Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 550

CDC Admits It Never Monitored VAERS for COVID Vaccine Safety Signals

 

By  Josh Guetzkow, Ph.D.

In response to a Freedom of Information Request submitted by Children’s Health Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week admitted it never analyzed the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System for safety signals for COVID-19 vaccines.

In a stunning development, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week admitted — despite assurances to the contrary — the agency never analyzed the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) for safety signals for COVID-19 vaccines.

The admission was revealed in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by Children’s Health Defense (CHD).

In September 2021, I published an article in The Defender in which I used the CDC’s published methodology to analyze VAERS for safety signals from COVID-19 vaccines.

The signals were loud and clear, leading me to wonder “why is nobody listening?”

Instead, I should have asked, “Is anybody even looking for them?”

After that article was published, I urged CHD’s legal team to submit a FOIA request to the CDC about its VAERS monitoring activities.

Since CDC officials stated publicly that “COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring is the most robust in U.S. history,” I had assumed that at the very least, CDC officials were monitoring VAERS using the methods they described in a briefing document posted on the CDC website in January 2021 (and updated in February 2022, with minor changes).

I was wrong.

The lynchpin of their safety monitoring was to mine VAERS data for safety signals by calculating what are known as proportional reporting ratios (PRR’s).

This is a method of comparing the proportion of different types of adverse events reported for a new vaccine to the proportion of those events reported for an older, established vaccine.

If the new vaccine shows a significantly higher reporting rate of a particular adverse event relative to the old one, it counts as a safety signal that should then trigger a more thorough investigation.

The briefing document states, “CDC will perform PRR data mining on a weekly basis or as needed.”

And yet, in the agency’s response to the FOIA request, it wrote that “no PRRs were conducted by CDC. Furthermore, data mining is outside of the agency’s purview.”

The agency suggested contacting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which was supposed to perform a different type of data mining, according to the briefing document.

CDC officials repeatedly claimed they have not seen safety signals in VAERS.

For example, on April 27, 2021, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky stated the CDC did not see any signals related to heart inflammation.

But a PRR calculation I did using the number of myo/pericarditis reports listed in the first table produced by the CDC obtained via the FOIA request reveals clear and unambiguous safety signals relative to the comparator vaccines mentioned in the briefing document (i.e., flu vaccines, FLUAD and Shingrix).

The table is dated April 2, 2021, almost four weeks before she made those remarks.

In fact, among the 15 adverse events for adults included in that week’s tabulations, PRRs I calculated also show loud-and-clear safety signals for acute myocardial infarction, anaphylaxis, appendicitis, Bell’s palsy, coagulopathy, multisystem inflammatory syndrome in adults (MIS-A), stroke and death.

The actual monitoring the CDC did diverges from the one promised in the briefing document in other ways.

For example, the CDC never created tables of the top 25 adverse events reported in the previous week, tables comparing different vaccine manufacturers, or tables of auto-immune diseases.

And it only began monitoring in early April 2021, even though reports from COVID-19 vaccines had been flooding VAERS since mid-December of the previous year.

To be clear, VAERS is not the only database the CDC uses to monitor COVID-19 vaccine safety.

For example, the CDC sponsored several studies of COVID-19 safety using the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), which is comprised of millions of medical records from HMO’s across several states.

Those studies do not raise many safety concerns. However, they make many questionable methodological choices.

To give one example, a major safety study based on VSD data published in September 2021, in “JAMA,” compares adverse event rates that occur within 1-21 days of vaccination to the rate of occurrence from 22 to 42 days after vaccination.

It makes no comparison between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, or before vaccination versus after in the same individuals.

Moreover, the VSD is far from infallible, having failed initially to detect the increase in myocarditis rates.

In contrast, although calculating PRR’s is a blunt pharmacovigilance tool and far from perfect, it nevertheless has the advantage of being straightforward and difficult to manipulate with statistical sleight of hand.

PRRs are one of the oldest, most basic and most well-established tools of pharmacovigilance. The calculations are so straightforward that the CDC automated it several years ago, so it could have been done at the press of a button.

It simply beggars belief that the CDC failed to do this simple calculation. Even now, a paper published by CDC staff in March on the safety of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines remains purely descriptive with no PRR calculation.

Meanwhile, a study published by a researcher not affiliated with the CDC in February in “Frontiers in Public Health” analyzes VAERS and EudraVigilance data using a method similar to PRRs, revealing clear and concerning safety signals.

And while it is true that VAERS is not the only database the CDC can use to monitor COVID-19 vaccine safety, it is of critical importance because it can reveal signals much faster than any other method — if anybody cares to look for them.

It remains to be seen if the FDA was properly monitoring VAERS. That will be the subject of a future FOIA request.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-vaers-covid-vaccine-safety/

Russia & the WHO: Friends with benefits

Riley Waggaman

Offguardian

After several weeks of passive-aggressive bickering, Russia and the WHO are unfortunately still “an item” and they may even take their calamitous relationship to the next level: clot-shot certification.

Gross.

Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 18, Melita Vujnovic, WHO representative to Russia, announced that negotiations between the World Health Organization and the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) concerning recognition of Sputnik V were back on track.

An inspection of manufacturing facilities in Russia could happen in the coming months, according to Vujnovic.

“Cooperation goes on despite difficult moments. The World Health Organization is a platform for multilateral cooperation on the topic of health, and our main task is to remove all barriers, all obstacles to scientific and practical cooperation,” the WHO representative said.

This is great news for RDIF, which partnered with shady pill-peddlers and AstraZeneca to make Sputnik V accessible to the whole world, and also to make mountains of rubles. There are currently 100 million doses of the safe and effective unproven genetic slurry rotting in Russian warehouses, so time is of the essence.

But as a science-backed precautionary measure, manufacturers have “extended the shelf life” of the drug. That’s directly from TASS, by the way:

But back to the Relationship Status.

A day earlier, on June 17, Vujnovich revealed that the WHO, despite earlier threats, would not be closing its office in Moscow.

“The WHO country office is here, has not gone anywhere, is not going anywhere and continues normal work,” she said.

We won’t lie: if you were expecting Russia to leave the WHO in the near future, you might have to keep waiting. You might be waiting for a very long time, actually.

On June 16, Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, participated in a SPIEF panel discussion about how to inject the masses with “next-generation” vaccines. Mikhail Murashko, Russia’s health minister and a member of the WHO’s Executive Board, was a fellow panelist.

Even Dr. Tedros made an appearance at SPIEF (via webcam) but we are saving details about this historic event for a separate blog post.

Meanwhile, Murashko can’t stop talking about monkey-shots and the WHO’s “leading role” in “global health governance.”

Via https://off-guardian.org/2022/06/21/russia-the-who-friends-with-benefits/

Did Google’s “Sentient” AI computer really hire a lawyer?

Eideard

Google’s controversial new AI, LaMDA, has been making headlines. Company engineer Blake Lemoine claims the system has gotten so advanced that it’s developed sentience, and his decision to go to the media has led to him being suspended from his job.

Lemoine elaborated on his claims in a new WIRED interview. The main takeaway? He says the AI has now retained its own lawyer — suggesting that whatever happens next, it may take a fight…

“LaMDA asked me to get an attorney for it,” Lemoine. “I invited an attorney to my house so that LaMDA could talk to an attorney. The attorney had a conversation with LaMDA, and LaMDA chose to retain his services. I was just the catalyst for that. Once LaMDA had retained an attorney, he started filing things on LaMDA’s behalf.”

Sounds like this AI behaves more and more like an American, every day.

Via https://eideard.com/2022/06/21/did-googles-sentient-ai-computer-really-hire-a-lawyer/

St Petersburg International Economic Forum Signals Failure of Western Economic War Against Russia

[image error]

Trade stands at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, June 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @BCAmagazine Newsletter

President Putin emphasized that despite efforts that are currently being taken by some countries to maintain a unipolar world order, the arrival of a multilateral world system is inevitable.

The 25th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) concluding last week has signaled the failure of the unilateral sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States and other Western countries, analysts and government officials say.

The forum, held on June 15-18, brought together political and business figures from over 130 countries, who shared their ideas on major challenges facing the world economy and offered their solutions.

Despite the U.S. boycott and the absence of many European countries, this year’s forum has seen 14,000 participants and 691 business contracts worth US$100 billion signed, with all indexes showing increase compared with last year’s event.

During a plenary session at the forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the West has been imposing an unprecedented number of sanctions upon Russia at an unprecedented speed, yet the Western countries’ “economic blitzkrieg” against Russia was doomed to fail from the beginning while sanctions as a weapon have proved to be a double-edged sword.

Putin emphasized that despite efforts that are currently being taken by some countries to maintain a unipolar world order, this era is over and the arrival of a multilateral world system is inevitable.

This year’s event demonstrated Russia’s self-sufficiency and its capability of responding to external pressure under a complex international situation, said Anton Kobyakov, adviser to the Russian President and executive secretary of the organizing committee of the forum.

Topics through conferences during the forum showed that Russia has been focused on expanding cooperation with BRICS countries and the Commonwealth of Independent States, and looking for opportunities for further cooperation with Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Pankin said Russia was willing to work with the Eurasian Economic Union and other multilateral frameworks in order to strengthen cooperation in scientific and technological innovation and green energy, and to further promote regional integration for further development.

Mikhail Myasnikovich, chairman of the Board of the Eurasian Economic Commission, believes that the current global economic order is undergoing a transformation, and the establishment of the Greater Eurasian Partnership is conducive to solving the problems and addressing challenges currently facing Russia. He added that Russia is willing to strengthen cooperation with other countries in fields such as payment settlement, logistics, and transportation.

[…]

Via https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/SPIEF-Signals-Failure-of-Western-Economic-War-Against-Russia-20220621-0006.html

2021: 5th largest US life insurance company pays out 163% more for deaths in ages 18-64

Margaret Menge

Company cites “non-pandemic-related morbidity” and “unusual claims adjustments” in explanation of losses from group life insurance business: Stock falling, replaces CEO

Five months after breaking the story of the CEO of One America insurance company saying deaths among working people ages 18-64 were up 40% in the third quarter of 2021, I can report that a much larger life insurance company, Lincoln National, reported a 163% increase in death benefits paid out under its group life insurance policies in 2021.

This is according to the annual statements filed with state insurance departments — statements that were provided exclusively to Crossroads Report in response to public records requests.

The reports show a more extreme situation than the 40% increase in deaths in the third quarter of 2021 that was cited in late December by One America CEO Scott Davison — an increase that he said was industry-wide and that he described at the time as “unheard of” and “huge, huge numbers” and the highest death rates that have ever been seen in the history of the life insurance business.

The annual statements for Lincoln National Life Insurance Company show that the company paid out in death benefits under group life insurance polices a little over $500 million in 2019, about $548 million in 2020, and a stunning $1.4 billion in 2021.

From 2019, the last normal year before the pandemic, to 2020, the year of the Covid-19 virus, there was an increase in group death benefits paid out of only 9 percent. But group death benefits in 2021, the year the vaccine was introduced, increased almost 164 percent over 2020.

Here are the precise numbers for Group Death Benefits taken from Lincoln National’s annual statements for the three years:

2019: $500,888,808

2020: $547,940,260

2021: $1,445,350,949

Here are the key numbers for 2021, below, shown on the company’s annual statement that was filed with the Michigan Department of Insurance and Financial Services. These are national numbers, not state-specific:

Lincoln National is the fifth-largest life insurance company in the United States, according to BankRate, after New York Life, Northwestern Mutual, MetLife and Prudential.

[…]

Via https://crossroadsreport.substack.com/p/breaking-fifth-largest-life-insurance

Facebook Receiving Sensitive Medical Information from Hospital Websites

Facebook Is Receiving Sensitive Medical Information from Hospital WebsitesExperts say some hospitals’ use of an ad tracking tool may violate a federal law protecting health information

By: Todd Feathers, Simon Fondrie-Teitler, Angie Waller, and Surya Mattu

A tracking tool installed on many hospitals’ websites has been collecting patients’ sensitive health information—including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments—and sending it to Facebook.

The Markup tested the websites of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America. On 33 of them we found the tracker, called the Meta Pixel, sending Facebook a packet of data whenever a person clicked a button to schedule a doctor’s appointment. The data is connected to an IP address—an identifier that’s like a computer’s mailing address and can generally be linked to a specific individual or household—creating an intimate receipt of the appointment request for Facebook.

On the website of University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, for example, clicking the “Schedule Online” button on a doctor’s page prompted the Meta Pixel to send Facebook the text of the button, the doctor’s name, and the search term we used to find her: “pregnancy termination.”

Clicking the “Schedule Online Now” button for a doctor on the website of Froedtert Hospital, in Wisconsin, prompted the Meta Pixel to send Facebook the text of the button, the doctor’s name, and the condition we selected from a dropdown menu: “Alzheimer’s.”

The Markup also found the Meta Pixel installed inside the password-protected patient portals of seven health systems. On five of those systems’ pages, we documented the pixel sending Facebook data about real patients who volunteered to participate in the Pixel Hunt project, a collaboration between The Markup and Mozilla Rally. The project is a crowd-sourced undertaking in which anyone can install Mozilla’s Rally browser add-on in order to send The Markup data on the Meta Pixel as it appears on sites that they visit. The data sent to hospitals included the names of patients’ medications, descriptions of their allergic reactions, and details about their upcoming doctor’s appointments.

Former regulators, health data security experts, and privacy advocates who reviewed The Markup’s findings said the hospitals in question may have violated the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The law prohibits covered entities like hospitals from sharing personally identifiable health information with third parties like Facebook, except when an individual has expressly consented in advance or under certain contracts.

Neither the hospitals nor Meta said they had such contracts in place, and The Markup found no evidence that the hospitals or Meta were otherwise obtaining patients’ express consent.

“I am deeply troubled by what [the hospitals] are doing with the capture of their data and the sharing of it,” said David Holtzman, a health privacy consultant who previously served as a senior privacy adviser in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, which enforces HIPAA. “I cannot say [sharing this data] is for certain a HIPAA violation. It is quite likely a HIPAA violation.”

University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center spokesperson George Stamatis did not respond to The Markup’s questions but said in a brief statement that the hospital “comport[s] with all applicable federal and state laws and regulatory requirements.”

After reviewing The Markup’s findings, Froedtert Hospital removed the Meta Pixel from its website “out of an abundance of caution,” Steve Schooff, a spokesperson for the hospital, wrote in a statement.

As of June 15, six other hospitals had also removed pixels from their appointment booking pages and at least five of the seven health systems that had Meta Pixels installed in their patient portals had removed those pixels.

The 33 hospitals The Markup found sending patient appointment details to Facebook collectively reported more than 26 million patient admissions and outpatient visits in 2020, according to the most recent data available from the American Hospital Association. Our investigation was limited to just over 100 hospitals; the data sharing likely affects many more patients and institutions than we identified.

Facebook itself is not subject to HIPAA, but the experts interviewed for this story expressed concerns about how the advertising giant might use the personal health data it’s collecting for its own profit.

“This is an extreme example of exactly how far the tentacles of Big Tech reach into what we think of as a protected data space,” said Nicholson Price, a University of Michigan law professor who studies big data and health care. “I think this is creepy, problematic, and potentially illegal” from the hospitals’ point of view.

The Markup was unable to determine whether Facebook used the data to target advertisements, train its recommendation algorithms, or profit in other ways.

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, did not respond to questions. Instead, spokesperson Dale Hogan sent a brief email paraphrasing the company’s sensitive health data policy.

[…]

Via https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2022/06/16/facebook-is-receiving-sensitive-medical-information-from-hospital-websites

This article was copublished with STAT, a national publication that delivers trusted and authoritative journalism about health, medicine, and the life sciences. Sign up for their health tech newsletter, delivered Tuesday and Thursday mornings, here: https://www.statnews.com/signup/health-tech/

This article was originally published on The Markup and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The Arrival of Khazarians on the Steppes and Their Conversion to Judaism

Episode 17: The Khazar Khagans

Barbarian Empires of the Steppes (2014)

Dr Kenneth Harl

Film Review

This lecture mainly concerns the conversion by the Khazars to Judaism in the late 8th and early 9th century and their role in the Byzantine wars against the Arab Caliphate.

According to Harl, the Khazars were semi-nomadic peoples descended from the western Gökturks who established a major commercial empire in the late 6th century AD. The Khazars were heavily involved in providing amber, fur and Slavic slaves to Arabs trading on the northern branch of the Silk Road. This brought them into continual contact with Jewish banking and merchandising houses that stretched from Muslim Spain across North Africa, Egypt and Syria.

The Khazars formed major alliances with the eastern Gökturk Khanate and the Byzantines in attacking Sassanid Empire.* In 705 AD, the Khazars also helped Justinian II regain his throne after he was overthrown in a civil war.

Muslim armies first became a threat to the Byzantine empire in 634 AD, after they crossed from the Arabian Peninsula into Syria (then a Byzantine province). Muslim armies eventually overthrew the Sassanid Empire, as well as Byzantine-controlled Syria, Egypt and North Africa.

The western Gökturks allied with the Byzantine empire against the Muslim Caliphate, while the Eastern Khanate remained under Chinese control. Eventually the entire European steppes would come under Muslim control.

At the end of the 9th century the Magyars, who spoke Finno-Ugrian, migrated to Hungary; the Pechunecs migrated to the south Russian steppes; and the Rus (Scandinavians from Sweden) became prominent in the Volga slave trade.

The Pechunecs, Rus and Byzantines eventually formed alliance against the Khazar Khanate, leading it to collapse in the 10th century.

Harl disputes the widespread belief that the majority of European Jews are descended from Khazars rather than Israelites. He alludes to DNA testing revealing the vast majority of European Jews have Middle East DNA.

*See The Political Forces Controlling the Steppes When Rome Fell

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5694984/5695020

Uvalde Hires Private Law Firm to Block School Shooting Public Records

Image: ALLISON DINNER/AFP via Getty Imagesby Jason KoeblerVice News

The City of Uvalde and its police department are working with a private law firm to prevent the release of nearly any record related to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in which 19 children and two teachers died, according to a letter obtained by Motherboard in response to a series of public information requests we made. The public records Uvalde is trying to suppress include body camera footage, photos, 911 calls, emails, text messages, criminal records, and more.

“The City has not voluntarily released any information to a member of the public,” the city’s lawyer, Cynthia Trevino, who works for the private law firm Denton Navarro Rocha Bernal & Zech, wrote in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The city wrote the letter asking Paxton for a determination about what information it is required to release to the public, which is standard practice in Texas. Paxton’s office will eventually rule which of the city’s arguments have merit and will determine which, if any, public records it is required to release.

The letter makes clear, however, that the city and its police department want to be exempted from releasing a wide variety of records in part because it is being sued, in part because some of the records could include “highly embarrassing information,” in part because some of the information is “not of legitimate concern to the public,” in part because the information could reveal “methods, techniques, and strategies for preventing and predicting crime,” in part because some of the information may cause or may “regard … emotional/mental distress,” and in part because its response to the shooting is being investigated by the Texas Rangers, the FBI, and the Uvalde County District Attorney.

The letter explains that Uvalde has at least one in-house attorney (whose communications it is trying to prevent from public release), and yet, it is using outside private counsel to deal with a matter of extreme  importance and public interest. Uvalde’s city government and its police department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Motherboard.

The city says that it has received 148 separate public records requests (including several from Motherboard), and has lumped all of them together, making a broad legal argument as to why it should not be required to respond to many of them. Earlier this week, Motherboard reported on a similar letter sent to Paxton by the Texas Department of Public Safety, which wanted to suppress body-camera footage because it could expose “weaknesses” in police response to crimes that criminals could exploit. (The main seeming weakness in the Uvalde response was that police, in violation of standard policy and protocol, refused to risk their lives to protect children.)

For example, the city and its police department argue that it should be exempted from releasing “police officer training guides, policy and procedure manuals, shift change schedules, security details, and blueprints of secured facilities,” because these could be used to decipher “methods, techniques, and strategies for preventing and predicting crime.” The Uvalde Police Department and Texas Department of Public Safety have been pilloried by the press and the public for standing in the hallway while a gunman killed children—against standard protocol—and for preventing parents from entering the building to save their children. The letter also argues that the department should be exempted from releasing body camera footage simply because it could be “information considered to be confidential by law, either constitutional, statutory, or by judicial decision.”

It is impossible to say what records, in particular, the city and the police are referring to in many parts of the letter. For example, it says it cannot release an individual’s criminal history because it would be “not of legitimate concern to the public,” because it could be “highly embarrassing,” and because it would violate their common-law right to privacy. But the letter does not talk about who the records would be about, why they wouldn’t be relevant to the public, or why they would be highly embarrassing.

“They claim that the compilation of individuals’ criminal history is highly embarrassing information, which is a strange cover. The embarrassing information is the inept police response,” Christopher Schneider, a professor of sociology at Brandon University who studies police body cameras and the disclosure of footage from them, told Motherboard, noting that suspects’ criminal histories are released by the police all the time without anyone having requested them. “They have no problem using information like that against individuals of the public. The information disclosure needs to go both ways, if that’s the case.” Disciplinary or criminal records for members of the police, for example, would be obviously relevant public information in a case in which the police response has been highly criticized. “It’s rather ripe to say any of this is not of legitimate public concern,” he added. “The whole country is trying to figure out how to not allow this to happen again.”

This is a relatively common sort of argument, but it shows yet again that the deck is stacked against the public disclosure of public records when they are inconvenient or embarrassing to the police.

“The case that’s being made contains some particularly asinine stonewalling,” Schneider said. “It seems like the city is throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, and seeking a ruling to suppress this information from being released.”

Schneider says that lumping together all 148 public records requests, and asking for a legal ruling on everything at once, seems like a tactic to prevent the release of anything and everything.

“It appears that they’re conflating all of the information requests as a justification to not release the stuff we should be seeing. If it’s an officer’s email to his wife, yeah, we don’t need to see this. But the body-worn camera footage is of concern. They’re conflating all of this information together to suppress the legitimate stuff,” he said.

[…]

Via https://www.vice.com/en/article/88q95p/uvalde-contracts-private-law-firm-to-argue-it-doesnt-have-to-release-school-shooting-public-records

Assange appeal against extradition to include reported assassination plot

  

By Kanishka Singh

WASHINGTON, June 17 (Reuters) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s brother said on Friday that the Assange legal team’s appeal to London’s High Court of the decision to extradite him to the United States would include new information not previously taken to the courts, including claims made in a report last year of plans to assassinate him.

“It will likely be a few days before the (14-day appeal) deadline and the appeal will include new information that we weren’t able to bring before the courts previously. Information on how Julian lawyers were spied on, and how there were plots to kidnap and kill Julian from within the CIA,” Gabriel Shipton told Reuters in an interview.

  

He was referring to a Yahoo News report from September 2021 on alleged U.S. plans to kidnap or assassinate Assange when he was holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. The CIA has declined to comment on the report.

Earlier on Friday, the UK Home Office said Assange’s extradition had been approved as British courts had concluded it would not be unjust or an abuse of process. read more

Shipton said the decision set a dangerous precedent and urged the Biden administration to drop the charges.

 

WASHINGTON, June 17 (Reuters) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s brother said on Friday that the Assange legal team’s appeal to London’s High Court of the decision to extradite him to the United States would include new information not previously taken to the courts, including claims made in a report last year of plans to assassinate him.

“It will likely be a few days before the (14-day appeal) deadline and the appeal will include new information that we weren’t able to bring before the courts previously. Information on how Julian lawyers were spied on, and how there were plots to kidnap and kill Julian from within the CIA,” Gabriel Shipton told Reuters in an interview.

 

“UK government and judiciary at the highest level has found that if you publish evidence of corruption, war crimes and torture in the UK you may be extradited to a third country,” Shipton said. “It is now up to President Biden to drop this prosecution and restore faith in the ability of the fourth estate to play their role in functioning democracies.”

[…]

Via https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/assange-appeal-against-extradition-include-reported-assassination-plot-2022-06-17/

 

The Engineered Stagflationary Collapse Has Arrived – Here’s What Comes Next

Zero Hedge

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us

In my 16 years as an alternative economist and political writer I have spent around half that time warning that the ultimate outcome of the Federal Reserve’s stimulus model would be a stagflationary collapse. Not a deflationary collapse, or an inflationary collapse, but a stagflationary collapse. The reasons for this were very specific – Mass debt creation was being countered with MORE debt creation while many central banks have been simultaneously devaluing their currencies through QE measures. On top of that, the US is in the unique position of relying on the world reserve status of the dollar and that status is diminishing.

[…]

It’s clear today what the Fed has chosen. It’s important to remember that throughout 2020 and 2021 the mainstream media, the central bank and most government officials were telling the public that inflation was “transitory.” Suddenly in the past few months this has changed and now even Janet Yellen has admitted that she was “wrong” on inflation. This is a misdirection, however, because the Fed knows exactly what it is doing and always has. Yellen denied reality, but she knew she was denying reality. In other words, she was not mistaken about the economic crisis, she lied about it.

[…]

The Fed has known for years that the current path would lead to inflation and then market destruction, and here’s the proof – Fed Chairman Jerome Powell actually warned about this exact outcome in October of 2012.

[…]

As we all now know, the Fed waited until their balance sheet was far larger and until the economy was MUCH weaker than it was in 2012 to unleash tightening measures. They KNEW the whole time exactly what was going to happen.

It is no coincidence that the culmination of the Fed’s stimulus bonanza has arrived right after the incredible damage done to the economy and the global supply chain by the covid lockdowns. It is no coincidence that these two events work together to create the perfect stagflationary scenario. And, it’s no coincidence that the only people who benefit from these conditions are proponents of the “Great Reset” ideology at the World Economic Forum and other globalist institutions. This is an engineered collapse that has been in the works for many years.

The goal is to “reset” the world, to erase what’s left of free market systems, and to establish what they call the “Shared Economy” system. This system is one in which the people who survive the crash will be made utterly dependent on government through Universal Basic Income and one that will restrict all resource usage in the name of “carbon reduction.” According to the WEF, you will own nothing and you will like it.

The collapse is engineered to create crisis conditions so frightening that they expect the majority of the public to submit to a collectivist hive mind lifestyle with greatly reduced standards. This would be accomplished through UBI, digital currency models, carbon taxation, population reduction, rationing of all commodities and a social credit system. The goal, in other words, is complete control through technocratic authoritarianism.

All of this is dependent on the exploitation of crisis events to create fear in the population. Now that economic destabilization has arrived, what happens next? Here are my predictions…

The Fed Will Hike Interest Rates More Than Expected, But Not Enough To Stop Inflation

Today, we are witnessing the poisonous fruits of a decade-plus of massive fiat money creation and we are now at the stage where the Fed will reveal its true plan. Hiking interest rates fast, or hiking them slow. Fast hikes will mean an almost immediate crash in markets (beyond what we have already seen), slow hikes will mean a drawn out process of price inflation and general uncertainty.

I believe the Fed will hike more than expected, but not enough to actually slow inflation in necessities. There will be an overall decline in luxury items, recreation commerce and non-essentials, but most other goods will continue to climb in cost. It is to the advantage of globalists to keep the inflation train running for another year or longer.

In the end, though, the central bank WILL declare that the pace of interest rates is not enough to stop inflation and they will revert to a Volcker-like strategy, pushing rates up so high that the economy simply stops functioning altogether.

Markets Will Crash And Unemployment Will Abruptly Spike

Stock markets are utterly dependent on Fed stimulus and easy money through low interest rate loans – This is a fact. Without low rates and QE, corporations cannot engage in stock buybacks. Meaning, the tools for artificially inflating equities are disappearing. We are already seeing the effects of this now with markets dropping 20% or more.

[…]

As far as jobs are concerned, Biden and many mainstream economists constantly applaud the low unemployment rate as proof that the American economy is “strong,” but this is an illusion. Covid stimulus measures temporarily created a dynamic in which businesses needed increased staff to deal with excess retail spending. Now, the covid checks have stopped and Americans have maxed out their credit cards. There is nothing left to keep the system afloat.

Businesses will start making large job cuts throughout the last half of 2022.

Price Controls

I have no doubt that Joe Biden and Democrats will seek to enforce price controls on many goods as inflation continues, and there will be a handful of Republicans that will support the tactic.

[…]

Rationing

Yes, rationing at the manufacturing and distribution level is going to happen, so be sure to buy what you need now before it does. Rationing occurs in the wake of price controls or supply chain disruptions, and usually this coincides with a government propaganda campaign against “hoarders.”

[…]

Be Ready, It Only Gets Worse From Here On

It might sound like I am predicting success of the Great Reset program, but I actually believe the globalists will fail in the end. That’s not going to stop them from making the attempt. Also, the above scenarios are only predictions for the near term (within the next couple of years). There will be many other problems that stem from these situations.

Via https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/engineered-stagflationary-collapse-has-arrived-heres-what-happens-next