Monday, March 30, 2020

Confusing Dreamscape

Parked In Driveway,

HELP, Oil Prices Have Fallen And Can't Get Up! 
The global pandemic shutdown will clear out all economically non-viable oil drilling and pumping operations, and many of them will never have the economic capital to start back up. All the shale pads on the drive from Austin to Yoakum were vacated yesterday. Usually half of them are covered with big, mobile pumping equipment, diesel power-rigs, football-stadium floodlights and RV bunkhouses. Not yesterday. Empty space. Nothing and nobody.
West ​T​exas Intermediate ​dipped to​ $​1​3/bbl Friday.​ 
It is $20 on Monday morning.​ Running out of storage for it, too.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Rig-Count-Crashes-Most-In-4-Years-As-Oil-Shock-Rocks-US-Shale.html 

​ ​“Russia is best-prepared of all the oil-producing countries, as our economy has been living in an economic war mode for 6 years,” the president of the Russian-Asian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Vitaly Mankevich, told RT...
 ​ ​“It will be a disaster [for the Russian economy] if oil companies become unfeasible, that is, when oil prices drop lower than 15 dollars per barrel,” Sergey Suverov, chief analyst with Premier BCS, said in an interview with RT.

​Fracking will not be able to bounce back after a certain amount of time, and it is likely that most of the equipment to drive from pad to pad, and intermittently tap the pad after it sits for awhile, will not be repurchased when it wears out. Only the most profitable pads/wells will be tapped, and only when prices are high enough. Meanwhile, those fracking companies are going to get bailed out, to keep them functional with mountains of bad debt, predicated on high oil prices continuing.
Fracking changed the international oil supply dynamic, allowing the US military to take Iran and Venezuela offline. Private investors were sucked into this by government assurances that "the Fed's got your back".  
They will expect to be made whole, but the $US​ will enter hyperinflation after the current crisis. 
Gold has become unobtainable, now that there is significant demand for physical gold. The paper-gold market is busted.

Dr. Clif sends this WSJ udate on the coronavirus treatment with hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin.
Also, there is an update to the French/Vietnamese clinical trial, which was scandalized a week ago by revelations of improper presentation of patient data to make results look better. The fixed that and have 80 patients now and it still looks good. The Pulmonologists at the hospital where my brother is a Respiratory Therapist are using this combination after checking EKG, which they monitor. This treatment is not discredited. It appears effective.

Russia has had good results with mefloquine, an antimalarial drug related to the chloroquines. They use it together with "a macrolide antibiotic", which azithromycin is. It's hard to find good English-language information on this.

In recent decades there have been numerous studies on zinc lozenges as a treatment for the "common cold". This has been based on cold-symptoms, not viral type testing. Some percentage of "common colds" have always been from coronavirus. The question arises of whether zinc helps treat novel-coronavirus. They use it with hydroxychloroquine in Korea. It is safe and possibly effective. It's cheap, but it's getting sold out. 
Take one every couple of hours during illness, then stop.  Bathe the back of your throat with it.
It's been looked at as a preventative for colds, but at lower doses.

Do take vitamin-D. 
Low vitamin-D weakens the immune system, and most people who do not work out in the sun are low. If you have not been taking it, take 10,000 international units (2 X 5000 IU) per day until June, then one per day. If you have been taking it, as I have, take 5000 IU/d. 

 High dose vitamin-C is helpful as an "antioxidant" during the time that a person is sick with fever and feeling bad.
Much of the immune system attack on viral particles and virus-infected-cells is through little bomblets of oxidants which destroy the bad viruses and the cells that are making them. That leaves a big, nasty, toxic mess in your body. High dose vitamin-C helps the body clean up and remove that mess. It is not a preventive treatment.
Oral dosing is 1000 mg 3-4 times per day with water. In hospitals it has been used in IV drips, up to 10 grams (10,000 mg) per day, which has recently been pushed to 20,000 mg/d in some cases.

Consider Dr. Day's Coronavirus Hydration Solution, an added-vitamin-c version of standard oral hydration solution.
Lots of people get nausea, vomiting and diarrhea with this virus. It binds to receptors in the GI tract, as well as airways.
Recipe:
1 liter water
2 level tablespoons sugar
Level half teaspoon salt
1000 mg vitamin-c, available as sodium ascorbate powder 1/4 teaspoon (A little more would also be ok.)

U.S. military command teams in charge of protecting homeland security are being isolated in the infamous Cheyenne mountain bunker where they will remain 'sealed off' until the coronavirus pandemic passes

Shut-in until June.​ That's the pattern we can anticipate, with local variations, based upon pandemic managements to date. Daisy Luther, The Organic Prepper, runs the graphs and numbers. 
The sooner your area started social distancing, in relation to penetrance of viral cases, the better your community will fare. Smaller peaks are to be expected in areas less affected, but they are all likely to be in late April. 
There will continue to be bleed-over from higher-incidence areas into lower incidence areas. That is already a bone of contention between New York and everybody else.

Bright sunlight and hot humid weather take their toll on exposed coronavirus particles, but there is no counting on that bringing summer relief.

Coronavirus vaccines kill too many of the mice when they are later exposed to coronavirus, due to excessive immunologic reaction, aka "immunopthology", aka "cytokine storm". 
"Don't try them on humans" was the advice of SARS-virus-vaccine researchers.

An early warning symptom:
The coronavirus is capable of attacking key cells in the nose, which may explain the unusual finding that some Covid-19 sufferers lose their ability to smell and taste, Harvard Medical School researchers found.  

911 Truth: WTC 7 Not Destroyed by Fire, Concludes Final University of Alaska Fairbanks Report
(How did we get lied to so badly? What really brought down that building that afternoon, and when was that decided?)

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Bill The Prophet

Seeking Understanding,

 Larry Romanoff has good analysis again. 
 I make no claim to being a virologist, but this is beginning to look damned peculiar. A natural virus hasn’t the ability to simultaneously infect 85 different countries on all continents of the world, with outbreaks in multiple locations in each country – and to do it without the vehicle of a seafood market full of bats and bananas.
 More peculiar is that these countries were by no means all infected with the same variety of the virus, which means the simultaneous infections in these 85 countries were not from the same source. Even more peculiar is that most countries, at least the major ones, reported simultaneous outbreaks in multiple locations, and to date while some nations have been able to identify one or more of their ‘patients zero’, I am aware of no country that was able to definitively identify all their several ‘patients zero’. Considering the above information in light of the known basic facts of virus transmission, intuition suggests at least the possibility of there having been many people carrying a pail of live viruses.
 It is interesting to note that high fatality rates are entirely within Italy, Iran, and China. For approximate figures, China’s fatality rate is between 3% and 4%, that of Iran at about 7% and Italy the highest at around 9%. Even more interesting is that if these countries did pass their strain of the virus to other nations, those strains abandoned their lethality when they left home. Of the 34 countries supposedly infected by Italy, for example, all exhibit very low mortality, the same being true of Chinese or Iranian infections. The natural conclusion is that these viruses prefer their ‘home populations’ and pose at best a minor threat to others.

Oh, this is funny, but it is a lead to follow. I was telling Jenny just now that I can't figure out who would benefit from releasing waves of mild-by-military-standards weaponized virus upon the world.
"This is evil genius stuff", I said...
Then I remember that a friend from Switzerland, high end audio uber-geek, had sent a TED talk by Bill Gates from 2015, explaining how the Ebola epidemic shows we are not prepared for the next viral pandemic. The picture Bill flashes after he walks in with the drum of survival rations for his childhood bomb shelter is CORONAVIRUS. He does not say that.
Bill goes on about the wonders of NATO and having doctors in teams ready to go to poor African countries so women can give birth safely and children can get vaccines. 
Nice guy in Mr Rodgers sweater giving talk that predicts our current scenario rather neatly.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI

Bill resigned as CEO of Microsoft in January.
I wondered why... 
Hey, I just looked up Microsoft headquarters. It's in Redmond Washington, which is to Kirkland, as Ft Worth is to Dallas, a confluent urban center. 
Kirkland is where all hell broke loose with coronavirus, right after Bill quite as CEO. 
A lot of CEOs resigned in January, I hear. I wonder where Bill is now.

Bill  got Event 201 up and running in October, just as it appears novel coronavirus was entering human hosts.  http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/

 I'm going to say that following-Bill-Gates'-money might be our best lead on this Malthusian biowarfare global pandemic.
We know Bill believes secret sterilizationwith tetanus vaccines is the save for human overpopulation.
Bill Gates may actually be trying to HELP the world by spreading a pandemic virus that kills 1-5%, and mostly the weaker ones. It may have other tweaks to increase and decrease mortality.
 From this 2015 TED talk, Bill seems like he was already working with NATO. He talked them up pretty well.
With Bill running the main project, other military/spook participants would be able to pitch some curve balls, more deadly viral strains, after Bill's humanitarian effort was already underway, and understood by global elites as a helpful thing.

Here is Bill on Saturday saying the entire US has to shut-down right away for 6-10 weeks. 
"Anything less will not work".
"State by state and county by county will not work", says Bill. 
(How can you be so sure, Bill? It worked in China.)

 Is the Corona Virus a new 9/11, a new deep event?
We cannot yet be sure, as of this writing. Perhaps the current strategy of suspending basic liberties will work to effectively eliminate all threats posed by the virus. Governments will then restore the civil liberties currently being suspended and all will fairly quickly return to the way things were before. Perhaps the economy will confidently weather the fallout from the ‘lockdowns’ and everything will return to business as usual.
 And perhaps a sober ‘lessons learned’ review will lead to public health officials developing reasonable and balanced plans, such as developing sufficient capacity for rapid testing and tracing, which can be deployed the next time a sufficiently dangerous virus starts to spread thus avoiding terrifying publics and implementing draconian measures that inflict significant damage to the social and economic fabric of society.
 Or perhaps not. It may be that, as British journalist Peter Hitchens has been warning, the loss of liberty and basic rights will continue indefinitely as governments greedily hold on to their increased powers of control over their citizenry.  

 Thanks for this, Tom:
 Today’s America is confronting an existential crisis similar to that which both Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt battled in their time. Just as the proto-deep state of 1865 ran Lincoln’s assassination from Montreal Canada, and took over the White House minutes after FDR’s untimely death in 1945, today’s deep state has attempted in vain to overthrow President Trump while successfully undermining the political viability of other “outsiders” like Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard.
 The difference is that today’s crisis combines elements of all previous crises of 1861-1865, 1929-1933 and 1938-1945: the very real new threat of chaos and civil war within, NATO-led wars with China and Russia without and economic collapse across the entire trans-Atlantic bubble economy. The other difference is located in the current presidency’s inability to FOCUS with a clear mind on principled solutions to this multi-faceted crisis while instead finding itself trapped within contradictory impulses.
 While FDR and Lincoln understood that VALUE was located the physically productive forces of labor which sustained and improved the lives of people and gave the constitution’s pre-amble a real living character, today’s American leadership has displayed a far greater ignorance to this basic fact of life.

Thanks for sending this, Tyler. The website format is edgy, but this is serious content:.
"I am an ER MD in New Orleans. Class of 98. Every one of my colleagues have now seen several hundred Covid 19 patients and this is what I think I know.​"​
​ ​Clinical course is predictable.
​ ​2-11 days after exposure (day 5 on average) flu like symptoms start. Common are fever, headache, dry cough, myalgias(back pain), nausea without vomiting, abdominal discomfort with some diarrhea, loss of smell, anorexia, fatigue.

Day 5 of symptoms- increased SOB, and bilateral viral pneumonia from direct viral damage to lung parenchyma.
Day 10- Cytokine storm leading to acute ARDS and multiorgan failure. You can literally watch it happen in a matter of hours.
81% mild symptoms, 14% severe symptoms requiring hospitalization, 5% critical.
​ ​Patient presentation is varied. Patients are coming in hypoxic (even 75%) without dyspnea. I have seen Covid patients present with encephalopathy, renal failure from dehydration, DKA. I have seen the bilateral interstitial pneumonia on the xray of the asymptomatic shoulder dislocation or on the CT's of the (respiratory) asymptomatic polytrauma patient. Essentially if they are in my ER, they have it. Seen three positive flu swabs in 2 weeks and all three had Covid 19 as well. Somehow this b***h has told all other disease processes to get out of town.​..
​ Basically, if you have a bilateral pneumonia with normal to low WBC, lymphopenia, normal procalcitonin, elevated CRP and ferritin- you have covid-19 and do not need a nasal swab to tell you that.
​ ​A ratio of absolute neutrophil count to absolute lymphocyte count greater than 3.5 may be the highest predictor of poor outcome. the UK is automatically intubating these patients for expected outcomes regardless of their clinical presentation.
​ ​An elevated Interleukin-6 (IL6) is an indicator of their cytokine storm. If this is elevated watch these patients closely with both eyes.​..
  Disposition
​ ​I had never discharged multifocal pneumonia before. Now I personally do it 12-15 times a shift. 2 weeks ago we were admitting anyone who needed supplemental oxygen. Now we are discharging with oxygen if the patient is comfortable and oxygenating above 92% on nasal cannula. We have contracted with a company that sends a paramedic to their home twice daily to check on them and record a pulse ox. We know many of these patients will bounce back but if it saves a bed for a day we have accomplished something. Obviously we are fearful some won't make it back.​..
 Treatment​: ​Supportive
 ​W​orldwide 86% of covid 19 patients that go on a vent die. Seattle reporting 70%. Our hospital has had 5 deaths and one patient who was extubated. Extubation happens on day 10 per the Chinese and day 11 per Seattle.
​ ​Plaquenil which has weak ACE2 blockade doesn't appear to be a savior of any kind in our patient population. Theoretically, it may have some prophylactic properties but so far it is difficult to see the benefit to our hospitalized patients, but we are using it and the studies will tell.​..
 We are also using Azithromycin, but are intermittently running out of IV.​..
​ ​Proning vented patients significantly helps oxygenation. Even self proning the ones on nasal cannula helps​.
[That means people breathe better face down. Got a massage table?]  ​...
 One of my colleagues who is a 31 yo old female who graduated residency last may with no health problems and normal BMI is out with the symptoms and an SaO2 of 92%. She will be the first of many.
I PPE best I have. I do wear a MaxAir PAPR the entire shift. I do not take it off to eat or drink during the shift. I undress in the garage and go straight to the shower. My wife and kids fled to her parents outside Hattiesburg. The stress and exposure at work coupled with the isolation at home is trying. But everyone is going through something right now. Everyone is scared; patients and employees. But we are the leaders of that emergency room. Be nice to your nurses and staff. Show by example how to tackle this crisis head on. Good luck to us all."

​Awaiting The Onslaught​

Saturday, March 28, 2020

Humpty Dumpty Is Broken

​Asking What Happened,​

​ ​One thing I have been seeing in clinic since last summer, a minor thing, usually brought home by the kids, is a cold that may give a fever for the first 2 days, which are the worst days for feeling achy and bad and so on, but then there is a cough and maybe sniffles for another 5 days. A “regular cold”.
​ ​The more interesting thing that I saw all last summer, fall and early winter, and might still be out there, but differently interpreted, is “the cold that lasts 3-4 weeks”. My wife is an elementary school librarian. Jenny and I both had it in September/October. I had already been seeing it for several months. People would come in during week 3 of symptoms, which always included rawness deeper down in the central chest, saying, “something’s wrong, I never stay sick this long. I think I need antibiotics or something”.
​ ​In late November or early December I had a patient get hospitalized for some-bad-something that affected his lungs, heart, whole body, and got him every test the residents and attending faculty could think of. He was diagnosed with viral pneumonia, caused by coronavirus. That was completely novel, but I remembered it, because I did not get those hospital records until January, and questions were already rolling about in my mind.
​ ​Was this the same coronavirus as in China?
Was this a milder, but similar coronavirus, released in the US ahead of the pandemic wave as a vaccination to the population?
​ ​I still have those same questions. I’m not “plagued” by them, because I’m ok with having unanswered questions. Wrong answers are preferred by many, but I have always detested that shite (Please excuse my Irish!)
It is now in the discourse, protested mightily by Trump, Pompeo and friends, that this virus (always pretending there is only one version) originated in the US, Ft. Detrick, and got spread to US soldiers, accidentally or purposefully (like Lyme probably did, and the 1975-1976 Swine Flu). You can never tell if Ft Detrick meant to do stuff. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. Anyway, they got shut down for “breaches-but-no-harm-done” last July and opened back up for business in November. (Do scroll http://www.johndayblog.com for those stories, if curious).
​ ​We can’t tell, because nobody is reporting RNA sequences openly for comparison any more, what versions of this viral family popped up when and where. It sure looks military. The viral sequences of L-strain and S-strain described in China show that the attack-sites are the same spike-protein-and-binding-sequence, but “neutral” segments of the genome are as much as 17% different. I likened that to mounting Texas Longhorn regalia on the front of a Ford and a Chevy. They look like the same car after that, but they started different.
​ ​I am hopeful that when the blood testing for antibodies eventually becomes available to me, in Austin, and I seem to be the only one at clinic who has heard of it, that it will show different immunogenic bands, for the 5 endemic coronavirus types in the US, and the important newcomer(s).
​I c​an’t hold my breath​ waiting​
​ ​​Things don't work at my clinic now. You can't get a urine dipped to see if there is infection without  30 minute lab-only appointment. There are none to be had any time soon. Urine infections can spread to the kidneys and then to the blood. Treating early prevents that. Treating blindly with antibiotics causes so very many public health problems. Dipping the urine with a quick, cheap test, solves most of that. This is only one example of how things are broken. It is pervasive.

Caitlin Johnstone:
​ ​Weaponizing a virus is the thing that biological warfare is. The US government might not have deliberately released the virus (also not a settled question), but they are using the virus as a weapon aimed at toppling vulnerable targeted governments.
​ ​The use of biological warfare, or germ warfare, is prohibited by international law, though in typical fashion the US is skirting the parameters of those laws in this case by weaponizing a virus that was already spreading. Which is not to say that the US is above deliberately infecting a population using biological weaponry as well; they used them extensively during the Korean War.
​ ​Thousands of Iranians have already died of this virus due to the difficulties US sanctions create in obtaining medicine, equipment and resources, and it’s possible that orders of magnitude more dead may follow. This is not accidental, this is deliberate. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has gone on record to say that the objective is to make Iranian civilians so miserable and desperate that they overthrow their own government, and it is clear that this virus is being employed toward this purpose.
​ ​This same imperial war machine is actively attempting to inflict this same fate upon Venezuela, where tens of thousands have already died of malnutrition and inability to access medicine because of the Trump administration’s brutal economic warfare. The DC-based International Monetary Fund has denied Venezuela a loan it says it needs to fight the pandemic citing dispute over the legitimacy of the Maduro government, a dispute the US itself created out of thin air and narrative spin. On top of all this the Trump administration is now offering a $15 million bribe to anyone who will help them arrest Maduro on ridiculous drug trafficking and terrorism charges.
​ ​Who would benefit from a disease-ravaged nation not having a government? Certainly not the Venezuelan people.

​Moon of Alabama on turning the knife in the wounds of Iran and Venezuela:

​Philip Giraldi:
​ ​Based on his wartime status, the president and his cabinet are poised to exploit Civil War and Korean War legislation to assume powers over the economy and will likely arrange bailouts of some industries that will then acquire the government as a partner. The now declared “national emergency” will undoubtedly come to include some forms of martial law to enforce the isolation of targeted populations and it is also being reported that the Justice Department has asked Congress to allow judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during the “emergency.” As we have learned from the Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act and the Authorization to Use Military Force, allegedly temporary powers acquired by the executive branch have frequently become permanent. Unrestrained power in the hands of a Trump or Biden should frighten anyone who is still interested in voting in November.
​ ​There is some speculation that Trump might well follow the example being set by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. Israel has banned foreign visitors, is under 24 hours curfew and is effectively in lockdown. It is using cell phone intercepts provided by the intelligence services to track the comings and goings of Israeli residents.


Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, America Terrorized  ​ ​
​ ​Apart from modest belated efforts at mitigation, the existing national security state is about as pertinent to addressing such threats as President Trump’s cheery expectations that the coronavirus will simply evaporate once warmer weather appears. Terror has indeed arrived on our shores and it has nothing to do with al-Qaeda or ISIS or Iranian-backed militias. Americans are terrorized because it has now become apparent that our government, whether out of negligence or stupidity, has left them exposed to dangers that truly put life and liberty at risk. As it happens, all these years in which the national security state has been preoccupied with projecting hard power abroad have left us naked and vulnerable right here at home.
​ ​Protecting Americans where they live ought to be the national security priority of our time. The existing national security state is incapable of fulfilling that imperative, while its leaders, fixated on waging distant wars, have yet to even accept that they have a responsibility to do so.
​ ​Worst of all, even in this election year, no one on the national political scene appears to recognize the danger now fully at hand.


​Residents of Hubei Province were released from quarantine, but they were not allowed to cross the river to return to work. Hubei citizens and Hubei police battled Jiangxi police for a strategic bridge. 
Regimes change when enforcers change sides. Masters know this. It worries them. It happens in a flash.
​ ​Residents of Hubei province in China teamed up with their local police force to battle the police from neighboring Jiangxi province - who set up a roadblock on the Yangtze River Bridge to prevent the people of Hubei from crossing and returning to work.  

Trump gives the Pentagon authority to call up retired troops. These are the troops that already know the lies and evil. What side will they take?

 Power elites maintain their power through "ownership" of factories, productive farmland, railroads, fleets of trucks, and control of working people by holding them in debt servitude, with the threat of economic banishment and eviction from their homes. 
 This requires enforcement by enforcers. At home it is police and alphabet-soup agencies like CIA, NSA, FBI, etc.   Abroad enforcement-of-ownership is military, the US banking system, and some of those alphabet-soup agencies.
If you were a military reservist, or retired soldier, called back to duty, what would you be willing to do to Americans, in order to enforce "ownership" by the elites? 
Just askin'...

Matt Stoller has an article about the $6 trillion (and counting) bill to save the owners just before the collapse, so they can keep owning everything, and modestly expand their holdings.
​ ​Congress is going to pass a bill with a lot of important stuff for workers, hospitals, cities and small business, and to address the pandemic. That's inevitable. And the bill on the table includes some of this. The question though is what else the bill includes, and that’s where we get into trouble. Because while we have to deal with the pandemic and crisis, we do not have to fundamentally eliminate the economic rights of all of us in the process.  

We might be able to do a lot more testing soon. 
That is the door to the loooong hallway to the other side of this snake-pit. 

Trying To Help

Thursday, March 26, 2020

Lacking Good Information

Impatiently Waiting,

New coronavirus information on PubMed dried up in the past 2 weeks.
March 10 review was that "hydroxychloroquine is promising, with lots of clinical trials ongoing in China and elsewhere, and we await the findings". We are still in that holding pattern.

The research paper which showed such good clearing of coronavirus on swabs with hydroxychloroquine, at a higher than usual dose turns out to be not real. 
French investigator Dr Raoult has a very good reputation, but this research was carried out at multiple sites in France and Vietnam, by multiple researchers. (Did Dr. Raoult sign off too soon? Was he manipulated?)
  
The sad fact is that the graph looked so good because they threw out the data of people who got worse and went to ICU. Throwing out a couple of data points like that in a small study makes all the difference. 
There were a lot of other procedural flaws. 
Mainly, the data was shaped to look good. 
There is actually no good data to suggest the use of azithromycin + hydroxychloroquine..

This link is highly politicized, amounting to a hostile-peer-review, but this time it's just what the doctor ordered. Thanks Lauren..  

Also, if we are not able to check blood levels, we should probably not push the hydroxychloroquine dose past 200 mg twice per day (in people with good kidneys and normal QT interval on EKG). We have to wait for good information.  

Wikipedia is pretty good on chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloroquine
The narrow therapeutic window is like digoxin. 1 pill good, 2 pills dead, kind of thing. Low end of fatal range is less than twice the upper level of therapeutic range, based on blood levels, and it distributes and hangs around a long time. 

This article on 4 coronavirus treatments has good information, no drama, and looks at the question of whether blood pressure medicines that act in relation to the ACE receptor sites, where SARS-CoV-2 binds, may be good or bad for coronavirus patients. There is no answer at all yet.

A Quarter of the 2 Trillion Dollar "Stimulus" Bill is Devoted to a Useless Accounting Gimmick 
(This kind of gimmick often turns out to actually be the whole plan.)

Economic Historian, and current Economist, Professor Michael Hudson, says there is no way around a debt jubilee for all the people who are in debt bondage as bank fees keep piling insult onto injury. These debts are hopeless, and they make these people hopeless. That sickens the economy further.
 Critics warn of a creditor collapse and ruinous costs to government. But if the U.S. government can finance $4.5 trillion in quantitative easing, it can absorb the cost of forgoing student and other debt. And for private lenders, only bad loans need be wiped out. Much of what would be written off are accruals, late charges and penalties on loans gone bad. It actually subsidizes bad lending to leave them in place.
 In the past, the politically powerful financial sector has blocked a write-down. Until now, the basic ethic of most of us has been that debts must be repaid. But it is time to recognize that most debts now cannot be paid — through no real fault of the debtors in the face of today’s economic disaster.

Debt forgiveness for really huge bad debts gets packaged as "Brady Bonds", invented when Mexico defaulted on it's debt. Michael Hudson again:
​ ​A close parallel to this situation was the state of Third World debt in the mid-1980s. Mexico’s announcement that it could not meet its foreign debt service was the shock that brought ugly financial reality into conflict with the assumption that somehow any government debt could be paid – even debts denominated in a foreign currency.
​ ​The international financial system was rescued by the issue of Brady bonds – “good” new bonds for old “bad” ones. The capital value of these bonds was still far below the original debt, but they had the virtue of setting realistic levels by bringing the debt balance more in line with the actual ability of debtor countries to earn the dollars or other hard currencies needed to service these bonds.
​ ​The current crisis requires a similar wrote-down and recognition that fictitious price levels must give way to reality at some point. In fact, we have reached the end of an illusion – the illusion that bond (and stock) prices could be sustained indefinitely simply by financial engineering, without an economic base capable of producing enough surplus revenue to justify existing bond and stock prices.


​Bibi Netanyahu makes good personal use of the coronavirus crisis in Israel, at the expense of almost everybody else.
​ By a series of moves Netanyahoo has neutralized the courts and the parliament and has thrown the country into a constitutional crisis. Even cabinet sessions are only held by telephone and without the cabinet members receiving the written proposals Netanyahoo wants them to vote on.
 Meanwhile Netanyahoo puts out new emergency regulations every day that steadily get harsher:
Anyone who leaves their place of residence for reasons not exempted by the emergency regulations is liable to be fined up to NIS 5,000. A person who has gone beyond the permitted distance [of 100 meters] could receive an NIS 500 fine or six months’ imprisonment, while one who operates public transportation in violation of the regulations can be fined NIS 5,000 or be imprisoned for six months.
 The emergency regulations were approved last night by the cabinet.
In which democracy can a cabinet enact imprisonment penalties without a parliament vote on an applicable law?

 Netanyahoo's current plan seems to be to go for a fourth election. Every second day he is holding a prime time TV briefing to update the population on the corona crisis. That will likely bring him additional popularity. Even Trump's approval numbers for handling the coronavirus crisis are at 60% despite his botched response.
 Gantz's current majority depends on support from the Arab parties. He will have difficulties forming a stable coalitions with them. His only alternative is to ally with Likud and that would likely keep Netanyahoo at the helm. If Gantz agrees to keep Netanyahoo at the top his Blue and White party may well fall apart.
By blocking the courts and parliament Netanyahoo wins time to make that scenario more likely.
 Meanwhile the novel coronavirus will indiscriminately affect the Jewish as well as the Palestinian population. But the Zionist racism against the Palestinians guarantees that they will get less help. As both populations can not be separated that behavior will likely increase the peak and the consequences of the outbreak for everyone. Additionally the Haredim cult members will protest against the government's measures of prohibiting religious services and passover festivities. The current mixture of political, racial and epidemic pressure in Israel may well blow up in everyone's face and cause serious conflagrations.

How Did Spain Get It's Coronavirus Response So Wrong? 
(A: By delaying drastic action until it was obviously necessary) 

Scott Ritter has the story of how a critical intelligence agency was sidelined to create a blind spot in US national response to novel coronavirus. The natural question is, "who stood this agency down, when, and why?"
 The U.S. response is something President Trump has likened to a “war,” going so far as to label himself a “wartime President,” leading the U.S. against “the toughest enemy” in a struggle in which he vows “total victory.” If the fight against the coronavirus is a war, then the virus clearly took the U.S. government by surprise. “Certainly we didn’t get an early run on it, Trump noted in a press conference on March 17. “It would’ve been helpful if we knew about it earlier.”
​ ​It is the job of the U.S. intelligence community to provide senior U.S. government policy makers, including the president, with advance warning about potential crises. The U.S. taxpayer pays a premium for this service; in 2020, the budget for the National Intelligence Program, which includes all programs, projects and activities of the U.S. intelligence community, was $62.8 billion.
​ ​Included in this budget is a small, specialized intelligence unit known as the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), which operates as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The mission of the NCMI is to serve as the lead activity within the Department of Defense (DoD) “for the production of medical intelligence,” and to prepare and coordinate “integrated, all-source intelligence for the DoD and other government and international organizations on foreign health threats and other medical issues to protect U.S. interests worldwide.”
​ ​For a small agency, the NCMI packs a large punch in terms of the overall impact of its product. For example, in April 2009—two months prior to when the WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially declared the global outbreak of H1N1 influenza a pandemic, NCMI published an intelligence product, known as an “Infectious Disease Risk Assessment,” which predicted that a recent outbreak of the Swine Flu (H1N1) would become a pandemic.


​Home coronavirus testing on a mass basis, like once a week for everybody who has not yet been infected, coupled with early treatment (when safe and available) and isolation of everybody who tests positive, is the recipe for success.
Currently, we do not even have enough tests to test one person out of 100. In the US it is 1 test available per 1000 persons, and they are taking over a week to report, due to backlog.​
This home finger-prick test from the UK is different. It looks for existing immunity. It determines who is relatively safe to self and others, and can therefore get back to work. 
I would sure like access to this, and might have it some time soon, depending on lab availability. From my perspective, I would like to get it myself, as should other medical practitioners. A few of us will turn out to be already protected, having had asymptomatic illness.
​ ​Millions of 15-minute home coronavirus tests are set to be available on the high street or for Amazon delivery to people self-isolating, according to Public Health England (PHE), in a move that could restore many people’s lives to a semblance of pre-lockdown normality.  

​Inquiring Mind​

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Forced Contract

Non-Consenting Adults,

 The social contract in the US was worked out during Franklin Roosevelt's administration, spanning the Great Depression and WW-2. 
 This social contract has been amended and corrupted many times, but generally assumes protections of freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and a social safety net of some sort, so children don't starve and die in the world's richest country.
 Roosevelt had enemies in the elites of his epoch, and there was a failed coup. He may  have been poisoned. 
Power elites do not willingly share. The role of power elites is to profit from the herd and cull the herd when it gets so big that it exhausts the resources upon which it relies for sustenance.
 We are now in the reset of the economy, and necessarily, the reset of the social contract in the US. I don't directly address other nations. Russia has a healthy social contract. China has a social contract which probably needs more work, but it is functional. India will have a hard time really creating a new social contract, as it has since the Brits left it internally divided. 
 The risks and benefits to the world from a renegotiated American social contract are great. Everybody's watching.
It's not all decided within the US at this point. Global wealth and powerful transnationals have a lot of say, and they speak powerfully, yet in hidden riddles, which the herd is not allowed to know. 
 We Americans still have The Patriot Act, which has eroded our constitutional rights. It did not time-out as promised.
The power to indefinitely detain without trial is now being requested by the "justice" department.
Freedom of speech is conditioned upon political correctness, which is defined by Zuckerberg's Facebook.
 This morning in Austin, one must be prepared to show a letter to a police officer, stating the social criticality of one's travel to home and work. I did not print mine, but I have "good facts" to support me on my bike ride.
Freedom of association is now "virtual", and subject to Zuckerberg, NSA, CIA, etc.
 The new social contract is being imposed by power and financial elites through enforcement of public health measures, which have been amazingly effective in Austin on a voluntary basis, through the shared efforts of a community which has not been noticeably touched yet by the contagion. I support the voluntary public health measures, and have been very proud of Austin. 
 This is a grab to lock in absolute power by the overlords, who see that this is finally the big reset. 
I'm a member of the herd. I see what this is. I don't have sharp teeth, but I have my horns and my good health.

Thanks to Anthony for the story that contained this link:
WUHAN’S OUTBREAK: CHINA DEMANDS AN HONEST ACCOUNTING
The following content is circulating in Chinese cyberspace.
Looks like China is finally in counterattack mode against relentless US efforts to blame it for the global COVID epidemic.
Key points:
• It is now virtually certain that COVID-19 was brought to Wuhan by American troops taking part in the city’s World Military Games last Oct. 18-27.
• The 300-st​r​ong US contingent stayed at the Wuhan Oriental Hotel. It is located a mere 300 meters from the Huanan Seafood Market, where China’s outbreak began (see map below).
• Five of the US troopers developed a fever on Oct. 25 and were taken to an infectious-diseases hospital for treatment.
• 42 employees of the Oriental Hotel were diagnosed with COVID-19, becoming the first cluster in Wuhan. At the time only 7 people from the market were thus diagnosed, though they were treated first. All 7 had contact with the 42 from the hotel. From this source, the virus spread to the rest of China.
• Back in the US, the American team had trained at a location near Fort Detrick, the military’s viral lab closed down in July for various deficiencies.
The big question now is whether the transmission was planned, or accidental. Chinese authorities are awaiting an explanation from US authorities.


​Eric sent these stories about the US bioweapons facility at Ft, Detrick being closed for "breaches" in July, and opened back up for business in November.​
8/2/19: “We are coordinating closely with the CDC to ensure that critical, ongoing studies within bio-containment laboratories are completed under appropriate oversight and that research animals will continue to be cared for in accordance with all regulations,” she said in an email. “Although much of USAMRIID’s research is currently on hold, the Institute will continue its critical clinical diagnostic mission and will still be able to provide medical and subject matter expertise as needed to support the response to an infectious disease threat or other contingency.”
11/24/19:​ ​The Army's premier biological laboratory on Fort Detrick reported two breaches of containment earlier this year, leading to the Centers for Disease and Control halting its high-level research.
​ ​The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases announced Friday that it would restart its operations on a limited scale.


​NATO war games to scare Russia are back on-track, without precautions inside pandemic-Europe. Thanks Eleni:
(What could go wrong?)
​ ​The goal is without a doubt to have a show of force against Russia, the main target of these massive exercises by NATO. Although this may seem like a simple reason, NATO needs to show Russia that they can organize such exercise in a demonstration of aggression even in times of uncertainty and crisis. The exercises could easily have been cancelled, because there is no reason for them to be held right now and in such conditions, but conducting them during a pandemic shows greater strength by NATO – or so they think.  

​Prince Charles of England tests positive for crown-virus. God Save The Queen! 
(I want to know what treatment Charles gets, and the CDC should want to know, too.)​

Health care workers are calling attention to a potential new symptom of a novel coronavirus infection: the loss of one’s sense of smell.
​ ​Clinicians in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world have reported, anecdotally, that some patients infected with the virus experience anosmia, or an inability to smell. The American Academy of Otolaryngology recently called for anosmia to be added to a list of screening tools for Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. On Monday, World Health Organization officials announced they were further probing a possible link between anosmia and coronavirus — though they noted the evidence of a potential connection remains preliminary.


Voters smell a rat as coronavirus-soaked primaries unfold in Illinois, Arizona & Florida… but they don’t want them canceled either​ (From last week, from Helen ​of DesTroy​, Massively, pre-emptively, pervasively and creatively rigged primaries to nominate Joe Biden, not Bernie Sanders were successful. Here's how.)

​Moon of Alabama looks at lockdowns, and how to gradually relax them after they deliver benefits, without getting a second bloom of contagion.​ (Mainly, I've got to have the Venn Diagram)

​Gilead Pharmaceuticals got a special "orphan drug" classification for remdesivir, which allows them to make massive, unregulated profits for 7 years. Some say this is unfair to the rest of us. 
(I say Gilead will want Prince Charles to take remdesivir and do well. If the prince of Wales does not get treated with remdesivir, it's a bust. Coronavirus infection is risky for the royal test-rat, any way you look at it.)​

Bold Vlad update:
​ ​A day after Putin donned a hazmat suit for a 'high risk' photo op while visiting Covid-19 patients at a hospital outside Moscow, the Russian president gave an important address to the nation, updating the country on new drastic measures amid the pandemic, starting with urging the country to "stay at home" and a declaring a week-long work holiday toward that end.
​ ​Importantly, Putin declared the postponement of a national referendum on constitutional amendments originally scheduled for April 22 to "a later date".

​We are all somewhere on this graphic:

Globalization, following the money across the globe and back in time​ , Louis Latham, Thanks Wiggs, seriously good...

Crony Capitalist 

Monday, March 23, 2020

Up Close And Personal

Getting Personal,

A respiratory Therapist describes managing novel coronavirus pneumonia:
​ ​“It first struck me how different it was when I saw my first coronavirus patient go bad. I was like, Holy shit, this is not the flu. Watching this relatively young guy, gasping for air, pink frothy secretions coming out of his tube and out of his mouth. The ventilator should have been doing the work of breathing but he was still gasping for air, moving his mouth, moving his body, struggling. We had to restrain him. With all the coronavirus patients, we’ve had to restrain them. They really hyperventilate, really struggle to breathe. When you’re in that mindstate of struggling to breathe and delirious with fever, you don’t know when someone is trying to help you, so you’ll try to rip the breathing tube out because you feel it is choking you, but you are drowning.
​ ​“When someone has an infection, I’m used to seeing the normal colors you’d associate with it: greens and yellows. The coronavirus patients with ARDS have been having a lot of secretions that are actually pink because they’re filled with blood cells that are leaking into their airways. They are essentially drowning in their own blood and fluids because their lungs are so full. So we’re constantly having to suction out the secretions every time we go into their rooms.”


​Here is a fit 39 year old woman in an English hospital who can still speak, and thoughtfully encourages distancing precautions be taken seriously: "It's like having glass in your lungs". Thank You, Tara.

Coronavirus may have been in Italy since November. (I will state again that I had a clinic patient almost die in the hospital last November. Viral pneumonia with Coronavirus was his diagnosis This was when coronavirus was still ordinary in our perceptions.)

Current trajectory of coronavirus cases in the US, if continued, reaches 1 million cases April 3, but the data is terrible. There are extreme restrictions on test availability. You have to be sick AND have a good argument, AND mesh into the bureaucracy right. Many positive results in Texas are posthumous so far.

Complete isolation of people from other people does make the viral cases burn out. The viral shedding can persist a month in some cases.
​ ​Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, began analyzing the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide in January and correctly calculated that China would get through the worst of its coronavirus outbreak long before many health experts had predicted.
​ ​Now he foresees a similar outcome in the United States and the rest of the world.


​Here is the data again, hopeful data, that the coronavirus should not spread as well in warm and humid climates. 
(Florida and Louisiana are seeing an explosion of cases. This is not a plan...​) Thanks Paul.

Newsweek still exists. Lots of people are rightfully afraid of martial law being declared. We still have The Patriot Act:  
EXCLUSIVE: INSIDE THE MILITARY'S TOP SECRET PLANS IF CORONAVIRUS CRIPPLES THE GOVERNMENT

​Prison is a place to contract this virus. Harvey Weinstein caught it. He's getting moved.

Denial is our primary cognitive defense mechanism, to prevent uncomfortable cognitive-dissonance, and it's efficient, until it fails completely. Some people went out to party over spring break with coronavirus infections.

COVID-19, All Truth Has 3 Stages:
First, it is ignored.
Second, it is widely ridiculed.
Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
With COVID-19, we have now entered Stage 2. At first, the media ignored the claims and the analysis that the virus could have originated in the US. But the spread of information and restatements of evidence from all sides, including in the US itself, has become too intense and now the claims are being openly ridiculed in the Western media.

​Do social distancing. Wash hands with soap before you snack. Don't touch public touch-things. 
Don't let virus jump hosts.
Take 5000 units vitamin D daily, unless you have not taken any before. 
Take 10,000 units per day until June if it is new to you. ​
Eat fresh vegetables. Do things outside in open spaces.
The best course is to avoid exposure until there are plenty of tests and treatment is easy to get early in the course, before you are bucking a ventilator in the ICU. 
Scroll down in the blog to see treatments, available and prospective.

Avoiding Contagion

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Fearless Life

Sharing Life,

The Boy In The Bubble, Paul Simon, 1987
 I awoke a couple of hours before dawn, with the question still burning of who is the enemy? Also, this song was answering, but I could only remember a few words and the refrain.
It is really worth a careful read, look and listen again.
 We are in the battle for and against life-on-earth. The”loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” is invisible, distributed, has henchmen in every niche of the machine that controls and bleeds life.
 There is no decapitating strike.
There is persistence in life, and sharing with other living entities.
 There is intuition, heroism, clairvoyance, inspiration and serendipity.
Choose life. It transcends you and me.

It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry

It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all, oh yeah

The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry

It’s a turn-around jump shot
It’s everybody jump start
It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
Think of the boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all, oh yeah

The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry, don’t cry

The current best treatment for coronavirus consists of 21 pills of hydroxychloroquine and 6 pills of azithromycin, both cheap, generic, and widely used medicines in the US and throughout the world. 
It's a really effective treatment. Test widely and treat early.

Power-lizards need a crescendo of fear to get societal buy-in for martial law... 
Fear is optional, a waste of life force. 
(Sorry, I forgot who sent this story.)
 US authorities are taking practical steps to introduce a state of emergency in which power can pass from civilian to military. This is reported by a large article by William M. Arkin published in Newsweek entitled “ Exclusive: inside top-secret military plans in case the coronavirus cripples the government .”
 An article in Newsweek reported that on February 1, 2020, US Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper signed orders directing NORTHCOM to implement nationwide plans to fight the pandemic. In addition, Minister Esper also secretly signed Warning Orders, WARNORDs to NORTHCOM and its subordinate military units on the US East Coast “to deploy in support of potential emergency missions.”

Contextual reset, along with everything else:
​ ​How ridiculous and insipid do the identitarian fights over gender, race, sex and color look now? How dangerous and stupid does all that capital, that time spent, look now in hindsight when today people with skills, humility and high executive function are needed?
​ ​Do you really care today if the guy behind the meat counter at your local supermarket is a MAGApede or a Bernie Bro, hates gay people or is a closet tranny?


​Economist Steve Keen, who does understand the exponential function, is in southern Thailand, having entered with his Thai National paramore one day before they closed the front gate. He'll weather the viral storm there. He has lots of useful information here. My friend Larry and his wife Timi are in Thailand, but they got there before Steve did. 
Good venue, but I'm in Texas, which does not need to be a bad venue.​ 
Austin is doing ok, especially my clinic...

Fracking is one fronts of the war against life. 
Professor Anthony Hall sent this story of the illegal fracking in Alberta poisoning municipal water supplies and STILL CONTINUING.


Water of Life

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Hybrid War Hypothesis

Directly Threatened,

It seems like a core of links about coronavirus pandemic being military, probably US military, comes through Global Research website, which is Russia-friendly. That seems bold on the part of this Canadian website, and also bold of the authors, like Whitney Webb and Pepe Escobar. My last broad overview included a summary to that date by Professor Anthony Hall, and information indicating that L-strain and S-strain coronaviruses were quite different in some parts of their genome, so one could not be a "parent" of the other. It appears that there are more strains than that. Iran and Italy have sequenced viral strains that are hitting them hard.
Look back at the excellent summary article from early this month, by Professor Anthony Hall, and related links here:

China Locked In Hybrid War With US (but who in China and who in the US?) Pepe Escobar
​ ​Beijing is carefully, incrementally shaping the narrative that, from the beginning of the coronovirus attack, the leadership knew it was under a hybrid war attack. Xi’s terminology is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a “people’s war” had to be launched.
​ ​Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means “white devils” or “foreign devils”: guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code.
​ ​When Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, voiced in an incandescent tweet the possibility that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan” – the first blast to this effect to come from a top official – Beijing was sending up a trial balloon signaliing that the gloves were finally off. Zhao Lijian made a direct connection with the Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019, which included a delegation of 300 US military.
​ ​He directly quoted US CDC director Robert Redfield who, when asked last week whether some deaths by coronavirus had been discovered posthumously in the US, replied that  “some cases have actually been diagnosed this way in the US today.”
​ ​Zhao’s explosive conclusion is that Covid-19 was already in effect in the US before being identified in Wuhan – due to the by now fully documented inability of US to test and verify differences compared with the flu.
​ ​Adding all that to the fact that coronavirus genome variations in Iran and Italy were sequenced and it was revealed they do not belong to the variety that infected Wuhan.


​Larry Romanoff presents the case that coronavirus was killing in America before it popped up in Wuhan, and that it may have gotten out of the oldest US bioweapons facility, Ft Detrick, Maryland, about the time that facility was shut down last year. Chinese, Japanese and Tiawanese researchers have been joined by Iranian virologists in this conclusion.
(I will add that a patient of mine was admitted to the hospital last November in cardiopulmonary distress, needed mechanical ventilation, survived, and was found to have had "coronavirus" as the cause, back before that was scary.)
Taiwan ran a TV news program on February,27,(click here to access video (Chinese), that presented diagrams and flow charts suggesting the coronavirus originated in the US.

US Intel Agencies Played Unsettling Role in Classified Coronavirus Response Plan, Whitney Webb
​ ​As the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis comes to dominate headlines, little media attention has been given to the federal government’s decision to classify top-level meetings on domestic coronavirus response and lean heavily “behind the scenes” on U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon in planning for an allegedly imminent explosion of cases... 
...the decision to classify was “an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion.” Reuters further noted that the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Alex Azar, and his chief of staff had “resisted” the classification order, which was made in mid-January by the National Security Council (NSC), led by Robert O’Brien — a longtime friend and colleague of his predecessor John Bolton.
​ ​Following this order, HHS officials with the appropriate security clearances held meetings on coronavirus response at the department’s Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF), which are facilities “usually reserved for intelligence and military operations” and — in HHS’ case — for responses to “biowarfare or chemical attacks.” Several officials who spoke to Reuters noted that the classification decision prevented key experts from participating in meetings and slowed down the ability of HHS and the agencies it oversees, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to respond to the crisis by limiting participation and information sharing.


​China is winning the char-offensive of this global hybrid war, and I appreciate it. I need masks, testing kits and medicines in Austin.
​ Over the past few days, China has sent planeloads of masks, teams of doctors and even ventilators around the world to help battle the crisis. Chinese billionaire Jack Ma donated one million masks and hundreds of thousands of testing kits to the U.S., with the first load arriving in Seattle on Monday.
 "We are doing instead of talking. We are the friends not enemy. Could the American do the same to Chinese?" China's ambassador to South Africa, Lin Songtian, tweeted on Monday.
 A shipment of 300,000 masks, sent by Chinese charities founded by Ma and his Alibaba empire, arrived in Belgium this week. Chinese state news agency Xinhua published a photograph of one of the containers draped with the slogan “Unity makes strength” in French, Flemish and Chinese.

 War stories from Italy include no coffins for speedy burials without viewing, and the case of  a town where they tested everybody and eradicated the virus. Asymptomatic cases were very common.

Favipiravir is an influenza drug from Japan that works very well in early cases, but not much after disease is severe. Great if started when symptoms are mild. Shortens course from 11 days to 4 days from diagnosis to resolution.

Here is a listing of types of drug treatment for SARS-CoV-2, ongoing trials, classifications and mechanisms:  

Our lords and masters are gritting their teeth to send $1000 to each American adult each month, or some variant of that. They hate this, but they face losing the entire economic life support system when a quadrillion dollars of credit default swaps go bad. (I can't understand a billion or a trillion, let alone a quadrillion. Can you?)

Eleni sent this excellent article explaining the impasse in Israeli electoral politics. This is the clearest explanation I have yet seen, by Daniel Lazare
​ ​Some forty percent of Lieberman’s followers do not meet the rabbinic standard, which means that they are effectively reduced to second-class citizenship in terms of marriage, employment, and a host of other issues as well. But makes the issue especially explosive is the military draft, which affects ex-Soviets but not orthodox males who devote themselves full-time to religious studies. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, struck the deal back in 1948 when just a few hundred yeshiva students in Jerusalem were affected. Since then, however, the orthodox sector has expanded to twelve percent of the population, more than a million people in all. Soviet immigrants and their children must their lives at risk to protect orthodox Israelis who don’t even regard them as Jewish.
​ ​Lieberman has made it clear that he will not enter any government that allows such exemptions to continue. But it’s a demand that Netanyahu cannot possibly accommodate since he is dependent on the support of the religious parties for support.


​Mortal Non Combatant​