Authored by Marina Zheng via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Ivermectin has been hailed as a “wonder drug” and, according to the UNESCO World Science Report, a critical component of “one of the most triumphant public health campaigns ever waged in the developing world.”

However, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and affiliated health authorities have vociferously recommended against ivermectin as a potential treatment for the virus.

Though the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved ivermectin for human use in treating conditions caused by parasites, it has also insisted that ivermectin “has not been shown to be safe or effective” when it comes to treating COVID-19.

In a social media message that has gone viral, the FDA labeled it as a drug for horses and not fit for human consumption: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it. https://t.co/TWb75xYEY4

— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) August 21, 2021

The post made headlines and was one of the FDA’s most successful social media campaigns. Yet, research findings seem to contradict the public health organization’s recommendations.

A growing body of research shows that ivermectin is an essential treatment for COVID-19. Many doctors have praised the drug for its broad yet effective antiparasitic, antiviral, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, and autophagic properties.

Ivermectin: Antiparasitic Beginnings

Ivermectin made its name through its significant benefits in treating parasitic infections.

In 1973, Satoshi Omura and William C. Campbell, working with the Kitasato Institute in Tokyo, found an unusual type of Streptomyces bacteria in Japanese soil near a golf course.

In laboratory studies, Omura and Campbell discovered that this Streptomyces bacteria could cure mice infected with the roundworm Heligmosomoides polygyrus. Campbell isolated the bacteria’s active compounds, naming them avermectins, and the bacteria was thus called S. avermitilis.

Despite decades of searching worldwide, researchers have yet to find another microorganism that can produce avermectin.

It was changing one of the bonds of avermectin through a chemical process that produced ivermectin, which was proven successful in treating onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis, both of which are debilitating diseases common in the developing world.

Though its broad antiparasitic functions are not well understood, it is known that ivermectin penetrates parasites’ nervous systems, turning off their neurons’ actions, possibly deactivating and killing them.

As part of a donation campaign launched in 1988 by Merck & Co., Inc., the manufacturer of ivermectin, the drug was used in Africa to treat river blindness. Also called onchocerciasis, river blindness is a tropical disease caused by Onchocerca volvulus worms. It is the second-most common cause worldwide of infectious blindness.

The Onchocerca worms mature in the skin of an infected individual (“the host”). After mating, female worms can release into the host’s skin up to 1,000 microfilariae a day; the female worms live for 10 to 14 years. The presence of these worms can lead to scarring in the tissues and, when microfilariae invade the eye, can cause visual impairment or complete loss of vision.

The World Health Organization estimates that 18 million people are infected globally, and 270,000 have been blinded by onchocerciasis.

When Merck distributed ivermectin in areas hardest hit by the disease, treatment benefited the residents’ overall health and led to economic recovery. Ivermectin replaced previous drugs that had devastating side effects.

“Ivermectin proved to be virtually purpose-built to combat Onchocerciasis,” Omura wrote in a study he co-authored in 2011.

Ivermectin has also proven effective against lymphatic filariasis, known as elephantiasis. Parasitic worms transmitted through the bite of an infected mosquito can grow and develop in lymphatic vessels, which regulate the body’s water balance. When certain vessels are blocked, the areas—typically the legs and genitals—can swell, with the legs enlarging to elephant-like stumps.

Worldwide, more than 120 million people are infected, 40 million of whom are seriously incapacitated and disfigured.

The World Health Organization listed ivermectin as an essential drug and has advised many countries to run annual campaigns to rid people of these parasites. Such recommendations are a solid testament to ivermectin’s safety.

For their work, including the discovery of avermectin, in 2015, Omura and Campbell were among three recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

It is an indispensable drug for the underdeveloped world, with about 3.7 billion doses administered as part of global campaigns during the past 30 years. To this day, ivermectin remains a staple drug of tropical areas and an essential drug in treating onchocerciasis, lymphatic filariasis, strongyloidiasis, and scabies.

Ivermectin and COVID-19

Analyses of studies on ivermectin have found it effective as a prevention, a treatment for acute COVID-19, and in advanced stages of infection by the virus.

1. Ivermectin as a Prophylaxis

Prophylaxis intervenes in the first phases of COVID-19 infection, which is mainly asymptomatic, when the virus replicates to increase its viral load—symptom onset occurs after the viral load peaks.

Ivermectin can be effective in the early stages of infection. Outside the cells, ivermectin can attach to parts of the virus, immobilizing it and preventing it from entering and infecting human cells.

Ivermectin can also enter the cell to prevent the virus from replicating. SARS-CoV-2 needs cell replication machinery to make more of the virus; ivermectin attaches and blocks a protein critical to this process, preventing viral production.

Additionally, ivermectin can be absorbed from the skin and stored in fat cells for a long time.

“Because it’s lipid soluble, it is stored and slowly released, [so] once you’ve taken a prophylactic dose, and I think it’s like the cumulative dose of about 400mg, that your risk of getting COVID is close to zero and you can actually stop it for a while,” said Dr. Paul Marik, a widely published critical care specialist with 500 peer-reviewed papers to his name, in an interview with The Epoch Times.

Marik co-founded the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), a group of physicians formed in the early days of the pandemic and dedicated to treating COVID-19. According to interviews, many of the group’s doctors have successfully treated COVID-19 with ivermectin. The organization’s other co-founder, Dr. Pierre Kory, has written a book about ivermectin’s use and controversy during the pandemic.

Dr. Sabine Hazan, a gastroenterologist with 22 years of experience in clinical research, told The Epoch Times that she would advise ivermectin use for only a short time in critical patients rather than recommending the use of it as a prophylaxis.

Continuous use of ivermectin—as with all drugs—can make the body dependent on the drug rather than working to fix itself.

2. Ivermectin for Early and Acute COVID

Many peer-reviewed studies have found that ivermectin, when used by itself or in conjunction with other therapies in symptomatic patients, reduces ventilation time, time for recovery, and the risk of progressing to severe disease. (pdf 1, pdf 2, pdf 3)

This is likely due to ivermectin’s anti-inflammatory role in multiple pathways, achieved by clearing out the viral particles by immobilizing them, reducing inflammation, and improving mitochondrial action.

Suppose the early viral replication is not controlled and cleared out soon enough by the body’s immune system. In that case, the infection can become severe or even hyperinflammatory, possibly leading to systemic organ failures.

Ivermectin can also directly interact with immune pathways, suppressing inflammation and reducing the chances of developing a cytokine storm. A cytokine storm occurs when the immune system is hyperactive and hyperinflammatory. Though ivermectin can help to clear out the virus and its particles, the inflammatory state of the tissues and the organs can often cause more damage than the virus itself.

Ivermectin also likely improves gut health, which plays an essential role in immunity by preventing bacteria and viruses from infecting people via the gut.

In a published study, Hazan hypothesized that ivermectin helps COVID-19 patients by increasing the levels of Bifidobacteria—a beneficial bacteria—in the gut.

As the CEO and founder of her own genetic sequencing research laboratory, ProgenaBiome, Hazan noticed that the Bifidobacteria levels in her stools would increase after she took ivermectin. Critical COVID patients would have “zero Bifidobacteria,” which can often be a sign of poor health.  

In her peer-reviewed study on hypoxic patients, she observed that COVID patients with low oxygen levels from the cytokine storms in their lungs would improve within hours of administering ivermectin.

“When people die of COVID, they die from the cytokines—they couldn’t breathe anymore. It’s almost like an anaphylactic reaction. So when you give them ivermectin at the moment they’re about to crash, you’re boosting the Bifidobacteria [and increasing their oxygen],” Hazan said.

She explained that ivermectin is a fermented product of Streptomyces bacteria. Streptomyces are within the same group Bifidobacteria are from, which may explain why ivermectin temporarily boosts Bifidobacteria.

Ivermectin also helps with mitochondrial function. During severe COVID-19, patients often experience pulmonary dysfunctions due to lung inflammation, reducing oxygen flow. This can cause stress to the mitochondria, leading to fatigue, and, when severe, may cause cell and tissue death. Ivermectin has been shown to increase energy production, indicating that it is beneficial to the mitochondria.

Furthermore, ivermectin can bind to the spike protein—a distinctive structural feature of the COVID virus which has a crucial role in its pathogenesis. In systemic disease, the spike protein can enter the bloodstream and bind to red blood cells to form blood clots. Ivermectin can prevent blood clots from forming in the body.

3. Ivermectin for Long COVID and Post-Vaccine Symptoms

The number of studies supporting ivermectin to treat long COVID and post-COVID-19 vaccine symptoms is limited. However, doctors treating these conditions have observed successful results with ivermectin.

An Argentinian study published in March 2021 is the only peer-reviewed study evaluating ivermectin for long COVID.

Researchers found that in patients reporting long COVID symptoms—including coughing, brain fog, headaches, and fatigue—ivermectin alleviated their symptoms.

Mechanistically, ivermectin can improve autophagy. This process is usually switched off during COVID-19 infections. By switching autophagy back on, ivermectin can help cells clear remnant viral proteins out, returning stability to the cell.

Like acute and severe COVID-19, chronic spike protein triggers inflammation, and ivermectin can reduce such responses by suppressing inflammatory pathways and lessening the damage to tissues and blood vessels.

The Changing Public Health Messaging on Ivermectin

The NIH’s stance on ivermectin has changed several times.

Early in the pandemic, there was little information on ivermectin as a potential treatment for the virus.

The first study that mentioned ivermectin as a potential COVID-19 treatment came from Australia in April 2020. Researchers administered ivermectin to SARS-CoV-2-infected monkey kidney cells in the laboratory and found the drug beneficial in very high doses. However, the researchers concluded that further study was needed. Many health agencies, including the NIH, the CDC, and other global health regulators concluded that ivermectin could kill the virus only at toxic levels.

Even now, NIH’s statement on ivermectin for COVID-19 reads: “Ivermectin has been shown to inhibit replication of SARS-CoV-2 in cell cultures. However, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies suggest that achieving the plasma concentrations necessary for the antiviral efficacy detected in vitro would require administration of doses up to 100-fold higher than those approved for use in humans.”

In October 2020, the first clinical study showing the benefits of ivermectin was published by the journal CHEST. The study found ivermectin to reduce mortality rates in COVID-19 patients and garnered immediate attention.

The study’s lead author, Dr. Jean-Jacques Rajter, is a critical care doctor specializing in pulmonary medicine.

Rajter gave a testimony (pdf) of his findings to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs in December 2020.

The day after he saw the Australian study, one of his COVID patients dramatically deteriorated from breathing normally at room oxygen levels to requiring intubation. The patient’s son pleaded with Rajter to save his mother using whatever options available. Rajter recognized that  hydroxychloroquine would be ineffective in the advanced stages of COVID. After much deliberation, he tried ivermectin.

“The patient deteriorated as expected for about 12 more hours but stabilized by 24 hours and improved by 48 hours. After this, two more patients had similar issues and were treated with the ivermectin-based protocol. Based on experience, these patients should have done poorly, yet they all survived,” the testimony read.

More clinical studies were published, showing the benefits of ivermectin as a prophylactic treatment. (pdf 1, pdf 2).

The findings encouraged the use of ivermectin among doctors desperate to find a cure.

Meanwhile, by October 2020, research into COVID-19 vaccines and the use of remdesivir to treat the virus was already in full swing.

According to the FDA, specific criteria should be met for the EUA (Emergency Use Authorization) to be granted for vaccines and medications, including that there are “no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.”

Some doctors say that if ivermectin’s use for COVID had been approved, it would have made the EUAs for vaccines and remdesivir null and void.

Following the Australian study, the FDA published a statement, “FAQ: COVID-19 and Ivermectin Intended for Animals,” highlighting the use of ivermectin in animals and advising against the use of ivermectin for COVID-19.

The NIH also discouraged the use of ivermectin, albeit briefly. On Jan. 14, 2021, the NIH changed its statement, writing that there was no evidence to recommend or disapprove the use of ivermectin. However, in April 2022, the statement changed to strongly disapproving of using ivermectin.

“We [Marik, Kory, and Dr. Andrew Hill, a virologist and consultant to the WHO] had a conference with NIH in January of 2021. We presented our data, and Andrew Hill presented the data he had done…there were a number of studies at that point, which were very positive,” said Marik.

Health Authority Overreach

Despite the NIH’s neutral statement on ivermectin for most of 2021, the FDA actively campaigned against using ivermectin in COVID-19 patients. On Aug. 26,  2021, the CDC sent an emergency warning against using ivermectin; a few weeks later, the American Medical Association and affiliated associations called for an end to ivermectin use.

Many doctors were thus discouraged from using ivermectin, and pharmacies refused to prescribe it. State health agencies warned against using ivermectin, and medical boards removed the medical licenses of doctors who prescribed ivermectin, alleging misinformation.

Yet using the FDA’s statement against ivermectin to ban its use in COVID-19 cases would be considered an overreach. Since the FDA approved ivermectin in 1996, this made the drug acceptable for off-label use.

“The fact that it’s not FDA approved for COVID is irrelevant because the FDA endorses the use of off-label drugs at the clinician’s discretion,” said Marik.

As an ironic side effect of the messaging on ivermectin, people suddenly found themselves unable to access ivermectin, and some turned to veterinary-grade ivermectin.

Though veterinary ivermectin is the same product as medicinal ivermectin, the manufacturing standard is not the same as it is for human-grade pharmaceuticals.

Contradictory Research and Campaigns

Though the initial research in 2020 showed promising results for ivermectin, published studies reported conflicting findings by the following year.

The NIH has funded many studies on the effectiveness of ivermectin, the most recent being ACTIV-6.

Individuals can participate in the study once they develop COVID by selecting ivermectin from four other drugs. The drug was sent to them via mail. This method means that some people in the study could have recovered by the time they received the ivermectin.

There are some controversies regarding this study.

The first is that the authors changed the primary endpoints during the study, which is heavily frowned upon as it can affect the validity and reliability of the outcome.

Initially, the primary endpoint was the number of deaths, hospitalizations, and symptoms reported at day 14.

Read more here…

Five days after the Associated Press cited an anonymous ‘senior US intelligence official’ in a story that claimed a Russian missile killed two Polish civilians, one of the two reporters behind the story was fired.

Reporters James LaPorta (fired) and John Leichester (not fired) share the byline on the now-retracted report, which sparked an entire news cycle that included talk of invoking ‘Article 5‘ – the mutual defense agreement between NATO members – and which would have obligated other members to engage in collective defense, aka WWIII.

As the day went on, President Biden popped out of a NATO / G7 briefing, and mumbled that “it’s unlikely” the projectile was fired from Russia. NATO then chimed in, saying it was more likely that the missile was fired by Ukrainian forces in self-defense (or was it?).

AP later retracted the story, and issued the following correction which pinned blame on the anonymous intelligence official;

In earlier versions of a story published November 15, 2022, The Associated Press reported erroneously, based on information from a senior American intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity, that Russian missiles had crossed into Poland and killed two people. Subsequent reporting showed that the missiles were Russian-made and most likely fired by Ukraine in defense against a Russian attack.

According to Mediaite, AP requires two sources for confirmation on this type of reporting when both are anonymous.

On Monday, the Daily Beast reported that LaPorta had been sacked for erroneous reporting, while Leicester has, as of this writing, kept his job with the wire service.

Remember when AP cited anonymous US intelligence officials to suggest that ZeroHedge was spreading Russian disinformation? Same energy, and wouldn’t be the first time ‘anonymous officials’ turned out to be bullshit.

Meanwhile on James LaPorta’s Twitter feed…

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

“Ya. Hehe. I had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those guys who get f—ed by it, by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

– Sam Bankman-Fried

The FTX Bitcoin empire of 30-year-old CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is in shambles. Or more specifically, his “dumb game” cryptocurrency exchange has destroyed thousands of lives. Electronically, he may have robbed perhaps a million investors, and along with them hundreds of large institutional investors. 

Mysteriously, only after the conclusion of the midterm elections, did we suddenly learn that this left-wing “philanthropist” and benefactor of Democratic politics, this megadonor to the quid pro quo puff-piece media, this con artist protected from federal securities regulators, had drained off, lost, hidden, or spent billions of dollars of other people’s money. 

As a result, the Bahamas-basking, tax-avoiding, polyamorous sybarite, and heartthrob of progressive moralists, now claims he has no wherewithal to honor his financial commitments to his own investors. Preliminary postmortem auditors sigh that they have never encountered a greater financial mess than what Bankman-Fried has left in his wake. 

How does the most sophisticated financial system in the history of civilization allow a virtue-signaling nerd to nearly wreck it? Where were the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, the IRS, and all the other alphabet soup agencies that supposedly exist so that someone like Bankman-Fried does not? Where is Merrick Garland and his special prosecutors, the FBI with its televised SWAT swoops and leg irons?

For all the performance-art boasts of simply doing good for others by doing far better for himself, Bankman-Fried may soon be revealed to be one of the great, dissolute con artists in American history. Like the infamous Charles Ponzi, “Bankman” may become our eponymous word in the 21st century for electronically driven, pyramid-scheme theft. 

His Stanford-Silicon Valley moral veneer was shiny but otherwise razor thin. Yet Bankman-Fried told at least one truth when he explained to obsequious media what his ilk easily does to fool purported suckers who send him cash, while he avoided federal and media oversight: “This dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.” 

Well, not everyone. Instead, he might qualify his “everyone” as the like-minded, cynical, left-wing politicos, the kindred media hacks at the Washington Post and New York Times, and brethren investor toadies who helped him render Bernie Madoff a small-potato sinner in comparison.

Bankman-Fried had showered Joe Biden in 2020 with millions of dollars in campaign donations and did so again with larger sums to congressional candidates in 2022. His public relations arm of FTX exuded the usual virtue speak—including promised impending multibillion-dollar gifting—for utopian, Democratic, and progressive causes. And the media on spec gushed about their pet grunger as he sought to buy protection from Democratic fixers. 

“Effective Altruism,” Ponzi-Style

Yet Bankman-Fried is merely one in a long line of Bay Area social-justice hypocrites and frauds. They share in common loud but cynical left-wing politics. They choreograph their personas to win exemption from left-wing government regulators, to guarantee puff pieces from a toady media, and to romance the rich, left-wing elite. Consider how the Washington Post gushed of the scam artist: 

Harnessing the enormous wealth created by FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that Sam Bankman-Fried had founded, they undertook a project to spend potentially billions of dollars on pandemic prevention, a long-neglected priority on Capitol Hill even amid the coronavirus crisis. The plan, drawn from the brothers’ adherence to a philosophy called effective altruism, sought to maximize philanthropic giving in ways that can have the most impact.

Bankman-Fried surely has had “the most impact.” If he had worn a suit, and said the wrong “shibboleths,” he would now be behind bars. 

What were the moral seeds of FTX? Bankman-Fried grew up on the progressive, moralistic Stanford campus, the son of two crusading Stanford law professors who often wrote about morality and the dispossessed. 

SBF, as he is known, was groomed and prepped at an exclusive nearby Hillsborough private academy before being packed off to MIT. Progressive souls like Bankman-Fried distrust capitalism so much that, in his case, he retreated to the Bahamas to maximize its rewards. There he embraced a hedonistic lifestyle, tax breaks and lack of regulations, all in order to better short taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars in income tax revenue. 

Such vulture capitalism is predicated on the presumption that young, loudly left-wing Bay Area hipsters in ratty clothes are the cool “good guys” if they have deep Democratic pockets and talk of “equity” and “fairness.” And so, they use the system to defeat the system—defined in their view as toxic traditional mores and values.

Indeed, Bankman-Fried’s mother, Stanford Professor Elizabeth Fried was a “utilitarian,” perhaps best defined as advocating any means necessary to achieve what she felt were the best ends for everyone. She moonlighted from her supposedly full-time job by running “Mind the Gap,” a central collection agency for Silicon Valley dark money to be funneled secretly to the “right causes.” The means of getting the millions was always excused by the ends of how it was used.

Apparently, some of her fund’s wherewithal was dripped in by some in her son’s stash circle—or rather his investors’ cash. Mind the Gap’s specialty was funding “to get out the vote.” To understand these dark-money operations in 2020, simply reread Molly Ball’s obnoxious Time magazine story of February 2021—a long boast of how stealth left-wing money, a toady progressive media, an army of lawyers, and social media combined to change voting laws, modulate the Black Lives Matter/Antifa street protests, and warp dissemination of news to craft a good utilitarian “conspiracy” that saved us from Donald Trump. 

Will the Bankman-Fried family now atone, and try to give back to the robbed and deluded any of the real money that was funneled into Democratic candidates from the massive fraud? Does the water flow uphill?

So how can the progressive embryos of Silicon Valley, Stanford University, Bay Area prep schools, and progressive humanitarian politics birth such an utter fraud who destroyed so many? Rather the question might be reversed, how could all that not?

Performance Art Grifting

In the context of Bankman-Fried, we recall another kindred Bay-Area erstwhile momentary billionaire charlatan. Do we remember the now felonious and prison-bound young prodigy and Hillary-Clinton aficionado Elizabeth Holmes? She, too, was birthed and swam in similar Stanford-Silicon Valley waters. 

GLENN CHAPMAN/AFP via Getty Images

Her scheme was Theranos. That was the pretentiously named fake-blood testing corporation that duped some of the most powerful investors in the United States to fork over billions of dollars to a twentysomething con artist. Holmes, like Bankman-Fried, was sired in the orbit of Stanford. She eschewed the slob props of Banksman-Fried, and instead preferred copy-catting Steve Jobs’ slicker all-black outfits.

Holmes assembled on her fake corporate board some of the biggest names associated with Stanford University and Silicon Valley, whose brands masked what was likely the greatest corporate medical fraud in American history.  

There is a pattern here of the “good” people doing “good” things with their “good” money that turns out very badly for everyone else. 

Silicon Valley multibillionaire and fellow leftist Mark Zuckerberg prefers T-shirts, sneakers, and jeans to the Bankman-Fried bum-look or Holmes’ Apple black-draped getup. He is now laying off thousands of Facebook employees as his Meta disaster erodes his stock value and takes his net worth down tens of billions of dollars. 

But it was just two years ago that Zuckerberg answered the utilitarian call of fellow leftists to use his mega money and power to stop the prince of darkness, Donald Trump. So Zuck, as he is known, poured $419 million into pro-Biden left-wing activist groups. That unprecedented sum was used to absorb the work of state election officials in key precincts to ensure the right people voted in the right way to ensure the right winner.

Leftists still brag how the good mega-money sandbagged dullard Republicans and helped to give Biden the election.  

Zuckerberg recently confessed that his left-wing company had also worked with the FBI to suppress online social media expression. Translated, that meant that the FBI partnered with Facebook to quash news deemed not helpful to the Biden election cause, such as the all-too-true revelations from the incriminating Hunter Biden laptop that was falsely passed off as “Russian disinformation.”

Is that a very liberal, civil libertarian thing to do—to weld the state and the media to punish political enemies and censor the news? Was the FBI-Facebook fusion a sort of “electronic insurrection” designed to warp democracy—absent the buffoonish cow horns and face paint? Might Zuckerberg have passed on channeling his dark money to “nonprofit” leftist organizations, and instead banked it to save a few of his now laid-off employees?

This column could become endless if it referenced all the Silicon Valley and Stanford progressive politico saints with feet of clay. Do we remember Tom Steyer, the Silicon Valley zillionaire, Stanford University board member, and former left-wing green presidential candidate, who spent $191 million without winning a single delegate? 

At least candidate Michael Bloomberg got a few delegates at roughly $18 million a pop for the hundreds of millions of virtuous dollars he blew up in 2020. Steyer used his 2020 campaign to lecture us on ending the fossil fuel economy—but only after he had made a fortune in financing dirty coal burning plants in the impoverished Third World. 

Posh Virtue

What is going on? 

The 21st-century globalized economy saturated the corridor between San Francisco and San Jose with wealth never before seen or imagined. Its beneficiaries discovered a number of things about the arts of becoming and staying ultra-rich.

One, they never needed to worry about the essentials of life that troubled the other 99 percent of the country—affordable fuel, food, and housing, safe streets, and a fair and legal immigration system. 

Or to put it another way, they could pose as progressive utopians—preening their moral superiority to the media, pouring money into the Democratic Party, funding foundations and PACs devoted to woke causes, climate change, and diversity, equity, and inclusion—and all the time never subject to the ramifications of their own exalted agendas. 

They could not have cared less about crippling $6 a gallon gas, the exorbitant kilowatt cost of air conditioning, out-of-reach $1,000-a-square foot bungalow housing, the mayhem on San Francisco streets, or the reparatory elite university admissions policies that drastically curtailed working-class male admissions. Their wealth guaranteed them leverage, and leverage ensured exemptions. 

But Bay Area morality was not just a pragmatic matter of the exempt elite force-feeding utopia down the throats of others who had no such immunity. Boutique, rich leftism also provided penance for the anointed, a mechanism that alleviated any residual guilt of talking like Eugene Debs while living like Marie Antoinette. 

The multimillionaire, social justice warrior House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) assumed, as one of the Bay Area’s liberal icons, that she had a right to break quarantine and sneak off to her private hairdresser, or cluelessly boast of her $13 a pint ice cream, home delivered to her $24,000 twin imported refrigerators—all in the midst of a near depression as the national COVID-19 shutdown ruined millions of small business and devastated the educations of tens of millions of children. 

As a member of the classy Bay Area elite, she knew the bankrupt political morality of the Left all too well: acts like tearing up the Trump State of the Union speech on national television veneered her privilege and made her one of the proverbial good people fighting for us from one of her various mansions. 

Bay Area ZIP codes have produced the now-familiar rich, liberal politicians whose exempt lives are not damaged by the ideology that damages others. Consider the billionaire Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who for two decades was chauffeured by a Chinese spy while head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, or multimillionaire former Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), now ensconced in Rancho Mirage as a registered foreign agent for a Chinese surveillance firm, or multimillionaire Gavin Newsom, who bragged how the COVID lockdowns might greenlight “progressive capitalism,” as he pushed social distancing and mask-wearing—while he palled around with lobbyists, maskless, at the French Laundry.

Sam Bankman-Fried is the ultimate dangerous and ridiculous expression of the most toxic and creepy culture in America. If he did not exist, someone like him would have to be invented.

Authored by Alan Macleod via MintPressNews.com,

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II has been available for less than three weeks, but it is already making waves. Breaking records, within ten days, the first-person military shooter video game earned more than $1 billion in revenue. Yet it has also been shrouded in controversy, not least because missions include assassinating an Iranian general clearly based on Qassem Soleimani, a statesman and military leader slain by the Trump administration in 2020, and a level where players must shoot “drug traffickers” attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border.

The Call of Duty franchise is an entertainment juggernaut, having sold close to half a billion games since it was launched in 2003. Its publisher, Activision Blizzard, is a giant in the industry, behind titles games as the Guitar Hero, Warcraft, Starcraft, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crash Bandicoot and Candy Crush Saga series.

Yet a closer inspection of Activision Blizzard’s key staff and their connections to state power, as well as details gleaned from documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Call of Duty is not a neutral first-person shooter, but a carefully constructed piece of military propaganda, designed to advance the interests of the U.S. national security state.

In the first five minutes the new Call of Duty has you pilot the missile that kills Soleimani lol

— sad because the female faceapp of me isnt fuckable (@websiteidi0t) October 20, 2022

MILITARY-ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX

It has long been a matter of public record that American spies have targeted and penetrated Activision Blizzard games. Documents released by Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA, CIA, FBI and Department of Defense infiltrated the vast online realms such as World of Warcraft, creating make-believe characters to monitor potential illegal activity and recruit informers. Indeed, at one point, there were so many U.S. spies in one video game that they had to create a “deconfliction” group as they were wasting time unwittingly surveilling each other. Virtual games, the NSA wrote, were an “opportunity” and a “target-rich communication network”.

However, documents obtained legally under the Freedom of Information Act by journalist and researcher Tom Secker and shared with MintPress News show that the connections between the national security state and the video game industry go far beyond this, and into active collaboration.

In September 2018, for example, the United States Air Force flew a group of entertainment executives – including Call of Duty/Activision Blizzard producer Coco Francini – to their headquarters at Hurlburt Field, Florida. The explicit reason for doing so, they wrote, was to “showcase” their hardware and to make the entertainment industry more “credible advocates” for the U.S. war machine.

“We’ve got a bunch of people working on future blockbusters (think Marvel, Call of Duty, etc.) stoked about this trip!” wrote one Air Force officer. Another email notes that the point of the visit was to provide “heavy-hitter” producers with “AFSOC [Air Force Special Operations Command] immersion focused on Special Tactics Airmen and air-to-ground capabilities.”

“This is a great opportunity to educate this community and make them more credible advocates for us in the production of any future movies/television productions on the Air Force and our Special Tactics community,” wrote the AFSOC community relations chief.

Francini and others were shown CV-22 helicopters and AC-130 planes in action, both of which feature heavily in Call of Duty games.

Yet Call of Duty collaboration with the military goes back much further. The documents show that the United States Marine Corps (USMC) was involved in the production of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty 5. The games’ producers approached the USMC at the 2010 E3 entertainment convention in Los Angeles, requesting access to hovercrafts (vehicles which later appeared in the game). Call of Duty 5 executives also asked for use of a hovercraft, a tank and a C-130 aircraft.

This collaboration continued in 2012 with the release of Modern Warfare 4, where producers requested access to all manner of air and ground vehicles.

Secker told MintPress that, by collaborating with the gaming industry, the military ensures a positive portrayal that can help it reach recruitment targets, stating that,

For certain demographics of gamers it’s a recruitment portal, some first-person shooters have embedded adverts within the games themselves…Even without this sort of explicit recruitment effort, games like Call of Duty make warfare seem fun, exciting, an escape from the drudgery of their normal lives.”

Secker’s documentary, “Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood” was released earlier this year.

The military clearly held considerable influence over the direction of Call of Duty games. In 2010, its producers approached the Department of Defense (DoD) for help on a game set in 2075. However, the DoD liaison “expressed concern that [the] scenario being considered involves future war with China.” As a result, Activision Blizzard began “looking at other possible conflicts to design the game around.” In the end, due in part to military objections, the game was permanently abandoned.

FROM WAR ON TERROR TO FIRST-PERSON SHOOTERS

Not only does Activision Blizzard work with the U.S. military to shape its products, but its leadership board is also full of former high state officials. Chief amongst these is Frances Townsend, Activision Blizzard’s senior counsel, and, until September, its chief compliance officer and executive vice president for corporate affairs.

Prior to joining Activision Blizzard, Townsend spent her life working her way up the rungs of the national security state. Previously serving as head of intelligence for the Coast Guard and as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s counterterrorism deputy, in 2004, President Bush appointed her to his Intelligence Advisory Board.

As the White House’s most senior advisor on terrorism and homeland security, Townsend worked closely with Bush and Rice, and became one of the faces of the administration’s War on Terror. One of her principal achievements was to whip the American public into a constant state of fear about the supposed threat of more Al-Qaeda attacks (which never came).

Before she joined Activision Blizzard, Frances Townsend worked in Homeland Security and Counterterrorism for the Bush White House. Ron Edmonds | AP

As part of her job, Townsend helped popularize the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” – a Bush-era euphemism for torturing detainees. Worse still, Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, the officer in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, alleged that Townsend put pressure on him to ramp up the torture program, reminding him “many, many times” that he needed to improve the intelligence output from the Iraqi jail.

Townsend has denied these allegations. She also later condemned the “handcuff[ing]” and “humiliation” surrounding Abu Ghraib. She was not referring to the prisoners, however. In an interview with CNN, she lamented that “these career professionals” – CIA torturers – had been subject to “humiliation and opprobrium” after details of their actions were made public, meaning that future administrations would be “handcuffed” by the fear of bad publicity, while the intelligence community would become more “risk-averse”.

During the Trump administration, Townsend was hotly tipped to become the Director of National Intelligence or the Secretary of Homeland Security. President Trump also approached her for the role of director of the FBI. Instead, however, Townsend took a seemingly incongruous career detour to become an executive at a video games company.

ENTER THE WAR PLANNERS

In addition to this role, Townsend is a director of the NATO offshoot, the Atlantic Council, a director at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a trustee of the hawkish think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a group MintPress News has previously covered in detail.

Funded by weapons companies, NATO and the U.S. government, the Atlantic Council serves as the military alliance’s brain trust, devising strategies on how best to manage the world. Also on its board of directors are high statespersons like Henry Kissinger and Conzoleezza Rice, virtually every retired U.S. general of note, and no fewer than seven former directors of the CIA. As such, the Atlantic Council represents the collective opinion of the national security state.

Two more key Call of Duty staff also work for the Atlantic Council. Chance Glasco, a co-founder of Infinity Ward developers who oversaw the game franchise’s rapid rise, is the council’s nonresident senior fellow, advising top generals and political leaders on the latest developments in tech.

Game designer and producer Dave Anthony, crucial to Call of Duty’s success, is also an Atlantic Council employee, joining the group in 2014. There, he advises them on what the future of warfare will look like, and devises strategies for NATO to fight in upcoming conflicts.

Anthony has made no secret that he collaborated with the U.S. national security state while making the Call of Duty franchise. “My greatest honor was to consult with Lieut. Col. Oliver North on the story of Black Ops 2,” he stated publicly, adding, There are so many small details we could never have known about if it wasn’t for his involvement.”

Oliver North is a high government official gained worldwide infamy after being convicted for his role in the Iran-Contra Affair, whereby his team secretly sold weapons to the government of Iran, using the money to arm and train fascist death squads in Central America – groups who attempted to overthrow the government of Nicaragua and carried out waves of massacres and ethnic cleansing in the process.

REPUBLICANS FOR HIRE

Another eyebrow-raising hire is Activision Blizzard’s chief administration officer, Brian Bulatao. A former Army captain and consultant for McKinsey & Company, until 2018, he was chief operating officer for the CIA, placing him third in command of the agency. When CIA Director Mike Pompeo moved over to the State Department, becoming Trump’s Secretary of State, Bulatao went with him, and was appointed Under Secretary of State for Management.

There, by some accounts, he served as Pompeo’s personal “attack dog,” with former colleagues describing him as a “bully” who brought a “cloud of intimidation” over the workplace, repeatedly pressing them to ignore potential illegalities happening at the department. Thus, it is unclear if Bulatao is the man to improve Activision Blizzard’s notoriously “toxic” workplace environment that caused dozens of employees to walk out en masse last summer.

After the Trump administration’s electoral defeat, Bulatao went straight from the State Department into the highest echelons of Activision Blizzard, despite no experience in the entertainment industry.

Trump stands with then-CIA Chief Operations Officer Brian Bulatao at CIA Headquarters, May 21, 2018, in Langley, Va. Evan Vucci | AP

The third senior Republican official Activision Blizzard has recruited to its upper ranks is Grant Dixton. Between 2003 and 2006, Dixton served as associate counsel to President Bush, advising him on many of his administration’s most controversial legal activities (such as torture and the rapid expansion of the surveillance state). A lawyer by trade, he later went on to work for weapons manufacturer Boeing, rising to become its senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary. In June 2021, he left Boeing to join Activision Blizzard as its chief legal officer.

Other Activision Blizzard executives with backgrounds in national security include senior vice president and chief information security officer Brett Wahlin, who was a U.S. Army counterintelligence agent, and chief of staff, Angela Alvarez, who, until 2016, was an Army chemical operations specialist.

That the same government that was infiltrating games 10-15 years ago now has so many former officials controlling the very game companies raises serious questions around privacy and state control over media, and mirrors the national security state penetration of social media that has occurred over the same timeframe.

WAR GAMES

These deep connections to the U.S. national security state can perhaps help partly explain why, for years, many have complained about the blatant pro-U.S. propaganda apparent throughout the games.

The latest installment, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, is no exception. In the game’s first mission, players must carry out a drone strike against a character named

The latest installment, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, is no exception. In the game’s first mission, players must carry out a drone strike against a character named General Ghorbrani. The mission is obviously a recreation of the Trump administration’s illegal 2020 drone strike against Iranian General Qassem Soleimani – the in game general even bears a striking resemblance to Soleimani.

The latest Call of Duty game has players assassinate a General Ghorbrani, a nebulous reference to Iranian General Qassem Solemani, pictured right

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II ludicrously presents the general as under Russia’s thumb and claims that Ghorbrani is “supplying terrorists” with aid. In reality, Soleimani was the key force in defeating ISIS terror across the Middle East – actions for which even Western media declared him a “hero”. U.S.-run polls found that Soleimani was perhaps the most popular leader in the Middle East, with over 80% of Iranians holding a positive opinion of him.

Straight after the assassination, Pompeo’s State Department floated the falsehood that the reason they killed Soleimani was that he was on the verge of carrying out a terror attack against Americans. In reality, Soleimani was in Baghdad, Iraq, for peace talks with Saudi Arabia.

These negotiations could have led to peace between the two nations, something that the U.S. government is dead against. Then-Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi revealed that he had personally asked President Trump for permission to invite Soleimani. Trump agreed, then used the opportunity to carry out the killing.

Therefore,, just as Activision Blizzard is recruiting top State Department officials to its upper ranks, its games are celebrating the same State Department’s most controversial assassinations.

This is far from the first time Call of Duty has instructed impressionable young gamers to kill foreign leaders, however. In Call of Duty Black Ops (2010), players must complete a mission to murder Cuban leader Fidel Castro. If they manage to shoot him in the head, they are rewarded with an extra gory slow motion scene and obtain a bronze “Death to Dictators” trophy. Thus, players are forced to carry out digitally what Washington failed to do on over 600 occasions.

A mission from “Call of Duty: Black Ops” has players assassinate a hostage-taking Fidel Castro

Likewise, Call of Duty: Ghosts is set in Venezuela, where players fight against General Almagro, a socialist military leader clearly modelled on former president Hugo Chavez. Like Chavez, Almagro wears a red beret and uses Venezuela’s oil wealth to forge an alliance of independent Latin American nations against the U.S. Washington attempted to overthrow Chavez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, multiple times. During the sixth mission of the game, players must shoot and kill Almagro from close range.

The anti-Russian propaganda is also turned up to 11 in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019). One mission recreates the infamous Highway of Death incident. During the First Iraq War, U.S.-led forces trapped fleeing Iraqi troops on Highway 80. What followed was what then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell described as “wanton killing” and “slaughter for slaughter’s sake” as U.S. troops and their allies pummeled the Iraqi convoy for hours, killing hundreds and destroying thousands of vehicles. U.S. forces also reportedly shot hundreds of Iraqi civilians and surrendered soldiers in their care.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare recreates this scene for dramatic effect. However, in their version, it is not the U.S.-led forces doing the killing, but Russia, thereby whitewashing a war crime by pinning the blame on official enemies.

A mission in “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” has players recreate the infamous highway of death

“Call of Duty, in particular, has been flagged up for recreating real events as game missions and manipulating them for geopolitical purposes,” Secker told MintPress, referring to the Highway of Death, adding,

In a culture where most people’s exposure to games (and films, TV shows and so on) is far greater than their knowledge of historical and current events, these manipulations help frame the gamers’ emotional, intellectual and political reactions. This helps them turn into more general advocates for militarism, even if they don’t sign up in any formal way.”

Secker’s latest book, “Superheroes, Movies and the State: How the U.S. Government Shapes Cinematic Universes,” was published earlier this year.

GAME OVER

In today’s digitized era, the worlds of war and video games increasingly resemble one another. Many have commented on the similarities between piloting drones in real life and in games such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Prince Harry, who was a helicopter gunner in Afghanistan, described his “joy” at firing missiles at enemies. “I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think I’m probably quite useful,” he said. “If there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game,” he added, explicitly comparing the two activities. U.S. forces even control drones with Xbox controllers, blurring the lines between war games and war games even further.

The military has also directly produced video games as promotional and recruitment tools. One is a U.S. Air Force game called Airman Challenge. Featuring 16 missions to complete, interspersed with facts and recruitment information about how to become a drone operator yourself. In its latest attempts to market active service to young people, players move through missions escorting U.S. vehicles through countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, serving up death from above to all those designated “insurgents” by the game.

Players earn medals and achievements for most effectively destroying moving targets. All the while, there is a prominent “apply now” button on screen if players feel like enlisting and conducting real drone strikes on the Middle East.

U.S. Armed Forces use the popularity of video games to recruit heavily among young people, sponsoring gaming tournaments, fielding their own U.S. Army Esports team, and directly trying to recruit teens on streaming sites such as Twitch. The Amazon-owned platform eventually had to clamp down on the practice after the military used fake prize giveaways that lured impressionable young viewers onto recruitment websites.

Video games are a massive business and a huge center of soft power and ideology. The medium makes for particularly persuasive propaganda because children and adolescents consume them, often for weeks or months on end, and because they are light entertainment. Because of this, users do not have their guards up like if they were listening to a politician speaking. Their power is often overlooked by scholars and journalists because of the supposed frivolity of the medium. But it is the very notion that these are unimportant sources of fun that makes their message all the more potent.

The Call of Duty franchise is particularly egregious, not only in its messaging, but because who the messengers are. Increasingly, the games appear to be little more than American propaganda masquerading as fun first-person shooters. For gamers, the point is to enjoy its fast-paced entertainment. But for those involved in their production, the goal is not just making money; it is about serving the imperial war machine.

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

Qatar’s state firm QatarEnergy signed on Monday the longest-term contract in the history of the LNG industry in a deal to supply LNG to Chinese state energy giant Sinopec for 27 years.

QatarEnergy will supply China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) with 4 million tons per annum (MTPA) of LNG to China from the North Filed East (NFE) expansion project, just as global competition for LNG intensifies amid a European rush to secure non-Russian gas supply.

“This is the first long-term SPA from the NFE project to be announced, and marks the longest gas supply agreement in the history of the LNG industry,” said Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, Qatar’s Minister of State for Energy Affairs and President and CEO of QatarEnergy.  

Qatar has traditionally preferred long-term supply deals with customers, at which Europe balked earlier this year. But more recently, even European companies have started negotiations for longer-term supply with LNG providers. 

China, for its part, is looking to secure LNG to avoid more spot buying amid uncertainties over the Asian spot prices in the coming years. 

Today’s sale and purchase agreement (SPA) also represents the first long-term LNG offtake agreement from the NFE Expansion project. Qatar’s North Field East and North Field South (NFS) projects are expected to come online in 2026 and 2027, respectively.

Qatar announced last year the world’s largest LNG project, which is set to raise its LNG production capacity from 77 million tons per annum (mmtpa) to 110 mmtpa. The Gulf gas and oil producer also plans another expansion phase at the North Field, the world’s largest natural gas field, which it shares with Iran. The second expansion phase will be the North Field South Project (NFS), set to further increase Qatar’s LNG production capacity from 110 mmtpa to 126 mmtpa, with an expected production start date in 2027.

It turns out that big tech companies may not be as committed to your privacy as their PR departments would have you believe – go figure.

The latest example of this reality appears to be Google, who was revealed last week by MarketWatch to have data-mining practices that employees say that they sometimes “don’t understand and can’t describe”.

The report cited a class action lawsuit alleging that Google “violated promises not to collect data of those using the browser without signing into their Google accounts”. Documents recently became unsealed in the case, offering a look into how privacy is discussed internally at Google. 

In the lawsuit, one unnamed employee seemed to make it clear that Google’s privacy policies are opaque, stating: “I don’t have the faintest idea what Google has on me. The fact what we can’t explain what we have […] on users is probably our biggest challenge.” 

“Users have a right to know,” one employee said. Another commented: “The reasons we provide are so high level and abstract that they don’t make sense to people.” A third employee said: “Consent is no longer consent if you think of ads as a product.”

Additional employees seemed to solidify the ethos within the company. A former employee who recently left the company said: “I am more than willing to believe this is how executives talked to each other.”

“Even people I was organizationally close to, knew well, and respected, were finding ways to justify that stuff to themselves,” they said about the company’s privacy teams. “The individual contributors [on Google’s privacy teams] are always idealistic people. Some of these quotes [from the case] look to me like things that idealistic people would say; others look like things management would say when the idealistic people aren’t around.”

When asked by MarketWatch, Google responded to the report by stating that “privacy controls have long been built into our services and we encourage our teams to constantly discuss or consider ideas to improve them.” 

As the report notes, ads are a material revenue generator for Google, making up $209.5 billion in sales for the company in its 2021 fiscal year. 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

For those of us who have written about the Hunter Biden scandal and the family’s influence-peddling operation for years, it is routine to read media stories denying the facts or dismissing calls to investigate the foreign dealings. However, this weekend, the Associated Press made a whopper of a claim that there is no evidence even suggesting that President Joe Biden ever spoke to his son about his foreign dealings. I previously discussed how the Bidens have succeeded in a Houdini-like trick in making this elephant of a scandal disappear from the public stage. They did so by enlisting the media in the illusion. However, this level of audience participation in the trick truly defies belief.

The statement of the Associated Press at this stage of the scandal is breathtaking but telling: “Joe Biden has said he’s never spoken to his son about his foreign business, and nothing the Republicans have put forth suggests otherwise.”

For years, the media has continued to report President Biden’s repeated claim that “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” At the outset, the media only had to suspend any disbelief that the president could fly to China as Vice President with his son on Air Force 2 without discussing his planned business dealings on the trip.

Of course, the emails on the laptop quickly refuted this claim. However, the media buried the laptop story before the election or pushed the false claim that it was fake Russian disinformation.

President Biden’s denials continued even after an audiotape surfaced showing President Biden leaving a message for Hunter specifically discussing coverage of those dealings. The call is specifically referring to these dealings:

“Hey pal, it’s Dad. It’s 8:15 on Wednesday night. If you get a chance just give me a call. Nothing urgent. I just wanted to talk to you. I thought the article released online, it’s going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good. I think you’re clear. And anyway if you get a chance give me a call, I love you.”

But who are you going to believe, the media or your own ears.

Some of us have written for two years that Biden’s denial of knowledge is patently false. It was equally evident that the Biden family was selling influence and access.

There are emails of Ukrainian and other foreign clients thanking Hunter Biden for arranging meetings with his father. There are photos from dinners and meetings that tie President Biden to these figures, including a 2015 dinner with a group of Hunter Biden’s Russian and Kazakh clients.

People apparently were told to avoid directly referring to President Biden. In one email, Tony Bobulinski, then a business partner of Hunter’s, was instructed by Biden associate James Gilliar not to speak of the former veep’s connection to any transactions: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that but they are paranoid.”

Instead, the emails apparently refer to President Biden with code names such as “Celtic” or “the big guy.” In one, “the big guy” is discussed as possibly receiving a 10 percent cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm; other emails reportedly refer to Hunter Biden paying portions of his father’s expenses and taxes.

Bobulinski has given multiple interviews that he met twice with Joe Biden to discuss a business deal in China with CEFC China Energy Co. That would seem obvious evidence. In addition, the New York Post reported on a key email that discussed “the proposed percentage distribution of equity in a company created for a joint venture with CEFC China Energy Co.” That was the email on March 13, 2017 that included references of “10 held by H for the big guy.”

The Associated Press later revised the line after an outcry from some of us. It now ends “there is no indication that the federal investigation involves the president.”  The revision creates a new problem. Rather than simply stating the fact, AP seems to struggle to shield the President. There is every indication that “the federal investigation involves the president.” Not only is the President discussed in key emails under investigation, but the grand jury heard testimony that the “Big Guy” is Joe Biden.

That brings us back to Houdini’s trick of making his 10,000 pound elephant Jennie disappear every night in New York’s Hippodrome. He succeeded night after night because the audience wanted the elephant to disappear even though it never left the stage.

I previously wrote about how the key to the trick was involving the media so that reporters are invested in the illusion like calling audience members to the stage. Reporters have to insist that there was nothing to see or they have to admit to being part of the original deception. The media cannot see the elephant without the public seeing something about the media in its past efforts to conceal it.

The media is now so heavily invested in the trick that they are sticking with the illusion even after “the reveal.” The Associated Press story shows that even pointing at the elephant — heck, even riding the elephant around the stage — will not dislodge these denials. This is no elephant because there cannot be an elephant. Poof!

N.B.: This column was revised to add discussion of the AP revision of the line on the investigation.

The Federal Reserve has hiked 375bps in just six meetings this year. Mortgage rates have followed suit, skyrocketing from a low of 2.7% in February to 7.35% earlier this month. The aggressive tightening of monetary conditions has sparked an affordability crisis — sidelining millions of potential homebuyers while existing home sales crash to the worst level since 2008. 

Higher borrowing costs triggered a sharp drop in mortgage applications and home sales in the back half of the year. Deal flow is drying up for many real estate agents, resulting in financial duress that may worsen into early 2023. 

In October, a shocking 37% of real estate agents struggled to pay office rent — a 10% increase from the prior month, according to Yahoo, citing a new report via Redfin. The figure could worsen as the housing market rapidly cools via the Fed-induced demand side crunch. 

Such rapid heating of the housing market during the pandemic era brought in an influx of new agents. The National Association of Realtors said membership hit an all-time high of 1.56 million in 2021 (pandemic boom year) — up from 1.49 million the year before. 

While we don’t expect a similar 2008-09 housing crash, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas warned last week that home prices could plunge 20% next year due to affordability woes. 

In October, existing home sales tumbled to 28.4% – its worst since 2008. 

Absent the nadir of the COVID lockdowns, this is the lowest existing home sales SAAR since Dec 2011…

Deal flow slump for agents comes as lagged Case-Shiller Index showed US housing prices dropped 1.3% from their June 2022 peak in August. This is the most significant monthly decline since the Lehman collapse.  

The national home price index growth has slowed for five straight months (below 13% YoY for the first time since Feb 2021). The absolute drop in the growth rate of 2.62 percentage points is the largest ever…

Researchers at Goldman Sachs aren’t as bearish as the Dallas Fed, expect a 5-10% slump from peak to trough in home prices — with their official forecast model predicting a 7.6% decline. 

The unprecedented explosion in mortgage rates and freezing of the housing market is terrible news for all those newly minted agents during the pandemic. Mounting financial hardships and slumping deal flow, with the inability to service office rent, could result in many leaving the industry, perhaps, returning to their old bartending jobs. 

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Authorities in Oregon say they’re looking into a report they published that falsely claims sky-high COVID-19 hospitalization rates among children.

“We are working with the company that completed the report, Rede Group, to look into that data question,” Jonathan Modie, a spokesman for the Oregon Health Authority, told The Epoch Times in an email on Nov. 19.

Modie said authorities would be able to provide an update as early as Monday.

The report in question was produced by a firm called the Rede Group as a contractor to the health authority, as outlined in a Senate bill that was passed this year.

The bill says that the authority “shall study the state’s public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic” and prepare various reports, including one that includes “a broad review of the COVID-19 pandemic” and identification of areas in the public health response to the pandemic that need improvement.

The 725-page report includes multiple instances of misinformation, including the false claim that COVID-19 hospitalization rates among children were as high as 47.4 percent.

In a graph, the report depicts the hospitalization rates as above 30 percent for all childhood age groups, with the highest being 47.4 percent among children aged 12 to 17 as of June.

According to Oregon Health Authority (pdf), the hospitalization rate in 2021 among children aged 0 to 9 was just 0.9 percent and the hospitalization rate among those aged 10 to 19 was 0.6 percent. A report issued in July (pdf) looking at the first six months of 2021 had the percentages at 0.6 and 0.3, respectively.

Hospitalization rates are the percentage of people who test positive for COVID-19 who were admitted to a hospital.

Robb Hutson, a spokesman for the Rede Group, told The Epoch Times via email that he would have the company’s data team look into the matter.

States across the country, as well as federal officials and media outlets, have repeatedly put forth COVID-19 misinformation during the pandemic, including exaggerating the risk the disease poses to people and hyping vaccine effectiveness.

Eric Happel, a Nike employee who has criticized Oregon’s COVID-19 restrictions, flagged the false information in the new report.

He said the graph on hospitalization rates “is so wrong that everyone in OHA should know it’s wrong,” adding that “this is just so incompetent it is beyond embarrassing.”

Happel also said he did not appreciate how the report does not address how school closures, which took place in many U.S. states in 2020 and into 2021, affected children apart from saying health officials had to “balance the potential benefit” of such measures “against the serious ramifications,” including “creating social isolation.”

Read more here…