Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Late-term abortion ally of George Tiller from Boulder, Colorado, says about half of the late term abortions he performs involve no devastating medical diagnoses for the fetus

His name is Warren Hern. His conscience used to bother him in the early days, but he got over it. 

Christianity, he told me, not for the first time, “is now the face of fascism in America.” ... Hern sent me a copy of his poetry collection and his new book on global ecology. In the latter, titled Homo Ecophagus, he compares mankind to a cancer on the planet, writing that our unrelenting population growth will ultimately lead to the demise of every species on Earth.

The story is here:

 Abortions that come after devastating medical diagnoses can be easier for some people to understand. But Hern estimates that at least half, and sometimes more, of the women who come to the clinic do not have these diagnoses. He and his staff are just as sympathetic to other circumstances. Many of the clinic’s teenage patients receive later abortions because they had no idea they were pregnant. Some sexual-assault victims ignore their pregnancies or feel too ashamed to see a doctor. Once, a staffer named Catherine told me, a patient opted for a later abortion because her husband had killed himself and she was suddenly broke. “There isn’t a single woman who has ever written on her bucket list that she wants to have a late abortion,” Catherine said. “There is always a reason.”

LOL, ex-FBI Frank Figliuzzi knows damn well Mueller never investigated "collusion" because it ain't a thing in law, but still beats that idiotic drum for the natives

It wasn't against Trump early on. It was to determine whether or not there was Russian interference with the presidential campaign. He slips into this too conveniently. "It was against Trump." Early on it was just about hey, have the Russians colluded or intervened in this campaign?

And as you accurately pointed out they did. There are two dozen Russians charged with indictments under the Mueller inquiry, six of them at least were card-carrying Russian intelligence officers from the GRU. You can't say there was no collusion found here. 

Here

Frank slips from interference to collusion too conveniently.

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.


One man who gets it

 

 

 

The guy on the left slaughtered 60 million Chinamen, the guy on the right slaughtered a cherry tree

 

.

.
There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise.

John Durham ends investigation of FBI Trump-Russia investigation with bupkis, shows how he and the law were totally flummoxed by the FBI's political capture by Democrats

 Politics is legal in America. That's precisely the problem. Only the communists have figured out the solution: staff the institutions with your own cadres.

A nation of laws is powerless against them.

From the story, here:

Durham goes further in his criticism, however, arguing that the FBI rushed to investigate Trump in a case known as Crossfire Hurricane, even as it proceeded cautiously on allegations related to then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In particular, the report notes that while the FBI warned Clinton’s team when agents learned of possible evidence by a foreign actor to garner influence with her, agents did not give a similar defensive briefing to the Trump campaign before quickly launching an investigation.

The FBI’s handling of key aspects of the case was “seriously deficient,” Durham wrote, causing the agency “severe reputational harm.” That failure could have been prevented if FBI employees hadn’t embraced “seriously flawed information” and instead followed their “own principles regarding objectivity and integrity,” the report said.

As examples of confirmation bias by the FBI, Durham cites: the FBI decision to go forward with the probe despite “a complete lack of information from the Intelligence Community that corroborated the hypothesis upon which the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was predicated”; agents ignoring information that exonerated key suspects in the case; and the FBI being unable to corroborate “a single substantive allegation” in a dossier of Trump allegations compiled by British former spy Christopher Steele.

Sunday, May 14, 2023

Thursday, May 11, 2023

Unregistered foreign agents: While VP Biden clan used more than 20 shell companies to hide $10 million in payments from foreign nationals

“From a historical standpoint, we’ve never seen a presidential family receive these sums of money from adversaries around the world,” said House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, Kentucky Republican.

The web of Biden family LLCs was uncovered by scouring four Biden family bank accounts. The companies were used in what investigators say was a complex money laundering scheme that filtered money from foreign companies, through Biden LLCs and eventually into the bank accounts of nine Biden family members, including one of the president’s grandchildren.

Republicans said a web of foreign transactions generated 170 suspicious activity reports by the banks where Biden family members and business associates deposited money.

The findings also contradict statements from the president, who said his family did not receive any money from China.

“That was a lie,” Mr. Comer said. “And he continues to lie to the American people now. The Bidens have received millions of dollars from China. It is inconceivable that the president did not know it.” ...

The FBI told the panel Wednesday that it would not comply after Mr. Comer asked FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to turn over a Biden-related whistleblower complaint by noon. The complaint says Mr. Biden took bribes from a foreign national while serving as vice president. The whistleblower is credible, Republicans said.

More.

 

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Core CPI inflation has been 5.5% yoy for four straight months

 


Byron York: E. Jean Carroll case v. Trump was bankrolled by a billionaire when she said it wasn't, also claimed to have suffered after saying she hadn't

 

'Hoffman's money has made some waves in the Carroll case because, in her October 2022 deposition, Carroll denied that anyone was paying her legal fees. Here is what Carroll said: 

Q: Are you presently paying your counsel's fees?

A: This is a contingency case.

Q: So you're not paying expenses or anything out of pocket to date. Is that correct?

A: I'm not sure about expenses. I have to look that up.

Q: Is anyone else paying your legal fees, Ms. Carroll?

A: No.

'As the trial approached, Kaplan, Carroll's lawyer, wrote to the Trump legal team to admit that what Carroll said was not true. ...

'In addition, advocates for the Adult Survivors Act wanted to address the tremendous suffering that victims of sexual abuse experience. The lawsuit says Carroll endured "significant pain and suffering" and uses some form of the word "suffer" 11 times. Yet in a June 24, 2019 interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, part of the book promotion, Carroll declined to refer to what happened to her as a "rape" and offered this statement: "I just have trouble with the word. I just have trouble. I write an advice column for 25 years and women write to me with these devastating stories and they have been violently, you know, disposed of by men. And I just — I feel too much respect for their suffering. I didn't suffer, Anderson. I did not suffer. I did not lose my job. I wasn't beaten."'



More.

Evidently the New York jury in the civil case which just found Trump liable knew neither fact.



Monday, May 8, 2023

Fidelity Investments: Average retirement account in 2022 fell to $104,000

 

 And most retirement nest eggs are much smaller now than a year ago. By Fidelity’s estimate, the average retirement account lost one-fifth of its value in 2022, dwindling from $135,600 to $104,000.  

More.

Naughty, naughty

 

Saturday, May 6, 2023

Full time jobs rebound in April 2023

 Full time employment as a percentage of civilian population in April 2023 came in at 50.2%, smartly ahead of 1Q2023 at 49.7 and ahead of 2022 whole year average 50.1%. Full time peaks in summer.

Recession delayed again.





Catholic Biden's US military doesn't renew decades-old contract with Franciscan college at Walter Reed, hires for-profit secular firm instead

 Story.

Incompetent lab inspectors from CDC completely missed rusting wastewater system at Fort Detrick Army biolab which spilled 2,000-3,000 gallons of contaminated water into Carroll Creek, USAMRIID response took 6 days until photo emerged


 Unsterilized laboratory wastewater from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, spewed out the top of a rusty 50,000-gallon outdoor holding tank, the pressure catapulting it over the short concrete wall that was supposed to contain hazardous spills.

It was May 25, 2018, the Friday morning before Memorial Day weekend, and the tank holding waste from labs working with Ebola, anthrax, and other lethal pathogens had become overpressurized, forcing the liquid out a vent pipe.

An estimated 2,000-3,000 gallons streamed into a grassy area a few feet from an open storm drain that dumps into Carroll Creek — a centerpiece of downtown Frederick, Maryland, a city of about 80,000 an hour’s drive from the nation’s capital.

But as the waste sprayed for as long as three hours, records show, none of the plant’s workers apparently noticed the tank had burst a pipe. This was despite the facility being under scrutiny from federal lab regulators following catastrophic flooding and an escalating series of safety failures that had been playing out for more than a week. ...

Lab inspectors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had apparently failed to recognize the plant was in such disrepair. The CDC offered no explanation of how the problems were missed, but after the incident it created a new policy and task force for overseeing labs’ wastewater decontamination systems.

Samuel Edwin, director of the CDC’s select agent regulatory program, did not grant an interview. Two years before the plant flooded and failed, the CDC had hired Edwin from USAMRIID, where he had spent eight years as the biological surety officer and responsible official in charge of making sure USAMRIID’s labs complied with federal regulations.

The whole story is a comedy of incompetence which would be funny if it weren't so serious, here.




Friday, May 5, 2023

World Health Organization declares global public health emergency over today, a week ahead of the US

WHO declares end to Covid-19 global public health emergency

The spread of Covid-19 is no longer a global public health emergency, the World Health Organization declared Friday.

“For more than a year, the pandemic has been on a downward trend with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection, mortality decreasing, and the pressure on health systems easing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference in Geneva.

“This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before Covid-19,” Tedros said. “It’s therefore with great hope that I declared Covid-19 over as a global health emergency.”

Nearly 7 million people have died from the virus worldwide since the WHO first declared the emergency on Jan. 30, 2020, according to the U.N. organization’s official data. Tedros said the true death toll is at least 20 million.

The WHO’s decision comes as the U.S. is set to end its national public health emergency on Thursday.

Tedros said there is still a risk that new variant could emerge and cause another surge in cases. He warned national governments against dismantling the systems they have built to fight the virus.

“This virus is here to stay. It’s still killing and it’s still changing,” he said.

But the WHO chief said the time has come for countries to transition from an emergency response to managing Covid like other infectious diseases. ...

“Covid-19 has been so much more than health crisis,” Tedros said. “It has caused severe economic upheaval, erasing trillions from GDP, disrupting travel and trade, shattering businesses and plunging millions into poverty,” he said.

“It has caused severe social upheaval with borders closed, movement restricted, schools shut and millions of people experiencing loneliness, isolation, anxiety and depression,” Tedros said.

More.

The pandemic wraps on May 11

 US Covid Case Count to Go Dark as Public Health Emergency Ends


(Bloomberg) -- The US government’s count of new Covid-19 cases has been dropping for months. Soon, it will disappear entirely. 

Thousands of Americans are still contracting the coronavirus each week. But when the public health emergency ends May 11, laboratories across the country will no longer be required to report Covid test results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That will eventually mean no more weekly infection, transmission and community-level numbers in CDC’s Covid Data Tracker. 

Concern about the pandemic is rapidly flagging as infection levels fall to those seen in the earliest months of the outbreak. The World Health Organization also moved to end its global health emergency Friday, lowering its alert level for the pandemic three years after the lethal disease was first seen in China. 

US infection data had already become increasingly unreliable as Americans began opting for at-home, rapid Covid tests — which most patients don’t report — rather than laboratory assays, like PCR. CDC will turn its attention to tracking severe Covid illness via hospital admissions, officials said on a call with reporters, while continuing to analyze wastewater and tests of international travelers to determine how the virus is spreading and evolving.

More.

Thursday, May 4, 2023

Billionaire says Florida too expensive for him

 THIEL: Moving to Florida from Silicon Valley Now Too Expensive...

Moderna's stock price is down 73% from its Aug 9, 2021 high of $484.47 as of this morning


 

 


LOL, Moderna's surprise quarterly profit plunged 97% per share amid collapsing vaccine demand, comes from Covid shot revenue deferred from 2022, first quarter sales tank 69%, CNBC says 30%

CNBC, here:

Moderna on Thursday blew past estimates for first-quarter earnings and revenue, posting a surprise quarterly profit, despite lower demand for Covid vaccines, its only marketable product.

The biotech company generated first-quarter sales of $1.9 billion, driven by Covid shot revenue deferred from 2022. That’s down more than 30% from the $6.1 billion it recorded in the same period a year ago amid a resurgence of Covid cases.

Moderna posted net income of $79 million, or 19 cents per share, for the quarter. That’s compared with $3.66 billion in net income, or $8.58 per share, reported during the same quarter last year.

Seeking Alpha got it right, noting the inventory write-downs of "excess and obsolete COVID-19 products" nobody wants:

 


I'll just put this here for the record in the event CNBC later corrects their reporting without saying so:


Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Besides their bad character, what do Trump and Obama have in common in 2009 and 2020?

 Trump and Obama signed off on the two most fiscally irresponsible periods in post-war history, and Biden two years in looks set to join them.

The Executive is supposed to be a check on irresponsible spending. But both Trump and Obama went right along with it instead of vetoing the outrageous spending of the periods.














What else do they have in common?

Two crises, both of which plunged the country into hysteria.

The Great Financial Crisis did not begin to end until March 2009 when the FASB signaled its intent to suspend mark-to-market rules. The stock market bottomed almost immediately, but as with all cases of mass hysteria it took time for the panic to pass as other sectors recovered "one by one". 

The Pandemic Crisis gripped the country in March 2020, sending millions home from work, stocks plunging, toilet paper into shortage, businesses into bankruptcy, and on and on. With just about everyone vaccinated who was going to be by the end of 2021, the country gradually started to come out of it in 2022, eschewing jabs, masks, and social distancing as it became clear that the Omicron variant was infecting tens of millions despite all those measures.

2020 was the single most fiscally irresponsible year in the post-war since 1953. Federal expenditures, bloated by panicked bailouts, outpaced tax revenues by a whopping 216%.

Only 2009 comes close, at 210%, the second worst year on record.

Third, not shown, was 2010 at 196%, and fourth, not shown, was 2021 at 176%, each a part of the respective crisis periods.











Do you know what else those two years share in common?

Spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives.

In 2009 and 2020 its Speaker just happened to be the same person, as she was in 2010 and 2021.












Nancy Pelosi owns the four most fiscally irresponsible years in the entire history of the post-war. Her two speakerships literally busted out all over. 


Tuesday, May 2, 2023

As usual the media and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, are portraying the House Republican bill which lifts the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion as a bill with "big spending cuts"

This is how NPR, who else?, frames the issue from the beginning:

The House of Representatives has narrowly approved a Republican bill to raise the debt limit. However, it ties the ability to raise that debt ceiling to big spending cuts. And this House bill rolls back several of President Biden's key policies.

The House Republican bill, now languishing in the Senate, rolls back spending levels to pre-COVID levels. That's not a spending cut. That's saying, as Biden himself says, the emergency is over.

If the emergency is over, the emergency spending should end, too.

Outlays in fiscal 2020 and 2021 ballooned because of the new pandemic spending. Deficits for just those two years soared to almost $6 trillion. Republicans seek to roll that spending back. Democrats want that spending to form the new baseline. If Democrats succeed, Katy bar the door. The national debt will absolutely explode.

NPR knows this. It just chooses to hide the facts about it all, how the pandemic spending created these massive deficits, and how that spending which flooded the economy with money contributed to the new inflation:

So it raises the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or through March of 2024, whichever comes first. It also sets spending levels for federal programs to those that were in place two years ago. It limits the growth of spending going forward to 1% annually. But as you said, it also targets a list of the president's policies. It repeals the president's student loan forgiveness program, which is tied up in the courts. It claws back unspent COVID relief money and rolls back key energy provisions that were in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also puts in place new work requirements for adults without children who receive federal assistance like food stamps or Medicaid.

Monday, May 1, 2023

Bank failure No. 3 of 2023: First Republic Bank of San Fran Freako, California

 

The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund will be about $13 billion. This is an estimate and the final cost will be determined when the FDIC terminates the receivership.

More.

Saturday, April 29, 2023

The price of gold of $20.64/ounce from 1913 adjusted for inflation to today

 $647.22


Sucka.

The minimum wage of $0.40/hour from 1938 adjusted for inflation to today

 $8.71


Cry more.

Biden's doing the same thing as Obama in making the 2020 crisis spending the baseline for his future spending proposals

 Obama did it in 2009 and Republicans acquiesced, running trillion dollar plus deficits for four straight years until Republicans enforced some fiscal discipline in Obama's second term.

The author below, a Republican, doesn't mention that.

Will Republicans acquiesce again?

If they do, the national debt will easily swell to in excess of $51 trillion by 2033, from $31 trillion at the end of 2022.

From the story, "Trillion-dollar deficits: Biden’s new normal":


The president and his White House have taken the 2020 COVID-19, one-time-only crisis budget as his administration’s working baseline, rather than the pre-Covid 2019 budget, which had a significant $4.4 trillion price tag.

In 2020, because of the pandemic, the budget jumped 47 percent to $6.5 trillion, as both Democrats and Republicans supported the need for emergency funding. That COVID funding was to sunset as the country returned to normal — as it did last year. Apparently, Biden decided to ignore that crucial point.

Friday, April 28, 2023

Latest inflation reads show entrenchment, Fed will have to go higher and stay higher for longer but Congress must cut spending and raise revenues

 The Fed can do only so much, but a Fed Funds Rate of 4.83 is hardly adequate for current conditions.

The fiscal side in this, however, has been completely ignored.

Outlays for 2020-2022 alone have topped $19 trillion vs. receipts south of $12 trillion.




Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Fauci: "So many people cannot be completely wrong"

Fewer than 19 million Americans completed the initial vaccine protocol in 2022. Fewer than 25 million received at least one dose.


FAUCI: "When you look around, nobody did great, except maybe one or two countries"


 


Fauci: "We also had a public-health system that we thought was really, really good. But it was really, really antiquated."

 


Wallace-Wells: "We had vaccines designed by the end of January 2020." Fauci: "Yes."

 


Fauci: "The gay community with H.I.V. is very, very different from the ultraright MAGA community with Covid. However, there is a bit of connection there."


 

Fauci: "We had to rely on conference calls in the middle of the night"

 



Suddenly in retirement Fauci is just another physician, not the embodiment of Science who presided over the deaths of 1.1 million Americans

Fauci's still in utter denial about the early timeline, and about the relative severity of the pandemic here in the United States vs. elsewhere.
 
The outcome in the US has been 3.6 times worse than in Norway, 6.02 times worse than in Japan. But Fauci, the former embodiment of The Science ™, has ZERO curiosity about why.
 
The vaccines were already designed by the end of January 2020 (really? sounds like a PLANDEMIC, uh oh), but Fauci behaved rationally at the time like we weren't going to have a global pandemic which would even require them?
 
Give me a break. That's astonishing.
 
The entire interview is full of dodgy shit.
 
The New York Times, here: 
 
“I’m a physician,” he told me in response to criticism that he had pushed the country too far. “That’s my identity. I’ve taken care of thousands of patients in one period of my life during the early years of H.I.V. I believe that I have seen as much or more suffering and death as anybody has in most careers. I don’t mean to seem preachy, but I don’t want to see people suffer and I don’t want to see people die."...
 
"Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per-capita basis we’ve done worse than virtually all other countries. And there’s no reason that a rich country like ours has to have 1.1 million deaths. Unacceptable."... 
 
"When you look around, nobody did great, except maybe one or two countries. Most everybody did poorly."... 
 
"If it took three years to get a vaccine, we would have had five million deaths here."... 
 
Wallace-Wells: Let’s talk about the vaccines. It was the fastest rollout in history, a miracle of modern medicine. But we had vaccines designed by the end of January 2020. The Phase II safety trials were completed by early July. Could we have accelerated the rollout from there and blunted that awful first winter surge? Could we do it faster in the future?
Fauci: Yes. The G7 talks about it: the hundred-day mission, to have distribution within a hundred days. Not that everybody gets vaccinated, but that you start doing it. Is that easy? No, it’s going to be really hard. Is it possible? I think so. ...
Wallace-Wells: But if you go back in time, if you put yourself in February 2020, you’re telling Helen Branswell,7 for instance, that this virus was low-risk and that you didn’t want to stake your credibility on what could be a false alarm. Do you wish you had said then more emphatically that this is a real, urgent threat and that we need to stand up our defenses immediately?
Fauci: Yeah, I think, retrospectively, we certainly should have done that. If you look at what we knew at the time, though — we didn’t know that in January. We were not fully appreciative of the fact that we were dealing with a highly, highly transmissible virus that was clearly spread by ways that were unprecedented and unexperienced by us. And so it fooled us in the beginning and confused us about the need for masks and the need for ventilation and the need for inhibition of social interaction.


 

Saturday, April 22, 2023

Climate Update for KGRR: 1Q2023

 Climate Update for KGRR: 1Q2023 since 1892

 



 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Average temperature, mean:  27.5F.
Average temperature, actual:  32.7F; Anomaly: 19%.
Compare 2012 actual: 37.4F; Anomaly 36%.
January 2023 was the fifth warmest January on record by average temperature.
February was the thirteenth warmest February on record by average temperature.
The March average temperature anomaly was comparatively insignificant at 3.8%.

Heating degree days, mean: 3354.
Heating degree days, actual: 2880; Anomaly: 14%.
Compare 2012: 2505 actual; Anomaly: 25%.
January ranked fifth for fewest HDD in January.
February ranked tenth for fewest HDD in February.
The March heating degree day anomaly was comparatively insignificant at 4.4%. 

Snowfall, mean: 40.8".
Snowfall, actual: 42.5".
March 2023 was the fourth snowiest March on record with 23.3".