Covid-19 vaccination booster shot: Top scientists question the need for COVID-19 booster shots - by Julie Steenhuysen and Kate Kelland

COVID-19 vaccine developers are making ever bolder assertions that the world will need yearly booster shots, or new vaccines to tackle concerning coronavirus variants, but some scientists question when, or whether, such shots will be needed.

Read mopre at: Top scientists question the need for COVID-19 booster shots | Reuters

USA: The Economic Recovery Story Is As Fake As Ever - by Jeffrey Snider

Disastrous to employment. Absolutely right. And in the more modern, 21^st century sense it doesn’t even have to be outright deflation anymore. We’ve seen time and again that a realistic threat is all it takes (a reminder about what happened last September before this March).

Familiar to us, if not always easily recognizable, it’s the very hazard of unsolved, chronic liquidity risks that spikes the dollar, keeps interest rates low (interest rate fallacy), and, as Keynes said, is therefore disastrous to employment by the introduction of what current Economists and central bankers otherwise call, while they do everything humanly possible to avoid recognizing, macro slack.

Bernanke, like his predecessors and successors, claims to be a keen follower of Keynes anyway.

What comes next is the weekly reminder about the labor market; initial jobless claims were 870k last week. That is, still, in the middle of September, 200k more than any of the worst weeks on record before March. And this latest “disastrous to employment” comes to us on top of the macro slack which has already forced the Fed to redefine (undefine, really) their whole conception of full employment.

They’ve got everything covered. Recovery’s in the bag. That’s the story, and it’s one with all the same characters, all the same scenery, and, least surprising of all, the same ending.

Read more at:
The Economic Recovery Story Is As Fake As Ever | RealClearMarkets

Wall Street: ‘Head-fake’ stock market rally may become real with interest-rate cuts - by Nigam Arora

Before getting carried away with any rallies, remember when the stock market started going up on the news of coronavirus. The reasoning of Wall Street was that the virus would cause central banks to print more money. (The stock market is addicted to easy money.) Subsequently, Wall Street twisted the news of the coronavirus to claim that it was easing, and the stock market went higher than it was before the news of coronavirus. At that time, I wrote “How an external event could stunt U.S. stocks.”

All prudent stock market investors should consider reading “Prudent investors should look at these four stock charts as coronavirus spreads” and “Stock market investors’ motto — ‘in central banks we trust’ — is still working.”

Comment EU-Digest: Expect what the Federal Reserve and central banks have done in the past: Save stock market investors

Read more at: Head-fake’ stock market rally may become real with interest-rate cuts - MarketWatch

da Vinci: "A Glaring Example of how Decadent Our Western Values have become" - As Someone Spent $450 milliom on a Possibly fake da Vinci Painting

“Salvator Mun"

Rhett Jones reports in Gizmodo that  on Wednesday, November 15, 2017, auction records were shattered when an anonymous buyer spent $450.3 million to be the proud owner of a “long lost” painting “by” Leonardo da Vinci. The thing is, it may not have even been painted by Leonardo, it’s in terrible shape, it’s not especially good, but in the financial world of art, none of that matters.

Christie’s auction house has been hyping the emergence of Salvator Mundi (“Savior of the World”) as “the greatest and most unexpected artistic rediscovery of the 21st century.” It’s believed to be the only Leonardo in private hands. According to Artnet, it was once part of the collection of King Charles I and has since bounced around less prestigious homes. In 1958, it was auctioned at Sotheby’s London for £45 and attributed to Boltraffio, a painter who worked in Leonardo da Vinci’s studio. It was then picked up at an estate sale for around $10,000 back in 2005. In the last decade, researchers and authenticators have studied its history and deemed it an authentic Leonardo.

The opening bid was set at $100 million and Christie’s reportedly wondered aloud if some collector could conceivably drop $2 billion on it. If the auction house truly thought that was a possibility, I guess they were a little disappointed by the final hammer price. But that $450.3 million is by far the highest price paid for a painting at auction. The previous record holder was Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger, which sold for $179,364,992 in 2015. The Guardian claims Salvator Mundi is also the highest priced artwork ever sold privately, but that record is a lot harder to definitively establish because artworks change hands without public records all the time.

Not everyone, however, is sure that this record-breaking painting is by Leonardo da Vinci. Authentication is a subjective trade, and a buyer’s confidence in an authenticator’s assessment is mostly based on that authenticator’s reputation. In the case of Salvator Mundi, it was being restored by Dianne Dwyer Modestini, a professor of paintings conservation at New York University, in 2007 when she started having a feeling that something was different about this piece. She was commissioned to clean up what she thought was a copy of the famous Florentine’s work but began to see details that were very Leonardo-like. A subsequent X-ray revealed traces of changes being made to the composition over time. Someone making a copy wouldn’t be making these drastic changes. Since then, many top scholars have concluded that it is, in fact, a Leonardo based on numerous factors including the technique, materials, and outside historical data.

Other experts have their doubts. Charles Hope, an emeritus professor at the Warburg Institute at the University of London, wrote in the New York Review of Books, “even making allowances for its extremely poor state of preservation, it is a curiously unimpressive composition and it is hard to believe that Leonardo himself was responsible for anything so dull.”

Most critics seem to agree that the painting is far below Leonardo da Vinci’s typical standards, especially considering that Salvator Mundi has been dated to 1500. That would place its composition directly between The Last Supper (1498) and the Mona Lisa (1502). Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York Magazine, wrote:
 The painting is absolutely dead. Its surface is inert, varnished, lurid, scrubbed over, and repainted so many times that it looks simultaneously new and old.

Experts estimate that there are only 15 to 20 existing da Vinci paintings. Not a single one of them pictures a person straight on like this one. There is also not a single painting picturing an individual Jesus either. All of his paintings, even single portraits, depict figures in far more complex poses. Even the figure that comes remotely close to this painting, Saint John the Baptist, also from 1500, gives us a turning, young, randy-looking man with hair utterly different from and much more developed in terms of painting than the few curls Christie’s is raving about in their picture.

Writing for the New York Times, art critic Jason Farago agrees that this is not the “Male Mona Lisa” it’s been advertised to be.

Authentication is a serious but subjective business. I’m not the man to affirm or reject its attribution; it is accepted as a Leonardo by many serious scholars, though not all. I can say, however, what I felt I was looking at when I took my place among the crowds who’d queued an hour or more to behold and endlessly photograph “Salvator Mundi”: a proficient but not especially distinguished religious picture from turn-of-the-16th-century Lombardy, put through a wringer of restorations.

Most assessments repeat similar criticisms: the composition is totally wrong; the details don’t say Leonardo; if it came from his studio, it was probably done by an assistant; and, on top of it all, the thing is a shadow of its former self because it’s been so heavily repainted. One expert cracked a joke to Saltz at the viewing: “Why is a Leonardo in a Modern and Contemporary auction? Because 90 percent of it was painted in the last 50 years.”
So why would this subpar and possibly misattributed Leonardo fetch so much money? Because quality and authenticity don’t really matter in art sales as long as a few top gatekeepers can get on the same page about the value of a work. As art critic Blake Gopnik told Marketplace:

I’m not saying that this isn’t Leonardo. I’m also not saying that it is a Leonardo. I’m actually saying that it’s a kind of incoherent question to ask. It’s kind of like asking, “Is the moon Jewish, or is the sun gay?” Pictures, even today (let alone in the 16th century), can be all sorts of things between being by a great master and being by some assortment of assistance.

Art brings in huge prices because it carries cultural cachet, looks good in your home, offers access to high society, and above all, is a very convenient way to park some money. High-priced art is often used for money laundering, but even in legitimate circumstances, it’s just another way to diversify the ways in which your money is being stored if you’re an extremely rich person. And hey, it goes up in value all the time.

Speaking of extremely rich people, who paid for this? We don’t know, and if the buyer doesn’t want to say, we may never know. Liu Yiqian, a Chinese billionaire, was rumored to be the buyer, but he told The New York Times it wasn’t him. Another possibility is Bill Gates. He did pay $30 million for Leonardo’s journals back in 1994.

But that’s the story with this piece. We don’t know for sure that it’s authentic, we don’t know that it’s any good, and we don’t know who bought it. We just know that some people decided it was worth a buttload of money. And so it is.

Note EU-Digest: This report really shines a direct light on how decadent our so-called "Western Values" have become, when someone can spent close to half a billion dollars on a possibly fake da Vinci painting,  and  this while millions of children are dying as a result of famine, wars and other calamities, many of which the direct results of those same "Western Values". 

Read more: Someone Spent Almost Half a Billion Dollars on a Possibly Inauthentic da Vinci Painting 

Turkey: Erdogan plotted Turkey purge before coup, say Brussels spies - by Runo Waterfield

 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan planned to purge opposition forces in the military before July’s attempted coup, according to a secret EU intelligence report.

The European intelligence contradicts the Turkish government’s claim that exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen was behind the plot to overthrow the Turkish government. Ankara is seeking Mr Gulen’s extradition from the US.

The report by the EU intelligence centre Intcen found the coup was mounted by a range of opponents to Mr Erdogan and his ruling AK Party.

“The decision to launch the coup resulted from the fears of an incoming purge. It is likely that a group of officers comprising Gulenists, Kemalists (secularists), opponents of the AKP and opportunists was behind the coup. It is unlikely that Gulen himself played a role in the attempt,” said the report, dated August 24.

“The coup was just a catalyst for the crackdown prepared in ­advance.”

Mr Gulen’s followers spent decades placing their supporters in senior positions in the police, judiciary and other institutions, building a network that enabled him to “influence the situation in the country and control the activities of President Erdogan”, according to EU intelligence sources

That situation “changed” after Mr Erdogan began purges of the police and state administration in 2014, weakening the Gulenists as well as targeting other opposition tendencies such as Kemalists and civil activists.

In a blow to Turkey’s claims that Mr Gulen masterminded the coup, the European intelligence report noted that his Islamist followers were weak in the Turkish army, which until last July remained a bastion of secularism.