Better in their words…

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

💊 Ars Technica ran a story last week headlined, “Pfizer hikes price of COVID antiviral Paxlovid from $530 to nearly $1,400.” The sub-headline piled on the pharma giant’s problems: “The price hike is expected to exacerbate already poor uptake of the drug.”

Poor uptake! You don’t say. Is it maybe because when you take Paxlovid you get covid twice?

The story and the linked transcript from this Monday’s investor call held some interesting nuggets. Paxlovid will be freely provided by the US government through the end of the year, after which desperate medical fetishists will be forced to buy their own supply. There were no estimates yet of the street price addicts might pay for contraband Paxlovid.

Pfizer’s Comirnaty jab — the “vaccine” — also transitioned from government-supplied to “commercialized” last month, which probably explains Pfizer’s tanking stock price more than anything else. The E.U. has a worse contract than we do, and will be obligated to buy the hazardous drug through 2026.

It might just be me, but Albert Bourla seemed a tad frustrated with those devilish anti-vaxxers during his Monday investor call:

BOURLA: “We have come through the period of fear that defined the early days of COVID, where everybody wanted to be vaccinated very quickly. In fact, we are right now in the middle of COVID fatigue where everyone wants to forget about the disease, and we are experiencing a peak of anti-vaccination rhetoric. Therefore, we believe those who are getting vaccines and medicines in the current environment are people who believe in the value of protection and treatment and will continue this behavior in the years to come.”

Well. At least he admitted that fear sold his unsafe and ineffective snake oil. More importantly, let’s hope the anti-vaccine rhetoric has not actually peaked yet.  It’s not peaking anytime soon if I have anything to do with it.

Are you in?

💉The UK Independent ran a story this month headlined, “‘World leading’ scientist dies aged 29 after ‘pulled muscle’ turned out to be rare cancer.” Kirsty Smitten, 29, was a real expert by any definition (except corporate media’s) and already had Nobel-level breakthroughs to her credit. A Forbes “30 under 30” and Young Entrepreneur of the Year, now Kirsty is gone forever, the victim of a sudden, unexpected, ultra-rare, turbo heart cancer.

Kirsty discovered the first new class of antibiotics in half a century, which are now being used to treat multi-drug resistant bacteria and save countless lives. She was called “world-leading,” “groundbreaking,” and a “top scientist.” Ironically, she studied bacteria. Now she will make no more breakthroughs. She will not lead the world. She will not develop any more lifesaving technologies.

If she does win the Nobel, it will be awarded posthumously.

Just last year, Kirsty was at the peak of her well-being. She played hockey and football once or twice a day. She had no health problems, no fatigue, and was busy traveling around the globe speaking at scientific conferences. Then one night in November she woke up with chest pain. In the ER the next morning, doctors advised she take codeine for a pulled muscle. A health professional, she wisely insisted on more tests, and the CT scan showed a large six-centimeter tumor growing in her right cardiac atrium.

A quote — not further explained by media — evidenced that Kirsty had also experienced a blood clot problem. She said, “But then they did a CT scan for my blood clot and found a 6cm tumour in my heart, which, obviously, was a bit of a shock, because I had no other symptoms prior to that.” None of the articles said anything else about her blood clot. But she clearly had a blood clot and a heart tumor.

Kirsty’s cancer is called cardiac angiosarcoma, and is so rare her surgeon had never seen it before. The disease is so rare that it took three months for doctors to properly diagnose Kirsty. Doctors only gave her a 28% chance of living more than 12 months. Kirsty started emergency chemotherapy, kept on working, and began advocating for other people with cardiac-angiosarcoma.

“To get any kind of growth in your heart is very rare because your heart cells don’t replicate after a certain age,” Kirsty explained. “I thought I was going to have kids and a family and I’ve been told I’ve got seven months to live. I had to have emergency chemotherapy and I didn’t have a chance to freeze my eggs. So it’s been a bit of a tough couple of months,” the 29-year-old said shortly before she died.

Who knows what other award-winning medical technologies Kirsty might have developed had she lived?

Regarding the jabs, it seems Kirsty cleaned up her social media, but I did find one thought-provoking bit of evidence:

Mayo Clinic’s website explains that “Angiosarcoma happens when cells in the lining of a blood vessel or lymph vessel develop changes in their DNA.” Weird. What could cause those cells DNA to change?

Described as an ultra-rare “one in 20 million” cancer, GoFundMe currently returns many active hits for “angiosarcoma.” Tragically, it includes many young people.

And that’s just the first page of many. So.

💉 The UK Sun ran a story Friday headlined, “Star of ‘The Crown’ and ‘Drop The Dead Donkey’ dies at 66 after cancer battle.”

British Tony award nominee and acclaimed stage and screen actress Haydn Gwynne, 66, died Friday “after a recent diagnosis of cancer.”

How recent? Haydn just earned a Bafta and Tony Award nomination for her current role in ‘Billy Elliot the Musical’ on the West End. Haydn played the titular character’s dance teacher, and was scheduled to appear in the production as late as last month, in September. But the actress was forced to pull out of the show because of her new cancer diagnosis.

Her new turbo cancer diagnosis.

💉 The UK Sun ran another SADS story Friday, this one headlined “Bodybuilder Raechelle Chase dies suddenly leaving behind 5 children as heartbroken daughter says mum ‘inspired millions’.”

Bodybuilder, fitness influencer, and mother of five Raechelle Chase, 44, of New Zealand, died mysteriously earlier this month from an unknown or undisclosed reason, but it happened suddenly and unexpectedly.  There have been a lot of sudden bodybuilder deaths over the last two years.

As the headline says, Raechelle had five kids, including seven-year-old twins. Raechelle was a single mom, having divorced her husband in 2015, being shocked to find him arrested and jailed for drug-related crimes.

Her surviving kids are in a tough spot, to say the least.

It’s hard to say about the shot. The influencer’s social media was partially locked down, and she seems to have always been careful to avoid politics. On her Facebook I found two very-mild anti-mandate posts that she “liked,” one in 2021 and one in 2022. But New Zealand had one of the most draconian and oppressive jab mandates in the world, especially for travel.

Raechelle also visited her mother in the hospital (for MS and pneumonia) in early 2022 during extreme lockdowns. Without other evidence, it seems reasonable that she was forced to get the jabs for work, travel (for work), and to see her mom.

We pray diligently for Raechelle’s children that they might soon find peace, comfort, and stability.

🔥 Stupid conservatives always claimed assisted suicide for incurable illnesses was a slippery slope, but what do they know? That was just typical rightwing fear-mongering nonsense. Pay no attention to the UK Daily Mail, which ran a story Thursday headlined “Canada to legalize medically assisted dying for drug addicts.”

Canada’s so-called “MAiD” program (Medically Assisted Dying), which began with a 2016 Canadian Supreme Court decision allowing the procedure only for terminal and irreversible illness, is now set to expand even more. Beginning in March, people with mental illness diagnoses and those who say they are addicted to drugs can obtain a free, government-funded execution.

In other words, people who by definition are not in their right minds can ask the Canadian government to kill them, and the government will happily oblige. Right over here, sir.

Why on Earth would the Canadians do this?  What moral, ethical, or even logical reasoning could possibly justify killing people who aren’t in their right minds? The inexplicable answer is: fairness:

Dr. David Martell, physician lead for Addictions Medicine at Nova Scotia Health, told VICE News: “I don’t think it’s fair, and the government doesn’t think it’s fair, to exclude people from eligibility because their medical disorder or their suffering is related to a mental illness.

“As a subset of that, it’s not fair to exclude people from eligibility purely because their mental disorder might either partly or in full be a substance use disorder. It has to do with treating people equally.”

“Fairness” is not an actual reason to capable of justifying assisted suicide. Fairness is a child’s concept. Adults know that life isn’t fair, and the word “fairness” escapes useful definition.

A recent Reuters article quoted a 47 year-old woman with anorexia who looks forward to the law’s expansion so that she can die from MAiD. Why treat the anorexia when you can just kill her?

In 2021 — the year of covid — MAiD was the seventh leading cause of death in Canada, beating liver disease, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, and Alzheimer’s. After the law’s latest expansion, it will almost certainly become a top five cause of death, if it isn’t already (2022 data isn’t available yet).

Even more ironically, Canada legalized “small amounts” of hard drugs in February of this year. So they get you coming and going.

🚀 Day 15 Middle East War Update.

💣 The Associated Press ran a perfectly predictable story yesterday headlined, “Biden is dangling border security money to try to get billions more for Israel and Ukraine.”

Why they mention Israel first is anyone’s guess, since the package is mostly aimed at Ukraine. The gist is, Biden’s $106 billion proposed Ukraine/Israel funding package would include $14 billion in money earmarked for “U.S. border security.” Of course, we’ve also learned that the majority of that money will be earmarked for the big blue cities, to help them take care of even more illegal migrants.

It’s becoming less and less clear why Biden has an open-border policy to begin with. Anger over the open border is becoming increasingly bipartisan. According to the AP, even democrats aren’t happy:

Democratic leaders at both the state and local level are begging for federal assistance to help care for migrant families living in squalid shelters and sleeping in police stations. Republicans are loudly critical of Biden’s border policies as too lax. And Congress has not passed an immigration overhaul in decades.

New York City alone is expecting to spend more than $5 billion on the issue by the end of the budget year. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said the money was “urgently needed for states like Massachusetts that are experiencing historic surges in migrant arrivals, and we appreciate the Biden administration’s acknowledgement that these funds need to be distributed more equitably.”

Republicans — still Speaker-less — are witting to Biden’s border sleight-of-hand:

After a classified briefing with administration officials on Wednesday, Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said he’d be inclined to support the money for Israel and Ukraine as long as there was a strong border security component. “But it’s got to be designed to secure the border, not to facilitate travel through the border,” he said. Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn posted online Friday that … “No more money should be spent simply to facilitate current border policy.”

I’d bet that Biden would give an alert, intelligible speech before I would bet any Biden aid package would include anything meaningful for border enforcement. So, absent a Speaker and a proposed package that actually addresses border problems, the “aid package” is dead in the water.

Thank goodness.

📈 Yesterday, in similar vein, the Daily Signal ran a story headlined, “Record Set as Over 3M Illegal Aliens Found at US Borders in Year.”

It’s a new Biden record! It’s just the bad kind of record. For the first time ever in history, U.S. border agents documented encounters with over 3.2 million illegal aliens on America’s borders in a single fiscal year, a number greater than the combined populations of Hawaii, Alaska, and Vermont.

And those are just the ones that Border Patrol was able to process. Data from the House Judiciary Committee released earlier this month noted that 1.7 million “known gotaways” have successfully evaded Border Patrol agents and entered the United States since Biden took office, in addition to an even larger number of documented illegals released into America by CBP.

Yet the majority of media discussion continues to focus on other countries’ borders.  Maybe we should start asking Ukrainians to give us money, to help stop the invasion at the U.S.’s border. America needs your help! After all, if America falls, then the world will also fall — especially Ukraine. Ukrainians should put little U.S. flags in their bio pics to show support, and apply “I stand with America” bumper stickers to their cars.

It’s a great idea, don’t you think? I’m actually considering doing it.

💣 The Associated Press joined the IDF, the US intelligence agencies, and the BBC yesterday when it ran a story headlined, “AP visual analysis: Rocket from Gaza appeared to go astray, likely caused deadly hospital explosion.”

Remember, the AP initially reported that an Israeli missile destroyed Hamas General Hospital* and killed 500 civilians. So it’s not exactly in the tank for Israel or anything. It ran a long feature yesterday reporting that after analyzing over a dozen videos from the moments before, during and after the hospital explosion, as well as satellite imagery and photos. The AP concluded a rocket that broke up in the air and fell toward the hospital was fired from within Palestinian territory, and that the subsequent explosion was most likely caused by part of that rocket crashing into the parking lot.

(* the hospital’s real name is al-Ahli Arab Hospital.)

The videos the AP used were sourced from news broadcasts, security cameras, and social media posts, with the key video being an Al Jazeera live broadcast from Gaza at the time of the explosion. In the clip, as a correspondent speaks, the camera pans to zoom in on a volley of rockets being fired from the nearby ground. One of the rockets appears to veer from the others, away from the distant lights of Israel and back toward a darkened Gaza City, where electricity had largely been cut.

The camera followed the light from the rocket’s tail as it arched  upwards into the sky and veered toward the left. Suddenly, the rocket seemed to fragment apart, and a piece appeared to break off and fall downwards. Another fragment shot sharply up and to the right, blazing before exploding in a fireworks-like flash and leaving a trail of sparks.

A small explosion was then seen on the ground in the distance, followed two seconds later by a much larger blast closer to the camera. The time stamp at the bottom of the live broadcast read 6:59 p.m. Gaza time — the exact time of the explosion at Hamas Hospital.

“From the video evidence that I have seen, it’s very clear that the rockets came from within Gaza,” said Andrea Richardson, a UCal Berkeley human rights lawyer and experienced war crimes investigator who has worked in the Middle East. She added that the timing of the rocket launch, the explosion, and the first reports that the hospital had been hit also confirm the sequence of events.

If you ‘re interested in this story, the AP, perhaps chagrined by its earlier fake news story, has assembled virtually all the available video evidence and added maps and commentary by various professionals to whom it showed the materials. It might be embarrassed but you wouldn’t know it; the news agency did not apologize or even “correct” its initial reporting. Reporting that, along with similar hot takes by other sources, inflamed worldwide protests, cause embassies to burn, and led to a number of civilian casualties.

It  never made sense to me that Israel would deliberately target the hospital and then immediately deny it. Why? What would be the motive? Or, if the hospital was accidentally hit by a stray Israeli missile, then it would just be a tragic accident and not a war crime. Certainly no one is accusing Hamas of war crimes for accidentally blowing up a hospital.

💣 Last week, after Biden announced a $100 million “aid package” for Palestinian civilians in Gaza, CNN interviewed Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer and asked him the rather obvious question, “how will the U.S. ensure none of the $100 million ends up in the hands of Hamas?”

Finer’s answer, bless his heart, was: We trust Hamas. “We believe there is an understanding,” Finer explained.

CLIP: Jon Finer tries to sell ridiculous lie to CNN audience (1:23).

An understanding! Not a “contract,” a “handshake deal,” or even an “agreement.” They just sort of nodded at each other and the State Department got the impression that everyone was on the same page, and none of the $100 million would be used for weapons, terrorism, or doing war. That’s just how the Biden Administration rolls these days.

At least Jon was wearing a suit and tie, and not a hoodied gym outfit or a dress with pearls. So I guess that’s something.

Have a blessed Sunday! And thank you for your continuing loyal support. Roll on back here tomorrow morning for another exciting wartime roundup.

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