Month: January 2022

Via FLCCC Alliance,

The results are in from the world’s largest study of ivermectin for COVID-19.

Researchers in Brazil found that regular use of ivermectin as a prophylactic agent was associated with significantly reduced COVID-19 infection, hospitalization and mortality rates.

The study was conducted in Itajaí, a port city in the state of Santa Catarina, between July and December 2020. Study authors include FLCCC physicians Dr. Flavio Cadegiani and Dr. Pierre Kory. Lead author Dr. Lucy Kerr was approached by the mayor of Itajaí, after the city began to experience a severe outbreak of COVID.

The entire population of Itajaí was invited to participate in the program, which involved a medical visit to compile baseline, personal, demographic, and medical information. In the absence of contraindications, ivermectin was offered as a preventative treatment, to be taken for two consecutive days every 15 days at a dose of 0.2 mg/kg/day.

Of the 223,128 citizens of Itajaí considered for the study, a total of 159,561 subjects elected to participate: over 70% opted to take ivermectin, and 23% chose not to.

Reduced infection and hospitalization rates

The study found a 44% reduction in COVID-19 infection rate in favor of the group that took ivermectin (3.5% versus 8.2%).

In cases where a participating citizen of Itajaí became ill with COVID-19, they were recommended not to use ivermectin or any other medication in early outpatient treatment. Of those who did become infected, two equal-sized, highly matched groups (one that used ivermectin as a prophylaxis and one that did not) were compared. The regular use of preventative ivermectin led to a 68% reduction in COVID-19 mortality (0.8% versus 2.6%), and a 56% reduction in hospitalization rate (1.6% versus 3.3%).

Study methods

Since vaccines were not available at the time, and few prophylactic alternatives existed in the absence of vaccines, Itajaí initiated a population-wide government program for COVID-19 prophylaxis. This was a prospective observational study that allowed subjects to self-select between treatment vs. non-treatment. The use of ivermectin was optional and based on patients’ preferences, given its benefits as a preventative agent was unproven.

To ensure the safety of the population, a computer program was developed to compile and maintain all relevant demographic and clinical data. All subjects were weighed to be able to accurately calculate the correct dose of ivermectin. In addition, a brief medical evaluation was conducted to record past medical history, comorbidities, use of medications and contraindications to drugs.

The following variables were analyzed and adjusted as confounding factors or used for balancing and matching groups for propensity score matching:

• Age

• Sex

• Previous diseases (myocardial infarction and stroke)

• Pre-existing comorbidities (type 2 diabetes, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hypertension, dyslipidemia, cardiovascular diseases, cancer [any type], and other pulmonary diseases)

• Smoking

Patients who presented signs or the diagnosis of COVID-19 before July 7, 2020, were excluded from the sample. Other exclusion criteria included contraindications to ivermectin and age (subjects below 18 years of age were excluded).

During the study, subjects who were diagnosed with COVID-19 underwent a specific medical visit to assess clinical manifestations and disease severity. All subjects with symptoms were recommended not to use ivermectin, nitazoxanide, hydroxychloroquine, spironolactone, or any other drug claimed to be effective against COVID-19. The city did not provide or support any specific pharmacological outpatient treatment for subjects infected with COVID-19.

Intriguing findings

Interestingly, the group who self-selected to take ivermectin was older and had more comorbidities than the group who opted for no treatment. These results show that prophylactic ivermectin may be a mitigating factor in groups with higher risk of morbidity.

The belief that preventative and early treatment therapies would cause people to relax their caution of remaining socially distanced, leading to more COVID-19-related infections, is not supported here.

The data demonstrate that using preventative ivermectin significantly lowers the infection rate, and that benefits outweigh the speculated increased risk of changes in social behaviors.

Many years too late, it appears The New York Times has suddenly discovered that the United States has been committing war crimes in Syria, coming long after it was clear Washington was pursuing regime change in Damascus. With Assad still in control of most of the country, US efforts have turned to far-reach sanctions of late, which have greatly increased the sufferings of common Syrians. Like with Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq before, the Times was the foremost cheerleader for that war, laundering Pentagon and admin propaganda, and only many years later admitting the truth that it was all based on lies… so now it seems to be going with Syria.

In its latest reporting, the NY Times has “uncovered” that an elite US military unit intentionally targeted and destroyed a large dam which was vital to the daily life and survival of tens of thousands of people near a vital Euphrates River reservoir. When the 2017 bombing of the Tabqa Dam (or al-Thawra Dam as it’s also called) was first reported, a top American general labeled those accusing the US of being behind it as “crazy”. Like much mainstream media reporting on Syria, those who had it right in real time – many from independent and alternative media – were dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” and loons, but now this…

A massive dam in Syria was on a U.S. no-strike list.

Tens of thousands people lived downstream.

When it was bombed, the Pentagon said the US didn’t do it.

A general dismissed even the possibility as “crazy reporting.”

The U.S. did it. https://t.co/AE3JcYZJ8Z pic.twitter.com/Odyb7Lu5c0

— Eric Umansky (@ericuman) January 20, 2022

The fresh NY Times reporting begins, “Near the height of the war against the Islamic State in Syria, a sudden riot of explosions rocked the country’s largest dam, a towering, 18-story structure on the Euphrates River that held back a 25-mile-long reservoir above a valley where hundreds of thousands of people lived.”

The US had quickly dismissed those accusing the US of being behind the attack. And since Russia was among them, it was easy for the Pentagon to bat it down as but the “propaganda” of America’s enemies in the region…

The Islamic State, the Syrian government and Russia blamed the United States, but the dam was on the U.S. military’s “no-strike list” of protected civilian sites and the commander of the U.S. offensive at the time, then-Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, said allegations of U.S. involvement were based on “crazy reporting.”

“The Tabqa Dam is not a coalition target,” he declared emphatically two days after the blasts.

Multiple Syrians had been killed and wounded in the attack, including dam workers and engineers who had rushed to the scene to save it. 

Apparently there was proof that the US did it right way, yet it seems this fact remained buried (or perhaps suppressed) in Western media reporting for years, given that as NYT details, “After the strikes, dam workers stumbled on an ominous piece of good fortune: Five floors deep in the dam’s control tower, an American BLU-109 bunker-buster lay on its side, scorched but intact — a dud. If it had exploded, experts say, the whole dam might have failed.”

As the Times now reveals, it was an elite Pentagon unit behind the attack on vital civilian infrastracture, responsible for other mass atrocities in Syria:

In fact, members of a top secret U.S. Special Operations unit called Task Force 9 had struck the dam using some of the largest conventional bombs in the U.S. arsenal, including at least one BLU-109 bunker-buster bomb designed to destroy thick concrete structures, according to two former senior officials. And they had done it despite a military report warning not to bomb the dam, because the damage could cause a flood that might kill tens of thousands of civilians.

Commentary by James Dale Davidson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

As of 2016, China’s empty apartment units could house New York City 27 times over.

What does this mean to you? There are a lot of carry-on effects from wasting so many resources. As you delve into a thought exercise to get more acquainted with the ruinous consequences of credit bubbles, be grateful that you don’t really have to worry about malicious genies magically tagging you with mortgaged deeds.

That could be scary. Imagine that some cruel genie took a perverse dislike to you. What worse instance of malevolent magic could the genie perform than to present you with deeds to the astonishing inventory of 70 million empty apartments structures accumulating dust throughout China.

You might think it would make you a billionaire, a real estate magnate on par with Donald Trump. But think again.

This may be a good moment to retell an uncharacteristically charming story Trump told on himself, dating to the savings and loan crisis (S&L crisis) of the late 1980s and early 1990s. That was a time when 1,043 out of the 3,234 savings and loan associations in the United States failed as they tried to digest billions in over-mortgaged real estate properties.

At that time, Trump found himself walking the streets of the Upper East Side of Manhattan one evening with his girlfriend of the moment. As they walked, they came upon a bum in a tattered peacoat lying on a grate. Trump remarked to his companion, “That guy has $1 billion more than I do.” She responded, “But he doesn’t look like he has a penny.” Trump replied, “He doesn’t.”

When he said that, Trump’s fortune was hostage to the banks to which he owed about a billion dollars more than his properties would have realized in a fire sale. I describe this “as an uncharacteristically charming story” because Trump is hardly famous for making jokes at his own expense. Nonetheless, he confirmed to me in a conversation that the above account I share with you is valid. It shows Trump humorously acknowledging the implications of double-entry bookkeeping at his best.

With that in mind, how could you afford to pay the construction mortgages on 70 million apartment units with no residents deeded to you by the evil genie? A challenging question. You would have to do some fast talking with the Chinese banks of the sort Trump managed with New York banks decades ago during the S&L crisis.

Your only hope of avoiding being sucked into a black hole of debt defaults would be to hire some creative scoundrels disguised as accountants to help you persuade the banks to lend you additional billions (or more probably, trillions) to postpone the day of reckoning. Note that the extent to which you could succeed would only worsen the ultimate malinvestment problem. Your assets would not be enhanced in any way by being encumbered with additional debt. They would just become more costly.

Could you keep kiting the debt?

A $36.4 Trillion Question?

That is at least a $36.4 trillion question. Maybe a $45.9 trillion, or possibly even a $116.6 trillion question. The correct answer depends on China’s actual debt level. Unlike Trump’s challenge of three decades ago when the systemic debt issue was denominated in billions of dollars, the Chinese bad debt problem is 1,000 times worse.

Forbes reports the estimate of Professor Victor Shih of the University of California San Diego. Shih believes that Chinese official debt figures have proven woefully inadequate.

A $45.9 Trillion Question?

In 2017, Shih put total Chinese debt at 328 percent of GDP (reported at $14 trillion), therefore $45.9 trillion. According to Shih, “total interest payments from June 2016 to June 2017 exceeded the incremental increase in nominal GDP by roughly 8 trillion RMB.”

If so, that hints that the end is near. However, as rough as that sounds, the actual situation may be even worse.

Or a $116.6 Trillion Question?

If you are a connoisseur of forbidden truths, as I am, you don’t take official figures at face value. You keep digging for tells that reveal the real story. I am convinced that Chinese government statistics are as bogus as those in the United States. And more so.

Professor Christopher Balding of HSBC Business School, Peking University, an authority with good sources in the People’s Bank of China’s (PBOC) Financial Stability Board, recently did some subversive arithmetic combining “on balance sheet assets” with “off-balance sheet assets.” Remember, while debts are liabilities to the borrowers, they are assets to the lenders.

He concludes that total debt in China is a breathtaking 833 percent of GDP. That means a debt of roughly $116.6 trillion.

Wow. Just wow!

The actual debt level could be three and a half times higher than suggested by official figures. The National Development and Reform Commission says Chinese debt amounts to 260 percent of GDP ($36.4 trillion). The International Monetary Fund (IMF) accepts a lower official estimate of 230 percent. But suppose Balding’s report of 833 percent is correct. In that case, this is a matter of capital importance to the world economy and your investments.

Annual Interest Payments of 29 Percent of GDP?

Remember, interest rates in China are not as minuscule as those in the United States or negative as those in Europe and Japan. Assume the average interest rate paid equals the short-term interbank deposit rate of 3.5 percent. Balding observes, “this would imply financial services costs to the economy of 29% nominal GDP.” A large nut to crack. Even Chinese growth rates would not come close to covering annual carrying costs of 29 percent.

Is it possible that Balding is right?

Yes. I see several hints that he is.

Are Official Financial Figures Wildly Wrong?

For one thing, almost every Chinese bankruptcy case brings evidence of undisclosed liabilities of individual companies. Balding observes, “it is common to find enormous amounts of undisclosed debts or (Enron-like) asset management products in Chinese bankruptcies or defaults.”

This underscores the suspicion that the actual level of debt has been low-balled. In Balding’s words, it also means that “official on balance sheet financial figures are wildly wrong with disastrous consequences.” He warns, “This implies that we need to rethink the entire story of Chinese development and finance since probably about 2000.”

Balding continues: “Excessive indebtedness is distributed in virtually every sector of the economy. Before, if there was a shock to the corporate sector, householders and the government could step in and help. However, virtually no sector of the Chinese economy does not have an enormous indebtedness. Distributing it throughout simply lowers the capacity to handle a shock.”

‘No Good Deed Goes Unpunished’

Speaking of “shocks,” you should not be shocked to learn that Balding was fired from his post at Peking University after discussing his conclusion—based on PBOC data—that total debt in China has surged to 833 percent of nominal GDP.

In a corrupt world, where people have trillions of reasons to lie about the economy (and some have no doubt lost their lives for failing to heed them), the firing of Professor Balding is as close as you can expect to come to official confirmation that his numbers are correct.

A way of restating Balding’s revelations is that no one knows who owes what to whom or how much can be settled before the whole Chinese house of cards collapses. Estimates of bad debt in the Chinese banking system run as high as 50 percent of GDP—or about $7 trillion. Far more than enough to make the banking system insolvent.

A collapse of China’s asset bubble lies ahead. I doubt any Chinese tycoons are strolling the streets of Shanghai with their girlfriends, making jokes about street people being a trillion yuan richer than they are. That underscores a problem when the government of a country enlarges debt to magnitudes beyond the scale of assets held by even the wealthiest persons. That makes it all the more unlikely that mortgaged assets can be redeemed from hock while encumbered by anything like their current level of debt.

Premier NFT marketplace OpenSea may have successfully leveraged the NFT boom for a monster $13 billion valuation, but it’s system is still riddled with security flaws, one of which was just successfully exploited by hackers, resulting in the theft of $1M in digital assets.

Elliptic reports that a bug on OpenSea’s marketplace has played a role in at least three attacks. Hackers managed to use the bug to purchase at least 8 NFTs for much less than what was considered their “fair market value”. All three incidents had occurred within a day of the report.

One of the attackers paid just $133K for seven NFTs by exploiting the bug – only to turn around and sell them immediately for $934K.

In another example, an NFT belonging to the Bored Ape Yacht Club series was bought for just 0.77 ETH (just $1,800 as of Monday morning). Many other members of the family have sold for around $200K.

The sale of that BAYC member caught the attention of other niche sources of crypto-related news and gossip.

⚠️⚠️⚠️ WARNING ⚠️⚠️⚠️

MAJOR OPEN SEA BUG ALLOWING HACKERS TO STEAL YOUR #NFTS 🚨

-Please check your listings were taken down appropriately or you can be scammed instantly but the hackers.

Check my RT and also listen up 👇 pic.twitter.com/qBtIgmw6cL

— Sir Bitlord (@crypto_bitlord7) January 24, 2022

🚨BREAKING: A bug on @opensea is causing Apes to be listed and sold at previous listing prices pic.twitter.com/0zxFkXLfKx

— m0rgan.ethᵍᵐ 💎🙆🏼‍♀️ (@Helloimmorgan) January 24, 2022

As of 1000ET on Monday, the attacks appear to be ongoing.

An #OpenSea bug has caused a #BAYC #NFT to sell for less than 1% of its true value ($2,000) on #Rarible!

Find out more about how a ‘life-hack’ to avoid paying gas-fees is putting millions of dollars at risk. #NFTs #LooksRare $ETH

👉https://t.co/DYvYF4BpJK

— Novum Insights (@NovumInsights) January 24, 2022

This means OpenSea users might want to think twice before listing one of their precious blockchain gifs for sale, lest it be snatched up by a hacker for far less than you paid for it.

One Twitter user created a step by step breakdown of how the hacks unfolded:

🚨 Finished on-chain analysis of how a scammer stole Bored Ape #NFTs on @opensea and made $880k usd in 90 minutes: Below are the facts & my conclusion

🚨 RT to spread awareness

Read on …

— OKHotshot.eth (@NFTherder) January 24, 2022

Before we start – know that this thread has limited space so I’m only covering main issues. It’s intended for education purposes only and all information shared is publicly available …

— OKHotshot.eth (@NFTherder) January 24, 2022

1) Today a scammer was able to buy multiple high valued #NFTs because he found the previous listings of those nfts through a loophole

How was it done and how can you prevent this from happening to your nfts? 👇👇

— OKHotshot.eth (@NFTherder) January 24, 2022

2) A scammer known as ‘jpegdegenlove’ used a money mixer to send 10Ξ to a newly created wallet before executing this attack

He then bought a CoolCat for 3E & Bored Ape for 0.77E, with current floors of 12Ξ and 86Ξ❗️

What happened next? pic.twitter.com/LiddepondM

— OKHotshot.eth (@NFTherder) January 24, 2022

3) Within 20mins the scammer sold the CoolCat for 11Ξ, and used the profits to buy another #BAYC for 6.66Ξ

Then repeats the pattern of buying and selling various
high valued #NFTs for about 90 minutes pic.twitter.com/pEFZNuJCsg

— OKHotshot.eth (@NFTherder) January 24, 2022

4) So how is this possible? Because of improper delisting. Example: If you list your NFT for 3Ξ but then cancel that listing you have to pay gas

Some ppl avoid paying that gas by sending their NFT
back & forth between 2 wallets removing the listing
off OS’s site … pic.twitter.com/nDWHXeRE95

— OKHotshot.eth (@NFTherder) January 24, 2022

5) This is an issue for ANY situation where you list your NFT for sale but then transfer it back & forth between wallets WHILE that sale is still active

Because once the NFT is send back in the original wallet the original listing is active again pic.twitter.com/izlCImCWcu

— OKHotshot.eth (@NFTherder) January 24, 2022

6) You can prevent this issue by correctly delisting your #NFTs before transferring to other wallets

If you’re trying to avoid paying gas for delisting you cannot securely send it back to the original wallet in the future

— OKHotshot.eth (@NFTherder) January 24, 2022

7) Speculation: most likely the scammer used the @opensea API to pull the old listings onto his own site where my guess would be using their own front-end or dApp to actually buy them

However …

— OKHotshot.eth (@NFTherder) January 24, 2022

8) … the scammer definitely knew what they were doing, they used a mixer to anonymize the original funding, had a list of NFTs vulnerable for this to buy, and executed the attack within 90 minutes …

— OKHotshot.eth (@NFTherder) January 24, 2022

9) This is not necessary a hack or an exploit. A better description would be a loophole abused by a bad actor

Note that this is not limited to OS, it could happen on any marketplace

— OKHotshot.eth (@NFTherder) January 24, 2022

To prevent this from happening use the following tips:

– Do not transfer NFTs that have active listings
– Pay gas to correctly delist
– Use https://t.co/a7eWHJi1O1 or https://t.co/Tm7MF9ej3Y to revoke

This is an ongoing loophole. Please share the info!

— OKHotshot.eth (@NFTherder) January 24, 2022

And Novum Insights has produced an explanation describing how the bug works.

Here’s how the bug works:

When users delist an NFT for sale, they are supposed to pay a ‘gas-fee’ to return the token to the owner’s wallet. Recently, users discovered that by transferring their NFT to another ETH address, the NFT would seemingly be delisted without paying gas. However, this only removes the NFT listing from the platform’s front-end (the user-interface of the marketplace).

Opportunists were quick to discover that if the NFT in question was ever sent back to the original ETH wallet, it would still be purchasable on Rarible as the delisting gas-fee was never paid on OpenSea. More importantly, the bug causes OpenSea’s contract to scrape the NFT’s original listing price as the current listing price – this is what caused the BAYC NFT mentioned above to be purchased for less than $2,000.

On Saturday (22 January), OpenSea added a new feature that asks users to confirm whether they are sure they want to proceed when a listing is made far below the floor price of a collection. While this does not directly address the bug, it does lower the likelihood of NFTs being sold by mistake.

Unfortunately, even this didn’t fix the problem. The world is still waiting to hear from OpenSea about the issue.

Submitted by NRA-ILA.,

Last weekend, when four hostages were taken at Congregation Beth Israel Synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, countless people remained transfixed on their televisions and computers, awaiting the outcome. Fortunately, the hostages were able to free themselves. After they had managed to escape, law enforcement moved in, and the attacker, who was armed with at least one handgun, was shot and killed by the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team.

As the investigation into this attack on a Jewish house of worship has unfolded, we have learned that the perpetrator was a British national with a criminal history, and his brother reported that he had “mental health issues.” We also know that he entered this country about two weeks ago, apparently without any close scrutiny, and that has raised questions from U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

While it may take some time to figure out all of the details involved in what the FBI eventually identified as a terrorist attack “in which the Jewish community was targeted,” we do know the man responsible had at least one gun, but not how he acquired it.

Usually, a high-profile crime involving a firearm would lead to endless proclamations from the Biden Administration intended to exploit the event to promote its anti-gun agenda. But in an early, brief appearance before the media to comment on the events in Texas, Biden admitted what NRA and Second Amendment supporters have always known.

Gun control laws do not stop criminals.

When asked a question that seemed to be directed at addressing if the synagogue attack might positively impact Biden’s push for more gun control (the White House transcript is unclear as to what the exact question was), the president offered his usual rambling, confusing response.

“Well, no—well, it does but it also doesn’t,” Biden said.

If that wasn’t unclear enough, he went on to state, “The guns are—we should be—the idea of background checks are critical. But you can’t stop something like this if someone is on the street buying something from somebody else on the street. Except that there’s too—there’s so many guns that have been sold of late; it’s just ridiculous.”

Trying to decipher Biden’s inarticulate word-salad responses is always difficult. He seems to be saying that nothing would have stopped this man from illegally acquiring a firearm and taking hostages, but he still wants to promote attacks on the Second Amendment in response to the crime.

Biden says he wants to focus his efforts “on gun purchases, gun sales, ghost guns, and a whole range of things that I’m trying to do.” But he just admitted that none of those issues would have stopped what happened in Texas. The mention of “ghost guns” seems particularly irrelevant, but it is clearly just one of his go-to topics whenever he talks about restrictions on our right to keep and bear arms.

We would not be surprised if Biden has been regularly coached to offer up “ghost guns” whenever he is discussing his anti-gun agenda, regardless of whether it is even remotely connected.

But his comment about the number of guns sold in recent years is particularly telling. In 2020, we saw a record number of firearms sold in America, and 2021 was not far behind that mark. These numbers are based on National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) data, so his concern over “so many guns that have been sold of late” should be negated by the fact that they went through the “background checks” he calls “critical.”

We can only surmise that this exposes his true goal, which is not going after the criminal misuse of firearms, but suppressing law-abiding citizens from purchasing firearms. It even appears he tried to catch himself from being too open about his desire to see fewer lawfully-owned firearms in America, as he seemed to stop himself from saying there are “too many guns” that have been sold to law-abiding citizens, and clumsily pivoted to the less-judgemental phrasing of “so many guns.”

Whether or not Biden and the anti-gun extremists that support his attacks on the Second Amendment will try to exploit the Texas synagogue attack to promote their radical agenda remains to be seen. But Biden was recently dealt another blow to his hope of ramming anti-gun legislation through Congress when the Senate rejected efforts, supported by Biden, to rewrite Senate rules and dramatically change how the filibuster would operate.

While the proposed change was targeted at efforts to federalize certain voting regulations, and remove state control, had it been successful, we are certain one of the next steps from Biden and his supporters would be to use the same strategy to make it easier for anti-gun legislation to be forced through the Senate. In that sense, Biden’s filibuster setback was likely a good thing for those who support the Second Amendment, even if our right to keep and bear arms was not part of the discussion…this time.

So, Biden’s ultimate goal of diminishing the rights of law-abiding gun owners, both current and future, is clearly exposed. Fortunately, it also remains clearly stalled.

Longtime Tesla partner Panasonic looks once again to be slated to produce new lithium-ion batteries for the EV automaker.

The company is going to be entering into “mass production” by 2023 in order to try and keep up with battery makers from China and South Korea. The new Panasonic batteries are expected to boost the range of EVs by 20% by 2023, according to a new report from Nikkei. 

In Tesla’s Model S, range is expected to rise to ~750km from ~650km.

Panasonic had started developing its 4680 battery cells after a request from Tesla, the report says. Tesla CEO Elon Musk had previously said it wanted to make its own batteries to supplement supply and vertically integrate. Battery cost is currently about 30% of the total cost of all EVs, Nikkei reported. 

The new battery is expected to be “twice as big as older versions”, but will offer a “fivefold increase in capacity”. The cost of the new batteries is expected to be 10% to 20% less than current batteries. 

Meanwhile, Tesla (and Panasonic) may still find itself playing “catch up”, as Mercedes “plans to start mass production of a new model this year that can travel 1,000 km on a single charge”. Those batteries are being manufactured by China’s CATL. 

Panasonic will be expanding its Wakayama factory to a capacity that’s expected to keep up with 150,000 EVs per year. 

Panasonic is expected to invest $700 million into the project and its production facilities in Japan. 

Panasonic said in a statement to Reuters: “We are studying various options for mass production, including a test production line we are establishing this business year. We don’t, however, have anything to announce at this time.”

Authored by Allen Zhong via The Epoch Times,

California Democrat lawmakers introduced a bill that would allow children to be administered with COVID-19 vaccines without parental consent.

Senate Bill 866, also known as the Teens Choose Vaccines Act, has been introduced by state Senators Scott Wiener and Richard Pan, who intended to add a new section to the California Family Code.

“A minor 12 years of age or older may consent to a vaccine that is approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration and meets the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (ACIP) without the consent of the parent or guardian of the minor,” read the proposal.

The bill doesn’t mention COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, but refers to human papillomavirus (HPV) and hepatitis B vaccines instead.

However, Wiener said COVID-19 vaccination for children is an apparent goal of the bill.

“With the persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread availability of highly effective and safe vaccines to treat serious COVID-19 illness, it’s more important than ever that young adults be able to access vaccines,” he said in a statement.

Current California law requires parental consent for children ages 12 to 17 to be vaccinated unless the vaccine specifically targets a sexually transmitted disease.

Besides Wiener and Pan, the bill has eight coauthors, including seven assembly members and one senator.

It’s unclear how widely the bill was received in the state legislature, controlled by the Democratic Party in both the upper and lower house in The Golden State.

California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon refused to comment on the bill, saying the bill hasn’t yet reached the Assembly floor.

The Epoch Times reached out to California Senate Majority Leader Robert Hertzberg for comment.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky speaks during a hearing in Washington on Nov. 4, 2021. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends everyone ages 5 years and older get a COVID-19 vaccine, saying vaccines are safe for children and teens.

The agency also recommended children 12 years and older get a Pfizer-BioNTech booster.

However, some prominent epidemiologists have reservations about vaccinating children.

Dr. Peter McCullough, a leading cardiologist and epidemiologist, said that healthy children should not be given the COVID-19 vaccine because the percentage of those children that die from the virus is minuscule, but the adverse effects from the vaccines in that age group are of great concern.

Dr. Robert Malone, a virologist and immunologist who has contributed significantly to the technology of mRNA vaccines, shares the same viewpoint.

“There’s a good chance that if your child takes the vaccine, they won’t be damaged, they won’t show clinical symptoms—[but] they may have subclinical damage,” Malone told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program in an interview. “But the question is, do you want to take that chance with your child? Because if you draw the short straw and your child was damaged, most of these things, if not all of them, are irreversible. There is no way to fix it.”

We have some good news for the thousands of candidates who failed the Level 1 CFA exam last year, when the notoriously difficult test saw a record-low pass rate of just 25%: turns out, the credential doesn’t really have any bearing on an individual’s competence as an investor.

On Monday, Bloomberg reported on a new study from researchers with two British business schools which purported to show that, contrary to popular belief, the CFA credential – once seen as a reliable path toward advancement on Wall Street – is actually correlated with worse performance. The researchers arrived at this conclusion after examining the careers of more than 6,000 fund managers.

Researchers from Bayes and Cork University Business School examined 6,291 US equity mutual fund managers’ careers, tracking their performance across various funds and companies as well as examining factors such as gender, qualifications and whether the manager was invested in the fund. Previous similar studies have looked mostly at managers’ performance while working for particular funds.

The research found that experience in the market was more closely correlated with investing success; on the whole, managers who had a CFA actually underperformed their non-charterholder peers. Although, as the researchers acknowledged, correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation.

“Some of the more experienced guys probably don’t have the CFA designation because they’re older,” Andrew Clare, a professor at Bayes Business School, City University of London, said in an interview. “So you could imagine that CFA designation is kind of a proxy for, not inexperienced, but less experienced managers.”

The research offered little to recommend the CFA, although the study ultimately found more persistent outperformance among managers who came from universities with more stringent entry requirements, as well as among those who studied more technical fields like physics and math.

In a sign of the CFA Institute’s injured pride, a spokesman for the institute insisted that other research arrived at the opposite conclusion.

“The CFA Program represents a demonstrated and proven pathway to a successful career in investment management,” a spokesperson for the institute that oversees the qualification said. “Other pieces of academic research have arrived at the opposite conclusion to this study.”

It’s been said that the average student studies for 300 hours before taking each of the three CFA exams, often taking about 4 years to complete the process. And if pass rates continue to plunge, more people might start to question whether the whole ordeal is truly worthwhile.

Especially when traders who YOLO’d Gamestop calls and sh*tcoin crypto plays still outperformed many of the market’s most esteemed investors last year.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Authorities in Western Australia say their draconian new vaccine passport scheme, which bars the unvaccinated from most public places, is likely to be in place for “years.”

Premier Mark McGowan announced the new measures, which will go into effect from the end of the month, as “the broadest proof of vaccination requirements in the nation.”

The vaccine passport mandate will now cover “a wider range of venues.”

“From Monday, January 31, 2022, the vaccine passport mandates will cover cafes, restaurants, dine-in fast food joints, pubs, bars, taverns, clubs, nightclubs, and “all hospitality venues,” as well as private and public hospitals and aged-care facilities,” writes Ken Macon.

Entertainment venues such as “play centers, gaming and gambling, theaters, concert halls, museums, cinemas, and live music venues,” will also be off limits for the unjabbbed.

“Life will become very difficult for the unvaccinated…no pubs, no bottle-shops, no gym, no yoga classes, no gigs, no dance floors, no hospital or aged care visits,” said McGowan, adding that the unvaccinated must be “protected from themselves.”

He added that the rules, which will soon only count people who have had three doses as “fully vaccinated,” will ensure the public is “confident in these public settings, and that they are only mixing with other vaccinated people.”

The restrictions “will not be removed anytime soon” and could be in place “for years.”

Australia has become notorious for becoming the developed world leader in inflicting the most draconian COVID control measures on its population.

As we highlighted last month, Australia’s chief pharmacist Trent Twomey says the public “just need to accept” they will have to take regular vaccine booster shots every six months and continue wearing masks for “many years” to come.

Australia is also building COVID quarantine camps for “ongoing operations,” with one facility at Wellcamp Airport outside Toowoomba not even set to be completed until March.

Citing new strains of COVID and people “who have not had access to vaccination,” Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles told the media outlet, “We anticipate there to be a continuing need for quarantine facilities.”

*  *  *

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Heading into today’s rollercoaster session, we were – perhaps naively – confident that Friday’s massive $3.1 trillion opex would also mark the bottom for stocks (an option expiration which we correctly said would be surrounded by massive volatility, as explained last Tuesday).

$3.1 TN opex tomorrow. Massive gamma expiration (with dealers deep negative). Stocks bottom

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 20, 2022

And – in a roundabout way – it did, because after plunging more than 4%, stocks staged a furious rally the likes of which have been seen only on a handful of occasions, before closing green. Putting today’s historic reversal in context, this was only the sixth time since 1988 that the Nasdaq reversed a 4%+ intraday drop to close higher. The other days were 10/28/97, 10/26/00, 7/15/02, 10/10/08, and 11/13/08. As for the S&P, this was the biggest intraday comeback since November 2008 when the US was in the middle of the biggest financial crisis in recent history.

To be fair, while we did expect the market to bottom, we did not anticipate an early plunge as furious as the one that took place today (before it was replaced with an even more furious bounce). We did however expect the market to recover from the post op-ex “hangover”, because as SpotGamma notes, the lows in the market during the December 2018 and March 2020 crashes both took place the day after options expirations.

And while this time it was a January opex, what was remarkable about this particular event, is that we had a record amount of puts selling heading into Friday’s event, some of which expired, some of which did not.

We bring this up because as SpotGamma explains in its post-mortem, it was the previously discussed massive negative gamma expiration that was responsible for today’s unprecedented volatility, but also it was a burst in option-linked activity that emerged around noon – just after the European close – that catalyzed the historic market reversal.

As shown in the chart below, which in addition to the S&P in black also shows put (blue) and call (orange) deltas, a massive put seller suddenly appeared (which via the negative gamma feedback loop also means dealers suddenly reverse from selling S&P futures to buying) just around noon, that was responsible for the slowdown in dealer selling and subsequent reversal, as a huge short squeeze kicked in and sent stocks sharply higher for the rest of the day.

Then from 12pm until roughly 3pm, the deltas in put options became increasingly positive dragging the market with them, as dealers scrambled to cover their long put hedges. At that point the reflexive pathway of put selling that also sent the VIX sharply lower (the VIX collapsed from 39 at the highs to 29 at the lows a few hours later driven in big part by this acceleration in put selling during the afternoon) had activated and prompted countless vol-targeting funds to join the buying frenzy.

Who was the put seller? Was it some contrarian dealer who had finally had enough of the waterfall selling, or was it some major hedge fund with little to lose, or perhaps it was the infamous plunge protection team? We don’t know, but we do know the mechanism by which the reversal happened, and courtesy of SpotGamma you too can keep track of such major market inflation points as they explain in the video below.