“The emphasis today has ceased to be upon the joys of Christ’s coming or upon the peace and wonder of possessing Him. Now the stress is on what it cost Our Lord to atone for the sins of men, on how much everyone needs His atoning death, and on what everyone can do to have a part in atoning for sin.Every Christian without exception must enter into the warfare between Christ and Satan — the warfare that begins to be dramatized and lived anew in these weeks.” https://tridentine-mass.blogspot.com/2021/01/septuagesima-sunday-saint-john-bosco.html
The following is an excerpt from a longer essay on the liturgical/historical aspects of the season, written by a priest of the FSSP who is known to me. Please pray for him.
Themes: The season of Septuagesima is set aside as a season of preparation for Lent and for the reception of ashes on Ash Wednesday. We are invited by the Liturgy to contemplate the misery of fallen humanity and the fatal consequences of original and actual sin. The Fall (original sin), the Flood (resulting from the malice of actual sin), and the Sacrifice of Melchisedech (a foreshadowing of the Sacrifice of Christ by which He worked our salvation from sin) are presented in the Matins readings over the course of the season. The Gospels and Epistles of the Sundays also touch on the themes of the Passion, salvation, and the necessity of penance. The season also serves as a transition period from the joys of Christmastide to the austerities of Lent.
The numerical value associated with the name of this season, 70, brings to mind the 70 years of exile the Hebrews endured in Babylon. This serves as a reminder that we, too, are living exiled from our heavenly home and invites us to sever our inordinate attachments to the things of this world so that we can seek after those of our true Homeland.
This multiple of 7 also calls to mind the Seven Ages of the World which, according to the ancient Christian tradition, are as follows:
1. The time from the creation of Adam to Noah
2. The time from Noah and the renovation of the earth by the flood to the calling of Abraham
3. The time from Abraham to Moses
4. The period between Moses and David
5. The years which passed between David’s reign and the captivity of Babylon, inclusively
6. The return of the Jews to Jerusalem to the birth and life of Our Savior
7. From Christ’s Resurrection to His Second Coming
The 8th and Final Age is that which follows the General Resurrection and the Last Judgement.
Length of Septuagesima: 17 days including Sundays.
Shrovetide and Forty Hours: “Shrovetide” refers to the three last three days of Septuagesima (Quinquagesima Sunday and the following Monday and Tuesday). The English terms “shrove” and “Shrovetide” come from the verb “to shrive,” which means “to hear confessions.” It was a traditional practice to confess one’s sins before the start of Lent. These are also the final days of Carnival (derived from the Latin “carnem levare,” “taking away of flesh/meat”). Tuesday of Shrovetide, Shrove Tuesday, is also called “Mardi Gras” (French for “Fat Tuesday”) or “Pancake Tuesday” because fats, eggs, and butter in the house had to be used up before Lent began (when the Lenten fasting laws were stricter), and making pancakes or waffles was a good way to do it (this also helps explain the practice of the Easter egg). Unfortunately, the innocent merrymaking kept during this time before entering the exercises of Lent was corrupted by a general excess. In order to provide a pious alternative and to make reparation for these excesses, the Church instituted for this time the Forty Hours Devotion (forty hours of Eucharistic Exposition and Adoration).
Gloria?: Only on feast days. The intermittent absence of the Gloria is a foretaste of its prolonged absence during Lent.
Alleluia?: At the conclusion of First Vespers of Septuagesima Sunday (the Saturday night before), the Easter Benedicamus with double Alleluia is Sung.
After this, the Alleluia will not be heard again in the Liturgy until the Easter Vigil. In some places an Alleluia banner is buried on this day and then dug up on Holy Saturday.
The absence of the Alleluia, which is a heavenly word, serves as a striking reminder that we are in a land of exile and should set our hearts on our heavenly home and that, were it not for the Sacrifice of Christ, which will be solemnly commemorated during Holy Week, the gates of Heaven would, due to sin, still be closed to us. The Alleluia in the Mass is replaced by the Tract and in the opening of the Office by “Laus tibi, Domine, Rex æterne gloriæ! / Praise be to Thee O Lord King of eternal glory!”
Liturgical Color: Violet, as a preparation for Lent, is the color of the season.
Organ and Flowers?: Yes, they are a remnant and reminder of our Christmas joy.
Merck will now focus instead on two therapeutic drugs, termed MK-7110 and MK-4482. MK-7110 allegedly has a “greater than 50 percent reduction in the risk of death or respiratory failure in patients hospitalized with moderate to severe COVID-19,” although full results are not yet published.The company is to receive around $356 million from the U.S. government as part of Operation Warp Speed in order to manufacture 60,000-100,000 doses of the two drugs until June 30, 2021.https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/merck-stops-developing-covid-vaccine-better-immunity-found-through-natural-infection
I mean, if the other vaccines work (Pfizer/Moderna), why would anyone be anticipating a surge in severe patient outcomes this summer? Doesn’t that seem counterintuitive? Why would a company place all their focus on treatment drugs for a disease that is about to be wiped out? What did Merck learn during their own vaccine trials that led them to make the switch, storming toward the betting window like Doyle Lonnegan when he found out Lucky Dan was going to run second…
This. Is. Why. I stumbled across the following last summer, when President Trump was promising a vaccine before the election. If you want to understand how and why all previous attempts at a coronavirus vaccine have failed, and failed spectacularly, read this. The vaccines have a history in causing a supercharged adverse reaction… not when injected, but down the road when the subject encounters the wild virus. It’s not just that the vaccines don’t work, it’s that they cause harm. One of the key terms you will want to research is antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE).
Would you be surprised to learn that coronavirus vaccines have a tendency to kill the patient?
Originally posted on
Imagine my shock to learn that there is a significant risk of worsened illness or higher mortality for vaccines for several past strains of coronavirus, including RSV, SARS, and feline coronavirus. The vaccines end up enhancing the infection by increasing the body’s uptake of the pathogen. It’s almost as if they picked a coronavirus on purpose. The following article is three nine months old, so bear that in mind, but all of the facts remain relevant. Full annotation at the source link.
As they race to devise a vaccine, researchers are trying to ensure that their candidates don’t spur a counterproductive, even dangerous, immune system reaction known as immune enhancement.
The teams of researchers scrambling to develop a coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine clearly face some big challenges, both scientific and logistical. One of the most pressing: understanding how the immune system interacts not only with the pathogen but with the vaccine itself—crucial insights when attempting to develop a safe and effective vaccine.
Researchers need to understand in particular whether the vaccine causes the same types of immune system malfunctions that have been observed in past vaccine development. Since the 1960s, tests of vaccine candidates for diseases such as dengue, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) have shown a paradoxical phenomenon: Some animals or people who received the vaccine and were later exposed to the virus developed more severe disease than those who had not been vaccinated (1). The vaccine-primed immune system, in certain cases, seemed to launch a shoddy response to the natural infection. “That is something we want to avoid,” says Kanta Subbarao, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza in Melbourne, Australia.
This immune backfiring, or so-called immune enhancement, may manifest in different ways such as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE),a process in which a virus leverages antibodies to aid infection; or cell-based enhancement, a category that includes allergic inflammation caused by Th2 immunopathology. In some cases, the enhancement processes might overlap. Scientific debate is underway as to which, if any, of these phenomena—for which exact mechanisms remain unclear—could be at play with the novel coronavirus and just how they might affect the success of vaccine candidates.
Some researchers argue that although ADE has received the most attention to date, it is less likely than the other immune enhancement pathways to cause a dysregulated response to COVID-19, given what is known about the epidemiology of the virus and its behavior in the human body. “There is the potential for ADE, but the bigger problem is probably Th2 immunopathology,” says Ralph Baric, an epidemiologist and expert in coronaviruses—named for the crown-shaped spike they use to enter human cells—at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In previous studies of SARS, aged mice were found to have particularly high risks of life-threatening Th2 immunopathology (2). Baric expresses his concern about what that might mean for use of a COVID-19 vaccine in elderly people. “Of course, the elderly are our most vulnerable population,” he adds.
Experts generally agree that animal experiments and human clinical trials of candidate vaccines for COVID-19, which is caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), should include a careful assessment of possible immune complications before releasing the vaccine to the public. If any of the mechanisms under investigation are indeed involved, they say, the resulting risks are real. “You really have to test a vaccine carefully,” says Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health in Boston, MA, “and not just roll it out because people are clamoring for it with an epidemic underway.”
Upwards of 80% of patients who contract COVID-19 develop only mild flu-like symptoms. “The immune system fights off the virus and people might hardly notice,” says Darrell Ricke, a researcher with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Bioengineering Systems and Technologies Group in Lexington, MA, who posted a preprint in March on the possible COVID-19 vaccine risks (3). “But there seems to be a tipping point: Some individuals appear equally healthy yet can progress to a more severe disease.”
Ricke points to ADE as a potential explanation for this variability. The phenomenon has been reported in some tissue culture and animal studies of HIV, influenza, and SARS. But it is best known for its influence on the immune response to the dengue virus. If a person is infected with one of dengue’s four serotypes, their immune system should confer lifelong protection against that serotype. But as researchers have discovered, if that person is later infected by a different dengue serotype, then they can develop a severe and potentially deadly illness. In fact, according to one study in the 1980s, more severe responses were found to be 15 to 80 times more likely in secondary dengue infections than in primary infections (4). Instead of the antibodies neutralizing encountered dengue viral proteins, they enhance uptake of the virus. The back end of the antibody binds to macrophages, a type of white blood cell, and helps the virus enter those cells and accelerate viral replication.
ADE has posed a similar challenge in the creation of vaccines for infections including dengue and a cat coronavirus, feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV). In one study, cats vaccinated against FIPV got sicker than cats left unvaccinated (5). Again, the virus-specific antibody increased the virus uptake by macrophages.
…
Barney Graham, deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in Bethesda, MD, which is collaborating with the Cambridge, MA-based biotech Moderna on a COVID-19 vaccine candidate, also questioned the role of ADE… Graham emphasizes alternative ways in which a vaccine could potentially induce more serious COVID-19 infections: Th2 immunopathology, in which a faulty T cell response triggers allergic inflammation, and poorly functional antibodies that form immune complexes, activating the complement system and potentially damaging the airways.
Both processes were at play as an unfortunate situation unfolded in the 1960s, according to Graham. Researchers at the time were pursuing a vaccine against RSV, the leading cause of severe respiratory illness in infants. In trials of one vaccine candidate, several children who received the vaccine developed a serious illness when infected with the natural virus (7). Two toddlers died. In this case, researchers noticed severe damage and the unexpected presence of lots of neutrophils and eosinophils, both immune cells, in the children’s lung tissue. A similar inflammatory response was seen in animal models of RSV, in which cytokines, a type of immune cell, had invaded and damaged tissue.
“That really killed RSV vaccines for a generation,” says Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX. After more than 50 years of further study, a candidate RSV vaccine is finally back in clinical trials.
When SARS, also a coronavirus, appeared in China and spread globally nearly two decades ago, Hotez was among researchers who began investigating a potential vaccine. In early tests of his candidate, he witnessed how immune cells of vaccinated animals attacked lung tissue, in much the same way that the RSV vaccine had resulted in immune cells attacking kids’ lungs.
Moderna’s mRNA vaccine candidate has progressed at unprecedented speed, thanks in large part to China’s January release of the genetic sequence of the virus. A phase 1 clinical trial began on March 16 in Seattle, WA. “We need to get some answers by next winter so we can at least be more prepared for the winter of 2021–2022,” adds Graham.
But immune enhancement concerns linger. Stanley Perlman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, agrees that a good T cell response should sidestep enhancement concerns. He is also part of a special committee convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) to address immune enhancement, which they refer to as vaccine enhancement. The committee now aims to define what exactly this enhancement means, what the relevant issues are for a COVID-19 vaccine, and what to do with that information, notes Perlman. A subgroup of the committee is expected to produce a summary report within a few months.
…
Vaccine experts have underscored the need to avoid mistakes from the past, such as the halting of SARS vaccine development. More coronaviruses are likely waiting in wild bats, primates, and rodents, ready to make the jump to humans. “Ecological disruption really increases the odds that we might encounter a pathogen that we’ve never seen before but grows in us just fine,” says Rasmussen.
The normal way Joe Basement shorts a stock is to “borrow” the shares and sell them into the market, betting that the stock will fall, and he will be able to buy the shares back for cheaper, before he has to return them. There is nothing wrong with this, and in fact is part of a healthy market. Putting on a short squeeze (betting against the short), as we have seen the past few days, is also perfectly fine, so long as motives are out in the open, no deception/manipulation.
But we do have a problem. You see, Big Hedge gets to play by a different set of rules. Big Hedge is allowed to naked short, which means they can sell the shares into the market without acquiring them first. You can imagine how this could become problematic? It means that the short float (numbers of shares shorted) can become disconnected from the reality of total shares outstanding. Denninger:
If you want to short a stock you are supposed to first borrow it. That is, ordinary people cannot sell what they don’t have, so if you wish to short you must first borrow that which you want to sell. This is one of the ways brokers make money; they keep all the stock their customers have in “street name” and keep track of who has what. They can (and if supply is limited do) charge you to borrow that stock. There’s nothing wrong with this, provided the stock borrowed is real. It’s one of the things you agree to allow if you have a margin account; as part of the “price” of that privilege the broker can loan your stock to others for the purpose of shorting it. However, since you own it if you demand it back because you wish to sell it the broker either has to find some other set of shares to replace what he lent out of yours or the short-seller is forcibly bought-in at the market because they have to return your shares. If that causes to take a loss, tough crap.
Yes, I’ve been forcibly bought-in before. It’s a risk of the game.
There is an exception to this rule: If you are a market maker then you can short naked, that is, without borrowing first. Why? Because a market maker’s job is, as the name implies, to make the market — that is, to take the other side of whatever the customer wants to do. If I want to be long something in order to do it someone else has to sell it. Now in the physical security market this is easy; there either is or is not what I want to buy out there on the sheet offered by someone else. But in the options market there is no physical security; the entirety of it is synthetic. This means if someone wishes to buy a CALL someone else has to sell one. The MM’s job is to, when necessary, be that other person.
Well, that’s dangerous because naked short options positions are obligations to deliver.
Doctor Tells NBC Americans Should Consider Wearing FOUR Face Masks
Doctor Scott Segal told NBC News that Americans should consider wearing FOUR face masks if they want the most effective protection against spreading COVID-19.
Yes, really.
As we highlighted yesterday, Dr. Fauci advised Americans to begin wearing two masks, saying that it “makes common sense” for more than one layer to be more effective.
However, Fauci was outdone by researchers at Virginia Tech, who said that two face masks only provide 50-75% efficacy and that three masks should be worn to achieve 90% effectiveness.
But why stop at 90 per cent?
According to Dr. Scott Segal, chair of anesthesiology at Wake Forest Baptist Health in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, even that may not be enough.
“If you put three or four masks on, it’s going to filter better because it’s more layers of cloth,” Segal told NBC News.
$370 intraday swing. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. If you don’t understand how short selling works, and how a squeeze on said short works, this chart is a great lesson. But that intraday isn’t the only thing I had never seen before.
It was all fun and games (and legal) until Robinhood unilaterally halted trading of GME for their clients, while the market remained totally open. All the other daytrading brokers (TD, Schwab, etc) followed suit. Basement traders could sell, but couldn’t buy, while the big boys were unrestricted. The free market ended in that moment. Stock peaked at $483, then started to plummet, to the squealing delight of the big hedges who had been burning through capital like Hunter Biden burning through hookers and blow.
As bad as this was, it got worse. As they rode it down like a rented three-legged donkey, they started allowing buying again, but only to close out your position IF YOU WERE ALREADY SHORT. I can’t believe I am typing this.
As bad as this was, it got still worse. At 11:25a.m., as the stock hit the intraday low of $117, Robinhood said “hold my beer” to itself and began arbitrarily selling their clients’ positions without their permission.
Wow, just wow.
I have been out of the market since 2011. I have never regretted it.
Bill just can’t believe what people are saying about him and Tony. All the buzz and exposing of truth, and the social media failing to censor… these “really evil theories”… how dare you!
0:48… “We are going to need to get educated about this.. understand what should have we done to minimize this?”
LONDON (Reuters) – Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates says he has been taken aback by the volume of “crazy” and “evil” conspiracy theories about him spreading on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, but said on Wednesday he would like to explore what is behind them.
In an interview with Reuters, Gates said the millions of online posts and “crazy conspiracy theories” about him and about top U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci had likely taken hold in part because of the combination of a frightening viral pandemic and the rise of social media.
“Nobody would have predicted that I and Dr. Fauci would be so prominent in these really evil theories,” Gates said.
Facebook has hired Roy Austin, former Obama administration official and a member of President Joe Biden’s transition team, as the social media company’s vice president of Civil Rights and deputy general counsel.
Austin used to serve as civil rights prosecutor and supervisor in the Department of Justice (DOJ) before becoming a deputy assistant to President Barack Obama for the Office of Urban Affairs, Justice and Opportunity in 2014. In 2017, he went into private practice as a criminal defense and civil rights attorney at Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis. In November, Biden named him as one of the volunteers on the Agency Review Team for the DOJ in his transition. It’s not clear what will be Austin’s specific responsibilities at Facebook. The company didn’t respond to a request for further details and an attempt to reach Austin for comment was unsuccessful.
Austin’s appointment underscores the closeness of Facebook to the Biden administration.
You have to admit, the malarkey currently on display in the District feels a lot like the shenanigans of Feb-Mar 2013 in Rome. The similarities are striking, even though the timeline is a little off. Just saying.
Vatican:
Pope fails to officially renounce his office
Establishment of faux office of Pope Emeritus
Illegal conclave, its outcome illegally predetermined, illegally elects fraud (anti)pope, who then usurps
“Universal Peaceful Acceptance”
USA:
Illegal election, its outcome illegally predetermined, illegally elects fraud President, who then usurps
President fails to officially concede his office
Universal peaceful acceptance
Establishment of faux Office of the Former President
A few days ago, one of my brothers, a retired lawyer, sent me a message that asked, “So is Trump still president?”
Since the phrasing of the question implied the answer was neither simple nor straightforward, I gave the answer serious thought, from every angle I could think of, and came up with the following.
Because of unprecedented anomalies that haven’t been sufficiently resolved regarding the Nov. 3 election, there is still some question as to the election’s outcome. Among the factors still at play are these:
The fact that on Nov. 3, several swing states conducted elections that were statutorily unlawful, according to the evidence (for example, large numbers of absentee and mail-in ballots were counted without being properly scrutinized as required by law, and there were enough of these unlawfully-counted ballots to turn a decisive victory for Trump in those states into a narrow alleged win for Biden without evidence of validity), yet these elections were certified on Dec.14 as lawful.[1]
The refusal by the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 11 even to consider evidence of the above fact (dismissing out of hand the Texas case, which challenged four states’ certifications, with the Court arguing that the people of Texas had no legitimate interest in the legality of other states’ presidential elections).
The release by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to Trump and Congress on Jan. 7 of the much-awaited Assessment of Foreign Interference in the 2020 Election, in which DNI Ratcliffe found that, based on available intelligence, “the People’s Republic of China sought to influence the 2020 U.S. federal elections”—a fact that gave Trump extensive authority under Executive Order 13848 to sanction China, freeze property, take needed remedial action, and punish American and Chinese perpetrators for their unlawful interference. (Unfortunately, by then, Congress had already awarded the election to Biden on Jan. 6.)
The suppression by the media and Big Tech of undisputed evidence found on the hard drive of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden (which he’d left in the legal possession of a repair shop owner after failing to reclaim it) that proved the entire Biden family—including Joe, Hunter, and others—were engaged in an unlawful scheme to sell influence to China and other countries for millions of dollars, making them, in the words of former federal prosecutor Joe DiGenova (go to 16:35), guilty of a “major kickback scheme,” “money laundering [of funds] coming in from foreign sources,” “mail fraud,” “wire fraud,” and “a criminal enterprise [that involves] RICO violations.” News of the laptop was first broken by the New York Post on Oct. 14 and was immediately throttled by Facebook and blocked by Twitter, which locked the Post’s entire account until Oct. 30 and continued to suppress the laptop story until after the election. Other media followed suit in censoring news of the laptop. Following the Nov. 3 election, a McLaughlin poll revealed that 4.6% of Biden voters say they would not have voted for Biden had they known about the laptop. It can reasonably be said that Big Tech and the media stole the election.
The belated second impeachment of Trump on Jan. 13 for inciting the leftist-led “insurrection” at the Capitol a week earlier, impeachment that would appear to violate the Constitution (see Art. 1, Sect. 3, Cl. 6-7, with its stipulation that only a sitting president can be tried for impeachment). The trial of Trump by the Democrat-controlled Senate is set to begin Feb. 9 .
And other related issues that have caused 79% of Trump voters (and nearly a third of Democrats) to believe the election was stolen by the Democrats—in direct violation of the vital principle in the Declaration of Independence that “to secure these [unalienable] rights [of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it”—meaning that the Biden presidency is illegitimate and subject to lawful correction, in harmony with constitutional requirements that have been blatantly disregarded by the courts, the “Deep State” establishment, corrupt state governments, the rich and powerful, and other players, including at least one foreign government, China, which happens to be the greatest current threat to America’s security and sovereignty, according to DNI Ratcliffe.
It’s possible that all of the above issues may be conclusively resolved once the Senate convenes the week of Feb. 9 to try Trump. This trial—despite its disputed legitimacy—will offer Trump’s lawyers a public opportunity to defend him against a continual stream of unfounded information from the media, Big Tech, the Democratic Party, and others relating to the election, as well as to publicly present the mounting evidence of deliberate theft of the election by the Biden Campaign and Democratic operatives and supporters (among whom is Mark Zuckerberg, who reportedly donated $400 million dollars to Democrat election officials in the swing states to ensure Biden’s win, in violation of the law).
These and related facts are part of the biggest constitutional—and existential— threat to our nation since the Civil War.
__________________
[1] Additional evidence that could be cited includes (1) blatant disregard for law in some swing states where election officials (including secretaries of state) changed the rules of the election without the statutory consent of their legislatures; (2) blatant actions by election officials that aggressively prevented poll watchers from observing the processing and counting of ballots, as required by law—nullifying that processing and counting; (3) credible evidence of large quantities of “mail-in” ballots that were apparently never folded, with Biden’s name pre-selected by the printing machine and no down-ballot races included; (4) the unprecedented pausing of voting late at night Nov. 3 in the swing states when Trump was winning by large margins, only to be resumed hours later with Biden winning by modest margins; and many more documented serious irregularities. These anomalies are significant enough to demand a thorough bipartisan investigation of these states’ elections, to settle the legitimate question of who lawfully won—a move state leaders have so far resisted.
So the real President, who was usurped in a rigged election, is now to be known as “Former.” This sounds familiar.
Former President Donald Trump opened an “Office of the Former President” on Monday that seeks to advance the interests of the United States and carry on the agenda of his administration. A statement from the office in Palm Beach County, Florida, reads, “Today, the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, formally opened the Office of the Former President.”
“The Office will be responsible for managing President Trump’s correspondence, public statements, appearances, and official activities to advance the interests of the United States and to carry on the agenda of the Trump Administration through advocacy, organizing, and public activism.
“President Trump will always and forever be a champion for the American People,” it said.