence to support these conclusions, which has been presented in reports published by the Renewable Energy Foundation in 2012 and in 2020 for the UK and Denmark, with updates provided by the Global Warming Policy Foundation and Net Zero Watch.
The news about Siemens Energy brings a strong inclination to say ‘you were warned’. However, their travails are a symptom of a much more widespread disease, which affects all of us, either directly through the costs of electricity or indirectly as the owners of wind farms (via pension funds and other investment vehicles). The plunge in the share price of Siemens Energy is dramatic, but that may be written off as a temporary market response to disappointed expectations. We need to look beneath the immediate story to understand the reasons for the disappointment and their implications for the prospects for wind generation.
The announcement by Siemens Energy focused on higher-than-expected failure rates for their onshore turbines. These were ascribed to problems with key components, but newspaper reports suggest more systematic design faults in recent generations of large turbines. Previous announcements have referred to problems with offshore turbines, and the market reaction suggests few believe that the current problems are confined to onshore turbines. Further, while each of the major turbine manufacturers has its own specific problems, Siemens Energy is not unique in experiencing high warranty costs due to higher than anticipated failure rates.
In increasing order of importance, there are three aspects to note:
(a) Siemens Energy and other manufacturers have given warranties on performance that won’t be met because of higher failure rates. They will incur additional expenses, either to replace components or to compensate wind farm operators for any resulting underperformance. Those costs are the basis for the write-offs that Siemens Energy has had to take. Investors will be painfully aware that the company has been declaring profits when they sell wind turbines, but without making adequate provision for future warranty repair costs.
In accounting terms this is known as recognising future profits for new contracts. When it becomes clear that the contracts will be less profitable, the company must write down the value of previously reported profits and, thus, the value of the assets on its balance sheet. In effect, though perhaps entirely innocently, the company has been misleading investors about its past and current profitability. Senior managers should be feeling very uncomfortable about their positions since the problem was predictable (and predicted).
(b) Warranties have a limited period – often 5 to 8 years – but the higher failure rates will persist and affect performance over the remainder of the life of the wind farms where the turbines have been installed. Their future opex costs will be higher than expected, and their output will be significantly lower. This will reduce their operational lifetimes, which are determined by how the margin between revenues and costs changes as wind farms get older. Lower revenues and higher costs bring forward the date at which replacement or repowering is necessary. These changes will reduce, often quite substantially, the returns earned by the financial investors – pension funds and other – to whom operators sell the majority of the equity in wind farms after a few years of operation.
(c) Siemens Energy and other manufacturers may argue that they can – with time – fix the component and design problems which lead to high failure rates. They may well be correct. The history of power engineering is littered with examples of new generations of equipment which experienced major problems when first introduced but which were eventually sorted out. Many companies have found themselves in severe financial difficulties or even forced into bankruptcy by these “teething” problems. The error in this case has been to pretend that wind turbines were immune to such failures.
The whole justification for the falling costs of wind generation rested on the assumption that much bigger turbines would produce more output at lower capex cost per megawatt, without the large costs of generational change. Now we have confirmation that such optimism is entirely unjustified – the whole development process has been a case of too far, too fast. Again, this was both predictable and predicted. The idea that wind turbines are immune to the factors that affect other types of power engineering was always absurd. The consequence is that both capital and operating costs for wind farms will not fall as rapidly as claimed and may not fall significantly at all. It follows that current energy policies in the UK, Europe and the United States are based on foundations of sand – naïve optimism reinforced by enthusiastic lobbying divorced from engineering reality.
In the longer term it is (b) and (c) that are the big story. With respect to (a), serious analysts have long since recognised that claims made about future wind costs and performance by the wind industry should not be taken seriously. It has been obvious that they were kidding themselves and their investors ever since the last 2010s. Unfortunately, we have now been tied into a high energy-cost future, with all the implications that has for the economy and standards of living.
[…]
The Most Revolutionary Act
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