Face Masks Make Things Worse And Even Dangerous
Face Masks Make Things Worse And Even Dangerous
Monthly Archives: June 2020
The Hoax
He did NOT get tested.
But they said he tested positive.
Black Lives Matter Cultural Revolution
Priss Factor says: • Website
The current lunacy has often been compared with the Cultural Revolution, but in some ways, it is closer to the aftermath of the Hundred Flowers Campaign.
Consider the story in the video below:
A company that claims to value Diversity of Views & Opinions fired the mother of the Atlanta police officer who was charged with murder of a black guy who resisted arrest with physical violence, snatched the taser from one of the officers, and fired it at them. What was her thought crime? She called it ‘nonsense’. She was accused of creating a ‘hostile work environment’ and canned just like that. So, on the one hand, the company says its policy is about the diversity of views(or freedom of speech) but, in practice, will immediately remove anyone who deviates from the official program.
It sounds like those Jewish oligarchs and commissars at Big Tech, academia & media, law firms & courts, and government who say they are for Free Speech but will not tolerate ‘hate speech'(to be subjectively and politically determined by their ilk). So, ‘diversity of views’ are respected but not when it is ‘hostile’, like a mother speaking up for her son who was obviously race-framed by the system. So, free speech is wonderful as long as it’s not ‘hateful’, with ‘hate’ being defined mostly by Jews who apparently think BDS(or speech calling for justice for Palestinians) is ‘hateful’. For sure, anti-BDS legislation has the backing of both parties.
Now, what happened in the aftermath of the Hundred Flowers Campaign? Nikita Khrushchev ushered in a new era of de-Stalinization, something the Chinese Communists were very critical of. They feared that criticism of Stalin’s legacy would undermine their legitimacy. Still, Mao Zedong wasn’t one to be outdone by Khrushchev and decided to have his own experimentation with freedom and go even further. So, he declared the Hundred Flowers Campaign. He urged all Chinese, high and low, to hold nothing back and speak their minds. Initially, most Chinese were hesitant as the first six years of communist rule had been pretty ruthless and repressive. People had either been cowed into fearful conformism or indoctrinated with party dogma. They were scaredy cats or rabid dogs.
When Mao called on the people in and out of government and in all walks of life to speak freely, most people were either hesitant or confused. So, the commissars were instructed to apply pressure on the people to speak up, to complain about something, to let things off their chest. It was as if people were forced to engage in free speech and speaking-truth-to-power. Gradually, one by one, people began to speak out. Then, the voices grew louder and bolder. The criticism went from personal things to local matters to problems at work to the failings of the communist party and then communism itself and finally the big kahuna, Mao himself. Still, people were speaking out ONLY BECAUSE Mao had started the Hundred Flowers Campaign. He was the one who ordered the Chinese people to take part in proto-Glasnost, and they did. They were told to be free in thought and speech, and they spoke their minds.
But when Mao had just about heard enough, he shut down the campaign and those who’d spoken up were rounded up and punished. The serious offenders who denounced the Party and Mao were executed. But even those who mildly rebuked the political system were denounced, fired from work, and sent to forced-labor camps. In the memoir SON OF THE REVOLUTION, Liang Heng told the story of his mother. When the campaign began, she was reluctant to say anything and told her boss that all was well. But her boss pressed upon her to voice some complaint in keeping with the spirit of the times. If Chairman Mao wanted people to speak freely, they should. So, finally and perhaps grudgingly, she made a minor criticism about some details at work. And everything seemed to be fine until Mao called an end to the campaign and ordered his commissars to punish those who had spoken against the Party. Suddenly, the very people who’d urged Liang’s mother to speak up came down hard on her. Especially to save their own skins, they had to condemn the very people they’d encouraged to speak freely during the campaign. The new directive, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, was about gathering up all those who’d spoken ‘hostile’ words about the system and punishing them as class enemies. So, the woman was denounced and fired from the job. Worse, her craven husband divorced her and denounced her, and she was sent to the farms to ‘learn from the people’.
So, what is the similarity between China of the Hundred-Flowers-and-Anti-Rightist-Campaigns and the US of today? Back in the mid-1950s, the Chinese were told to value freedom and speak freely… but, as it turned out, they were only free to agree with the dogma and narrative(and to hail Mao to high heaven). If they dared to speak freely against the system, dogma, or narrative, they were to be targeted for denunciation, firing, imprisonment, and even execution. You were free only to agree.
US and the West of today follow a similar logic. They’re said to be ‘liberal democracies’ that value free speech, but that doesn’t mean ‘hate speech’, and of course, ANYTHING can be construed as ‘hate speech’ by the Jewish Supremacists who rule as overlords. And so-called ‘liberal’ institutions of media and academia say they value diversity of views and opinions, but they will not tolerate words that create ‘hostile’ work environments. But what does this mean? It doesn’t mean all forms of hostility or aggression are banned. Indeed, certain hostilities are encouraged, as with Facebook and Youtube Terms of Service that, while banning ‘hostile views’ against Jews, blacks, homos, and the like, are not only okay but encouraging of hostile views against whites, conservatives, true Christians, and nationalists. Diversity Programs encourage everyone, from children to adults, to harbor hostile feelings toward certain groups, especially straight white men, while berating whites to be ever so sensitive about not saying or doing anything that might, just might, offend certain favored groups, especially Jews, blacks, and homos. Whites are forced into fragility but then accused of ‘white fragility’ as well. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. (But all those whites who wonder why the Chinese acted so stupidly under Mao should look in the mirror because their behavior is just as irrational, stupid, craven, and retarded.)
Now, is this a victory of the Left over the Right? Is it a triumph of Liberalism over Conservatism? Many think so, especially as Tucker Carlson and others of Conservatism Inc. keep blaming the Left, Left, Left. But the real power behind all this is Jewish Tribal Supremacism. True Leftism died long ago. Not only did communism fall in the East but the American Left gave up on workers and cut a deal with super-capitalists of Big Tech, Wall Street, and Global ‘free trade’. The triumph of Homo-Mania has NOTHING to do with true leftism. It’s faux-leftism that destroyed Mayday in favor of Gayday with full backing of Super-Capital and neo-aristo globalism.
Also, if Antifa is truly communist or against the oligarchy, why does it pick fights mostly with the Dissident Right that has NO POWER in any industry and institution. In effect, Antifa has been valued by Jewish Capitalist Oligarchs as their Janissary force(who attack any sign of white identity or white pride as ‘nazi’); Jews promote and protect Antifa thuggery to clamp down on uppity whites who seek White Liberation from the Jewish Supremacist Plantation. Antifa are mostly idiot whites trained and directed by venal Jewish tribalists to hate and attack white patriots. Jews use the goy dolts of Antifa for their own supremacist purposes but hoodwinked the idiots into believing they are fighting the coming of Neo-Nazism to the West.
There is no true left anymore. And it’s not a triumph of liberalism either. Liberalism is about individualism, liberty, and free speech. The current power hates individual conscience and free speech. It insists that we all bow our heads and go along to get along with the System dominated by Jewish globo-homo capitalists. Why would Jews approve of individual conscience when a truly free-thinking moralist will surely condemn Zionist tyranny over Palestinians? Jews use PC to dictate approved-morality(the kind that is useful to Jewish Power) on the masses. Sure, some of the current rhetoric has some faux-leftist window-dressing or sentimentalism about ‘liberal democratic values'(as opposed to the ‘autocratic’ ways of Evil Putin and the like), but boiled down to essentials, the dominant power is Jewish Supremacist.
If leftism is about the little guy or the underdog and if indeed leftism is the dominant ideology in the US, the current power should be siding with Palestinians against Zionists. But where do you see that? Some may say BLM movement is leftist in supporting justice for blacks against powerful white ‘racism’ and ‘white privilege’, but it’s really a form of black supremacism exploited by Jewish supremacism. Blacks act out in supremacist contempt toward the weaker races. They love to holler, intimidate, and do as they please. They don’t really care about black lives, or else they’d stop murdering one another. BLM implies that blacks lives are superior to white lives, and that’s why it’s an unforgivable sin for any white to kill a black; it’d be like a slave killing the master, and blacks feel as the new master race. BLM isn’t about remembrance of slavery and the dark past. Rather, it is a cultist-spiritualization of the past to elevate blacks from a people with a tragic history to new gods to be worshiped and ass-kissed by rest of humanity. It is the expression of black god-complex. It is also a form of black nihilism, i.e. blacks can use anything as an excuse to rob, loot, pillage, beat up people, murder whites, shoot police officers, and etc. Blacks can act like animals by pretending to be angels.
In truth, history changes, and blacks today are not what they were 100 yrs ago, just like China today isn’t what it was 100 yrs ago. Basing current perception of blacks on past history is like seeing today’s China through the prism of China-as-sick-man-of-Asia 100 yrs ago. It’s like pretending history is static, rather weirdly ironic coming from progs who are always celebrating the acceleration of history and change. (For those who say blacks are mired in problems due to the legacy of slavery, why not argue blacks are mired in savagery due to the legacy of savagery? After all, blacks were slaves for only 200 yrs in America whereas they were savages for 100,000 yrs in Africa? Isn’t the legacy of savagery and its genetic imprint a more determinant driver of black behavior than the meager 200 yrs of slavery, which, at the very least, elevated blacks from the stage of savagery? It’s been a common theme among all human groups wherein slavery played a key role as civilizing agent. It was hardly unique to blacks.) And we know Jews aren’t sincere in their concern for blacks because they have no qualms about oppressing and terrorizing Palestinians and using the US to wage Wars for Israel that have destroyed millions of lives. And speaking of hate campaigns, which group in Hollywood financed all those movies depicting Arabs/Muslims as nothing but subhuman terrorists? It sure wasn’t the Eskimos.
Just like the Corleones in THE GODFATHER movies had a lot of buffers, Jews have a lot of buffers or fronts. Neocons used buffers like Dubya Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. Globo-Homo Zionists had their pet monkey in Barack Obama. BLM is a tool used by Jews for the most cynical reasons. Jews incited BLM rage to turn blacks away from Donald Trump. Jews use BLM to bolster ‘white guilt’, the key element in keeping whites ashamed and subservient, thus obeisant to Jewish Supremacist Power. The scales will fall off many more eyes when they stop blaming the ‘left’ or ‘liberals’ and just name the Power that is Jewish Supremacist.
Though Soviet leaders and CCP bigshots acted like gangsters, they were still in service of an ideology. There is no ideology in the current madness in the West. As such, it’s hard to discern any thematic consistency in all that is happening. Instead, we are to believe in the magic of Diversity. But Diversity of Peoples often leads to contention and conflict. Diversity of Ideas means commitment to free speech, but free speech also means speaking-truth-to-power, something Jewish supremacist elites cannot tolerate as they fear being called out(and blamed) as the True Rulers of the West, i.e. Jewish Privilege, not ‘white privilege’, is the determining force in US and EU.
Because Diversity of Peoples and Cultures leads to conflict, some kind of unity is sought by ‘Idology'(or idolatry as ideology) of gods and devils. Since it’d be too confusing to emphasize the equal worth of every group, the trick is to make ALL groups unite in reverence to the Holy Three: Jews, blacks, and homos. That is one part of Intersectionality. Whether you’re Mexican, Hindu, Chinese, Iranian, Muslim, Arab, Filipino, or etc, your identity doesn’t have much intrinsic value, and therefore, you must rally around the ‘gay pride’ flag because homos are special, or ‘more equal than others’. All unite under Globo-Homo… or BLM or Holocaust-Worship. The other side of Intersectionality is the common denunciation of the Enemy, the Devil, the Whitey. So, never mind the problems among all shades of blacks, browns, yellows, and etc. Where they should all ‘intersect’ is in demonizing and scapegoating Whitey as the source of all Evil, rather ironic since they all head to or cling to the white worlds(and run from their own peoples and cultures) for better material lives and more Rule of Law.
But behind all this is the Barzini-Hyman-Roth of Jewish Power. Jewish Supremacists are pulling the strings. And yes, the current discourse is uber-stupid because ‘idology’ is based on cult-worship of idolized groups and witch-hunting of demonized ones. One might say the current ideology is ‘anti-racist’, but if ‘racism’ means racial supremacism and demonization of certain groups based on skin color, then it is the reigning zeitgeist of the times. Of course, many are blind to this because whites have IN ESSENCE been associated with racial supremacism while blacks have been branded as eternal ‘victims of racism’. But history changes, and the victims of yesterday can be oppressors of today and tomorrow. But under the illogic of current stupidity, even if blacks were to enslave whites and make ‘honkeys’ pick cotton under the whip, the narrative would drone on and on about the new reality as ‘justice’ because blacks, even as the new master race, have been tagged as the eternal victim race whereas whites, though the new slave race, has been tagged as the eternal ‘racist’ master race. Such is the idiocy that blinds people to Zionist tyranny over Palestinians. Because Jews have been tagged as the Eternal Victims of Antisemitism, even criticism of Jews acting like New Nazis toward a weak people like the Palestinians is deemed ‘antisemitic’ because Jews are righteous and holy no matter what they do. Even as they kill and terrorize as IDF goon squads, they are to be regarded as a bunch of Anne Franks.
But then, white people deserve blame for failing to speak the truth. As long as they don’t name Jewish Power in all this, they are hopeless and deserve to lose and fall. Those who are incapable or unwilling to speak the truth deserve no sympathy. They are like cancer patients who refuse to admit they got cancer and seek proper treatment. Are they so fearful of charges of ‘racism’ and ‘antisemitism’? Don’t they know that history changes and is not static? Look at China and Japan today as opposed to how things were 100 yrs ago. Look at Roman Empire and Germanic Barbarians when the former was on top and when the latter was on top and sacked Rome. Look at Jews as early immigrants to Palestine that was overwhelmingly Arabic and compare them to Jews who totally dominate Israel/Palestine today. A small immigrant community became the dominant force in the territory.
Blacks were social slaves of whites, but they soon became biological masters over whites. Being more muscular and more aggressive, they began to kick white butt. Blacks complain of ‘redlining’, but whites suffered even more under black violence and criminality. White Flight was something that was forced on whites by black thuggery. Whites were forced to pay HIGHER PRICES for property values just to be safe and secure from black neo-savagery. If whites were guilty of redlining, blacks were guilty of front-lining, i.e. turning entire localities into front-lines of black war on white. Many whites didn’t want to leave their ethnic communities in the cities. They had roots there. They left because of the black fist and oogity-behavior. But no one talks about the biological slavery of whites under black thuggery. White Flight was like Harriet-Tubmanism for whites. If blacks tried to flee to the north from social slavery in the South, whites tried to flee from biological slavery under black thuggery. And Jews are full of shit because Jew Flew was part of White Flight. And what brought down crime in places like NY in the 1990s and 2000s? Jews worked with Billy Boy Clinton to build neo-plantations of prison systems to incarcerate lots of black super-predators who were exploited for cheap labor.
A Country Not Salvageable
Nor, Many Say Quietly, Worth Saving
FRED REED
What fun, what entertainment. And rare: One seldom sees the collapse of a landmark society in a rush of wondrous idiocy. Would I could sell tickets. Don’t look at it as a loss, but as a show, an unwanted but grand amusement.
The coup de grace in our ripening decadence is the current uprising purportedly, though implausibly, over racism. But never mind. The causes don’t matter. The deal is done.
Still, it is interesting to recognize that the protesters are, perhaps deliberately, confusing the incapacity of blacks with systemic racism. In truth, America has made the greatest effort ever essayed by one race to uplift another. Reflect: In 1954 an entirely white Supreme Court unanimously ended segregation. Later it found the use of IQ tests by employers illegal because blacks scored poorly, then found “affirmative action,” racial discrimination against whites, legal (hardly oppression of blacks, this). An overwhelmingly white Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act the next year. A white President sent troops to Little Rock to enforce desegregation. There has been an enormous flow of charity to blacks: Section Eight Housing, AFDC, Head Start, hiring quotas, set-asides, sharply lowered standards in police and fire departments. We now have free breakfasts for black children, then free lunches, in addition to outright welfare. In aggregate they resemble a distributed guaranteed basic income. Which is interesting.
These measures sprang from the best of intentions. Most I think should continue. I for one do not want to evict blacks from public housing or have their children go hungry. Yet none of these programs has had its desired effect. The crucial academic gap has not closed, crime remains horribly high, illegitimacy verges on universal. This is a great shame. Blacks are decent enough people, likable if they don’t hate you, and phenomenally talented. But it hasn’t worked.
Nothing has worked. There is no indication that anything will. The great black cities are in something approaching custodial care.
You cannot solve a problem without knowing what it is. This we dare not know. Democracies, however approximate, cannot deal with chronically underperforming minorities.
They cannot even try. Anything that might help is politically impossible, and anything politically possible won’t help.
So, after the riots:
Social division will worsen after the riots. Racial hostility from blacks will not decrease because their conditions will not change. The rioters are getting their way now, and rule, but at the price of sowing hatred. At best we will have many decades of ugly rancor. At worst, we are winding the spring for another outburst.
Multiculturalism has not worked, quite apart from race, and will not. White Americans are not one people. The poor communications and bad roads that once allowed them to live almost separately no longer exist. In its writ-large form, trying to force West Virginia to accept the culture of Massachusetts will produce only anger.
The likelihood of amity between races is proportional to their agreement on values important to them. For example, the Chinese share (what once were) the white values of study, work, courtesy, and obedience to the law. That they eat with chopsticks and celebrate New Year on the wrong day doesn’t matter.
However, again for example, a culture that believes in female genital mutilation and utter subjection of women cannot live amicably with a culture that abhors these things. Black ghetto culture and white are immiscible in so many fundamental values that they will not live well together.
Some cultures can assimilate, for example East Asian and American white, Latino and American white. But, in addition to sharply different cultures, too many blacks live in sprawling, racially isolated urban centers with almost no contact with the outside world other than television.
Censorship will intensify, not just of communications and office chitchat but of books. Tom Sawyer will be pulled from bookshelves or—Amazon being the continental shelf—or bowderlized to remove the Nigger Jim and Injun Joe The Nigger of the Narcissus may survive because none of the blacks and few of the whites will ever have heard of Conrad. At least for the foreseeable future, firings for anything imaginably redolent of racism–saying “All lives matter,” for example–will be snatched at in a mixture of passive aggression and schadenfreude to result in firings. This is unlikely to have a happy ending.
Schooling: Watching great universities become sandboxes for unpleasantly righteous dimwitted brats galls, or does if one lets it. I don’t. Most of the protesters seem recently to have erupted from the drains of an educational system that has been in sharp decline for decades They, including the intelligent among them, appear historically not just ignorant but carefully misinformed, culturally pathetic, and intellectually laughable. (For example, a protestress interviewed by a British reporter as to what she thought of Churchill said she couldn’t really say because she hadn’t met him. How many in BLM can spell “Confederacy”? A statue of Ulysses Grant was pulled down in the belief that he was a Confederate general. May God preserve us.)
The, uh, redaction of culture will not stop with books. Classical music is too white, the sciences too white, mathematics a tool of oppression (meaning that blacks cannot understand it) and so on. We have created a nation of pampered and imbecile peasants.
Schooling will continue its plummet. Science departments probably will not be abolished. However, because they are too white, schools will recruit hopelessly unqualified black students and professors, standards will fall yet more, and mathematics will be played down even in astrophysics (this is being done). Extirpating racism will replace scholarship, already degraded by the retirement or death of those professors who knew what education meant. This will inevitably result in lowered American technological competitiveness and prosperity. There is no hope of preventing this.
The replacement of learned professors by aging detritus from the Sixties antagonistic to scholarship is not surprising. America has had strong anti-intellectual undercurrent since its inception. The degradation will not be noticed by the young as they have never lived in a world different from their own, with Harry Potter and Toni Morrison thought to be literature. A liberal education was once the mark of the cultivated, being deep in languages, literature, philosophy, the sciences, history, mathematics,. Universities once had, at least among the better students, a love of open minded curiosity, thought, and debate. No more. Future historians will notice the shift, but those within it will not. We are left with a nation of morons who will not know they are morons.
This too cannot be prevented. Jejune herdthink is now warmly espoused throughout the academy with children in grade school being primed for it.
The most—I dare not say “entertaining” for fear of lynching, but, well, perhaps “interesting” reforms will be those of the police, whether abolition, defunding to shift money to youth outreach and rehab (which don’t work) or replacement of police by warm and caring adults, will result in increased crime. We need not concern ourselves with whether and to what extent the police have been culpable in which cases. The changes will come anyway.
An intriguing question is what the nonviolent, non-racist, warm and fuzzy pseudopolice will do when they encounter violent criminals. Counsel them on social justice? I would love to watch.
Our system of governments has proved itself weak, feckless, and unable to govern. The chaotic response to the coronavirus is a prime example, there being no national policy and the states being told to do as they see fit. The other major example was the inability or unwillingness to prevent looting and arson.The widespread destruction was unopposed, protected by the media, and celebrated by the many corporations that have fallen over themselves to truckle to the unwashed and to give them money. If our rampaging anthropoids can loot once, there is no reason to think they cannot do it again.
Many cities are routinely out of control, with seven hundred homicides in Chicago and three hundred in Baltimore every year. Increasingly criminals are released without bail and small crimes, such as evading subway fares, are ignored when committed by minorities. The hordes of derelicts grow, the New York subways become a homeless shelter. These are not problems seen in civilized countries. Which America no longer is, to the astonishment and amusement of the world.
Perhaps this was to be expected. The American practice of choosing its leaders every two, four, or six years by popularity contest worked, after a fashion anyway, in a sprawling continental country in which government had very little local influence. In a world far more complex, with little ability to plan when those in charge change with paralyzing rapidity, and everything intensely regulated by people unfamiliar with problems, results are poor. America’s competition with large countries having intelligently authoritarian and stable governance will prove a losing proposition proposition. The inevitable decline in standard of living, already well underwater, will promote unrest. Here we go again.
We have done what Marx couldn’t: Achieved communism, a true dictatorship of the proletariat, of a rabble jacquerie of much noise and no wit, the rule of the unfit. It is a rule only of the culture. The moneyed would not grant it power over anything else. Yet rule it is. We shall hear much of the authenticity of the illiterate, the purity of ghetto urges, the wisdom of the people, the need to lay low the pretensions of the mansion.
Yet the catastrophe has its consolations. It is amusing for those amused by the end of empires. The Soviet Union spoke of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but lived under the dictatorship of a gray aristocracy. America speaks of the rule of the people, a horrible idea, and seems to be getting there.
Think of it as the Cultural Revolution by suburban hobbyists. There are the same raging untermenschen, the same desire to destroy anything they do not know, or cannot understand, or be bothered to learn.
As a philosophic emollient one may reflect that all empires and civilizations must end, and ours is. America will remain as a place, a military bastion, a large if declining economic force. It will never again be, even by the low standards of humanity in such things, a relatively free and vigorous society. The world will not again credit its charades of moral leadership. The rot, the tens of thousands of derelict people living on the sidewalks, the looting and fire setting, the censorship, are now visible to the entire earth. Oh well. It was a good thing while it lasted.
Write Fred at jet.possum@gmail.com Put the letters pdq anywhere in the subject line to avoid autodeletion. All read, not always answered due to volume.
This Is so Weird that I Can’t Fathom It
By Malcolm Kendrick, doctor and author who works as a GP in the National Health Service in England. His blog can be read here and his book, ‘Doctoring Data – How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense,’ is available here.
As a doctor, I occasionally get confronted with difficult, inexplicable things, but this is a mystery I simply can’t solve. What lies behind this unusual rise in deaths in an age group that isn’t vulnerable to Covid-19?
It has been almost impossible to make any sense of the figures of Covid-19 deaths from around the world. They say that the first casualty of war is truth. However, the enemy, in this case, doesn’t much care what anyone says, so there’s no point in lying to it.
All it wants to do is move from one host to another and propagate itself. Why does it wish to do this? We don’t really know – it just does. Covid-19 doesn’t do interviews, but we can guess that its mission is to completely dominate the world.
Faced with the same implacable enemy, you would expect that every country would see similar patterns of infection and death. Or you might expect to see the same figures from countries that carried out the same actions – essentially, whether or not they imposed a nationwide lockdown.
However, if you try to compare lockdown vs no lockdown, the Covid-19 mortality figures appear incomprehensible. Belgium, for example, entered lockdown on March 18, while Belarus didn’t lockdown at all. Belgium has a population of 11.5 million, while Belarus’s is 9.5 million.
As of June 22, Belgium had suffered 9,696 coronavirus-related deaths, while, Belarus, as of the same date, had suffered 346. The death rate in Belgium, per million of population, on that date, was 847. In Belarus, it was 36.
That means the death rate in Belgium was over 23 times higher than in Belarus. Yes, two European countries sitting at approximately the same latitude, both starting with the letter ‘B’, have a vastly different rate of death.
What can we make of such statistics? The simple response would be not to believe the figures from Belarus. Alternatively, we could decide not to believe the figures from Belgium either, because it has the highest death rate from Covid-19, per million, in the entire world. Why? Who knows? However, I’d caution against dismissing figures we don’t like or don’t feel make sense.
After all, there are other countries that didn’t lockdown to any extent, such as Japan, where there’s been a death rate of seven per million, or one fifth that of Belarus. But I think it would take someone very bold to simply dismiss the Japanese figures.
In fact, the death rate in Japan is very nearly the same rate as the rate in New Zealand, which has had only 22 deaths, and has been lauded for its aggressive lockdown policy and low rate of deaths. New Zealand’s death rate is 4.9 per million.
In short, if you look around the world, there are no patterns to be seen, and the death rates between countries vary by more than a hundredfold. However, nowhere in the world have those figures been weirder, or more difficult to interpret, than in England, and – even more curiously – in younger people.
Around 10 days ago, someone pointed out to me an anomaly so strange, so unexpected, that I’ve since spent a considerable amount of time speaking to other doctors, and statisticians, to find an explanation – with no luck so far.
First, to provide some context. The most accurate figures to use, in studying the Covid-19 epidemic, are excess deaths – that is, deaths from all causes, over and above the average from the past few years. If, say, 10,000 people normally die in the first week in April, a figure of 15,000 deaths in the same week this year would represent 5,000 “excess” deaths.
This figure is of crucial importance, mainly because it can be fully relied on. From personal experience, I know that what’s written on a death certificate is often no more than an educated guess. I also know there have been huge differences across countries in the way doctors have been instructed to record Covid-related deaths.
If an elderly person goes downhill rapidly and dies in a care home, and they hadn’t had a test, did they die of Covid, yes or no? Probably, possibly? Doctors in the UK have been advised to record “yes,” while, in other countries, they are more likely to record “no.” On the other hand, there are tales of doctors in the US being coached to write “Covid” on almost all death certificates, because the hospital is paid more money if they do so.
That means relying purely on the statistics for Covid-recorded deaths may be highly misleading. However, you can absolutely rely on the diagnosis of death. It’s a tricky clinical condition to miss.
So, if you want the outcome that’s the most reliable indicator that something truly significant is going on, you need to look at excess-mortality rates. If they stay the same, you can be reassured nothing serious is happening. This is true, however much the diagnosis of a single condition rises.
To provide this data, in as close to real time as possible, the EuroMOMO hub was established to monitor European mortality activity. Currently, it tracks changes in overall mortality in 24 nations. England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are treated as separate countries, and this was to become significant.
EuroMOMO showed absolutely no change in mortality across all 24 countries until week 11 of this year – the second week in March. It then rose rapidly, topping out in week 14. By the end of May, everything had fallen back to normal, which means the Covid-19 mortality spike lasted 10 weeks from start to finish. Overall mortality rates are now lower than normal.
It’s fascinating that some countries showed a sharp rise in mortality, and some showed none. For example, Austria, Denmark, Finland and Germany – nothing. France, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, England – major spikes. Half the countries didn’t have a spike; the others did.
Then, and here we get to the really weird part, is the data that was tucked away in a sub-section. A massive rise in mortality that was seen in only one country out of the 24, and nowhere else. And a spike in the age group 15 to 44 – one of the age groups least vulnerable to Covid-19, and in England alone. Not in Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales. It lasted five weeks and then disappeared.
Frustratingly, the figures on causes of death are not available – some types of death can take a long time to be recorded, such as those as the result of an accident or suicide. So, were all the excess deaths from Covid-19? It seems unlikely, as the total number of recorded deaths in this age group has been under 500 since the start of the epidemic, and that wouldn’t have created such a spike.
Might lockdown, in some way, have caused it? Might the loneliness of lockdown have caused a rise in suicides? Or a surge in drug overdoses? Or other reckless behaviour?
I don’t know… but if we are to truly understand what happened during the pandemic, we need to find out.
That’s the US !!!
NATO 2030: How To Make A Bad Idea Worse
Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Just when you thought the leaders of NATO could not push the limits of insanity any further, something like NATO 2030 is announced.
After helping blow up the Middle East and North Africa, dividing the Balkans into zones of war and tension, turning Ukraine upside down using armadas of neo Nazis, and encircling Russia with a ballistic missile shield, the leaders of this Cold War relic have decided that the best way to deal with instability of the world is… more NATO.
In a June 8th online event co-sponsored by the Atlantic Council, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced the launch of a planning project to reform NATO called NATO 2030. Stoltenberg told his audience that in order to deal with Russia and China’s strategic partnership which is transforming the global balance of power, “we must resist the temptation of national solutions and we must live up to our values: freedom, democracy and the rule of law. To do this, we must stay strong militarily, be more united politically and take a broader approach globally.”
In the mind of Stoltenberg, this means expanding NATO’s membership into the Pacific with a high priority on the absorption of Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea into NATO’s dysfunctional family. It also means extending NATO’s jurisdiction beyond a military alliance to include a wider political and environmental dimension (the war on climate change is apparently just as serious as the war on terrorism and should thus be incorporated into NATO’s operating system).
Analyzing China’s intentions through the most Hobbesian dark age lens on the market, Stoltenberg stated “they are investing heavily in modern military capabilities, including missiles that can reach all NATO allied countries. They are coming closer to us in cyberspace. We see them in the Arctic, in Africa… and they are working more and more together with Russia.”
In spite of NATO’s Cold War thinking, Russia and China have continuously presented olive branches to the west over the years– offering to cooperate on such matters as counter-terrorism, space exploration, asteroid defense, and global infrastructure projects in the Arctic and broader Belt and Road Initiative. In all instances, these offers have been met with a nearly unanimous cold shoulder by the western military industrial complex ruling NATO and the Atlantic alliance.
The Engine of War Heats Up
As Stoltenberg spoke these words, the 49th Baltic Operations running from June 1-16th were underway as the largest NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea featuring “30 ships and submarines, and 30 aircraft, conducting air defence, anti-submarine warfare, maritime interdiction and mine countermeasure operations.” In response Moscow reinforced its armored forces facing Europe.
Meanwhile in China’s backyard, three aircraft carriers all arrived in the Pacific (the USS Theodore Roosevelt, USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz) with a senate Armed Services Committee approval of $6 billion in funds for the Pacific Defense Initiative which Defense News stated will “send a strong signal to the Chinese Communist Party that America is deeply committed to defending our interests in the Indo-Pacific”. The committee also approved a U.S. Airforce operating location in the Indo-Pacific for F-35A jets in order to “prioritize the protection of the air bases that might be under attack from current or emerging cruise missiles and advanced hypersonic missiles, specifically from China.”
Another inflammatory precursor for confrontation came from a House Republican Study Committee report co-authored by Secretary of State Pompeo calling for sanctioning China’s leadership, listing Russia as a state sponsor of terror and authorizing the use of military force against anyone on a Foreign Terrorist Organization list. When one holds in mind that large sections of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard happen to be on this list, it is not hard to see how quickly nations doing business with Iran can be considered “state sponsors of terror”, justifying a use of military force from America.
With this level of explicit antagonism and duplicity, it is no wonder that China’s foreign ministry announced on June 10th that it would not participate in joint three-way arms talks between the USA and Russia. If America demonstrated a coherent intention to shift its foreign policy doctrine towards a genuine pro-cooperation perspective, then it is undoubtably the case that China would enthusiastically embrace such proposals. But until then, China is obviously unwilling to loose any part of its already small nuclear deterrent of 300 warheads (compared to Russia and the USA, who each own 6000).
The Resistance to the Warhawks
I have said it many times before, but there is currently not one but two opposing American military doctrines at war with each other and no assessment of American foreign policy is complete without a sensitivity to that fact.
On the one hand, there is the sociopathic doctrine which I outlined summarily above, but on the other hand, there exists a genuine intention to stop the “forever wars”, pull out of the Middle East, disengage with NATO and realign with a multipolar system of sovereign nation states.
This more positive America expressed itself in Trump’s June 7th counter-attack on former Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis who had fueled the American Maidan now unfolding by stating his belife that solutions can happen without the President. Trump had fired Mattis earlier over the Cold Warrior’s commitment to endless military enmeshment in Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. In this Oval Office interview, the President called out the Military industrial complex which Mattis represents saying “The military-industrial complex is unbelievably powerful… You have no idea. Some legit, and some non-legit.”
Another aspect of Trump’s resistance to the neo-cons running the Pentagon and CIA is reflected in the June 11 joint U.S.-Iraq statement after the Strategic Dialogues summit of American and Iraqi delegates which committed to a continued reduction of troops in Iraq stating:
“Over the coming months, the U.S. would continue reducing forces from Iraq and discuss with the government of Iraq the status of remaining forces as both countries turn their focus towards developing a bilateral security relationship based on strong mutual interests”.
This statement coincides with Trump’s May 2020 call to accelerate U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan which has seen a fall from 12000 troops in February to under 9000 as of this writing.
Most enraging to the NATO-philes of London, Brussels and Washington was Trump’s surprising call to pull 9500 American troops out of Germany hours before Stoltenberg gave his loony NATO 2030 speech with Johann Wadephul (Deputy head of the CDU) saying “these plans demonstrate once again that the Trump administration neglects a central element of leadership: the involvement of alliance partners in the decision-making process”. In his next breath, Wadephul made his anti-Eurasian delusion transparent saying “Europe gains from the Alliance being unified. Only Russia and China gain from strife.”
Just a few months earlier, the President showed his disdain for the NATO bureaucracy by unilaterally pulling 3000 American military personnel out of the Trident Juncture exercise held annually every March.
In Defense of President Trump
In spite of all of his problems, Trump’s resistance to the dark age/neocon faction which has been running a virtually independent military-industrial-intelligence complex since FDR’s death in 1945 demonstrates a high degree of courage unseen in American presidents for many decades.
Most importantly, this flawed President represents a type of America which is genuinely compatible with the pro-nation state paradigm now being led by Russia and China.
Trump’s recent attempt to reform the G7 into a G11 (incorporating Russia, India, South Korea and Australia) is a nice step in that direction but his exclusion of China has made it an unworkable idea.
To solve this problem, American University in Moscow President Edward Lozansky stated in his recent Washington Times column that adding China to the list making it a G12 would be a saving grace to the idea and one of the best flanking maneuvers possible during this moment of crisis. Lozansky’s concept is so important that I wish to end with a larger citation from his article:
“Both Russia and China got the message a long time ago that they need to stay together to withstand the efforts to destroy them in sequence… The G-7 indeed is an obsolete group and it definitely needs a fresh blood. Therefore, a G-12 meeting in New York in late September during the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly would be a perfect place and timing since Mr. Trump had already announced that he is willing to hold a G-5 summit with the leaders of Russia, China, Britain and France — the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — to discuss nuclear security issues. China so far is reluctant to join these talks, arguing that its smaller nuclear force is defensive and poses no threat. However, for the discussion in the G-12 format Mr. Putin might be able to convince his pal Xi to accept Mr. Trump’s invitation. This would be a huge achievement for the world’s peace and at the same time allow Mr. Trump to score lots of political points not only from his electoral base but from undecided and even from his opponents who want to save their families from nuclear holocaust.”
Unless world citizens who genuinely wish to avoid the danger of a nuclear holocaust learn how to embrace the idea of a G-12, and let the NATO/Cold War paradigm rot in the obsolete trash bin of history where it rightfully belongs, then I think it is safe to say that the future will not be something to look forward to.
For the next installment, we will take a look at the British Imperial origins of NATO and the American deep state in order to help shed greater light on the nature of the “two Americas” which I noted above, have been at war with each other since 1776.
COVID-19: China (and Russia) Reseeded with COVID-20
From the date of the initial outbreak in Wuhan I watched carefully on a daily basis the dispersion and progression of the coronavirus in China and then abroad, collecting as much data as were available on each location. By late May of 2020, China had been infection-free for many weeks, the concern turning to the identification and quarantine of imported cases. At the same time, the US became once again ‘the leader of the world’, this time in virus infections and deaths, producing 20,000 to 30,000 new cases and around 1,000 deaths per day. At the time, American hostility toward China’s success in stopping the virus was palpable, with many nasty media articles and White House accusations about China’s false statistics and blaming China for “spreading the virus” to the US. CNN stated, “Chinese state media has repeatedly touted China’s effective measures in containing the virus as the number of infections and deaths surged abroad, contrasting its success with the failures of Western governments, especially the United States.” Clearly there was much surprise and bitterness at China’s success and America’s failure, this coated in a sticky layer of resentment based partly on a justified suspicion that the Chinese were not overly distressed at the Americans enjoying the fruits of their own labor.
But even then I had a sense of an apparition, a version of Dickens’ ‘ghost of coronavirus past’, accompanied by an uncomfortable feeling the Americans were sufficiently bitter (and vicious) to deny the Chinese their apparently easy victory. My fear was that the Americans would try to reseed China as they did Russia, and it would seem my fears were not unjustified. The new virus that broke out at the Xinfadi market in Beijing was a different strain than any previously existing in China, one that existed only in the US and Europe and could only have been brought in from the outside. And once again at a seafood market with no identifiable patient zero, no clear epidemiology (source and distribution) of a virus that did not exist in China. It almost had to be deliberately seeded, the odds against being infinitesimally small.
In terms of what I am calling COVID-20 (to differentiate it from the initial outbreak), China may have been fortunate to detect and corral this new pathogen before it could spread. The outbreak did expand to three other provinces but in single digits and the medical authorities have taken extreme action to prevent further spread since this variety – which again did not exist in China and had to be seeded from another country, appears to be much more contagious than the original COVID-19. In response, Beijing has locked down everything and sent a group of experts to guide the fight against this new potential epidemic, so far with good success. Nucleic acid testing has been initiated on a massive scale, already many millions of people tested, and all those in contact with the Xinfadi market being in quarantine. Many residential compounds in the city strictly prohibit anyone from entering or leaving, with residents having their temperatures checked and reported on a daily basis, and their food and daily necessities delivered.
Before this new outbreak, Beijing had been virus-free for nearly 60 days, meaning there were no local viruses and that this new pathogen was definitely an import (or an American export). On June 19, China’s CDC experts, after intensive investigations of the Xinfadi market, announced what they termed “a groundbreaking virus tracing discovery”, which was that the strain of the new virus in Beijing was the same as that in much of Europe – but much older than those in Europe, and “had been around for quite some time” – and that can mean only that it came from the US because that was the source of all the original varieties many months ago.
The investigators said they obtained so many positive samples that the entire market was “severely contaminated by the virus”, but also that no one should form the conclusion that the market was the origin merely because the outbreak took place there. More importantly, they also said “Beijing’s outbreak gives us the opportunity to re-examine our previous speculation that the virus originated from wildlife”, because unlike Wuhan, “the possibility of wildlife causing Beijing’s latest outbreak is slim.” Their conclusion was that “an infected individual or object contaminated with the virus entered the wet market, and the market only gave it an environment to multiply”. The authorities have already produced the genome sequence and are now establishing when and how the virus was likely imported into China, and how long was the transmission chain. There is no question this pathogen was brought into China “by people”, the question being the identity of those people and their purpose. And, what better way to “teach those smug Chinese a lesson” and attempt to derail China’s rapid economic recovery.
Russia Re-seeded
There is something equally strange about the virus in Russia. For a long time, Russia had only a few infections, rising steadily by only five or ten per day, then suddenly it exploded, rising by 5,000, then 10,000 and 20,000 per day. Virus outbreaks don’t normally manifest that way. The normal process upon an outbreak is a rapid acceleration in the number of infections until it peaks, as happened with all other countries. But with Russia, the infections were minor for a long time, steady at very low numbers, with all the indications of an unsuccessful epidemic, and the Russian government took strict measures to control the spread. The US government was clearly resentful at the failure of the virus to devastate Russia and the US media bemoaned the fact that Russia’s death rate was so low. I would be very interested to see the genome sequences from the first infections in January and February, and for those happening in April and May. I haven’t any definitive proof, but I am certain Russia, as China, was seeded again with another variety for a second attempt.
Virus Distribution
But to return to our main point, it isn’t necessary for us to determine the physical origin of the virus. We know the virus originated in bats; that much is confirmed, but the more important issue is the epidemiology, particularly the incidence and distribution. First of all, for China and most other nations originally infected, there were so many multiple and simultaneous sources that locating a patient zero was a hopeless task. Virus outbreaks, left to their own natural devices, do not behave in this fashion, but begin with one person in a tightly localised situation and provably spreading from that point. Equally distressing is that we have the truly unprecedented “two waves” of worldwide infections. For this, let’s review my observations from an earlier article and take a quick look at those two waves of infections that circled the globe.
The First Wave simultaneously infected 25 nations within a few days centered on January 25. One month later, the Second Wave simultaneously infected 85 nations within a few days centered on February 25. A natural virus hasn’t the ability to simultaneously (within three days) infect 85 different countries on all continents of the world. More peculiar is that these countries were not all infected with the same variety of the virus, and that most reported simultaneous outbreaks in multiple locations. Considering the above information in light of the basics of virus transmission, the only theory that fits all the known facts is that these waves resulted from many people leaving Fort Detrick on the same day carrying a pail of different live viruses, because those multiple varieties at the time existed only in the US. It could not possibly have resulted from air travel because that timing would have been scattered. When 85 countries experience a virus outbreak on virtually the same day, this can happen only with human assistance. The Americans have steadfastly refused to address this point.
Experts on biological weapons are in unanimous agreement that eruptions in a human population of a new and unusual pathogen in multiple locations simultaneously, with no clear idea of source and cases with no proven links, is virtually prima facie evidence of a pathogen deliberately released, since natural outbreaks can almost always be resolved to one location and one patient zero. But with COVID-19 (or COVID-20), not one country out of 200 has been able to do this.
It should be firmly noted that this new infection in Beijing is not a “second wave” as termed by the Western media. This is an entirely new and different infection by a new virus and totally unrelated to anything prior, a strain of a new and different virus that was deliberately carried to Beijing and flooded in the Xinfadi Market. This infection is not related to COVID-19 but is the seeding of yet another biological pathogen in China, making that now seven different biological attacks on China in two years. And China has suffered others similar. One of the most notable was the H1N1 virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic – and which was extinct for decades – but which suddenly appeared in 1977 in both China and Russia causing a global pandemic, prompting immediate claims by the Americans that it “escaped from a Chinese lab”. But the only sensible explanation is that the H1N1 virus ‘escaped’ from the Americans because there were persistent reports that the US military had found or saved samples of the original ‘Spanish Flu’ virus and were attempting to re-activate it. There was never a shred of evidence that either China or Russia had anything to do with this, and both were taken entirely by surprise.
It is my view that the world needs to stop pretending that COVID-19 was an accident of nature. Consider China’s recent experience. In addition to SARS – which was indisputably man-made, China has suffered repeated viral pandemics in the past two years. February 15, 2018: H7N4 bird flu. June, 2018: H7N9 bird flu. August, 2018: outbreak of African swine flu. May 24, 2019: massive infestation of armyworms. December, 2019: COVID-19. January, 2020: A “highly pathogenic” strain of bird flu. June, 2020: China is hit with COVID-20. Are we to tell ourselves it was merely a run of bad luck that China was the only nation in the world to be hit repeatedly with so many different biological pathogens in such a short time? And merely more ‘bad luck’ that China became the only country in the world that was domestically virus-free and was suddenly hit again with a foreign strain in another wet market? This assumption is too ridiculous to bother refuting.
It is unfortunate that so much of our information today comes to us in a passive receptance from the mass media because one result is the loss of our ability to examine information critically and use our minds to assess the presentation. As an example, it was very clever for the Americans to use a wet market as a distribution point for a virus and for the media to give this point massive air time, because we instinctively associate such markets with at least a possibility of germs and bacteria and thus passively accept the claims as true without the necessary evidence and thus avoid using our brains as intended. Our assessment of wet markets as unsanitary may be correct, but common germs and bacteria are a very different thing from a coronavirus that makes its home in bats and has no business being in a vegetable market. It isn’t important for our purposes to decide if COVID-19 was created in a lab; the important point is that a coronavirus has no means of transportation from bat caves in Sichuan to a market in Wuhan, nor the ability to mutate itself in such a way as to be energetically contagious to humans, and much less the conscious intelligence to choose China’s largest passenger transportation hub as the distribution point and the Eve of the Chinese New Year as the best time to attack. For these, the coronavirus required a helping ‘black hand’.
The Noose Tightens on the US
There is almost daily an increase in the volume of evidence that COVID-19 was circulating in the US far earlier than admitted, and serving as incriminating proof that the CDC’s deliberate (and threatening) forbidding of testing was to bury this evidence. The most recent example is headlines in the US media on June 21, 2020, stating, “Over 40 mysterious respiratory deaths in California could dramatically rewrite narrative of COVID-19” in the US. The LA Times reported on “a cluster of mysterious respiratory deaths” beginning in December of 2019. The local news website stated this meant that COVID-19 was circulating in California “way earlier than we knew”. And let’s not forget too quickly that Japanese tourists were infected in Hawaii in September of 2019.
And on June 20, 2020, the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS) revealed that they had discovered that COVID-19 was present in water samples dating back to mid-December of 2019. The results were confirmed by two separate labs that used two entirely different testing methods, and also showed that environmental wastewater from Milan, Turin and Bologna returned positive traces of the virus dating back to December if not earlier. Apparently, the RNA from COVID-19 does not readily dissolve or disintegrate in water and polymerase chain reaction testing allows scientists to identify the RNA after many months.
And it wasn’t only Italy. Dutch researchers discovered COVID-19 RNA in a wastewater plant in the Utrecht, Netherlands, city of Amersfoort. French scientists detected “high concentrations” of COVID-19 RNA in samples of sewage water from greater Paris that were obtained before Paris first recorded any deaths. Sputnik News reported in May that a Paris hospital confirmed it had treated Amirouche Hammar, the country’s first COVID-19 patient, on December 27, 2019 – one month before France’s first announcement of infections and four days before the WHO China bureau was informed of a “pneumonia of unknown etiology” on December 31.
The Irish Mirror reported on June 19 that “many countries are beginning to use wastewater sampling to track the spread of the disease”, scientists claiming these detections were “consistent with evidence emerging in other countries” that COVID-19 was circulating around the world long before China reported its first cases, all of which would of necessity have had to have originated in the US and transported around the world. It is now beginning to appear that many countries were seeded at approximately the same time, perhaps in their water distribution systems. Following these discoveries, the ISS told Reuters it intends to launch a new study of the wastewater of Italian tourist resorts. I suspect other nations will follow.
And it would seem the NYT, WSJ, WP, CNN, ABC, NBC, National Post, Globe & Mail, have no knowledge of this. The Chinese and Europeans know, but the Americans and Canadians don’t know because the owners of their major newspapers and TV networks don’t want them to know.
A Brief Update
If you look at the graph (courtesy of CNN), you can see the European infection pattern (in pink) and the American (in green). The Europeans followed China’s protocols in varying degrees, and thus with varying degrees of success. Europe’s infections peaked at around 30,000 per day then descended to around 2,000 near the end of June, while the Americans, led by a man who is living proof that democracy is the worst possible form of government, saw their infections peak at the same level, slightly decrease, then revert to 30,000 infections and around 1,000 deaths per day where they will now remain until the virus surges through the entire population. Twenty-six states are already experiencing dramatic spikes reaching new records each day, so Trump ordered the CDC to “stop testing” because it makes him look bad.
The next graphic is a list of the top ten nations for COVID-19 infections. Missing from this picture is a comparison I want to make about leadership and competence, to say nothing of intelligence. Shanghai is a city only two hours from Wuhan and, when the infections exploded, had no warning and almost no time to prepare, but acted so quickly and decisively that the city had only 26 infections and 7 deaths. Missing from the graphic is Canada, with a population very similar to Shanghai, and who, with months to plan and prepare, had 101,000 infections and 8,400 deaths. Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau is also living proof of democracy’s vast failings.
The Americans elected a pathetic buffoon who lives in outer space, while the Canadians elected a bullied child so painfully unintelligent and indecisive his wife would have to tell him to call the fire department if his house were burning down. I would include here the Brazilians who, with excessive assistance from the Americans, elected an arrogant sociopath who said famously, “It’s not my fault. What do you want me to do about it?”
In all three countries the leaderless pandemic results are the same, with infections and deaths likely increasing until at least the end of the year. China, with a population of more than 1.4 billion people, had about 80,000 infections and little more than 4,000 deaths, and stopped the virus cold in about three months. But according to the NYT, WSJ, WP, and Canada’s terminally-obnoxious National Post, the “free-market capitalist” countries are God’s first choice while “socialist authoritarian” China should incur yet more sanctions for all its mistakes.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/15/asia/coronavirus-beijing-outbreak-intl-hnk/index.html
[2] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1191598.shtml
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/asia/coronavirus-beijing-outbreak-intl-hnk/index.html
[4] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1192146.shtml
[5]http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202006/15/WS5ee6b33da310834817252ec9.html
[6] COVID-19 – Two Major ‘Waves’ of Global Infection; https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/05/covid-19-two-major-waves-of-global.html
[7] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1192389.shtml
[8] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-sewage-idUSKBN23Q1J9
[9] https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/italy-sewage-study-suggests-covid19-was-there-in-december-2019/news-story/2fd865f7b12a33698f3e9ab2f15a35e3
[10] https://sputniknews.com/europe/202006191079667103-scientists-find-traces-of-sars-cov-2-in-italian-wastewater-predating-2019-wuhan-outbreak/
Debt? What Debt?
US National debt increased by nearly $1 trillion in the last month
In the past 30 days, the United States national debt has increased by nearly $1 trillion– screaming past $26.2 trillion total, or 128% of GDP.
That means the US government is borrowing over $23 million per MINUTE.
But that’s just the last 30 days. The US government has gone nearly $3 trillion further into debt since March 1.
That is over $9,000 for every man, woman, and child living in the United States. And all you received was a $1200 check…
Now the “Save our Country Coalition” has penned a letter to Congress stating that the federal budget is dangerously close to $10 trillion this fiscal year.
On an inflation adjusted basis, that means the government will spend more fighting Covid than it spent fighting every single 20th century war– plus the 21st century Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan– COMBINED.
The cost of World War I, World War II, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, The Gulf War, The Iraq War, and the War in Afghanistan combined, does not add up to this fiscal year’s budget.
Lies, Damned Lies and Covid19
by Michael Lesher via https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/18/lies-damned-lies-and-covid19/
[ . . . ]
Well, here are some choice examples of “pure wind” that made “lies sound truthful” over the past three months:
Shelter in place. The fraudulent use of this term stands in synecdoche to all the rest. “Shelter in place” originated in US Civil Defense regulations in the context of a possible nuclear attack; over the following decades, the term evolved to mean any emergency order to “take cover until the coast is clear on order of officials.” But it has never had the slightest connection with disease control.
An order that restricts the movement of someone who is not ill, but who is suspected of contact with someone who is, is called a “quarantine.” But there are laws that regulate slapping quarantine orders on people — to say nothing of an entire population — and the governors and mayors who were bent on lockdowns clearly didn’t intend to be constrained by anything as pedestrian as the law.
So they dug up this irrelevant phrase and plastered it over their arbitrary confinements of huge numbers of citizens — in violation of quarantine statutes, without a court order, and without even a semblance of public debate — hoping nobody would notice the compounding of official malfeasance with verbal fakery.
It’s worth taking a moment to imagine how this trick must have been hatched in the bowels of some executive mansion.
I can picture someone like New Jersey governor Phil Murphy (last seen claiming that the constraints of the Bill of Rights weren’t part of his job description) barking at his aides, “Damn it, there’s got to be something to justify locking up the whole state without going through those pesky quarantine procedures!”
And I can see a harried assistant, having rummaged for hours in the archives, jogging into an office with the term “shelter in place” and a rather sheepish explanation that, well, it’s not about infection control, and doesn’t really have anything to do with the present situation, but it does say “in place” and, um, “shelter” and, you know…and anyway, for God’s sake, there isn’t anything else!
And then it’s not hard to imagine the boss (who knows the media better than his subordinates do) triumphantly working the words “shelter in place” into his next public address, confident that few mainstream reporters will ask him where the phrase came from.
The imagined details are less important than the obvious fact that “shelter in place” could not have been sprung on us by way of an innocent error. The term had to be found, and the officials who found it would necessarily have known what it meant, and therefore that its use in the context of a viral epidemic would constitute a fraud.
Thus, anyone — and I mean anyone — who has employed the phrase “shelter in place” over the last three months has been repeating a lie. It’s as simple as that. Every public health care official who has used the phrase is a scoundrel; every “journalist” who has used it is a shameless propagandist; every politician who has used it is an imposter who, in my view, deserves to be impeached or voted out of office forthwith.
Social distancing. This one runs “shelter in place” a close second. The phrase was nonexistent, or at best obscure, until rather recently; when officials of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention used it in a 2007 advisory memorandum, they felt obliged to explain the term in a footnote:
Social distancing refers to methods for reducing frequency and closeness of contact between people in order to decrease the risk of transmission of disease. Examples of social distancing include cancellation of public events such as concerts, sports events, or movies, closure of office buildings, schools, and other public places, and restriction of access to public places such as shopping malls or other places where people gather.
Note that this definition does not include keeping people six feet apart, stifling them with surgical masks, or barring them from inviting family members to their apartments. Evidently, not even the germophobes at the CDC were prepared to contemplate so brutal a disruption of human life just thirteen years ago.
In fact, the same memorandum stressed the importance of “[r]espect for individual autonomy” and “each individual’s general right to noninterference,”adding that even in the event the government did close office buildings or restrict access to shopping malls, “[a] process should be in place for objections to be heard, restrictions appealed, and for new procedures to be considered prior to implementation” — something never even remotely attempted during the last three months.
In other words, “social distancing” really means whatever the changing whims of our governors would like it to mean, as they continue to exercise “emergency” powers in what is clearly not an emergency. Meanwhile, the use of the term gives a false patina of scientific legitimacy to unprecedented government intrusions into the most basic interactions of human life.
The timing of the successive redefinitions of the phrase is itself instructive. In my own state of New Jersey, masks were not required as a component of “social distancing” until mid-April, by which time it was clear that the number of new cases in the region was already leveling off. (Masks remain mandatory in public as of this writing, even though the infection rate has fallen almost to pre-outbreak levels.)
Allow that point to sink in for a moment: “social distancing” took on a more extreme and divisive definition at just the moment that, by any rational calculation, restrictions should have been reduced, if not removed altogether! And the most recent fiats from the governor suggest that nothing like ordinary companionship is going to be permitted any time soon — regardless of the facts.
This implies that, at bottom, “social distancing” is not intended to serve any genuine medical purpose. It’s much better understood as an instrument of political repression — a way of keeping people apart and preventing any sort of public organizing.
I don’t consider it an accident that the “phased reopening plan” being peddled by nearly all media “experts,” and routinely attributed to Johns Hopkins University, was in fact produced under the leadership of Scott Gottlieb, a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute — the right-wing think tank that served as a major cheerleader for the Iraq invasion of 2003 and whose recent initiatives include efforts to sharply reduce federal spending on health care.
(Dr. Gottlieb, who until recently was Trump’s Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, now sits on the boards of pharma heavyweights Pfizer, Illumina and Tempus — so it’s not hard to see where his interests lie.)
That AEI is in no hurry to help small businesses reopen or to keep working people from losing their jobs will come as no surprise. What needs emphasis is that if such an outfit couldn’t hide its agenda behind the medical-sounding phrase “social distancing,” it would stand little chance of slipping its initiatives past the general public and into practice. But while we’re all creeping around with our faces wrapped like mummies, turned away from each other whenever possible, staying at least six feet apart, and speaking only when spoken to, how are we supposed to mount effective political opposition as the high rollers play their favorite games?
Emergency. Though it’s not often reported this way, the United States largely suspended democratic government back in March, when some 40 state executives declared “health emergencies,” granting themselves quasi-dictatorial powers to act without legislative approval or legal process.
They did this by invoking each state’s version of the Emergency Health Powers Act, a controversial piece of legislation crafted in the nervous aftermath of the September 2001 attacks and supposedly designed for a coordinated response to a massive act of bioterrorism. The American Civil Liberties Union was not alone back then in condemning the bill as “replete with civil liberties problems” and “a throwback to a time before the legal system recognized basic protections for fairness.”
Nevertheless, liberal media didn’t utter a peep when governors across the nation effectively scuppered democracy in the face of what, however threatening, didn’t even arguably resemble a catastrophic bioterror attack.
If that strikes you as a flagrant abuse of the word “emergency” for questionable political purposes — and it should — you ain’t seen nothing yet.
On June 4, New Jersey’s Governor Murphy issued his third consecutive extension of what was supposed to be a thirty-day “state of emergency” he had originally declared — unilaterally — on March 9.
What was the “emergency” this time around? In the governor’s own words: “there has now been a decrease in the rate of reported new cases of COVID19 in New Jersey, in the total number of individuals being admitted to hospitals for COVID19, and in the rate of reproduction for COVID19 infections in New Jersey.”
Got that? New cases, hospitalizations, even the “rate of reproduction” for the virus are all on the wane throughout Murphy’s jurisdiction. (And have been for months.) Yet in today’s Newspeak, that’s an “emergency” — enough to justify another month of democracy-free rule by executive fiat.
And I’m the Maharaja of Mysore…
I won’t even bother writing about that most buffoonish of phrases, “flattening the curve.” If that ever meant anything (which I doubt), it means literally nothing, or more accurately less than nothing, when applied (as it is now) to an outbreak that is demonstrably almost over.
I’ll only note that if the lockdown enthusiasts had been able to specify an actual goal, in intelligible language, they would have done so from the start. They couldn’t — because their true objectives were political, not medical — so they offered us a magical-thinking cartoon image instead. They must be hoping we still haven’t noticed.
As always, fraudulent language goes hand in hand with fraudulent political posturing, of which the Atlantic article I’ve already mentioned — oozing crocodile tears over the excesses of the cops while oblivious to the Constitution-defying antics of Governors Cuomo, Murphy, Whitmer et al. — is a rather rank example.
[ . . . ]
As I write this, the US is teetering simultaneously on the edge of its worst financial collapse since the 1930s and on the brink of a descent into quasi-dictatorial rule. Sectarian protests, however justified, won’t halt that descent. General political resistance just might. And liberal pundits are scared to death that protesters, black and white, progressive and conservative, might figure out that they’re really fighting the same enemy.