It's hard to remember now, but Trump's hyper-populist 2016 campaign attacked Wall Street, big business, the banks, the Saudis... his strongest attack on Hillary was that she was in the pocket of business.
As soon as he was elected, Trump started sucking up to the Saudis, appointed a bunch of Wall Street types to key posts, weakened banking regulations and gave these companies huge tax cuts. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
The most hardcore Trumpist base, the alt-Rightish chan types, who saw Trump primarily as a source of nationalist disruption, never liked this pivot. They blamed it on Globalists, Jews and the Deep State. Of course Trump opposes the banks, but what can he do?
A part of this tendency ends up becoming early QAnon. A part morphed into the Boogaloo movement who want to burn it all down. A part became core MAGA types who trusted Trump but still fumed at the wealthy, the banks etc.
Now Trump's out of office, this MAGA base is rediscovering its anti-establishment roots. Some of these guys supported Ron Paul in 2012, Bernie in 2015 and Trump in 2016. Three different political tendencies that all oppose 'the system'.
Trumpist forums treated the GameStop stuff as if it was a MAGA movement. Of course, it wasn't. But they saw it as part of the same political trend, attacking the people who "fix the markets like they fixed the election".
And now Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are jumping on-board too. Do they genuinely believe in Wall Street reform? Because it seems like it's just a cynical attempt to appear down with the kids.
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From tomorrow, Israel is opening its vaccination programme to cover all residents over the age of 16. The decision is partly because of success in vaccinating over-70s, but also a response to the slower vaccine uptake among the 35-69 age groups.
Most over-60s have had their second dose already (pink in the graph), and first doses among the other eligible age-groups 35-59 and 16-18, have been around 75k a day for a while. Vaccine centres are empty.
Israel's population is very young. There are nearly as many 20-29s as there are over-60s. So in absolute terms, opening vaccinations to all will mean a lot more doses delivered.
Prevalence of the B117 British variant of Sars-CoV-2 in Israel as a percentage of total cases.
The blue line is the Arab community where prevalence is about 25%.
The brown line is the Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) Jewish community, 90%.
Purple is the wider public: up to 80%
On the one hand, this is strong evidence that the Pfizer vaccine protects against B117. Israel is still seeing a strong protective effect among the vaccinated despite the British variant.
That was quick. Silver has been a cult for decades. The first time some true believer tried to sell me shares in a silver mine was 2004. It was going to boom any day now!
A few of my friends got into buying silver in like 2014. It was being pushed by ZeroHedge, a cult investment site with ties to Putin, and Russia Today's Max Keiser. For years, they and thousands of others have been buying silver.
ZeroHedge in particular has been trying to convince the WSB crowd to pump silver. So has Keiser.
Israel vaccine update: Of 668,100 over-60s who had their second Pfizer jab more than a week ago, 473 have tested positive for the virus. Of them, 38 are hospitalised, 14 are considered 'serious' and 2 have died.
For comparison, among ALL over-60s in the last week, 3,835 tested positive for the virus, some 0.25% of the total population of over-60s.
Comparing the fully vaccinated (ie 7 days past 2nd dose) over-60s with the non-fully-vaccinated over-60s, there's an 83% decrease in observed cases of Covid-19.
Updated vaccine data: Maccabi reports only 31 new Covid cases among 163,000 people who had their second Pfizer dose 16 or more days ago. None of the cases were serious or required hospitalisation.
The group was observed for the period from 7-16 days after receiving their second dose. Maccabi estimates that this translates to a 92% effectiveness compared to the unvaccinated (but locked-down) population.
For comparison, among their unvaccinated members, Maccabi saw 6437 infections over the same period (the HMO has 2.4M members total).
Vaccination stats of over-80s in England revealing huge racial disparity, with white people more than double as likely to have been vaccinated as black people.
A similar pattern has been seen in Israel, where Israeli Arabs have low coronavirus vaccine uptake, despite relatively easy access. Vaccine uptake also lower among Ultra-Orthodox Jews.
In Israel, conspiracy theories about the vaccine are spreading widely on Arab/Palestinian social media, which could be contributing to hesitancy.