Month: October 2021

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

No group in this world is above ridicule, and that includes the mentally ill. Just because the mentally ill become an organized mob does not mean they are a victim status group deserving of special protection or special treatment. The mentally ill are the LAST people on the planet that should be given the power to dictate the course of society. Madness is, in a way, infectious. Narcissism is poisonous. Psychopathy is radioactive. The majority of humans naturally discriminate against such people because every facet of our biology, every cell of our being warns us that if they are given an ounce of control, destruction will surely follow.

Human tribes and societies have understood this reality for thousands of years. Our repellent reactions to madness are ingrained in our cellular memory. Just as we instinctually recoil from snakes and spiders we have also learned over millennia to recoil from unhinged minds. But for some reason in the past 5-10 years we are being told to embrace the exact reverse. The insane are now above the rest of us. The insane must be worshiped. The insane are our leaders and role models. Biology is wrong, and the cultural Marxists and woke ideologues are right.

The new narrative is that truth tellers and rational people are the “insane” ones and they should be watched or possibly locked up.

I’ve been writing about political correctness and woke culture for a long time now, and I have to say that the developing trends of social justice are not surprising. However, the speed at which they are being forced on the rest of us today is disturbing. One has to wonder if the woke mob is in a rush to meet some kind of propaganda deadline the rest of us are not aware of.

The gender and “Trans” issues are really at the forefront of leftist ideology these days. If you have observed these people for any length of time you know all about the Oppression Olympics and the intersectional totem pole. And, you are also probably aware that people who claim to be trans earn an automatic spot at the top of that totem pole, well above women, black people, and even your run-of-the-mill gay people. The trans costume is the most powerful of all SJW costumes and imbues a person with unlimited protection no matter how terrible that person might be. It even allows them to dictate the very thoughts and speech of the public at large.

For example, there is a policy among western governments to allow male convicted criminals who claim to be trans women to be interned in women’s prisons. This allows them to rape female inmates at their leisure while claiming special status. Yet, according to the leftist media it is the men posing as women that are being “victimized” by guards and female inmates. In Britain, they are even passing a law which makes it a crime for prisoners to use the wrong pronouns when referring to a trans inmate.

It is important to note that the trans identity is a sort of magic ticket for white people in particular. The SJW cult is especially concerned with all white people (mainly white men) as some kind of monstrous threat to the safety and emotional stability of everyone else. If you are a white person within the SJW religion you are immediately hated for your original sin and are relegated to the leftist gutter. They despise your skin color, and no amount of help you give as an “ally” is going to earn you a place among the oh-so-holy oppressed.

Unless, that is, you say you are trans. Then, as if you have touched the pure hand of the SJW deity, you are suddenly absolved of all your inherent white evil and are given a mantle of divinity. You are better than everyone else, because you are supposedly the most oppressed of them all.

Maybe this sounds like a bit of exaggeration. Surely I am engaging in hyperbole. I promise you I am not. Western culture is being increasingly segregated by the political left into various tiers of people based on their skin color as well as their sexual orientations and mental instabilities, and the more made-up the orientations and the more volatile the mental instability the more privileges a person is afforded. The patients are truly taking over the asylum.

I am revisiting this subject because I have noticed a renewed uptick in aggression from leftists on the trans issue, and I suspect this is because they are starting to get more push-back from the public. The latest Dave Chappelle special on Netflix triggered the sensitive snowflakes again simply because Chappelle argues what most of us already know –That gender is a biological fact, not a social construct.

This has led to numerous angry demands on Twitter to have Chappelle kicked off Netflix and canceled in general. For now it seems as though these demands are being ignored, which is exactly what should be happening everywhere all the time.

Others, like author JK Rowling, have not been as lucky. And I suspect if Dave Chappelle was white it would be a different story.

Sometimes people in the middle of the totem pole can get away with criticizing another group in the progressive stack, but if you’re a straight white person there are no allowances.

Why are people that represent a tiny percentage of the population (around 0.3% or less) being given massive special attention and enjoying unprecedented legal regulations in their favor? Why are states like California going out of their way to force the public to accommodate the tiny trans minority, to the point of passing laws which make it an offense to have separate toy aisles for boys and girls, or trying to make it illegal to ignore a person’s preferred pronouns?

Again, it seems that leftists (mostly middle-class and rich white progressives) are creating a kind of ultimate victim pass – A way to climb to the top of the totem pole from the very bottom. All they have to do is loudly denounce biological gender and say they are “trans”, and like magic they become part of a new civil rights movement in which they are the righteous “freedom fighters” in a fake revolution for a fake cause.

Anyone that asserts conflicting viewpoints on the trans issue is usually met with accusations of bigotry and “transphobia.” After all, why should we care about the trans movement getting whatever it wants? Is it because we are prejudiced?

This is a gaslighting tactic among leftists to deter any criticism of their activities. For most people who argue against corporate marketing and government laws in favor of gender neutrality, our interest is in fighting against the propaganda and disinformation, not fighting against trans people in general.

There are some real transexual men and women out there that suffer from a disorder called “Gender Dysphoria.” It is an extremely rare condition; a mental illness that is mostly harmless to the rest of society but does cause a high rate of depression and suicide among those that have it. I don’t have any problem with these folks or their existence. What I do have a problem with is social justice Marxists exploiting gender dysphoria as a weapon in their ideological war to tear down western society and replace it with their own dystopian vision.

The issue here is not about actual trans people, but about respect for freedom of speech and thought. You see, every single facet of the leftist movement is about collectivism and control. They say they care about minorities and their well-being, but they are really just using them to further their own twisted political conquests. Whether we are talking about critical race theory or the transgender movement the end goal is always the same: The leftists want to put themselves in the position of arbiter over what speech is acceptable and what speech is not acceptable.

Once they are allowed to dictate what is and what is not “hate speech”, they then control ALL speech. Control is obviously the agenda rather than the defense of minorities; all you have to do is examine how they treat minorities that step out of line. Look at how they attack blacks like Dave Chappelle, classic feminists like JK Rowling, gay people like Dave Rubin or even trans conservatives like Blaire White. They are part of the precious totem pole, but as soon as any of these people leave the leftist plantation or speak contrary to the main agenda they are declared heretics and viciously excommunicated.

The purpose of the trans movement and the purpose of social justice overall is two-fold:

• The first purpose is to break down the foundations of western society and create chaos so that leftists can replace the existing culture with their own communist framework.

• The second purpose is to use supposed “victim groups” as a shield from any criticism of their agenda by controlling the language and labeling the people that oppose them as “intolerant.”

The battle over pronouns is indicative of this agenda because it requires the forced participation of everyone in the delusions of a minority of people with mental instability. It requires that I give respect to someone who hasn’t earned it and is not entitled to it, and call them whatever label they dictate I call them for however long they wish. And if I don’t, I am evil and should be punished by the state or by the mob.

Imagine if schizophrenics decided to join together into a movement to demand that the rest of society call them by whatever delusional persona they happen to fantasize about that day. A guy suddenly decides that on Monday he is Napoleon Bonaparte or Jesus Christ and I’m supposed to accommodate him or be called a bigot? There is really no difference between this and what the LGBTQ-whatever movement is demanding when it comes to their made-up pronouns.

I really don’t care if a person wants to declare themselves transgendered. That action by itself doesn’t really affect me and I hope it makes them happy. I think they should seek psychological help because if they really have gender dysphoria then they are statistically far more likely to commit suicide (and it’s not because society makes them commit suicide, there is no evidence to support that claim). Beyond that, as long as they don’t turn their sexual preferences into a political mob then there’s really no conflict. If I really like the person and they are respectful of my personal freedoms, I might even use their pronouns, who knows. Frankly, I don’t think any reasonable person would care about pronouns outside of their own biology.

The war arises when leftists and the trans people they exploit try to impose their ideology and their views on the rest of us. The fight is over freedom, not over trans people. If you want to control how I talk, how I think and how I live; If you don’t respect my freedoms then I don’t respect you. You are not owed or entitled to respect just because you were born or because you think you are special. You get respect by earning respect. You get respect for your actions, not your identity.

The world is not here to accommodate you or your pronouns. People are not here to adjust their speech to protect your feelings. Your feelings do not matter. Your pronouns do not matter. You will be measured by your accomplishments and by how much or how little you violate the rights of others. And if your goal is to manipulate or control how the rest of us speak or interact according to our natural biological preferences then perhaps you should start your own society somewhere else? Maybe somewhere far, far away…

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In 1999, the CIA created In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit investment firm that invests in high-tech startup companies focused on increasing the capacity of US intelligence agencies. The fund has been notable for funding Google and Palantir at very early stages, bringing us to the latest possible investment into encrypted messaging platform Wickr. 

Vice’s Motherboard was first notified by Jack Poulson, executive director of Tech Inquiry, about In-Q-Tel’s From 990 filed in the fiscal year ending in March 2020. The form details compensation paid to outside contractors and mentions a $1.6 payment to Wickr but doesn’t explain if it was an investment or a purchase order. 

But deeper within the form, a section reads: “The hallmark of IQT’s strategic an agile model is the development effort—aka work program—where the company collaborates with the startup to tailor a company’s technology to specific government requirements and invests funds towards that work program.”

Motherboard spoke with Carrie Sessine, senior vice president of marketing and communications at In-Q-Tel, and asked more about the funds sent to Wickr. 

“In-Q-Tel is a prolific strategic investor, making more than 50 investments each year. Our website features the majority of our portfolio investments. There will always be companies that are not announced publicly, which is common practice in the investment community. In-Q-Tel serves multiple agencies committed to national security including the CIA, FBI, NSA, NGA, NRO, DHS (specifically Customs and Border Protection), DIA, and Air Force,” Sessine said. 

However, Wickr’s funding profile is nowhere to be found on In-Q-Tel’s public portfolio section on its website.

In June, Amazon Web Services announced it acquired Wickr. Amazon has been known to have cloud contracts with the CIA. 

More questions than answers remain about In-Q-Tel’s $1.6 million injection into the end-to-end encrypted messaging app. 

Interesting to note that the CIA had invested $1.6million into Wickr, the encrypted messaging software that organized crime groups used white labelled in Anom phone devices, later discovered to be a sting operation run with US Law Enforcement agencies.

— Hacker Fantastic (@hackerfantastic) October 12, 2021

Edward Snowden responds to Wickr’s CIA funding by tweeting: “Into the trash it goes.”

No, I don’t use Wickr. The point is that in 2021, you can’t credibly purport to provide a secure app when you

a) take money from the CIA and

b) literally give the CIA a seat on your board of directors.

ayfkm?

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 13, 2021

Authored by Matt Agorist via The Free Thought Project,

A female officer with Victoria Police, who served for 16 years, has resigned in protest against the use of police to enforce Covid-19 rules, saying in an interview that a “great majority” of her colleagues shared her sentiments.

Acting Senior Sergeant Krystle Mitchell has appeared on The Discernible Interviews channel on YouTube on Friday, wearing her dark-blue uniform and revealing that she had been “troubled” by how police resources have been applied during the pandemic by state authorities.

Victoria Police has been tasked with making sure that people in one of Australia’s most populous states abide by the lockdown restrictions, and with curbing illegal protests against the health rules and vaccination mandates, which often turn violent, resulting in numerous arrests and accusations of police brutality. Melbourne, Victoria’s capital city, holds the world record for longest lockdown.

Mitchell, who had been working with the gender equality and inclusion command, said that “all of my friends that are police officers that are working the front line and are suffering every day enforcing CHO (Chief Health Officer) directions, that certainly the great majority don’t believe in and don’t want to enforce.”

The law enforcers were “scaring people in the community,” and she herself felt uneasy when encountering officers in the street while off-duty and wearing civilian clothes, she confessed.

Some rough behavior by the police during the pandemic might be partially explained by the enforcement approach taken by Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews, Mitchell suggested. 

“I think that the reason, or the issue, in why perhaps police [are] feeling more emboldened to act the way they are in relation to these harsher actions is because of the messaging that comes from Dan [Andrews],” who tells the law enforcers what to do “on a daily basis,” she said.

“The consequences of me being here today, is that I will be resigning from Victoria Police, effective the end of this interview because the consequences of me coming out publicly would be dismissal,” Mitchell announced.

I can’t remedy in my soul any more the way in which my organization, that I love to work for, is being used and the damage that it’s causing in the reputation of Victoria Police and .. to the community.

Victoria Police confirmed that Mitchell used to be one of their officers, but stressed that her comments in no way reflected the views of the whole force.

“Victoria Police cannot pick and choose what laws it enforces,” it said in a statement on Saturday, adding that the police “looks forward to the easing of restrictions and the eventual return to pre-COVID life,” just like ordinary residents do.

As for Mitchell, she would be the subject of a professional standards command investigation over her revelations, according to the statement.

Several instances of police brutality in the state of Victoria went viral in September at the height of the protests against Covid-19 restrictions in Melbourne. One of the viral clips that caused outrage featured police violently tossing an elderly woman to the ground and pepper-spraying her. In another incident, an officer was filmed slamming a demonstrator onto the pavement, allegedly rendering him unconscious.

If you smell something strange during your next subway ride, don’t panic, it’s not a terror attack – it’s just the Feds testing out a new strategy for averting chemical and biological attacks on the country’s largest public transportation system.

According to NBC 4 New York, the MTA, working in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security and a team of researchers and city agencies, will deploy a non-toxic gas at 120 places across the city. The tests will be carried out on five days between Oct. 18 and Oct. 29.

Most of the test sites will be above ground, including in some parks. But an unknown number of tests will be carried out below ground in subway stations across the city (exact details aren’t being released to the public).

The public is advised: should one happen to stumble upon a test site, the gas is non-toxic and poses no public health risk.

Although details are slim, the study is intended to simulate “the aerosol release of a biological agent in a densely populated urban environment.”

“The study will track movement of non-toxic material and the results from these tests will be used to learn more about the relationship between airflow in street level and underground environments,” the MTA said.

Commuters who encounter test sites will likely see teams of researchers around. The study is part of a secretive federal campaign called the Urban Threat Dispersion program. Testing has taken place in NYC before back in 2016, while cities like Washington DC and Boston have also been tested.

Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

On Real Time With Bill Maher two Fridays ago, I fumbled and deflected politely over a Russiagate question, instead of going full cage match. The segment went off the rails beginning with this exchange:

MAHER: You compared it to WMDs. You said, the Russia connection with Trump is this generation’s WMD. I don’t think that’s an accurate analogy, because there were no WMDs. But there was collusion with Russia.

TAIBBI: Really? Where?

MAHER: Where? The Senate Intelligence Committee, run by Republicans, who are if anything slavish to Trump, their report said, “The Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian intelligence services during the 2016 presidential election posed a ‘grave’ counterintelligence threat.”

First of all, that quote isn’t from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report from last August. It’s actually a paraphrase of the report from an Associated Press article, “Trump campaign’s Russia contacts ‘grave’ threat, Senate says,” which reads:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian intelligence services during the 2016 presidential election posed a “grave” counterintelligence threat, a Senate panel concluded Tuesday…

The real SSCI quote is a little different:

Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat.

By all rights, Russiagate should be dead as a serious news story. But as the Real Time episode showed, “collusion” is still alive for some, and the bulk of the case essentially rests now upon the characterization of one person from the above passage as a Russian agent: a former aide to Paul Manafort named Konstantin Kilimnik.

Kilimnik is a Ukrainian-American who’d served in the army and was hired to work as a translator at the American-funded International Republican Institute in Moscow beginning in the mid-nineties. In 2005, he left the IRI to go work for Paul Manafort, who was advising future president Viktor Yanukovich and the “Party of Regions” in Ukraine.

As it happens, Kilimnik worked at the IRI in Moscow during the same time I lived in that city in the nineties and early 2000s. In fact, he was well-known enough in that small expatriate community that in the space of a day last week I was able to reach, through mutual acquaintances, five of Kilimnik’s former colleagues, including three from the IRI and one from the U.S. State Department, to whom he was a regular and valuable contact (the Senate investigators left that fact out). I also called Kilimnik and had two lengthy interviews with him.

Why bring this up? Because in that little flurry of calls, I did more actual work on Konstantin Kilimnik than either the Special Counsel or SSCI researchers, who ostensibly spent thousands of man-hours investigating him.

Kilimnik being a spy wouldn’t just mean that the Trump campaign had been penetrated. It would mean the same thing for the IRI, which was chaired by late Senator and leading proponent of the Russiagate theory John McCain at the time. More to the point, it would also be disastrous for the State Department, and particularly for the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, whose staffers placed great trust in “KK” as a regular source.

The FBI’s own declassified reports show Kilimnik met with the head of the Kiev embassy’s political section “at least biweekly” during his time working with Manafort and Yanukovitch, adding that he “displayed good knowledge and seemed to know what was going on,” and came across as “less slanted” than other sources, among many other things. This fits with what I was told by multiple former colleagues of Kilimnik’s, that staffers in the Kiev embassy valued his analyses above those of some Americans in Yanukovitch’s orbit. (A third former co-worker was a little more blunt about what he heard, saying the Kiev embassy was “sucking his dick”).

They also show the embassy was so intent on protecting Kilimnik’s identity as a State Department source that they pulled his name out of diplomatic cables sent home:

Kilimnik says he “played a certain role in communication with the Western embassies in Kiev” both before and after the “Euromaidan” Revolution in 2014. “I tried to draw attention to facts about thugs attacking TV channels and opposition politicians, and things like [an arson attack against “InterTV” in 2016],” he says, adding that he “naively thought the West would stand for media freedom and protecting rules for fair play in politics, like it has for many years.”

The only reason nobody’s asked the Senate Committee why Kilimnik’s alleged spy status doesn’t also represent a “grave” embarrassment to, say, the U.S. State Department is because our press corps is the most dogshit on earth (more on that in a moment).

Special Counsel Robert Mueller claimed the FBI spoke to an IRI employee who said Kilimnik was “fired from his post because his links to Russian intelligence were too strong.” Though not all the IRI staffers I reached liked Kilimnik, each found the idea that he might be a spy alternately ridiculous and baffling. Multiple ex-colleagues said they believed he was fired for “moonlighting,” i.e. because he’d already started working for Manafort.

“I was actually moonlighting. It was a funny story,” Kilimnik says (for a more complete explanation, see the Q&A below).

As to the idea that it was known around the IRI office that Kilimnik had intelligence ties, one former senior IRI official said, “I think whoever said that, that’s someone trying to feel more important in retrospect,” adding that the idea that he was “some GRU plant from years gone by” was questionable because the Russians “didn’t know their right from their left back then, and the IRI could not described as a high-value target.” The official concluded: “I find the notion that Kilimnik is now this big figure remarkable.” None of former employees of the Moscow IRI office I spoke with had been contacted by any American investigator, including Mueller.

Then there’s the matter of the suspect himself. Question to Kilimnik: how many times was he questioned by American authorities, with whom he was so familiar — remember he met with American officials “at least biweekly” at one point pre-Trump — during the entire Russiagate period?

“Not a single person from the U.S. Government ever reached out to me,” Kilimnik says.

Nobody from the Office of the Special Counsel, the FBI, or the Senate Intelligence Committee ever contacted him?

“Not once,” Kilimnik says. “Nobody from Mueller’s team reached out to me, literally nobody.”

In reaching Kilimnik last week I also became just the second American reporter, after Aaron Maté of RealClear Investigations and Grayzone, to call Kilimnik for comment on the Senate report. Virtually every American news organization or TV commentary program has in the last year repeated accusations against Kilimnik made by either the Senate Intelligence Committee or the U.S. Treasury Department, which earlier this year called him a “Russian Intelligence Services agent” in an announcement of sanctions against Russia.

It was once normal practice in American media to give people a chance to respond to serious allegations, but no longer, apparently. “Zero. Zero,” says Kilimnik, when asked how many American media outlets called him after the release of the Senate report. Incidentally, Kilimnik isn’t hiding under a snow-covered trap door at a secret FSB installation outside Izhievsk. He’s in an apartment in Northwest Moscow, where anyone could find him.

“Everybody knows my phone number. It was in Mueller’s reports,” he says. “But I got no questions. I mean, a lot of people know how to find me. I guess they just didn’t care.”

Kilimnik was even on the list of 16 entities and 16 individuals the Treasury just this year said “attempted to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election at the direction of the leadership of the Russian Government.” That’s the 2020 election, not the 2016 election, meaning the one that came after the Senate report.

“The US actually sanctioned me for interference in 2020 elections,” Kilimnik says. “I would not be able to say why. I’d love to know. I’ve been sitting in fucking Moscow, in my backyard, and feeding squirrels. Must have been some sort of interference.”

The aforementioned Maté published photos of Kilimnik’s passport that appear to show he entered the U.S. on a visa stamped in a regular Russian passport on October 28, 1997. This is the same date the Senate committee said he was entering the United States on a diplomatic passport. The Senate also said Kilimnik met with Manafort in Spain in 2017, which he denies. “I’ve never been to Spain,” Kilimnik laughs. “I haven’t been there. Let them prove I’ve been there.”

Another thing that came up on Real Time was the idea that we shouldn’t dismiss the monetarily tiny Russian Facebook campaign — featuring classics that ironically read like Real Time bits, with images of Jesus pleading with American voters, “Struggling with addiction to masturbation? Reach out to me and we’ll beat it together” — because “9/11 didn’t cost much either”:

I oversold things on the air, talking about how the Internet Research Agency only spent $100,000, as only $44,000 of that was before the campaign. More importantly, only a tiny percentage of ads qualified as coherent propaganda. I’d wager few Americans have actually read through all these ads, which have messages like, “Tell me once again that there’s no such thing as white privilege,” “Stop Trump and his bigoted agenda!”, and “Share the experience and the challenges of the black hair industry.” Overall, for 2016, they read like a creepy, overambitious parody of woke culture, with a tinge of Charlie Manson’s “Helter Skelter” plan thrown in. Whatever it is/was, it’s pretty far from 9/11:

Kilimnik stands accused of helping Evil Von Putin aim this high-tech weapon. How? Senate investigators said, “Manafort briefed Kilimnik on sensitive Campaign polling data and the Campaign’s strategy for beating Hillary Clinton.” What was sensitive about it?

“That’s bullshit. There was nothing that resembled ‘sensitive’ polling data,” Kilimnik says. “I would get two figures maybe once a month, not every day, not every week.”

Two figures — meaning two pages?

“Two digits,” he says. “Like, ‘Trump 40, Hillary 45.’ That’s all I would get, nothing more. So I don’t understand how this is sensitive data.”

Kilimnik was getting his information from former Trump deputy campaign chief Rick Gates, who was directed to send the data to Kilimnik by Manafort. None other than Rachel Maddow once called Gates “Mueller’s star cooperating witness.” I called Gates last week and asked: what was he passing to Kilimnik?

“Top-line data, and I want people to understand what that means,” he says. “It was like, ‘Ohio, Clinton 48, Trump 50,’ Or, ‘Wisconsin, Trump 50, Clinton 42.’ The sources were a combination of things like RealClear Politics and occasionally some numbers from [Republican pollster] Tony Fabrizio. But it was all just top-line stuff.”

Gates’s story is that Manafort was passing this data back to people like his longtime sponsors, the Ukrainian barons Rinat Akhmetov and Sergei Lyvochkin, because “Paul was just trying to show that Trump was doing well,” as “Paul was just trying to do what he’s always done,” i.e. trying to show how valuable he could be.

For those disinclined to believing the Gates or Kilimnik version of events, remember that neither Mueller nor the Senate Intelligence Committee could come up with a different one. Apart from adding “sensitive” to their description (Mueller just called it “internal polling data”), the Senate never offered evidence that Kilimnik was getting more than those few numbers. As to why Kilimnik was sent this information, this is what the Senate had to say:

The Committee was unable to reliably determine why Manafort shared sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy with Kilimnik. Manafort and Gates both claimed that it was part of an effort to resolve past business disputes and obtain new work with their past Russian and Ukrainian clients by showcasing Manafort’s success.

Why “sensitive?” The Committee was “unable to reliably determine” why, having no idea what Kilimnik did with those numbers. But they were sure enough it was bad to conclude it represented a “grave counterintelligence threat.”

Kilimnik is roughly the twentieth suspect in a long list of alleged secret conduits that across five years have already been tried out and discarded by pundits and investigators alike as “smoking gun” links between Trump and Putin.

An abbreviated list:

There was a Maltese professor named Josef Mifsud and a young Trump aide named George Papadopoulos, former Trump adviser Carter Page, an alleged “secret server” supposedly pinging between Trump and Alfa Bank, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser J.D. Gordon, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, real estate developer Felix Sater, another Russian who approached Trump people claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton named Henry Oknyansky, a Russian firm called Concord Consulting, plus Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and many others.

The pattern with all of these “smoking gun” cases was the same. At first, there would be a great press hullaballoo, complete with front-page media profiles and heated straight-to-camera monologues at the tops of cable commentary shows over “Breaking News” chyrons:

Freakouts would be long, but months or years later, narratives would collapse. Ambassador Sergei Kislyak was everyone’s favorite suspect in the summer of 2016 for having done everything from rig the Republican convention platform to turning Sessions into a spy, but then Mueller quietly said Kisylak’s interactions with Trump officials in those months were “brief, public, and non-substantive.” Reporters howled that Christopher Steele was right about Cohen meeting Russian hackers in Prague to help rig the 2016 race, and even claimed (see above) that Mueller was about to release evidence of it any minute, until Mueller said flatly, “Cohen… never traveled to Prague.”

The saddest case involved Carter Page. Steele’s Dossier identified Page — not Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, or even Donald Trump — as the mastermind of the Wikileaks leak:

The aim of leaking the DNC e-mails to WikiLeaks during the Democratic Convention had been to swing supporters of Bernie SANDERS away from Hillary CLINTON and across to TRUMP… This objective had been conceived and promoted, inter alia, by TRUMP’s foreign policy adviser Carter PAGE…

Steele also had Page negotiating a massive bribe via the oil company Rosneft in exchange for the dropping of sanctions, and acting as the personal intermediary between Paul Manafort and the Kremlin. Page, not knowing he was being spied upon, told an FBI informant that August that he had “literally never met” or “said one word to” Paul Manafort, even going so far as to complain that Manafort never answered his emails. The FBI sat on this information, and wrote up a secret surveillance warrant application that read:

Sub-Source reported that the conspiracy was being managed by Candidate’s then campaign manager, who was using, among others, foreign policy advisor Carter Page as an intermediary…

It wasn’t until the report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz came out in December of 2019 that the world found out that the FBI not only “did not have information corroborating the specific allegations against Carter Page,” but had covered up Page’s history as an informant for the CIA, very much like the Senate and the Treasury are now covering up Kilimnik’s status as a U.S. State Department source.

Kilimnik is just the last person on the list, and he’s conveniently in Moscow, unlikely to ever come back here to defend himself. As such, he’s the perfect fall guy for the marooned-Japanese-soldier-type holdouts on Russiagate who think the collusion narrative is still viable. More from Kilimnik:

TK: You were described by the Senate Intelligence Committee as a “Russian Intelligence Officer.” Are you one?

Konstantin Kilimnik: I have not had any relationship with any intelligence agency. Not with U.S. intelligence, not the Ukrainian, Russian, Zimbabwean, whatever. I’m a consultant who has worked for many years running elections in Ukraine. I just haven’t had any relationship with any intelligence, and haven’t seen any facts proving otherwise.

I think the investigation was so politically charged from the beginning, that they just needed to find a Russian body that they could just put as much dirt as possible on. Ultimately, nobody is going to care, because all the Russians are considered to be bad anyhow, they’re all spies.

TK: The intelligence community in the U.S. seems unanimous in their conclusion that Russians interfered in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Did they not?

Konstantin Kilimnik: I don’t think Russians interfered… I know that runs counter to all the conclusions of the intelligence community and all that country to all the intelligence and press and all that. And maybe there were other efforts, as well. But, I was not involved in any of that.

There was a lot of misinformation, just because the public wanted someone, and I just happened to be that person thrown into the mix. If I had Hungarian citizenship or any other citizenship, of course, people would not have given my name. They just needed the Russian connection, and I happened to be that unfortunate Russian connection.

TK: The Mueller report claims an IRI employee believed you were “fired from his post because his links to Russian intelligence were too strong.” Others say you were “moonlighting.” Why did you leave the IRI?

Konstantin Kilimnik: I was actually moonlighting. It was a funny story. I was looking for ways to move on, because by 2005 I had been at IRI for 10 years. Some time in mid-2004 an old IRI pal, Phil Griffin, reemerged and proposed a well-paying job of going to Ukraine and writing analyses of what was going on during the Orange Revolution, for Manafort.

So, I went there after not having been to Ukraine for over 10 years. I was ecstatic about Kiev and got seriously interested in what was going on politically… Manafort, Griffin and I (as a translator) went to Donetsk in, I think, November 2004 to meet some guy I had no previous knowledge of (who turned out to be Rinat Akhmetov’s closest confidant, Borys Kolesnikov). Manafort and he spoke for several days and got convinced that the “Donetsk guys” were not even close to being thugs they had been portrayed by the Western media to be. I went back a couple of times to translate for these meetings, which I thought were not in any conflict with my work at IRI Moscow.

Then, the government in Ukraine changed. [Viktor] Yuschenko became the President, Manafort was in negotiations about the contract, and I almost forgot about my short translation jobs. In April 2005, we were at an IRI retreat, and my boss, director of Europe and Eurasia programs Steve Nix got a tip from the new President’s office that “Donetsk thugs” were looking to hire an American consultant, and that a guy who seemed to work at IRI was helping in the process.

Steve, who was very pro-Yuschenko, completely freaked out, and accused me of working for criminals. I said that a) I was doing this in my free time, 2) this did not conflict in any way with my job at IRI Russia, and 3) maybe things are not so straightforward in Ukrainian politics, and there are no guys in black and white hats, but mostly gray hats. He disagreed and demanded I resign, which I did.

TK: The Senate claims you met Manafort in Spain in 2017. Did you?

Konstantin Kilimnik: I have never been to Spain. (laughter)…I have not been there. They can’t prove that. And yet they’ve inserted that. And yet, that’s central to what they’re saying.

Europe is specific place in terms of passports and immigration. To cross the border, you have to give your fingerprints, and upon any re-entry too. If I went to Spain, I can guarantee that, first of all, Europe keeps a record of that. They would say that I have crossed the border at a certain time in a certain place. And that would be okay because, again, it’s all tied to the fingerprints. You cannot get into the EU without this. You can’t fake it. So let them prove it.

TK: You’ve been accused of obtaining that “sensitive polling data” for Oleg Deripaska. Was that right?

Konstantin Kilimnik: No, Deripaska was a Russian businessman. I actually didn’t have any contact with him. There were Ukrainian businessmen and Ukrainian politicians in 2016 who were in opposition, and who were actually under pressure from Petro Poroshenko’s government. Naturally, for them, any change, opening a channel into the U.S. Government, that for them would have been a great thing. So that’s why they were interested in the outcome of the elections. There was no Russian connection whatsoever. If there were, they would have a record of me talking to Deripaska or visiting him.

TK: You never had any contact with Deripaska?

Konstantin Kilimnik: No, I haven’t met him since, I’m afraid to be exact, but like 2006, I think was the last time I saw him. I was translating for Manafort. But after that, Manafort spoke to him himself, because Deripaska spoke the language by then. And there was no need for me.

Part 2 of my interview with Konstantin Kilimnik is coming later this week.

After months of dithering about the potential safety risks of mixing and matching various approved COVID vaccines, a long-running NIH-sponsored study has found that patients can safely and effectively receive booster shots from any of the major approved vaccines, even as the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee has sounded lukewarm about the prospect of approving booster jabs for all adults over the age of 18.

According to Bloomberg, the complicated 9-arm trial involved over 450 people and measured the effects from giving a booster shot of the Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech or J&J vaccines to those who had originally gotten a different vaccine. The data showed that the new jabs increased patients’ levels of neutralizing antibodies, sometimes by more than would be expected if they received a third jab of the same vaccine they had received initially.

“These data suggest that if a vaccine is approved or authorized as a booster, an immune response will be generated regardless of the primary Covid-19 vaccination regimen,” the researchers said in their conclusion.

In the abstract from the preprint of the study (which can be found on medrxiv.org) the researchers claimed they were embarking on this research because of the persistent breakthrough infections that continue to occur in some patients. While “homologous” mRNA booster jabs have received approval in some jurisdictions (Israel, and now the EUA, are now allowing some patients to receive a third dose of whatever initial jab they received)

In total, 458 individuals were enrolled: 154 received mRNA-1273 (Moderna), 150 received Ad26.CoV2.S (J&J), and 154 received BNT162b2 (Pfizer) booster vaccines. The study was sponsored and primarily funded by the NIH.

Participants were divided into nine groups with roughly 50 volunteers in each. Those who initially got the two-dose Moderna vaccine got either another Moderna shot, a Pfizer shot or a J&J shot as a booster four to six months after their primary immunization.

People who got the two-dose Pfizer vaccine got either another Pfizer shot or a Moderna or J&J booster. And people who got the one-shot J&J vaccine, either got another J&J shot, or a Moderna or Pfizer booster. Antibody levels were then measured at two weeks and four weeks after the booster dose.

Data showed that homologous boosters increased neutralizing antibodies by 4.2-20-fold while heterologous boosters created an increase of 6.2-76-fold. The conclusion: Conclusion: “Homologous and heterologous booster vaccinations were well-tolerated and immunogenic in adults who completed a primary Covid-19 vaccine regimen at least 12 weeks earlier.”

Notably, the study found that for patients who initially received the J&J jab, switching to an mRNA jab (Pfizer’s or Moderna’) for the booster dose might afford them better protection. Regardless of the initial jab, Pfizer and Moderna boosters appeared to work best.

More detail about the study are expected Friday afternoon during a meeting of an FDA advisory panel, where researchers conducting the trial are scheduled to give a presentation on their early findings. A panel will also meet Thursday to deliberate over Moderna’s application for booster-jab approval.

Find the full pre-print below:

2021.10.10.21264827v1.full by Joseph Adinolfi Jr. on Scribd

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

There is no schadenfreude in seeing the Left destroy everything it touches – because its claws tear all of us as well…

What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?

Then

No sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes that he might, some day, in theory, could possibly commit.

Foreign Policy published an article by a liberal Obama Administration lawyer outlining all the ways to remove an elected president as soon as possible—including consideration of a military coup. 

The FBI and the entrenched bureaucrats at the Justice Department continued their prior failed efforts during the campaign to seed the lies of the fabricated Steele dossier and Fusion GPS. A 22-month-long and $40 million hoax ended with the special counsel himself, a doddering Robert Mueller, swearing under oath that he essentially knew nothing about the dossier or Fusion GPS—the twin catalysts that had prompted his very own investigation. 

Fired FBI Director James Comey—a lion on Twitter, and a lamb when under oath—on over 240 occasions testified to the Congress that he either did not know or could not remember, when asked details about the collusion fraud that the philosopher G-man had helped perpetuate. 

No one worried about the weaponization of government. So, we went right from the nefarious legacy of John Brennan (who lied under oath to Congress twice), James Clapper (who lied under oath to Congress once), James Comey (who leaked confidential presidential memos), Andrew McCabe (who gave false testimony to federal investigators), Lisa Page (who was fired from the special counsel’s legal team for various unprofessional conduct), Peter Strzok (about whom there is not enough space to detail his transgressions), and the now convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith onto the next round of impeachments. 

Two of them followed. Neither was conducted by a special counsel. There was no array of witnesses, no prosecutorial report. Much less were there formal charges of a specific high crime or misdemeanor, or bribery or treason, as specified by the Constitution. 

In the end, both farces ended in trials—but not before the Left had established lots of baleful precedents. Impeachment is now simply a tool to embarrass a president in his first term when he has lost the House. A Senate trial could hound an innocent president, even as a private citizen out of office. And a chief justice need not preside over the Senate trial. If and when Joe Biden loses the House, the Left should applaud any attempt to impeach him—given it established the new model of opposition.

Of the January 6 debacle, we were not told that it was a riot involving lawbreakers who would be punished. Instead, we were lied to that it was an “armed insurrection,” a “coup,” and “a rebellion” of massive proportions. 

Our esteemed retired military and civil libertarians who had damned the mere thought of using federal troops to quell the prior four summer months of continuous rioting were suddenly happy to see 25,000 federal soldiers patrol Washington to hound out fantasy second-wave insurrectionists. In Animal Farm fashion, there were now to be good federal troops deterring mythical violent domestic extremists, but bad federal troops who should never stop real, ongoing mayhem in the streets.

It mattered nothing that “armed” in the case of January 6 meant that no firearms were used or even found among the protestors. No one was charged with conspiracy, insurrection, or racketeering. But many were placed in solitary confinement without specific charges being filed—to the utter delight of liberal groups like the ACLU and human rights organizations.

The FBI—recently known mostly for spreading Hillary Clinton’s campaign collusion hoax—found no premeditated grand plot. The remaining media narratives were also untrue: Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick was not murdered, but died tragically of a stroke the next day. Five persons were not “killed.” Four who died were Trump supporters. Only one of the five deaths occurred at the hand of a known other—a 14-year military veteran, unarmed, 110-pound female Ashli Babbitt. She was fatally shot while attempting to enter through a window of the Capitol by a law-enforcement officer—to the frequent approbation of the left-wing commentariat. The officer’s name was hidden for months from the public—something conspicuously uncharacteristic in other cases where law enforcement officers are involved in shooting unarmed suspects. 

Videos surrounding the entire melee still have been repressed. They likely will never be released. That infamous day remains in dire contrast to the prior 120 days of continuous rioting, looting, and arson. In the election-year summer 2020, federal courthouses and iconic buildings were torched. Nearly $2 billion worth of property was destroyed and 28 were killed. 

Yet current Vice President Kamala Harris rallied the public to help bail out the arrested. And the architect of the “1619 Project” reassured Americans that crimes against property like arson and looting are not really violence per se. The weeks of “spontaneous” mayhem magically vanished after November 3, 2020. Note that esteemed medical professionals argued that BLM protestors who flooded the streets were exempt from quarantine, social distancing, and mask requirements, given their higher morality. There are now good riots and bad ones, and noble sustained silence about a noble officer who lethally shoots an unarmed suspect, and noble immediate outing of an ignoble officer who lethally shoots an unarmed suspect.

These were merely the main media distortions and fixations over the last four years. We forget the daily craziness such as a president’s calls to foreign heads of state routinely leaked or the FBI director passing on confidential memos of private presidential conversations to the liberal press, or the “whistleblower” who was not a whistleblower as much as a Democratic operative. The media nadir came when the press bellowed that Trump had overfed a fish.

An array of retired four-stars damned their president as Hitlerian, Mussolini-like, and deserving an early exit from office. Their superior morality naturally excused them from abiding by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. 

The New York Times falsely identified a minor Trump Administration bureaucrat (“anonymous”) as a major conservative truth-teller—once he thrilled the media by lying that a large, morally superior, inside cabal was devoted to obstructing the implementation of a president’s orders. Everyone from Hillary Clinton to an active FBI lawyer bragged of joining the “Resistance,” with plenty of conspiratorial retro-accusations that the 2016 election was “rigged.”

All that was a warm-up for the plague year in which Donald Trump was blamed for every COVID death. His medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci was deified, due largely to his coy opposition to the president he was supposed to serve. 

Both the current president and vice president had, less than a year ago, urged Americans not to be vaccinated, given their own reluctance to take a “Trump” vaccine. At least the anti-vaxxers had consistent opposition to the experimental inoculations; in contrast, the anti-Trumper anti-vaxxers merely saw sabotaging the 2020 vaccination program as necessary to be in a position to claim it as their own in 2021.

Now

What did all that madness achieve? Mostly, the first election in U.S. history in which over 100 million ballots were not cast on Election Day. Strangely, with such an avalanche of ballots, the usual error rate of absentee balloting dived from around 2-4 percent to 0.2-0.4 percent. You see, when we suddenly must count tens of millions more paper ballots then it becomes easier, not harder, to spot errors.

So, the Left won its Pyrrhic victory. 

The nation was done with the demonized Trump and now the Left controlled the presidency, and both houses of Congress. Somnolent Ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton pledged to heal the nation as he overturned his predecessor’s supposedly disastrous policies and went on a rampage of slandering his opponents. If Donald Trump was once damned as non compos mentis, the same media and academic accusers kept mum as Biden shuffled, fell, went mute, slurred words, and went off on angry, disjointed, and incoherent riffs.

What followed was a concerted effort to destroy the Trump record: the greatest level of combined annual natural gas and oil production in any nation’s history, record low minority unemployment and near record peacetime, general unemployment, a border secure and illegal immigration finally under control, and a New Middle East in which Israel and its Arab enemies concluded neutrality pacts. China was put on notice for its past mockery of global norms. Inflation was low, growth was good. “Stagflation” was still a rarely remembered word from the past.

And again, what was all that Pavlovian nihilism to achieve? 

Within eight months the following was finalized: Joe Biden utterly destroyed the idea of a border. Some 2 million were scheduled to cross illegally in the current fiscal year. The sheer inhumanity of deplorable conditions at the border surpassed any notion of the “cages” Donald Trump, in fact, had inherited from the humanitarian Barack Obama. 

A war almost immediately broke out in the Middle East, once Biden distanced the United States from Israel and rebooted the radical Palestinian cause. 

The Taliban defeated the 20-year effort of the United States in Afghanistan, in the most humiliating withdrawal of the American military in over 45 years. Tens of billions of dollars of abandoned military equipment now arm the Taliban and have turned Afghanistan into a world arms mart for terrorists. Iran is emboldened and speeds up its nuclear proliferation efforts. China brags that the United States has been Afghanistanized and will not defend its allies, Taiwan in particular. 

At home, gas prices have soared. Prior trillion-dollar deficits now seem financially prudent in comparison to multitrillion-dollar red ink. The nation is more racially polarized than at any time in the last half-century. A bleak and venomous woke creed has outdone the hate and fear of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, as it wages war on half the nation for various thought crimes and the incorrect idea that the United States was, is, and always will be a kind and humane place.

More will likely have died each day from COVID by year’s end during the Biden first 12 months than during Trump’s last 12 months. That statistic perhaps might have been meaningless had Biden himself not demagogued the idea that a president is strangely responsible for all pandemic deaths on his watch. 

But then again, Biden had warped the pandemic narrative only after he had inherited the Trump vaccination program (17 million vaccinated by Inauguration Day). Biden was wrongly and prematurely convinced that vaxxes were a permanent prophylaxis to any sort of COVID variants that would simply disappear once he took office. Depending on the occasion, Biden claims none, or just 4 million, were vaxxed until he took office, as truth and fantasies waft through his cloudy cognition.

With Biden came not just woke polarization, stagflation, a subsidized ennui that erodes the work ethic, and selective nonenforcement of existing laws: Worse, still, we got a bankrupt ideological defense of these insanities. Critical legal theory, critical race theory, and a new monetary theory were all dreamed up by parlor academics to justify the nihilism. 

Did America ever believe that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would trash his commander in chief as Hitlerian to journalist hitmen, or allegedly denounce news organizations as “terrorists,” or interrupt the chain of command on a prompt by the Speaker of the House, or warn the Chinese military that he believed there was enough instability in the White House to justify a promise to warn of any impending U.S. military action against Beijing deemed offensive? Was General Milley suffering from the very “white rage” he sought to ferret out?

With Biden, China is now omnipresent in the halls of power. A task of our chief COVID advisor, Anthony Fauci, seems to be to deny repeatedly that his stealthy funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan virology lab in China had anything to do with the likely accidental release of a likely human engineered and energized coronavirus. Americans still cannot even imagine that their government might have helped subsidize the plague germ that has wrought such havoc upon them.

Meanwhile the president’s son still owns a 10 percent cut in a communist Chinese government-affiliated financial venture, apparently due to his prior drug-addled record of financial mismanagement. The media still insists Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” while his paint-by-numbers art is auctioned off to foreign lobbyists expecting a return of the old days when Hunter and Joe grandly arrived on Air Force Two to do their bidding. 

What did the Left leave as the proper model for conservatives now to deal with Biden? 

Impeach him when he loses the House? Get a special counsel, lavish said counsel with $40 million, a dream team of right-wing lawyers, and 22 months to find real Chinese collusion? 

Start seeding a conservative version of Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman and an “anonymous” whistleblower inside the Biden octopus? 

Get retired four-star generals on TV to swear Biden is a Chinese “asset,” or have them retweet the idea of sending Biden supporters to China, or swear that he is a fascist? Bring back Woodward and Bernstein to find out whether Biden, Inc. ever paid taxes on all that Chinese and Ukrainian cash? 

Call in the ubiquitous Dr. Bandy X. Lee from Yale to administer the Montreal Cognitive Assessment to prove that Biden can distinguish a camel from an elephant or a train from a bike or count backwards from five? 

Will the Right prod General Mark Milley’s replacement to collude with soon-to-be Speaker Kevin McCarthy and call the Russians to warn them that Biden is demented, democracy is “messy,” Kamala Harris is crazy, and thus Moscow might need a warning from us about any Biden preemptive aggression?

And what of the people who voted for this change and the media that empowered it? In the latest Quinnipiac poll, known for its liberal affinities, Biden now earns a 38 percent approval rating. We should add a few extra negative points given media bias. Do they suffer buyer’s remorse or angst that they were lied to by the hard Left that Joe Biden was cognizant and not a mere vessel for a two-year push for overt socialism?

Meanwhile the media is reduced to explaining why an undocumented activist has an understandable right to chase a liberal Democratic senator into a public restroom, hector her, and then video her as she enters a stall to relieve herself and then post the grotesqueness on the internet—a felony in the state of the Arizona, though just part of the “process” for the president of the United States.

We could call the above insanity nemesis for woke hubris. Or maybe it is karma, “payback’s a bitch,” or “what goes around comes around.” But there is no schadenfreude in seeing the Left destroy everything it touches—because its claws tear all of us as well.

Things are getting very confusing in Texas.

Shortly after governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order banning the vaccine mandates by any employer, which in turn was followed by several prominent Texas corporations – such as IBM, American Air, Southwest – saying they would snub the EO and back Biden on shots, we’ve reach a point where some employers side with the governor, others side with the president, meanwhile employees have no idea what they have to do (or not do), while yet another group of (former) employees that was fired for refusing to comply with the mandates is now trying to get their jobs back. 

As Houston Public Media reports, more than 150 former employees of Houston Methodist Hospital, who either quit or were fired in June over a vaccine mandate policy will demand to be rehired after Gov. Abbott issued an executive order on Monday banning any entity in the state from implementing such mandates, according to a lawyer representing the former employees.

Attorney Jared Woodfill, who represents almost 200 healthcare workers in multiple lawsuits against Methodist, said executive order GA-40 makes the hospital’s policy illegal.

“Governor Abbott says very clearly, ‘whereas countless Texans fear losing their livelihoods because they object to receiving a COVID-19 vaccination for reasons of personal conscience,’” he said. “That applies to every plaintiff that I represent, and every plaintiff that Methodist hospital thought it was appropriate to fire.”

Woodfill said he planned to send a formal request to the hospital on Tuesday in an attempt to reinstate the former employees.

As we reported at the time, Houston Methodist, which operates several hospitals in the area and has more than 25,000 employees, was the first hospital in the country to implement a vaccine mandate for workers in April sparking a fierce legal battle between hundreds of employees and the hospital. In June, 178 employees were suspended after declining to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Weeks later, 153 employees either resigned or were terminated. According to Methodists’ numbers, 25 opted to get vaccinated and return to work.

In a statement, Methodist CEO Marc Boom didn’t touch on whether or not the former employees would be allowed back, but said he was “deeply disappointed” by Abbott’s order. He added that the order wouldn’t have an impact on Methodist since the hospital implemented its vaccine mandate months ago.

The hospital system is still reviewing Abbott’s order and its possible implications, but because its own rule went into effect months ago, 100% of its employees are compliant with the vaccine policy, according to Boom. 

“We are reviewing the order now and its possible implications,” the statement read.

“We expect all of our employees and physicians to be vaccinated as we must continue doing everything possible to keep all our patients and each other as safe as possible until this pandemic is over.”

He added that “not only are our patients safe as a result, but we are able to remain healthy at work and be there for our community when it needs us the most.”

Boom said he hoped that other Texas hospitals, like Baylor College of Medicine and Memorial Hermann, would continue to implement their vaccine mandates despite the governor’s orders.

“We are grateful we mandated the vaccine early so the order will not have an immediate impact on us,” Marc Boom, the chief executive officer of Houston Methodist, wrote in an email. “But we are concerned for other Texas hospitals that may not be able to continue their mandates now with this executive order.”

At this point, we’ve lost count of how many central bankers Turkey’s authoritarian head Erdogan has fired, so a quick stroll down memory lane helped us remember:

• July 2019: Lira Crashes After Erdogan Unexpectedly Fires Turkey’s Central Bank Governor
• Nov 2020: Erdogan Fires Turkish Central Bank Governor, Launching Full-Blown Currency Crisis
• March 2021: Turkey In Turmoil Again: Erdogan Fires Second Central Bank Chief In 4 Months, Sparking Foreign Capital Panic
• May 2021: Erdogan fires deputy governor of Turkey’s central bank

One look at the headlines above reveals that Erdogan, who himself is technically the head of the central bank as he can replace any current central bank governor that does not do his bidding and swap in some figurehead, tends to have a short fuse when it comes to heads of TCMB when they don’t follow the crackpot economic “theory” known as Erdoganomics according to which cutting interest rates is the way to lower inflation, not vice versa. It’s also why back in June when the Turkish central bank kept rates unchanged despite Erdogan’s prodding for a rate cut (even as Turkish inflation was well in the double digits), we predicted – jokingly – that Erdogan was about to fire everyone.

Turkish Central Bank Keeps Benchmark Rate Unchanged at 19%

Erdogan is about to fire everyone

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 17, 2021

Well, he didn’t “fire everyone”, but he definitely sent a message and back in September, the central bank shocked the market when it cut rates by 100bps to 18% with consensus again expecting an unchanged decision. The move sent the lira plunging to an all time low.

Alas, it turns out that the pace of cuts was not to Erdogan’s liking and earlier today when we noted a Bloomberg headline that Erdogan was meeting with his central bank puppet, Kavcioglu, we said it was “game over” as more heads were about to roll.

*TURKISH PRESIDENT ERDOGAN MEETS CENBANK GOVERNOR: PRESIDENCY

And… game over

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 13, 2021

This time we were correct, and late on Wednesday evening, President Erdogan fired three members of the central bank’s interest-rate setting committee in a midnight decree after meeting with Governor Sahap Kavcioglu who was appointed by Erdogan to lead the central bank in March, replacing his hawkish predecessor Naci Agbal.

Erdogan removed deputy governors Semih Tumen and Ugur Namik Kucuk, along with Monetary Policy Committee member Abdullah Yavas, according to the decree. He appointed Taha Cakmak as deputy governor and Yusuf Tuna as an MPC member.

According to Bloomberg, the changes followed a meeting between Erdogan and Kavcioglu on Wednesday evening, where the two discussed changes to the committee. Kucuk was the only member of the committee who voted against Kavcioglu’s interest-rate cut last month, thus committing professional career suicide. Yavas didn’t vote because he had contracted Covid-19 in the U.S., where he lives, but that was enough to prompt Erdogan’s ire and to get him sacked.

Erdogan probably wanted to fire the head as well, but just last week, Erdogan’s office refuted a Reuters report that said Erdogan is “cooling” on Kavcioglu in the job even though the central banker had cut rates just over a month ago – a move sure to make Erdogan happy – despite explosive inflation crushing Turkey’s economy. The inflation rate was 19.6% in September, when Kavcioglu lowered the benchmark interest rate by 100 basis points to 18%.

Predictably, the lira – which has been hitting new all time lows almost daily – dropped to a record low against the dollar, and extended its losses to nearly 5% against the dollar since the governor delivered his surprise interest-rate cut on Sept. 23.

The Turkish presidency posted a picture of the two men together on Twitter after the meeting, and Erdogan’s office described the conversation as “positive.” The presidency also said the two men discussed the general economic situation.

Cumhurbaşkanı @RTErdogan, Türkiye Cumhuriyet Merkez Bankası (TCMB) Başkanı Şahap Kavcıoğlu’nu Çankaya Köşkü’nde kabul etti. pic.twitter.com/zpjiEkcnVv

— T.C. Cumhurbaşkanlığı (@tcbestepe) October 13, 2021

The lira fell 1% to a fresh record low of 9.1883 per dollar…

… and by now it should have become clear to even the most die-hard EM fanatic desperate for carry that any long position in the lira is career suicide. Which is why very soon we may see a wholesale capital flight out of Turkey which leads to total economic catastrophe, not to mention hyperinflation, for the NATO member state.

New Zealand announced late Monday that it would join the growing list of developed nations forcing workers – or at least certain workers – to choose: either accept the jab, or lose your job.

One week after Canada adopted mandatory vaccination rules for federal workers and travelers, New Zealand has announced its own vaccine mandates for most teachers and health care workers.

Per NZ’s Liberal-led government, doctors, nurses and other health-care workers must be fully vaxxed by Dec. 1, while everyone working in education who has contact with students must be vaccinated by Jan. 1.

“We can’t leave anything to chance so that’s why we are making it mandatory,” said COVID Response Minister Chris Hipkins, who is also the country’s education minister.

“Vaccination remains our strongest and most effective tool to protect against infection and disease,” Hipkins said.

New Zealand briefly enjoyed COVID-free status after the initial global outbreak, but the country’s “drawbridge” strategy was unable to keep out the delta variant, imposing a lockdown in Auckland, the country’s largest city after confirming just a single case. As cases spread despite the tightening restrictions, the government was forced to finally abandon its “COVIDZero” strategy.

New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern said the highly transmissible delta variant had proved a “game-changer” that can’t be easily eliminated.

As kiwis confront the new system, the Guardian is reporting that New Zealand’s epidemiology “experts” were taken by surprise when Ardern abandoned “COVIDZero”. They said they weren’t consulted about the government’s new system, which will lessen restrictions in three stages.

“We were obviously surprised on Monday last week when the government seemed to say that we were moving away from elimination,” said prof Michael Baker, one of the country’s most prominent pandemic communicators and a member of the ministry’s Covid-19 Technical Advisory group. “A decision of that size – changing your major strategy – you’d think you would consult with [the] quite small batch of scientists and other advisers who work very hard to support the government … explaining things to the public.”

“That was very unusual. I think the government’s done a great job generally with consultation and getting us all to at least understand the rationale for change.”

Others insisted that the only way out for the country is full vaccination.

Now, keep in mind, New Zealand has confirmed fewer than 5K cases and fewer than 30 deaths.