Category: zerohedge

Ever since a government study declared that minorities in the UK appear to be more vulnerable to the virus than whites (though this racial disparity diminishes substantially once occupation and class are introduced as factors), it appears the UK public health authorities have caught the social justice bug.

The data prompted the UK Vaccines Task Force, the public health authority responsible for supervising the many studies of a COVID-19 vaccine, to put out urgent calls for more minority candidates to sign up for their trials, despite recruiting 100,000 candidates for the studies. On Monday, the UK government put out another similar request, asking for more volunteers who are either “high risk” (elderly or immuno-compromised), front-line hospital or care-home workers, or ethnic minorities.

Here’s more from Reuters:

The government said it was particularly keen for over 65s, frontline health and care workers and people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds to sign up.

[…]

“Protecting those at risk is the only way we will end this pandemic,” said Kate Bingham, chair of the UK Vaccines Taskforce. “Getting 100,000 volunteers on board is a great start but we need many more people from many different backgrounds that we can call on for future studies if we are to find a vaccine quickly to protect those who need it.”

Recruiting these groups might be more difficult now that English-language media in the US and the UK has been blasting out stories claiming minorities are more susceptible to the virus, when what they really mean is that minorities are dying at higher rates than white people largely because a higher percentage of minorities are in working-class jobs.

Given liberals’ fondness for justifying every wanton decision with “science”, we’re curious about how this attitude evolved, considering that typically, racial differences don’t impact how a vaccine works in the human body.

The Times of India, meanwhile, reported that the British government has even gone so far as to broadcast ads in Gujarati, Punjabi and  Bengali – languages commonly spoken by members of the Indian diaspora – in the hopes of recruiting more migrants for the studies.

While health officials are put through their paces by the “anti-racist” crowd, we can’t help but wonder whether the UK Vaccine Task Force’s priorities will slow the start of these trials, potentially stymying the rollout of a vaccine while the west continues to Bash Russia’s vaccine, even though more countries are signing up to run trials or buy medication.

But don’t worry: if this decision leads to more lives being lost unnecessarily, at least we can rest easy knowing they died in the name of “equality”.

In a lengthy transcription of an interview with Italy’s La Repubblica, billionaire hedge fund manager, philanthropist, and – some might argue – puppet master to a new world order, expounded at length on Europe’s demise, financial market bubbles, and – the focus of this note – Europe’s imminent demise unless they follow his grand plan.

He begins on a rather ominous note:

“We are in a crisis, the worst crisis in my lifetime since the Second World War. I would describe it as a revolutionary moment when the range of possibilities is much greater than in normal times. What is inconceivable in normal times becomes not only possible but actually happens. People are disoriented and scared. They do things that are bad for them and for the world.”

Then escalates…

Q) So how do you see the situation in Europe and the United States?

A)  I think Europe is very vulnerable, much more so than the United States. The United States is one of the longest-lasting democracies in history. But even in the United States, a confidence trickster like Trump can be elected president and undermine democracy from within.

But in the US you have a great tradition of checks and balances and established rules. And above all you have the Constitution. So I am confident that Trump will turn out to be a transitory phenomenon, hopefully ending in November. But he remains very dangerous, he’s fighting for his life and he will do anything to stay in power, because he has violated the Constitution in many different ways and if he loses the presidency he will be held accountable. 

But the European Union is much more vulnerable because it is an incomplete union. And it has many enemies, both inside and outside.

Q) Who are the enemies inside?

A) There are many leaders and movements that are opposed to the values upon which the European Union was founded. In two countries they have actually captured the government, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Jaroslaw Kaczyński in Poland. It so happens that Poland and Hungary are the largest recipients of the structural fund distributed by the EU. But actually my biggest concern is Italy. A very popular anti-European leader, Matteo Salvini, was gaining ground until he overestimated his success and broke up the government. That was a fatal mistake. His popularity is now declining. But he has actually been replaced by Giorgia Meloni of Fratelli d’Italia, who is even more of an extremist. The current government coalition is extremely weak.

They are only held together to avoid an election in which the anti-European forces would win. And this is a country that used to be the most enthusiastic supporter of Europe. Because the people trusted the EU more than their own governments. But now public opinion research shows that the supporters of Europe are shrinking and the support for remaining a member of the eurozone is diminishing. But Italy is one of the biggest member, it is too important for Europe. I cannot imagine a EU without Italy. The big question is whether the EU will be able to provide enough support to Italy.

Q) The European Union has just approved a €750B recovery fund…

A)  That’s true. The EU took a very important positive step forward by committing itself to borrow money from the market on a much larger scale than ever before. But then several states, the so-called Frugal Five – the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden and Denmark and Finland – managed to make the actual agreement less effective. The tragedy is that they are basically pro-European, but they are very selfish. And they are very frugal. And, first, they led to a deal which will prove inadequate. The scale back of plans on climate change and defense policy is particularly disappointing. Secondly, they also want to make sure that the money is well spent. That creates problems for the southern states that were the hardest hit by the virus.

Q) Do you still believe in a European perpetual bond?

A) I haven’t given up on it, but I don’t think there is enough time for it to be accepted. Let me first explain what makes perpetual bonds so attractive and then explore why it is an impractical idea at the present time. As its name suggests the principal amount of a perpetual bond never has to be repaid; only the annual interest payments are due. Assuming an interest rate of 1%, which is quite generous at a time when Germany can sell thirty year bonds at a negative interest rate, a €1 trillion bond would cost €10 billion per year to service. This gives you an amazingly low cost/benefit ratio of 1:100. Moreover, the €1 trillion would be available immediately at a time when it is urgently needed, while the interest has to be paid over time and the longer out you go the smaller its discounted present value becomes. So what stands in the way of issuing them? The buyers of the bond need to be assured that the European Union will be able to service the interest. That would require that the EU be endowed with sufficient resources (i.e. taxing power) and the member states are very far from authorizing such taxes. The Frugal Four – the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Sweden (they are now five because they were joined by  Finland) –  stand in the way. The taxes would not even need to be imposed, it would be sufficient to authorize them. Simply put, this is what makes issuing perpetual bonds impossible.

Q) Can’t Chancellor Merkel who is determined to make the German presidency a success do something about it?

A) She is doing her best but she is up against a deeply engrained cultural opposition: the German word Schuld has a double meaning. It means debt and guilt. Those who incur a debt are guilty. This doesn’t recognize that the creditors can also be guilty.  It is a cultural issue that runs very, very deep in Germany. It has caused a conflict between being German and European at the same time. And it explains the recent decision of the German Supreme Court that is in conflict with the European Court of Justice.

Q) Who are the enemies of Europe on the outside?

A) They are numerous but they all share a common feature: they are opposed to the idea of an open society. I became an enthusiastic supporter of the EU because I considered it an embodiment of the open society on a European scale. Russia used to be the biggest enemy but recently China has overtaken Russia. Russia dominated China until President Nixon, understood that opening and building up China would weaken Communism not only but also in the Soviet Union. Yes, he was impeached, but he, together with Kissinger were great strategic thinkers. Their moves led to the great reforms of Deng Xiaoping.

Today things are much different. China is a leader in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence produces instruments of control that are helpful for a closed society, and represent a mortal danger for an open society. It tilts the table in favor of closed societies. Today’s China is a much bigger threat to open societies than Russia. And in the US there is a bipartisan consensus that has declared China a strategic rival.

Time to panic?

Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

With his refusal to toe the coronavirus line Alexandr Lukashenko has outlived his usefulness, and is being shuffled of the grand chessboard…

Belarus had their presidential election last Sunday, and the incumbent Alexandr Lukashenko apparently won. This was evidently not supposed to happen, or in some other way counter to the Western world’s grand plan – because now we have a little colour revolution happening.

You can always tell an Eastern European colour revolution, because Shaun Walker emerges from his burrow, dragging with him 3000 words of total speculation, unsourced anecdotal evidence and some partisan quotes from Western-backed NGOs. You know, like this.

Another good indication is just how irate Simon Tisdall is, and judging by this column…he’s pretty irate. Granted it’s mostly about Erdogan and Turkey, but he has words for Lukashenko too, and they are not friendly. I wouldn’t be surprised if he broke the keys on his laptop, so furious is his typing.

If you can’t be bothered to read it, I don’t blame you. To sum up: NATO needs to “do something”, or “take action” or “intervene”. He doesn’t use the word “coup”, because our side don’t do those, but he definitely means coup.

The Economist is talking about the “right way to get rid of Lukashenko”, while Chatham House is insisting it’s time to “play hardball” in Belarus.

Europe’s foreign minister, Josep Borrell, has gotten involved too, issuing a statement that Belarus’ elections were “neither free nor fair”, and that “the people of Belarus deserve better”.

I have no idea if the vote was rigged or not. But I do know that none of the people claiming it was have provided any evidence to back that up, and I’m always suspicious when a fact is asserted without proof. Because you know if they had they would use it.

It’s also perfectly true that Europe – and the Western world in general – don’t care in the slightest about elections being fair. Witness the total lack of rebuke for the corrupt mess that was the 2014 Ukrainian election.

As for the police violence against protesters, Lukashenko and Belarus have received more harsh words in the Western press in the last two days, than Macron did during the 18 months of Gilets Jaunes protests, or the Spanish government ever did for their fascist destruction of the Catalan independence movement.

History is very clear in this precedent: Corruption and/or violence would be no obstacle whatsoever to doing business with the West, were Lukashenko willing to be biddable and serve a NATO-backed Deep State agenda. Lukashenko’s coronavirus policy shows he is not, and so twenty-six years of being gently tolerated are over and it’s time for him to go.

All the hallmarks of a narrative roll-out are there.

The sudden widespread and uniform use of terminology (In this case “Europe’s last dictator”), protest placards helpfully being written in English, and the social media-spread accounts of “heroes” overcoming adversity (eg. the woman who can’t live steam the protests so weaves them into a quilt instead. Yes, seriously.)

Making the marches in Minsk all women holding flowers and wearing white is a nice touch, a new spin. The question is what they’re going to call it. They absolutely can’t call it the “White Revolution”, for fairly obvious reasons.

Maybe the Flower Revolution? The Petal Revolution?

Their options are limited, but whatever they end up with can’t be any worse than “the snow revolution”.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar visited Taiwan for high level meetings last week in a move that angered Beijing. As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, Azar’s unprecedented trip prompted China to send J-10 and J-11 fighter jets into the Taiwan Strait where they briefly crossed the sensitive median line which unofficially separates airspace between the mainland and the island.

China considers Taiwan a rogue province and maintains that reunification is inevitable, reserving its right to use all necessary measures, including military force.

In recent years, political and military tensions between Beijing and Washington have escalated amid the Trump administration’s ongoing trade war with China as well as its decision to supply Taipei with advanced variants of the F-16 fighter jet, along with other items of modern military hardware. China’s controversial territorial claims in the South China Sea have also contributed to growing feelings of unease across the region and prompted Japan to cast aside its postwar pacifism.

Even though the possibility of China taking Taiwan by force is low, the military balance in the Taiwan Strait is firmly in China’s favor. The infographic provides an overview of that imbalance and is based on an annual U.S. government report.

You will find more infographics at Statista

China has never ruled out the possibility of invading Taiwan and it has continued acquiring the military capability to do so. In recent years, it has modernized its military, introducing the J-20, an indigenous 5th generation stealth fighter. It has also commissioned two aircraft carriers (although one is used for training and omitted from the infographic above) along with several modern amphibious transport dock/landing vessels.

By Richard Bernstein of RealClearInvestigations

Around a large table with a map and icons representing ships, submarines, planes, missile batteries, land-based forces, space-based sensors, and other apparatuses of modern warfare, officials from the Pentagon and the Rand Corp. fight a thus far unimaginable conflict.

The Red Team, composed of experts on the Chinese military, aims to use all available forces to capture Taiwan, the island 90 miles off the coast that China regards as a renegade province and that it has repeatedly vowed to retake, by force if necessary. 

The Blue Team, made up U.S. military personnel with operational experience — fighter pilots, cyber warriors, space experts, missile defense specialists – must try to defeat the Chinese invasion.

It doesn’t generally go well for the Blue Team.

“It’s had its ass handed to it for years,” David A. Ochmanek, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development and now a defense analyst at Rand, told RealClearInvestigations. “For years the Blue Team has been in shock because they didn’t realize how badly off they were in a confrontation with China.”

War game simulations are not the real world, of course, where an array of economic, diplomatic and cultural considerations inform a country’s military decisions and actions. And few experts on China seem to think that the country will actually go to war over Taiwan anytime soon.

But as the U.S. seeks a closer alliance with Taiwan – illustrated by the visit of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar there last week, the highest-level official U.S. delegation to the island in 40 years – the possibility of war between the two superpowers may be more than theoretical: A bill now before both houses of Congress, the Taiwan Defense Act, would end the long-held American policy of “strategic ambiguity” – which aims to keep China guessing as to the U.S. response to any attempt to take Taiwan by force – and require the U.S. “to delay, degrade, and ultimately defeat” an attempt by China “to use military force to seize control of Taiwan.”

The proposed legislation reflects strong bipartisan support for Taiwan in Congress. But it’s hard to predict. whether public opinion, already tired of long American wars in Asia, would support the faraway island, where the U.S. maintains has no U.S. military presence now although it maintains forces in the region. Nonetheless, if passed the measure would be far more than a tough talk statement of belief – it would impose serious legal obligations that would demand action. This adds an urgency to the questions officials are now asking: What would happen if China launched an all-out military effort to seize Taiwan? Does the United States possess the wherewithal to meet the obligations of the Taiwan Defense Act?

These questions are hotly debated among military specialists and within the Pentagon, but at a time of national preoccupations over COVID-19 and the looming presidential election, they have received scant notice in the mainstream press. And yet, given the rise of tensions with China, they are perhaps among the most important facing the country.

Taiwan became a separate entity from Mainland China in 1949, when the defeated Nationalist forces retreated to the island, 90 miles off China’s southeast coast, and set up a rival government. Over the years, even as every major country has officially recognized Beijing as the rightful government of all of China, Taiwan has become a full-fledged democracy, with public opinion there overwhelmingly opposed to any formula that would reattach the island to the mainland and its authoritarian ways. 

Despite China’s often warlike rhetoric and its continuous efforts to isolate Taiwan diplomatically – not allowing it, for example, to participate in World Health Organization meetings even during the coronavirus pandemic – most analysts think it does not want to use military force against Taiwan.

In the short term China seems to be hoping that the Trump administration’s hard line is more a matter of electoral politics than a permanent American position. U.S. intelligence has also concluded that Beijing hopes Trump loses in November to former Vice President Joe Biden (who faces criticism over his son Hunter’s lucrative deals in China.)

Still, China’s tense relations, not just with the U.S. but many Western nations, are not rooted in electoral politics. There is a more general alarm over aggressive Chinese policies, including the mass detention of Uighurs; its claims in the South China Sea; its crackdown on Hong Kong’s traditional freedoms; its cyberattacks against other governments; and fears that it is using high-tech products it exports to spy on citizens of other countries.  China shows no sign of moderating its policies, especially in areas that it regards as its “core interests,” and no core interest is more important to it than establishing its sovereignty over Taiwan.

As China faces more criticism, there’s no question that achieving what Beijing calls the “reunification of the motherland” would be a crowning glory for the Chinese Communist Party and its authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping. Senior Chinese officials continually issue warnings that they are ready to use force if other means of achieving reunification fail, and that is the reason for China’s massive military buildup, which, as the Pentagon’s war games show, has created a new and unprecedented challenges for the United States.

As several military analysts put it, the days of unfettered American military superiority in the Western Pacific are over. China has, the analysts say, achieved what’s called anti-access area denial, or A2/AD, which would prevent American forces from being able to penetrate anywhere near Taiwan once a war there started.

Given this capability, China, with its 2-million-strong military, might directly attack Taiwan, with a standing force of 220,000, hoping that the U.S. would stay out of the conflict. But the U.S. would have powerful reasons for not allowing that to happen. Aside from the destruction of a friendly democracy, a Chinese seizure of Taiwan would enormously expand China’s power and position in Asia, especially if combined with its absorption of the entire South China Sea into its maritime territory.  This would be a major step forward for China, now clearly a strategic revival and an enemy of democracy, in its goal of replacing the U.S. as the dominant power in all of Asia.

If China felt that the U.S. would intervene, military planners from the Pentagon and Rand who have gamed out scenarios believe a war over Taiwan would most likely begin with a massive attack by advanced Chinese missiles against three American targets: its bases on Okinawa and Guam, its ships in the Western Pacific, including aircraft carrier groups, and its air force squadrons in the region. 

Military analysts predict the American side would initially counter with Patriot anti-missile missiles. But the sheer number of Chinese missiles would mean that hundreds of them would reach their targets. American submarines operating near Taiwan would be able to sink some Chinese ships, including amphibious landing craft bringing the Chinese invading force to Taiwan. But the number of submarines near enough to the battle zones at the time of the Chinese strike would, analysts say, be around 20 or 25, each armed with about 12 torpedoes and 10 or so Harpoon missiles, not nearly enough to overcome China’s flood-the-zone strategy. Military analysts seem to agree that in the first day or two, there would likely be thousands of American deaths and the loss of billions of dollars’ worth of materiel.

“We’re playing an away game against China,” Rand’s Ochmanek said. “When bases are subjected to repeated attacks, it makes it exponentially more difficult to project power far away.”

“The casualties that the Chinese could inflict on us could be staggering,” said Timothy Heath, a senior international defense researcher at Rand and formerly a China analyst at the U.S. Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii. “Anti-ship cruise missiles could knock out U.S. carriers and warships; surface-to-air missiles could destroy our fighters and bombers.” 

China would have its own challenges. At the same time as it worked to keep the U.S. out of the battle zone it would have to address the trickier and riskier part of the operation: getting an invasion force, consisting of tens of thousands of troops, across the 90 miles separating Taiwan from the Mainland.

“They are giving off a lot of signals about how this campaign would unfold,” Lyle J. Goldstein, a China and Russia specialist at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, told RCI. “They’re talking a lot about airborne assault in two varieties, by parachute and by helicopters. It’s what’s called vertical envelopment. Amphibious assault is old school. It may be necessary but it’s not the main military effort.  The new school is to bring lead elements over by air, secure the terrain and then bring in more forces over the beach. The intensity and scale of training in the Chinese military now for airborne assault is, to me, shocking.

“There would be 15, maybe 20 different landings on the island, east, west, north, and south, all at once, some frogmen, some purely airborne troops,” Goldstein continued, saying he was expressing his own views, not official assessments of the U.S. “The Chinese high command would watch these bridgeheads to see which of them is working, while the Taiwan command is looking at this amid decapitation attempts and massive rocket and air assaults. The Chinese would seize several beachheads and airports.  Their engineering prowess would come into play in deploying specialized floating dock apparatuses to ensure a steady flow of supplies and reinforcements—a key element. My appraisal is that Taiwan would fold in a week or two.”

In short, China’s strategy would be to get an invasion fleet across the Taiwan Strait before the U.S. could come to its ally’s aid. “And once that happens we’d face an Iwo Jima situation,” Ochmanek said, referring to the small Japanese-held island in the Pacific that the U.S took in one of the most casualty-heavy battles of World War II. “Once Taiwan was occupied, the option of retaking it with an amphibious assault of our own would be very unattractive.”

Goldstein has likened an American commitment to defend Taiwan, of the sort that would be required by the proposed Taiwan Defense Act, to be a kind of Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse, a reference to the 1962 confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which ended when the Soviets backed away from its effort to put nuclear missiles on the island just 90 miles from Florida.

The overwhelming American advantage on Cuba then mirrors what Goldstein sees as an overwhelming Chinese advantage on Taiwan today – “vast conventional superiority” in a region of the world far closer to it than to the U.S., combined with “the wide recognition that the island’s fate is a ‘core interest’ that united Chinese citizens behind the cause.”

China also seems aware of the comparison. A typical statement earlier this month in Global Times, the nationalist mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, put it this way: “The Mainland has many cards, including military cards, and it is very important that our will to play those cards at critical moments will be far better than Washington’s.”

Other experts, however, believe that the situation is not quite as bleak as the war games would indicate, or at least that it can be remedied. They argue: 1) that the American deterrent even now is still strong enough to make China very hesitant to use force on Taiwan, and 2) that the U.S. can and should adapt to China’s capacity with new weapons and new tactics that would enable the country to prevail if it did come to an armed confrontation.

According to most analysts, the key to defending Taiwan would require stopping China’s ability to transport a large occupying force the 90 miles across the Taiwan Strait. Chinese military publications are full of pictures of what such an assault would look like – hundreds of amphibious tanks landing on Taiwan’s beaches, troops arriving on new landing craft called 075 units (now being built), and thousands of troops parachuting into the country at night. They have also been heralding the use of helicopters flying below Taiwan’s radar to land advance troops.

Some analysts say that the U.S. could counter that threat by shifting from a reliance on aircraft carriers and long-range bombers to weapons such as stand-off missiles – that is, missiles fired from beyond the range of any Chinese attack, especially a new generation of long-range anti-ship missiles, or LRASMs, that can be fired from ships as far as 600 miles away.

A second component of a Taiwan defense would be space-based reconnaissance using artificial intelligence to locate enemy targets, which the LRASMs would hit; a third would be an American version of flooding the zone, with unmanned undersea drones that could fire torpedoes at Chinese landing craft.

“All of these things are doable,” Ochmanek said. “There’s no magic here, no technological breakthroughs.” He estimates that the Defense Department could make the needed changes if it diverted about 5 percent of its budget— about $35 billion — a year.  Taiwan, he said, also needs to move away from the glamorous, showy weapons, like F-16 fighter planes, that it buys from the United States. “The F-16s are not going to get off the ground once the war starts,” Ochmanek said. “They need anti-ship cruise missiles, sea mines, mobile artillery, mobile air defenses, unmanned aerial vehicles.

“It comes down to sinking about 300 Chinese ships in about 48 hours,” he said.

Analysts believe Taiwan could spend more on defense than it does – currently about $13 billion a year, which is a small fraction of the estimated $225 billion to $260 billion that the mainland spends. But, they say, it already possesses sea mines and coastal missile defenses that could take a heavy toll on a Chinese invading force – assuming they aren’t wiped out in an initial Chinese missile attack. It could shoot down helicopters with Stinger missiles, which the U.S. has agreed to sell Taiwan.

“What both sides can do is turn the sea and air space around Taiwan into a no-go zone,” Heath said. “China could do that, but we could make it very hard for any surface ship to survive near Taiwan, including Chinese transport vessels loaded with troops. That alone might stop an invasion.”

And if it doesn’t? China would face the risk of a larger war with the United States, which might involve nuclear weapons and an outcome Beijing could not guarantee. “The biggest threat to China is that a regional anti-China coalition forms,” Heath said. “And so if the United States can succeed in building its alliances in Asia, that would be a powerful deterrent, because China can’t afford to go to war with Asia.” 

Others, like Goldstein, fully agree that China would be reluctant to go to war, but they argue also that if war should happen, it’s unrealistic — indeed, Goldstein says it’s dangerously self-deluding – to think that the combined forces of Taiwan and the U.S. would prevail.  

“I don’t agree that all we’d have to do is sink 300 ships,” he said. “Chinese war planners would expect to lose a thousand ships. They would put 10,000 boats, ferries, barges and fishing craft into the water, with thousands of decoys, far more than there would be LRASMs or submarines to sink them.”

The English-language press is generally no fan of Philippines’ pseudo-‘Strongman’ Rodrigo Duterte (half of the Americans who know who he is probably mistakenly believe him to be an autocrat due to the general tone of the coverage, although he was Democratically elected). Nonetheless, they’ve begrudgingly given him credit for his military-imposed lockdowns, and for reimposing the restrictive measures in and around Manila. Still, none of this has stopped Southeast Asia’s biggest outbreak from  clearly still has a long way to go to bring COVID-19 to heel.

And as South Korea is showing us right now, the virus can be surprisingly difficult to eradicate completely, just one more reason why the world needs to find a more sustainable way to live with COVID-19, rather than resorting to lockdowns as the only tool in the kit.

But there’s one variable that could upend all of this thinking, and effectively force all vulnerable populations into strict lockdown mode: that would be a mutation that causes it to become even more deadly. As Dr. Fauci once warned, mutations could make the virus more virulent and more infectious, and there’s already some evidence that certain strains of the virus are much deadlier than others.

And as Bloomberg reported on Monday, Southeast Asia – Malaysia specifically – has seen evidence that a certain mutation is more infectious, just like other mutations catalogued in the UK, NY and elsewhere. They call the mutation “D614G”. It’s also the “predominant variation of the virus” seen in Europe and the US – meaning it’s the same “world-conquering” virus we reported on back in June.

Southeast Asia is facing a strain of the new coronavirus that the Philippines, which faces the region’s largest outbreak, is studying to see whether the mutation makes it more infectious.

The strain, earlier seen in other parts of the world and called D614G, was found in a Malaysian cluster of 45 cases that started from someone who returned from India and breached his 14-day home quarantine. The Philippines detected the strain among random Covid-19 samples in the largest city of its capital region.

The mutation “is said to have a higher possibility of transmission or infectiousness, but we still don’t have enough solid evidence to say that that will happen,” Philippines’ Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said in a virtual briefing on Monday.

And now, we can add ‘Southeast Asia’ to its list of conquered territory.

Though the often intransigent WHO has yet to fully acknowledge the mutation’s potential, it “is said to have a higher possibility of transmission or infectiousness, but we still don’t have enough solid evidence to say that that will happen,” Philippines’ Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire told BBG.

Some argue the mutation won’t have an impact on vaccines being developed. But we can’t say any of this with 100% certainty, as much as some scientists would like to dismiss the risks out of hand.

One HK University professor told BBG that the mutation “might be a little bit more contagious. We haven’t yet got enough evidence to evaluate that, but there’s no evidence that it’s a lot more contagious,” University of Hong Kong’s Cowling said.

Others have claimed it’s “ten times more infectious” than the original.

Still, as more evidence suggests that the variation is linked to higher levels of mortality, understanding its potential will be key to bringing the vicious pandemic to heel.

Via DKAnalytics.com,

AG Barr to the rule of law rescue?

In a nutshell, don’t hold your breath.  Leading conservative/constitutionalist radio talk show host Mark Levin had a fine interview with Mr. Barr on his “Life, Liberty and Levin” TV show last weekend.  It was a pivotal discussion about how destructive, violent, anarchist, un-American, uncivil, and rogue the left has become in its efforts to fundamentally transform America.  That transformation is away from an erstwhile codified citadel of liberty to an increasingly Marxist nation featuring iron-fisted tyranny (for flavor, consider the Corona virus policy responses, especially in blue states, where prolonged lockdowns have led to serious and widespread behavioral issues).  This effort, of course, is being led by the party of slavery, the party of segregation, the party of re-segregation, the party of the KKK, the party of internment of Japanese Americans, the party opposed to civil rights, and the party that led to unbridled third world amnesty which fueled ever growing voter disenfranchisement, Balkanization, and stagnant US jobs (for Americans).  I’m talking, of course, about the  power-obsessed, “Constitution, Americans, and America-be-damned” Democratic party. 

So far, so good.  It’s a great thing that Barr and his Department of Justice (DOJ) are at least calling the left out.  But there is a huge fly in the ointment, in my view.  It isn’t just about restoring law and order in America’s crime-infested, burning cities under racist/Marxist BLM and Antifa siege with local, state-level, and national Democratic power holders either approving or enabling rank lawlessness, and RINOs generally too intimidated to speak out against it.  

It is also about going after the very lawless elected officials and bureaucrats that have made a mockery of the rule of law while the same cast of characters has often set the stage for the anarchy and destruction that law-abiding urban Americans have faced, and are currently facing in unprecedented terms, from coast to coast, especially in Democratically-run cities (the vast majority of them).  This prosecution of rogue of former and current public officials is precisely what isn’t happening.  That is the devastating fly in the ointment.

I addressed this in an email with a friend of mine who who initially drew Barr’s interview on Mark Levin’s TV show to my attention. 

Here is what I wrote my friend: 

Got a chance to listen.  GREAT interview.  Barr nails it, as does obviously Mark.  Allow me a criticism or two; you may well consider it “majoring in minors,” but I think it goes to the heart of any honest system of government, and that starts with telling the truth. 

Barr mentioned that Trump’s economy until recently saw virtually zero percent unemployment, and that this will recur.  This is disingenuous at best.  Trump himself called the unemployment rate fake as a candidate when it was around 5% (U3, or the most flattering measure).  Furthermore, Trump mentioned, as a candidate, that real world unemployment was likely north (if not well north) of 20%.  Translation: take the U3 measure, turn it into the U6 measure, and then add back all the discouraged workers that have been looking for a job for more than a year and were conveniently taken out of the job seeker category back in the Slick Willy (Clinton) administration, and you a get “real world” US unemployment rate of around 30%.  Today!

One more point, arguably an even much, much  bigger one concerning honest government – a government run by people that are not above the law.  Here we are, some 3.5 years into the Trump administration.  Barr has (thankfully) been on board since February of 2019, or about 1.5 years.  We have mountains of evidence of treasonous and felonious acts by the heads/the top brass of former Obama and early Trump administration politicians and bureaucrats ranging from Hillary to the former Obama AGs to the top brass of the FBI and the CIA to the judges that recklessly (or worse!) issued warrants to spy on Americans, a clear Bill of Rights violation if there ever was one.  Former FBI head Comey, in the summer of 2016, not only still “toiled” as the top (bad) cop of America, but he also put on a judge’s hat and effectively told America, after reading a litany of indictable charges against Madam Clinton, that Hillary “didn’t really mean any harm,” but if the average American acted in such a manner, then the full force of the law would come down on him.  Comey even wagged his finger “at us” as he issued his stern warning for us little people.

Have we seen ANYONE of at least a few handfuls of high level top brass bureaucratic and elected criminals even get indicted by the supposedly lawful, ethical DOJ that supposedly eminently capable, rule-of-law man Barr heads?  Should we wait until Biden assumes the presidency to finally indict these varied disgusting, oath-shredding, Constitution-curdling crooks??  What a freakin’ pathetic banana republic with above the law power brokers running free and making millions in the MSM and by giving speeches!  Yet everyday Americans get fined for not wearing masks, wanting to run their businesses only to find that they’re forced to shut down or that their power and water have been shut off (L.A.).  Yet everyday Americans get treated by the IRS like quasi criminals (or worse) if they fall short in terms of filing or declarations or payments.  And don’t try to defend your home in red state America; just accept the violence and destruction of often organized rioters and then call 911, but no one may answer because your police force is being defunded.

Now I know a lot of the harassment, intimidation, and Bill of Rights violations are state-based affairs (I’d argue that the 14th Amendment should offer state like Bill of Rights protections), but I’m trying to make a bigger point: Mark Levin and AG Barr and others can talk the big talk, but until our governing elites are no longer above the law (the Constitution), all this is a bunch of talk with precious little “here’s the beef” walk as far as everyday Americans are concerned — and rightly so.  No wonder governmental institutions are often held in such low esteem.

Are all these mega crooks that have abused their elected or appointed positions of power going to skate?  Are sorely needed indictments going to be pushed aside by all the sickening diversions the left is continuing to cook up for us from Russia Gate to Ukraine Gate to the virus policy scam to Marxists/anarchists tearing the crap out of the fabric of both our cities and society?  And will this BR style “looking askance policy” be thanks to neither Trump or Barr or the man from Connecticut having enough guts to finally go after these above the law creeps?  Or could it be that both sides of the aisle are so steeped in corruption and so eager to sustain their power, prestige, and crony/fascist advantages that this is just all a big, bad, throw us a bone of hope pretend game that we fall for until we realize we’ve been had again?

I, for one, won’t be holding my breath.  Less talk, just walk, 3.5 years into the Trump admin, on this VITAL, no one is supposed to be above the law front.  And Barr definitely knows the ropes, so why hasn’t he had  the decency and guts to start the process of trying to show the country that DC ain’t above the law while he still has the chance?

Here is how my friend responded:

Of course, I agree completely that Barr is not the be all and end all, or even close, for the reasons you mention, and more. The biggest one to me, because it (not the unemployment rate) is squarely in his wheelhouse is the lack of any prosecutions of arguably the biggest political criminals in the country’s history – i.e., starting with Hillary, Comey, Brennan, McCabe and… yes, Obama, the messiah himself.

That said, he is very refreshingly honest in a relative sense. Could and should he (and countless other bureaucrats, representatives and putative “leaders”) be 500% better? Absolutely. The closest one to that ideal that I can think of is probably Ted Cruz, but I have no doubt that if he were president, on the SCOTUS and/or AG, he’d disappoint as well.

So I basically agree with your critique but as many have said, politics is the art of the possible. That is the framework within which he exists, and that inevitably skews and corrupts. Right now, he’s light years better than Sessions was, and Universes better than Holder or Lynch were. Am I 100% happy with him? No, not even close. But am I much happier with him than many/ most other currently available alternatives? Absolutely.

To which I responded:

Your first paragraph says it all, as far as I am concerned.  Politics is indeed the art of the possible.  Yet for a man of conscience (Barr), a man that self-identifies as a rule of law constitutionalist, a man who has had under his “wheelhouse belt” the “machinery” with which to prosecute “arguably the biggest criminals in the country’s history” for about 1.5 years yet has prosecuted no such person … — this speaks sobering volumes about his true dedication to a system in which no one is above the law, else you can’t have the rule of law. 

To me, this is sadly less than politics being the art of the possible, and more about rank dereliction of duty, dereliction of the oath he took, and, perhaps most stunningly and destructively of all, sustaining the very “Department of Injustice” that he inherited from the mega crooks Holder and Lynch and the absolutely incompetent, scared crapless Jeff Sessions.

Sure, Barr is 100x better than hapless Jeff and extremely crooked Holder and Lynch, but what good is that if he doesn’t take a potentially rapidly fleeting opportunity to at least attempt to yank America back from its B.R. status in which way too many elites are above the law crooks and way too many of us law-abiding citizens often get treated as if we were crooks by the an alphabet soup of un-elected, unrepresentative, untouchable federal and state bureaucrats that have long and unconstitutionally issued the vast majority of our de facto legislation, thousands upon thousands of often effectively cloaked regulations (how can anyone keep up with 72,561 Federal Register pages?) frequently featuring stout fines and even incarceration teeth?”

President Trump, despite some of his beyond the pale assertions, especially as a candidate and early into his presidency, has often displayed the very uncanny knack for sharing “the resonating bottom line” with Americans that won him the 2016 election.  In this regard, here is what he recently said: 

Attorney General William Barr could go down in history as “the greatest attorney general” or just as “an average guy,” but that will depend on what U.S. Attorney John Durham reveals from his investigation into the origins of the Russia probe, President Donald Trump said Thursday. 

“Bill Barr and Durham have a chance to be — Bill Barr is great most of the time, but if he wants to be politically correct, he’ll be just another guy,” Trump said during an extensive interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo. He said he hopes Durham is “not going to be politically correct.”

“I hope he’s doing a great job,” Trump said. “[President Barack] Obama knew everything. Vice President [Joe] Biden, as dumb as he may be, knew everything, and everybody else knew.”

Trump added that former FBI Director James Comey, ex-CIA Director John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper “were all terrible and they lied to Congress.”

Is the first Ex-FBI lawyer pleading guilty for falsifying documents to investigate the Trump campaign a hopeful sign? 

Or, is this just a token, “orchestrated prosecution” by the bigwigs in both parties to throw citizens a middle management bureaucratic “sacrifice” before the top echelon power brokers revert back to widespread, bi-partisan corruption, and cronyism, also called B.R. business as usual?

A recent appeals court decision to overturn the Hillary Clinton deposition order that Judicial Watch won under the Freedom of Information Act suggests the heads of the above-the-law fish are as foul as ever.  Said differently, the jury is still out whether we will sustain an arbitrary, capricious, rapacious, despotic rule of man system over a rule of law system based on the US Constitution.  If only “the jury” got to decide such cases, for if it is ultimately principally up to leftist circuit (appeal) courts or to the Supreme Court of America, any remaining fidelity to our Constitution and the associated Bill of Rights won’t just be hanging by an ever thinner thread, but these seminal documents will have fallen deeply into a grave with dirt being rapidly heaped on top, quickly replacing daylight that was already rapidly dimming.

What if AG Barr falls short?

As you can surmise, I think this is much more likely than not. 

If we cannot bring back fidelity to the rule of law for our elitist politicians and bureaucrats, how can we expect to rein in increasingly “green-lighted” anarchy, racism, and destruction?  How can we address the highly destructive “cancel culture”* (OURS) and “virtue signalling“* that is increasingly making policy in the US for all of us if our leaders act lawlessly and destructively? 

The short answer is, we can’t. 

In such an unraveling world, how can we reconstitute free market capitalism, stouter property right protections, smaller government, balanced budgets, and sound money, the elixirs of invention, productivity enhancement, deflationary growth, and a wealth of nations trajectory lifting more boats and generating more happiness than any other system? 

The short answer is, we can’t. 

With our toxic public policy stew run, in essence, by lockdown fascists in bed with anarchistic and racist hoodlums, we threaten to careen further and further into stagflation, revisited — this time laced with with record debt, unmatched public sector and pension deficits, unparalleled financial repression, plummeting productivity (prior to an even stronger embrace of “not so green” energy), and an increasingly threatening loss of a functioning (civil) society.  Not exactly confidence-inspiring.  Not exactly a “wealth of nations” trajectory, shutting down supply and printing money like never before.  More like 1970s’ style stagflation on steroids laced with rising civil unrest and destruction.  

In plain English, eventually our asset bubbles, especially in global bonds and US stocks, will be pierced, ending over four decades of bull markets as reversion beyond the mean gets really mean, and screaming buys proliferate.  This will not only reflect unheralded and expanding balance sheet weakness, a secular reduction in corporate earnings power stated in today’s currency terms, and hugely rising monetary inflation risks, but it will also reflect plummeting confidence in the currency in which those increasingly unsound, overvalued assets are based.   In short, we will have a stability-eviscerating and purchasing power-crushing fiat currency crisis led by the currency that has been abused the longest and the most flagrantly, the US dollar.  This is how the end of a financial system is spelled.

In such a world, people and investors have always resorted to safe haven, purchasing power-protecting real money, which is physical gold and silver.  It won’t be different this time.  If the central bankers/central planners want to keep from being rendered fully academic (which history suggested would be wonderful), they will have to again back their currencies with a stout amount of gold — around 40%.  As so much fiat money has been printed, and gold (and silver) remain very limited, we could easily be looking at $11,500 gold per Troy ounce and over $230 silver per Troy ounce (history coupled with a bit of simple math as in “15:1” silver-to-gold ratio suggests silver could reach into the $700 range per Troy ounce).  Those precious metals dollar prices would be prior to even more money supply expansion both domestically and abroad.  In this regard, note that the US money supply has rising at a 42% annual rate in  M1 terms.  

While an adequate allocation to physical precious metals in your own possession at current price levels will help to take the economic and financial edge off of what will likely prove tumultuous times ahead, they can’t address our increasingly dysfunctional political and societal systems.  But, as the saying goes, it’s better to be relatively well-off financially during hard times than poor.  Plus, someday, when Blue Chip crony plays will again be trading for a sub-10 P/E with a 6 – 8% dividend yield (a blast from the not too distant 1970s past), you will likely have the PM purchasing power to “back up the truck” to avail yourself of a possibly once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunity, i.e., if our current fascist system doesn’t morph into full-blown communism, where there is no more private property.

But with rising gold and silver prices, don’t wait too long to get adequate precious metals diversification, especially not with Big Warren of Berkshire Hathaway wading into gold stock(s), which will make it suddenly acceptable for all the Wall Street lemmings to embrace the very gold the talking financial news heads have long been panning (together with Warren) as a barbarous relic earning not a dime of interest.   Well, with negative real interest rates abounding and with goods and services inflation on the rise, physical gold and silver in your own discreet possession don’t look so bad.  Meanwhile, precious metals stocks have tremendous operating and financial leverage to rising precious metals prices with which to fatten your dividend income. Pretty salivating, those barbarous relics …

Conclusion: go for the PM “bar” instead of placing too much trust in Barr (and our heavily compromised system)

Hope you found this post of interest!

Greetings,

Dan

*- In case these psychobabble terms confuse you, let me cut to the chase: cancel culture and virtue signalling express what amounts to kindergarten bullies enforcing the alpha male’s tyranny, which they have voluntarily subjected themselves to and now insist that everyone else also has to abide by.  THAT is what is really going on.  Welcome back to kindergarten.  Where are the cops?

A little over a month ago we were told that Russian military intelligence was paying the Afghan Taliban to kill American troops. As many predicted, that “bombshell” – later admitted by some of the same sources that initially promoted it to be of “sketchy” intelligence origin – was very short-lived, grabbing headlines for a few days, only to be rapidly memory-holed akin to the fate of other Russiagate-related ‘anonymous sources say’ type stories.

In the foreign-policy-think of the D.C. blob, the cast of “rogue” actors constantly threatening US national security seamlessly rotates, entering in and out of familiar narratives when convenient, and now CNN is out with the latest: “US intelligence agencies assessed that Iran offered bounties to Taliban fighters for targeting American and coalition troops in Afghanistan, identifying payments linked to at least six attacks carried out by the militant group just last year alone, including a suicide bombing at a US air base in December, CNN has learned.”

Administration officials say it was US intelligence’s uncovering of the Iranian bounties plot which was decisive in convincing President Trump to assassinate IRGC Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani on January 3rd. 

The killing by drone of Soleimani came less than a month after a particularly devastating attack on Bagram Air Base which resulted in two civilian deaths, and injuries to four American personnel, among more than 60 others wounded. That attack was on December 11, 2019.

CNN writes:

“The name of the foreign government that made these payments remains classified but two sources familiar with the intelligence confirmed to CNN that it refers to Iran.”

So there it is — the largely debunked ‘Russian bounties’ story lives on apparently, in new form, fed to the public by anonymous intelligence sources. The CNN story even links the two threads together, suggesting that two major American enemies, Russia and the Islamic Republic, are now essentially handing out vast amounts of cash to mujahideen to kill Americans in Central Asia.

Specifically identified as Tehran’s alleged proxy mercenaries being paid off with Iranian money is the notorious Haqqani Network:

While US intelligence officials acknowledge that the Haqqani Network would not necessarily require payment in exchange for targeting American troops, the internal Pentagon document reviewed by CNN notes that the funding linked to the December 11 attack at Bagram “probably incentivizes future high-profile attacks on US and Coalition forces.”

But there are some immediate and obvious red flags to the story which should give serious pause and cause for skepticism. 

For starters, the Haqqani Network and more broadly the Taliban considers Iran to be the worst among heretic and apostate regimes, given Iran is a Shia Republic at war with Sunni fundamentalism. The feelings are mutual, given Haqqani Network is basically the poster child for Sunni jihad and Takfirism which ultimately seeks to wipe out Shiism. Historically, the Taliban has been a near constant violent persecutor of Afghanistan’s own minority Shia community.

And as CNN perhaps begrudgingly pointed out of its own story: the radical Sunni Haqqani organization has never needed monetary incentive to attack American forces and their allies.

It’s crucial to remember that Sunni global jihad started with war against what early al-Qaeda propaganda speeches and documents dubbed the “near enemy” — that is, against secular regimes like Baathists and ‘heretics’ and ‘apostates’ like Shia, Alawites, and the popular “folk” Sufi movements of Mideast/North Africa which firebrand Saudi and Pakistani clerics have railed against for decades and even centuries (Haqqani has long found safe-haven in northwest Pakistan).

This fault line remains the key driver of proxy war in the region, meaning these two sides are still at war, which it should be remembered is largely what the Syria conflict is all about (the Sunni Saudi axis & Western allies fighting jihad against the so-called ‘Shia axis’), and the continuing US-led ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran (the latest Israeli-UAE deal is largely focused on cooperation in countering Iran as well).

This is precisely why just after 9/11 very few authentic Middle East analysts with experience of the region believed the neocon lie that secular Baathist autocrat Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to unleash WMD on the United States. Neocons have actually continued until now to push a narrative of “Iran was behind Sept. 11”.

Pence blames Iran for 9/11.
Bush blamed Iraq for 9/11.

Maybe the GOP just really sucks at national security. And thinkin’. https://t.co/Ss3WPXl7TN

— Bryan Behar (@bryanbehar) January 5, 2020

Remember that in the days after Soleimani’s death Vice President Mike Pence actually tried to link the top Iranian commander to 9/11. This new ‘Iranian bounties’ story is cut from the same neocon cloth, and thus demands a high threshold of evidence presented publicly — not the mere usual anonymous intel sources and regurgitated paranoid headlines.

While it’s true that “anything is possible” especially when it comes to competing ‘dirty wars’ where proxies are used of state actors for plausible deniability, any narrative which claims the world’s vanguard of hardline Shia Islam is working with the global vanguard of international Sunni jihad (and throwing around lots of cash at that!) should again be met with a high degree of skepticism. It should be noted that indeed over the past few years there’s been a growing number of Western think tanks linking Iranian intelligence and Taliban factions  born out of a pragmatic desire to create “managed instability” for occupying US forces in Afghanistan.

But just like with the prior “Saddam and bin Laden working together” story, or the “Iran behind 9/11 attacks” theory advanced by Bush-era think tank policy wonks, the public is very unlikely to ever get anything in the way of hard evidence concerning this new “Iran bounties” story.

Authored by John Miltimore via RealClearPolitics.com,

This past week Minnesota became the second state to reject regulations that effectively ban the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine for use by COVID-19 patients…

The decision, which comes two weeks after the Ohio Board of Pharmacy reversed an effective ban of its own, was rightfully praised by local health care advocates. 

“We are pleased that Governor [Tim] Walz lifted his March 27 Executive Order 20-23 restrictions on chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine,” said Twila Brase, president of Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom.

The reversal by Walz, a first-term Democrat, clears the way for doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine, a drug commonly used to treat malaria and other conditions but one the FDA has declined to recommend for COVID-19 treatment.

The decision is the latest development in the weird saga of arguably the most divisive drug in modern history.

The acrimony began in March after President Trump tweeted that hydroxychloroquine had the potential to be “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine” as a treatment for the coronavirus. 

The tweet and similar statements provoked an avalanche of media criticism, with many claiming that the president was going to get people killed. Critics pointed out that medical evidence suggests the medication is linked to a fatal arrhythmia and some trials show no benefits in coronavirus treatments.

Though his critics are likely loath to admit it, there’s reason to believe the president may have been on to something. In recent weeks a chorus of voices in the medical community has emerged to challenge the view that hydroxychloroquine is ineffective as a COVID treatment. Dr. Harvey A. Risch, a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, said a full analysis of the literature suggests hydroxychloroquine may be the key to defeating the coronavirus.

“Physicians who have been using these medications in the face of widespread skepticism have been truly heroic,” Risch wrote in Newsweek, adding that a full review of the COVID literature on the drug shows “clear-cut and significant benefits.”

Prescribing hydroxychloroquine in the early stages of the virus is key, Risch said, and others agree. Steven Hatfill, a veteran virologist and adjunct assistant professor at the George Washington University Medical Center, says the literature supporting hydroxychloroquine is overwhelming.

“There are now 53 studies that show positive results of hydroxychloroquine in COVID infections,” Hatfill wrote in RealClearPolitics.

“There are 14 global studies that show neutral or negative results — and 10 of them were of patients in very late stages of COVID-19, where no antiviral drug can be expected to have much effect.”

One of the positive studies, published by Henry Ford Health System, was a large-scale retrospective of six hospitals. Analyzing 2,541 patients, it found that those treated with hydroxychloroquine alone died at about half the rate of patients not treated with it.

It’s unclear if it was this research that prompted Walz to reverse his March ruling, which ordered the Board of Pharmacists to instruct pharmacists to not issue hydroxychloroquine prescriptions unless the diagnosis was “appropriate” — which halted any off-label prescription requests. 

The reason it’s unclear is that Walz has been mum on why he rescinded his order. There’s been no announcement or new stories. Local lawmakers told me they had no idea Walz had reversed course.

“There’s been absolutely no transparency here,” said Dr. Scott Jensen, a Republican state senator who criticized Walz’s approach. Jensen, who has practiced medicine for more than 30 years in Minnesota, told me pharmacists he’s worked with for years told him they could not fill a hydroxychloroquine prescription for COVID because of the March executive order.

He agrees that hydroxychloroquine is terribly misunderstood by the public and said politicians need to take a step back.

“Hydroxychloroquine is one of the most studied drugs in the history of mankind,” Jensen said. “My wife was on hydroxychloroquine for 15 years. It’s been on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines for decades. It’s been in play since 1955, the year after I was born.”

Hydroxychloroquine might be politically controversial, but that hasn’t stopped some of its critics from taking advantage of the drug. In a May interview, former presidential hopeful Sen. Amy Klobuchar admitted her husband was successfully treated with hydroxychloroquine, a medication she had mocked on Twitter.

The politics of hydroxychloroquine are unlikely to cool before November’s presidential election.  Yet, if Walz’s decision is any indication, at least some leaders are starting to recognize the ethical dilemma of using the long arm of government to stand between suffering patients and a drug that may have the potential to save them.

“Cake lives matter” was actually written on a sign of one of the protesters who showed up outside Coccadotts Cake Shop in New York, just outside of Albany. The bakery drew huge protests over the last couple of days for doing what a bakery does: baking a cake.

But, of course, this wasn’t just any cake. This was a cake with feelings: a super-racist, super-homophobic capitalist cake. And the protesters knew that because it was made in the shape of a red hat that said “Make America Great Again” on it. 

The bakery’s owner, Rachel Dott, had posted images of the cake on social media in late July, which catalyzed the protests. 

But supporters of the bakery also showed up. According to the Times Union:

The Black Lives Matter protesters, who also alleged a member of the Cocca family was sympathetic to the right-wing group known as the Proud Boys, were equipped with bullhorns but they were greatly outnumbered by anti-protesters who waved American flags and encouraged passing vehicles to honk in support. 

Colonie police officers stood between the two groups keeping them separated as much as possible. State Police troopers and Albany County Sheriff’s deputies also were on the scene.

The two groups got “face-to-face” and were “yelling at each other”, the article says. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, racism has got to go,” the BLM group was shouting (reminder: still about a cake).

One protester said: “They’re able to feel what they feel about their politics. We have issues when it comes to social injustice as in firing someone because they’re gay, wearing ‘All Lives Matter’ masks.”

None of those things were reported to have happened at the bakery they chose to protest at. 

Dennis O’Kane of Delmar showed up in support of the bakery, telling reporters he was there to “support America”. “I’ve known these people for 30 years. These people are really nice,” O’Kane said about the bakery owners.

You can view video of the protest below. As the first YouTube comment says so succinctly: “Imagine living in a world where people are triggered over a cake.”