Thursday, April 30, 2020

President Kushner

Remotely Controlled,

Jared Kushner Is the “De Facto President of the United States” Says Former White House Official
Donald Trump’s son-in-law pressed him not to declare a national emergency because he thought it would tank the stock market. 

​ ​Jared Kushner's White House résumé is quite extensive. His father-in-law, Donald Trump, tasked him with brokering peace between Israel and Palestine, completing an environmentally destructive wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, reforming the criminal justice system, and building an "Office of American Innovation," dedicated to making the government run like a business.
​ ​Despite his failing to follow through on any of these tasks, Trump also put Kushner in charge of the U.S. coronavirus response, complete with his own "shadow" task force made up of equally unqualified friends, which caused confusion about competing power structures.​.. 
​ ​Brad Parscale, the Kushner-appointed manager for Trump's campaign, said, "Nobody has more influence in the White House than Jared. Nobody has more influence outside the White House than Jared. He’s No. 2 after Trump." ...
 A New York business executive recounted a fall 2019 meeting with Kushner, saying, "I told Jared that if Trump won a second term, he wouldn’t have to worry about running again and you can really help people. Jared just looked at me and said, 'I don’t care about any of that.’ ”  

​ ​Jared Kushner, praised the administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic as a "great success story" on Wednesday -- less than a day after the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States topped 1 million.
​ ​Kushner painted a rosy picture for "Fox and Friends" Wednesday morning, saying that "the federal government rose to the challenge and this is a great success story and I think that that's really what needs to be told."
When he was pressed on coronavirus testing levels in the US, Kushner said the question shouldn't be why did it take so long, but, "How did we do this so quickly?"
Kushner also predicted that things will be "rocking" by July.

​ ​Two leading U.S. news outlets reported on Wednesday on business ties totaling tens of millions of dollars between the family of Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, and the Steinmetz family, one of the richest families in Israel...
 ​A​ spokesperson for the Kushners made sure to note that Raz Steinmetz, who is 53 years old, is "the only Steinmetz" the family is doing business with. This was important to note, since Raz Steinmetz's uncle, Beny Steinmetz, is currently under police investigation for allegedly bribing officials in Guinea in order to advance his mining business. He was detained and investigated by the Israeli police half a year ago.
Beny Steinmetz's investigation has also spread into the United States, where it is overseen by the Justice Department.​..
​ The New York Times report mentioned that Beny Steinmetz's attorney in the United States is Alan Dershowitz, who said that his client had no business ties to the Kushners. Last month, Haaretz reported that Dershowitz was asked by Trump to convey a message to Prime Minister Netanyahu on the importance and possibility of reaching a peace deal with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

 Matthew Pottinger is a former journalist and U.S. Marine Corps officer who has served as the United States Deputy National Security Advisor since September 22, 2019.
Pottinger graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with an undergraduate degree in Chinese studies; he is fluent in Mandarin.[6] ...
He covered a variety of topics, including the SARS epidemic and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami; in the latter assignment, he met United States Marines and was inspired by their courageousness.[7][2] He spent seven years reporting in China.[8][9] While interviewing Chinese workers in Beijing about their claims of government corruption, Pottinger was attacked by a government thug.[2][7][10] ...
In September 2005 Pottinger joined the Marine Corps and served as a military intelligence officer.[2] ...
He served three deployments: one in Iraq from April to November 2007, and two in Afghanistan from November 2008 to May 2009 and July 2009 to May 2010.[11] On his second tour in Afghanistan, he met U.S. Army General Michael T. Flynn, with whom he co-wrote a report.[2][12] The report, published in January 2010 through the Center for a New American Security, was titled Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan.[13] After he left active service, Pottinger worked in New York City, including for the hedge fund Davidson Kempner Capital Management.[2] ...
In 2017, he was hired as a member of the U.S. National Security Council of the administration of Donald Trump.[15][16][17] Michael Flynn, whom Pottinger had worked for in the military, made him the NSC's Asia director, and he remained in his position under H. R. McMaster and John R. Bolton. ...

 
​I used the Wikipedia quotes above to give a snapshot of who Matthew Pottinger is. He is a Mandarin-speaking military spook who got paid off by some hedge fund work after he left military intelligence, then got hired by the NSC, where he has been thriving. His words are weapons, not his true opinions, so consider them as such.​ China punched him in the face.
The White House's Most Influential China Hawk Suspects COVID-19 Leaked From Wuhan Lab
When asked who is responsible for the severity of the global coronavirus outbreak, Pottinger insists that China is to blame. Because by the time the US was receiving the first information about the virus from China in January, it was already likely too late​...​  

​ Pottinger got his big promotion at the same time this program to look for coronavirus outbreaks in the world got shut down, last September, after the Ft Detrick Md. biowepons lab was closed for a breach of containment​ in August, but before Event 201 and the US military participation in the Wuhan games in mid October. 
 China says coronavirus was introduced by US military participants at those October games in Wuhan. That is plausible, as is the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis.
The Trump administration decided to end a $200m early warning program designed to alert it to potential pandemics just three months before it is believed Covid-19 began infecting people in China.
 The project, called Predict, had been run by the US Agency for International Development since 2009. It had identified more than 160 different coronaviruses that had the potential to develop into pandemics, including a virus that is considered the closest known relative to Covid-19.


​ The US agency that would have detected a new coronavirus in the world was shut down right after Ft. Detrick bioweapons lab was shut down for a breach of containment.
If a coronavirus escaped into the US from Ft Detrick, the government would need to be careful not to discover that through another agency. Maybe they already noticed something.
I remain very interested in the busy winter of flu-like illness in American hospitals, including a patient of mine who almost died around Thanksgiving of "coronavirus", which was nothing special then, a bad cold.​
There was a 3-4 week chest-cold going around. Jenny and I had it. So did another doctor I work with. If I can get antibody testing, I will. 
If it shows positive for SARS-CoV-2, then I will consider that to be confirmatory of the Ft. Detrick leak hypothesis.
I'll let'cha know either way.

This is interesting, and I have seen these exercises, protocols and laws listed in other places, but not all together like this.
9 Simulations, Drills and Laws that Planned and Prepared for the Coronavirus
https://thefreedomarticles.com/9-simulations-drills-laws-prepared-for-the-coronavirus/  


​Back to the US fighting China in the struggle for global dominance. If the USMC is going to fight China, they won't need tanks...
​ ​The official logic for the restructuring claims that the real threat the Marine Corps is being designed to fight is actually China and by extension Russia, not the Taliban/Al Nusra/ISIS etc. Perhaps because hating China has become the hip cool thing to do under the Trump administration it is was easier to sell these reforms as a means to counter the dragon, but an infantry focused force with some new-fangled drones and tech is not going to be what brings down China. Infantry is what is needed to hold positions, but good luck trying to Guangzhou on foot like some Hollywood D-Day fantasy.
​ ​What they probably mean, when stating Beijing as the real target, is that they want to counter China in some proxy conflicts in fights with small numbers where tanks are weak to today’s long range weaponry. This logic makes much more sense.
​ ​The core of the decision to restructure seems to have come from wargames in 2018-2019. These exercises played out a proxy style conflict between the U.S. and other entities in the sands of the Middle-East. The Marine Times broke down the results of the wargames as follows…
​ ​“But tanks and armored vehicles have had trouble surviving against the threat of precision strike and the plethora of drone and reconnaissance systems flooding conflict zones across the Middle East.”


Back to General Flynn, too. It looks like there was a politically driven criminal conspiracy against him.
Unsealed FBI Handwritten Notes, Emails Reveal Agents Plotted Perjury Trap On Flynn
 
​Now for the relatively good news. Take your vitamin-D, please. 
10,000 units per day until July is good if you have not been taking it, otherwise 5000 units per day long term.
Those groups at higher risk of severe disease, such as American blacks also tend to have lower vitamin-D levels:
Vitamin D Insufficiency is Prevalent in Severe COVID-19

​This is reassuring. The reinfections in Korea may have been false positives when tests found coronavirus remnants, not intact/infectious virus.
Tests in recovered patients found false positives, not reinfections, experts say

 How long a line can LA generate with 6 feet between each person? This is a really good initiative.
Los Angeles will begin offering free coronavirus tests to all residents no matter if they have symptoms or not, Mayor Eric Garcetti said Wednesday

​Charles Hugh Smith:
The Crash Has Only Just Begun
Everything, including a rational, connected-to-reality, effective financial system, is on back-order and unlikely to ship any time soon
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-crash-has-only-just-begun.html 

​There is no going back, and we have to negotiate the empty cookie jar with IOUs instead of retirement cookies before we can go forward together. 
The uber rich cannot starve everybody else to death and maintain their "holdings". 
They are only rich within the context of a functional society and economy.​
Rebuild a better world? First we need to accept that the West’s economies were utterly broken before Covid-19 came along

Eating the Fortune​ (not the cookie)​

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

War Reparations

Getting the Bill,

President Trump intimates that the US can sen​d​ China a very large bill for the coronavirus pandemic that China failed to keep confined to itself. Economic divorce proceedings...
"We haven’t determined the final amount yet. It’s very substantial," Trump added, suggesting it would be significantly more than the $160 billion floated in German media.
He argued that amid other failings, ultimately Beijing could have stopped the deadly disease at the source when it was first identified in Wuhan in December, though was present in November.

​(I​ personally find it somewhat more plausible that some version of the novel coronavirus leaked from Ft Detrick Md. last early summer, which "breach of containment" led it to be shut down until November. "Patient Zero", according to the Chinese, was American military attending the Wuhan Games in October. Both narratives are presented in prior posts. At any rate, this IS War.)
​ ​Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News on Wednesday that the US knows that the pandemic began in Wuhan, but that China still refuses to disclose information about their facilities and is engaging in 'classic communist disinformation.'
He added that the CCP must be held accountable.
​ ​A US government analysis leaked to the Washington Times concludes that the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Chinese CDC is the "most likely" source of the COVID-19 pandemic which has killed over 200,000 people worldwide in roughly four months.

https://www.zerohedge.com/health/us-government-report-concludes-wuhan-lab-most-likely-source-covid-19-outbreak  


​Trump wants US troops out of Afghanistan, which the US agreed with the Taliban in February. 
He seems to actually want to do what was agreed, and complains to the generals that it isn't happening much yet.
"They'll get sick with COVID" is the new prompt. It has merit.

 "Driving The Gringos In The White House Crazy": Iran & Venezuela Deepen Sanctions-Busting Cooperation 
​ ​Two so-called 'rogue states' recently targeted for US-imposed regime change are helping each other fight coronavirus as well as Washington-led sanctions.
​ ​Late last week it was revealed Venezuela received a huge boost in the form of oil refinery materials and chemicals to fix the catalytic cracking unit at the 310,000 barrels-per-day Cardon refinery, essential to the nation's gas supply.

Iran breaks through US-led blockade to deliver record amount of oil to Syria
https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/iran-breaks-through-us-led-blockade-to-deliver-record-amount-of-oil-to-syria/  


"Dr. Doom", Nouriel Roubini is rather gloomy, though technically correct and worth reading. He's not seeing silver linings, just clouds. He did call the 2008 crash, though.
While there is never a good time for a pandemic, the COVID-19 crisis has arrived at a particularly bad moment for the global economy. 
The world has long been drifting into a perfect storm of financial, political, socioeconomic, and environmental risks, all of which are now growing even more acute.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/greater-depression-covid19-headwinds-by-nouriel-roubini-2020-04  

Jim Kunstler presents The Great Conundrum:
 The Great Conundrum of the moment: Reality is telling us that things organized on the gigantic scale are entering failure mode; but so many Americans are employed by exactly those activities organized on the gigantic scale. Or were, I should say. The humungous joint effort by the federal government and its caporegime, the federal reserve, to flood the system with dollars is precisely a desperate effort to prop up the giant-scale activities that defined the prior state-of-things. Those giant enterprises even did an end-run around the truly small businesses that were supposed to get scores of billions in grants, loans, and bailouts so congress is attempting a do-over of that play.
 The question, then, is how do you go through a swift and dramatic re-scaling of a hypertrophic, excessively complex, ecologically fragile economic system in a way that doesn’t produce a whole lot of damage? I can’t answer that satisfactorily except to say this: at least recognize what the macro trend is (downscaling and re-localization), and support that as much as possible. Don’t knock yourself out trying to save giant, foundering enterprises that need to go out of business. Don’t bankrupt the society or destroy the meaning of its money to prevent the necessary bankruptcy of things that must go bankrupt. Remove as many obstacles as you possibly can to allow smaller-scaled enterprises to thrive and especially to support the rebuilding of local networks that smaller-scaled businesses play their roles in.

​Trump invokes the Defense Production Act (Korean War era) to staff meat packing plants and slaughterhouses​, where workers have been dying of COVID. 
Who has to go do that? Daisy Luther asks some questions. Nobody seems to be offering hazardous duty pay. Nobody much wants to do this kind of work, already.
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/defense-production-act-forced-work-meat-plants/ 

​"It speaks for itself"​
An unprecedented coalition of workers from some of America’s largest companies will strike on Friday. Workers from Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, and FedEx are slated to walk out on work, citing what they say is their employers’ record profits at the expense of workers’ health and safety during the coronavirus pandemic. The employees will call out sick or walk off the job during their lunch break, according to a press release set to be published by organizers on Wednesday.​..
 “These workers have been exploited so shamelessly for so long by these companies while performing incredibly important but largely invisible labor,” said Stephen Brier, a labor historian and professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. “All of a sudden, they’re deemed essential workers in a pandemic, giving them tremendous leverage and power if they organize collectively.” The workers coalition will unveil a set of demands. Among them are: compensation for all unpaid time off used since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis in March; hazard pay or paid sick leave to be provided for the duration of the pandemic; protective equipment and all cleaning supplies to be provided at all times by the company; and a demand for full corporate transparency on the number of cases in facilities.

​America's Super Rich see their Wealth Rise $282 billion in 3 weeks​. 
Wealth transfer in the usual direction will be followed by wealth destruction down below.

​What are they offering for this hard and relentless and very intermittent labor?​
 British Environment Secretary George Eustice said that in a normal year around 30,000 people come from mainly the European Union to do seasonal agricultural work, though only a third are here now.
“We will need a significant number of British people, in particular those who have been furloughed they have the chance if they want,” Eustice told BBC radio.
“We are getting huge interest from people wanting to do this,” he said. “We need tens of thousands of people to do this work.”
The peak comes at the end of May and during June, he said.


​It seems that Boris Johnson is not returning the EU's calls about Brexit negotiations, now that the tables have effectively turned, and the EU really needs the revenue stream badly.
WTO-Terms-Brexit is looking more likely. Michel Barnier stews by the phone.
 https://tomluongo.me/2020/04/25/eu-karens-barnier-complains-brexit-negotiations/  


Pandemic is Not Just a Crisis, It's Also a Gift (sorta')
Nitrogen Dioxide has plummeted over China and Italy during this pandemic. Coyotes walk free again in California, eating people’s pets the way God intended
A zoo in Hong Kong has been trying to get two pandas to Netflix and chill for 10 years. And now that the zoo is shut down, they finally mated. 
What more proof do you need that we’re witnessing utopia? The pandas are shtupping again!
But let’s cut to the chase — and I’m sorry if the next statement upsets you — but in order to stop climate change and create a sustainable world, it requires the end of capitalism
I know I’m not “allowed” to say that. Saying such a thing would be heresy on one of the corporate media dog-and-pony bullshit infotainment hours. If I spoke that unholy fact on CNN or Fox News or CBS or NPR, a tranquilizer dart would immediately hit me in the neck, and they’d cut to a commercial while my lifeless body was dragged off.

​Charles Hugh Smith looks at the shift to the economy of necessities. What will it be?
​ Superfluous demand is demand that's a manifestation not of what we might call authentic or organic demand for essentials but demand driven by cheap credit and the consumerist mania to fill the insatiable black hole of insecurity inside every debt-serf to raise their publicly posted social status with an endless stream of aspirational goods and services that shout "Look at me! I have the same things and experiences the top 5% have!"
 But sadly, no amount of aspirational goods and services will fill the insecurity or create an authentic positive social role, or express an authentic selfhood that exists outside of the consumerist definition of "self" as nothing more than a consuming machine.
 Every business owner and manager has to anticipate a decline in superfluous demand as incomes decline and credit tightens, and households and enterprises recalibrate their exposure to risks of further downside and forego spending in favor of rebuilding a cash reserve. How severe the drop in demand will be correlates with how much of their pre-pandemic sales were manifestations of superfluous demand.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2020/04/with-superfluous-demand-in-free-fall.html  

​Remdesivir seems to help the sickest COVID patients, which is an official release, not a leak, this time.
​Hail Mary​




Sunday, April 26, 2020

Common Interests

Comrades,

 We share common interest in a healthful environment, healthful human lives, and a safe present and future for "ourselves and our posterity". How can we invest together those interests?
 How might the interests of other groups impact our interests? 
Do we have actual adversaries? What are their interests?

This Colonel in Russian Intelligence gives an interview in Russian, about the military intelligence view of the coronavirus pandemic, and the global economic reset, which is co-evolving with it. He believes that looking at global strategic interests of nations, financial powers and special interest groups is the most useful vantage.
He says that this big reset on the peoples of the world is an effort by the same interests that brought us 9/11 and the global-war-on-(people who had valuable stuff they wanted to keep).
 I agree that this is useful, because power elites know that more oil is not going to be found, nor more copper, or the nice, clean coal, or more pure aquifers of lovely water.
 The exponential growth phase of human-economy and human population is over, and they need to secure oil, copper, the environment and all that is useful for THEMSELVES.
 Like the people of Iraq, we are using up all the stuff they need going forward in our own interests, not in faithful service to them. They need some of us to faithfully serve them, of course, but the rest of us might as well go to Detroit.
 Thanks for this excellent strategic analysis in a short and direct 3/25/20 video, Eleni!

Sister Caitlin in Oz has another essay worthy of consideration:
We are born from a womb into a world, which Caitlin likens to a womb, but a pretty janky one in a lot of ways, because what it teaches us about how everything works is completely broken, just wrong. However, if we can be born-again we can know the actual workings of life, we can be human, instead of being manipulated by marketing pitches.

 Responding to viral reports alleging that the novel coronavirus was leaked from a US military biochemical laboratory, Chinese scientists said that they could not make a judgment on the allegation, as the US had not given any public response on the issue.
 Shi Yi, a research fellow from the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, made the remarks at a press conference Thursday, noting that the origin of the virus is a scientific issue requiring a long period of research and involves a great deal of uncertainty.
 The remarks came amid circulating reports alleging that the Fort Detrick laboratory, which handles high-level disease-causing materials such as Ebola, in Fredrick, Maryland, may be the origin of the deadly novel coronavirus, which has infected more than 2.6 million Americans with nearly 20,000 deaths as of 4:30 pm Thursday.
 The lab was ordered to shut down in July 2019, reportedly for multiple causes, including failure to follow local procedures and a lack of periodic recertification training for workers in the biocontainment laboratories.
 Some other posts on social media platforms also alleged that a US armed diplomatic driver and cyclist who was in Wuhan in October 2019 for the cycling competition in the Military World Games, could be patient zero for COVID-19 in Wuhan.
 Netizens from both China and the US have called on the US government to respond to public concerns over the above mentioned issues. 

This novel-coronavirus does some weird things, like making blood clots all through a person's body. 
Young people are getting strokes and heart attacks as well as blood clots in their lungs and kidneys.

The University of Texas at Austin has a viral pandemic graphing application, upon which you can look up your US state or local area, and see the coronavirus cases, trends, and estimate whether peak is likely to have happened, or when it is likely to happen. Austin started social distancing well before it was official, and we have something that looks like a straight line of deaths at a low level. Peak yet? How to know?

Putin and Trump find a 75 year old day of cooperation against the Third Reich to recognize on Elbe Day.
Any little reminder that our people worked together in the past has a potential for good. RT has the story.

The Kim Is (brain) Dead, Long Live The Kim!  ...or something to that effect. We're not sure yet.
Kim Yo Jong
​ ​Which - since Kim's children are far too young to run the country - brings our attention to the line of succession. As we noted earlier this week, there are several potential successors to the throne. Since the founding of the modern state in the aftermath of the Korean War, the country has been ruled by the "Mt Paektu Bloodline", which comprises most of the mythos and cult of personality around the Kim family.
​ ​But one thing we didn't really cover in great depth was the concerns that some in western intelligence have about Kim's sister, who has been seen more frequently in international news reports in recent years. The younger Kim, believed to be 31, is one of her brother's closest confidants and his de facto chief of staff. She has joined him at several high-profile international summits.
​ ​Unfortunately, to put it simply and straightforwardly, many fear that Kim Yo Jong would be even more diabolical and hostile than her brother.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/kimg-jong-un-reportedly-his-death-bed-these-are-most-likely-heirs-north-korean-throne
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/panic-buying-trains-halted-low-flying-helicopters-reported-pyongyang-amid-kim-death

Wuhan China was Fentanyl and meth-chemical capital of the world until February. Now drug lords, pushers and addicts everywhere are feeling the 'Rona-hurt.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-04-24/wuhan-china-coronavirus-fentanyl-global-drug-trade

RFK Jr carries on in the finest Kennedy tradition, and should not fly in small planes, nor ride in a convertable.
​ ​For over twenty years Bill Gates and his Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) have been vaccinating foremost children by the millions in remote areas of poor countries, mostly Africa and Asia. Most of their vaccination program had disastrous results, causing the very illness (polio, for example in India) and sterilizing young women (Kenya, with modified tetanus vaccines). Many of the children died. Many of the programs were carried out with the backing of the WHO and – yes – the UN Agency responsible for the Protection of Children, UNICEF.
​ ​Most of these vaccination campaigns were implemented without the informed-consent of the children, parents, guardians or teachers, nor with the informed-consent, or with forged consent, of the respective government authorities. In the aftermath, The Gates Foundation was sued by governments around the world, Kenya, India, the Philippines – and more.

​ ​Bill Gates has a strange image of himself. He sees himself as The Messiah who saves the world through vaccination – and through population reduction.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/bill-gates-and-the-depopulation-agenda-robert-f-kennedy-junior-calls-for-an-investigation/5710021

Professor Guy McPherson, of Nature Bats Last sends this peer reviewed article regarding an unthought-of aspect of global pollution reduction, short-term-heating.
  Abstract The outbreak of the novel coronavirus and the associated COVID-19 is causing an abrupt reduction in industrial activity. As a result of the associated reduction in the aerosol masking effect (“global dimming”), Earth might experience an abrupt rise in global-average temperature. The current temperature of Earth is the highest with Homo sapiens present, suggesting that an abrupt rise in global-average temperature could destroy habitat for humans on Earth. Human extinction could result.
https://opastonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/will-covid-19-trigger-extinction-of-all-life-on-earth-eesrr-20-.pdf

Eleni sends this article about how US rewards "Dead Or Alive" style, for Hezbollah ("axis of resistance") leaders have not produced a severed head yet, but are something of a ranking and status symbol.
https://ejmagnier.com/2020/04/22/us-rewards-for-hezbollah-leaders-heads-how-do-they-affect-the-organisation/



​Headless ​Blogger

(pictured in Yoakum Mexican avocado orchard this morning)​

Saturday, April 25, 2020

Crowning Achievements

Coronated,

T​here has never been a successful vaccine for any coronavirus in all of human history, and now that scientists have discovered approximately 30 different strains of the virus that will just make the task of trying to develop a vaccine even more complicated.
​ ​Sadly, the reality of the matter is that this virus is going to be with us for a very long time to come.  Eventually herd immunity will hopefully be achieved, but until then a lot of people are going to get sick and a lot of people are going to die.
​ ​And fear of this virus is going to be with us for a long time to come as well, and that is going to paralyze our economy whether there are lockdowns or not.
​ ​The bottom line is that this virus is not going to be stopped, and the economic collapse that has now begun is not going to be stopped either.


​ Clif sends this article, which looks at the propaganda-narrative war between the US and China about the origin of this viral plague, and where the blame might be assigned. This is a battleground for global hearts and minds between an aging empire, and a much older, but rising empire. (Are there any other options I can have?)​
​ ​The political and media class in the United States is doing all it can to inculcate the public with the idea that China is to blame for Covid-19. With over forty thousand Americans dead from the virus, this narrative has tremendous propaganda power. But the more information is revealed about the details surrounding the origins of the virus, the more vulnerable Washington’s narrative becomes.  

​Referenced in that article is this article, Last Man Standing, from a month ago, which makes the case that the current global pandemic, first apparent to us in Wuhan, in January, was seeded there by American military participants in the global military game in Wuhan. Some of the Americans got really sick with something, had to be hospitalized and couldn't compete in their events. Could have been coronavirus, as we look back. 
The soldiers stayed in a hotel near the wet-market, and trained near Ft Detrick, Maryland. 
Enticing circumstantial evidence. There's more.​

Eleni sends this article about Chinese research into the ancestry of the novel coronavirus that hit Wuhan so hard. 
Italy wants to know, too. The US is preventing any investigation of American "flu deaths" from this past winter. 
It was bad in the hospitals. I had a patient almost die in November/December, and all the teaching hospital found was "coronavirus".
 “This suggests that the H1 specimen was brought to the seafood market by some infected person, which sparked the epidemic. The gene sequence cannot lie.” (Ambassador Zhang)  ​...​
​ ​Shockingly enough, Italy wanted to trace the first infection case of Covid-19 by conducting an exhumation in the US of so-called flu victims, by the US has flatly refused permission.  

​The angle getting more press in the US is propounded here by a RUSSIAN.​ (All biowepon labs play with this fire.)
​ ​A world renowned Russian microbiologist says that the novel coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of Wuhan scientists doing "absolutely crazy things" in their laboratory.
​ ​Dr. Peter Chumakov of the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology and Russian Academy of Sciences claims that while the Wuhan scientists' goal in creating the coronavirus was not malicious - instead, they were trying to study the pathogenicity of the virus

​English tabloid press has this scoop. 20% (or more) of New Yorkers show antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, so at least that many have had the infection. That leaves 80% still sitting ducks, which is no good at all.​
New York City antibody survey reveals more than a FIFTH residents have been infected and mortality rate is FIVE TIMES deadlier than the flu

​Jim Kunstler is in good form again.​
​ ​It’s one thing to get sandbagged by a public health crisis ­– a plague being about the worst kind – and quite another for an advanced, complex economy to fall away under your feet like a freight elevator that snapped its cables. The two are now linked in the public imagination, which naturally churns out narratives to serve the collective human craving for pattern recognition.
“The news” is the net sum of all that, mixed with a lot of cognitive “noise.” Even highly intelligent people have a hard time sorting it out. The Internet is full of stories, often contradictory, charged with anger, horror, indignation, and agendas, mostly unhelpful and some quite dangerous ­– like the cry that China must pay for this! Uh, like how? Send them an invoice: Please remit $11.7 trillion to the address above…?  Release the US Airborne over Beijing as if it were Belgium, 1944…? Drop the big one…? (They have big ones, too.)
​ ​Grievances and recriminations sprout like the skunk cabbages of April: China did it to us so they could rule the world…. The Democrats are lovin’ it cuz it’ll finally get rid of the wicked Trump…. Bill Gates is lovin’ it because the vaccine he’s working on will make him rich…! Doctors Fauci and Birx are tools of Big Pharma…! The New World Order (aka The Globalists) are using it to take away our freedom and turn us into the foot-servants of George Soros…!
​ ​Probably the biggest argument is over the seriousness of the disease itself. The statistical through-put of the moment appears to underwhelm the models the USA and Europe constructed at the onset of the plague. At least, that is, far fewer people have died, and of those, mostly the very old and those burdened with chronic illnesses ­– but also quite a few doctors and nurses in the prime of life.​..
​ The old system is permanently broken now. We’re having a hard time recognizing that, plague or no plague.  Many activities have flunked the scale challenge and will not come back to running the way they used to, generally anything organized at the giant scale: global supply chains, global corporations that depend on them, fracking for shale oil, big institutions like colleges and even public school systems, commercial aviation and tourism, the auto industry, show business (including the Disney empire and things like it), suburbia as a general proposition, skyscrapers and megastructures, shopping malls, pension funds, insurance companies, mega-banks, and, of course, medical conglomerates. [I personally think suburbia is still in the running. More distance. Room for gardens.]​ ...
​ Times have changed and we’re going to have to get some new good ideas that fit the new times. But, the craziness out there is very likely to start expressing itself differently as we discover the urge to action does not produce the desired result of returning-to-normal. Instead, it produces more disorder in the foundering system, and then the question is: how much disorder do we have to slog through to get to those new ideas suited to the new times?

​Fraying Food System May Be Our Next Crisis (Ya think? What if the internet crashes first?)​
​ O​ur modern food system is packed with ticking bombs. The ways we grow, process, package, and distribute food depend overwhelmingly on finite, depleting, and polluting fossil fuels. Industrial agriculture contributes to climate change, and results in soil erosion and salinization. Ammonia-based fertilizers create “dead zones” near river deltas while petrochemical pesticides and herbicides pollute air and water. Modern agriculture also contributes to deforestation and biodiversity loss. Monocrops—huge fields of genetically uniform corn and soybeans—are especially vulnerable to pests and diseases. Long supply chains make localities increasingly dependent on distant suppliers. The system tends to exploit low-wage workers. And food is often unequally distributed and even unhealthful... https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-04-23/fraying-food-system-may-be-our-next-crisis/  

David Stockman(​He's ​73 years old​, and I'm not taking-his-side, but presenting it.​)
​ ​I think for once, Donald Trump was right when he worried out loud the other day that the cure may be far worse than the disease.
​ ​Governors - mostly Democratic governors and mayors of major areas of the country - have imposed Lockdown Nation. It's a complete economic disaster.
​ ​It's a wrong policy from a public health point of view and an economic point of view.
​ ​It is hitting, like a ton of bricks, a highly fragile and vulnerable economy that was living hand to mouth anyway because of the kind of highly counterproductive monetary and fiscal policies and debt build-up we've had over the last 30 years.
​ ​If you look at the data for New York—which is the epicenter of the whole COVID-19 pandemic—it is abundantly clear that COVID is not some kind of latter-day Black Death plague that takes down the young, the old, the healthy, the sick, and everyone in between.
It is a kind of super winter flu that strikes fatally, almost entirely, the elderly population that is already afflicted with many life-threatening medical conditions—or what the technicians call comorbidities.
​ ​The shutdown, which I call the "plenary lockdown policy," is wrong. Closing all the businesses except a tiny, arbitrary set of essential operations is courting disaster for no good reason.​..
​ For those under 50 years of age in the state of New York, the death rate is slightly under 5 per 100,000.
That isn't a disaster. That isn't a plague or a calamity.

MICHAEL HUDSON: 
​ ​Just think of when, in the debates with Bernie Sanders during the spring, you had Biden, and Klobuchar keep saying, ‘What we’re paying for Medicare-for-All will be $1 trillion over 10 years.’ 
Well here the Fed can create $1.5 trillion in one week just to buy stocks.
​ ​Why is it okay for the Fed to create $1.5 trillion to buy stocks to prevent rich people from losing on their stocks, when it’s not okay to print only $1 trillion to pay for free Medicare for the entire population? This is crazy!
​ ​The idea that only the rich should be allowed to print money for themselves, but the government should not be allowed to print money for any public purpose, any social purpose — not for medicine, not for schools, not for personal budgets, not for full employment — but only to give to the 1 percent. People hesitate to think that.
​ ​They think, ‘It can’t possibly be this bad.’ But those of us who have worked on Wall Street, for 50, 60 years in my case, that’s what the numbers show.
​ ​And that’s why you don’t have the media talking about actual numbers. They talk about, you know, just words, and they use euphemisms, and it’s the kind of Orwellian vocabulary, describing an inside-out world that they’re talking about.

​Printing Vegetables


Thursday, April 23, 2020

Natural Intelligence

Intelligently Engaged,

TECHNO-TYRANNY: HOW THE US NATIONAL SECURITY STATE IS USING CORONAVIRUS TO FULFILL AN ORWELLIAN VISION  ​, Whitney Webb    Thanks Til​ 
​ ​Though the May 2019 NSCAI document was authored nearly a year ago, the coronavirus crisis has resulted in the implementation of many of the changes and the removal of many of the “structural” obstacles that the commission argued needed to be drastically altered in order to ensure a technological advantage over China in the field of AI. The aforementioned move away from cash, which is taking place not just in the U.S. but internationally, is just one example of many.​ 
 ​For instance, earlier this week CNN reported that grocery stores are now considering banning in-person shopping and that the U.S. Department of Labor has recommended that retailers nationwide start “‘using a drive-through window or offering curbside pick-up’ to protect workers for exposure to coronavirus.” In addition, last week, the state of Florida approved an online-purchase plan for low income families using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Other reports have argued that social distancing inside grocery stores is ineffective and endangering people’s lives. As previously mentioned, the May 2019 NSCAI document argues that moving away from in-person shopping is necessary to mitigate China’s “adoption advantage” and also argued that “when buying online is literally the only way to get what you want, consumers go online.”...
 It is indeed striking how the coronavirus crisis has seemingly fulfilled the NSCAI’s entire wishlist and removed many of the obstacles to the mass adoption of AI technologies in the United States. Like major crises of the past, the national security state appears to be using the chaos and fear to promote and implement initiatives that would be normally rejected by Americans and, if history is any indicator, these new changes will remain long after the coronavirus crisis fades from the news cycle. It is essential that these so-called “solutions” be recognized for what they are and that we consider what type of world they will end up creating – an authoritarian technocracy. We ignore the rapid advance of these NSCAI-promoted initiatives and the phasing out of so-called “legacy systems” (and with them, many long-cherished freedoms) at our own peril.  

 Michael Snyder asks if the second wave of coronavirus infections is already here. 
"Here" can be local, national or global. With 2-3% of global population showing antibodies, this family of viruses has a completely open world of hosts to infect. This is gonna' take awhile. 
The estimate of another 18 months remains pretty reasonable, maybe a little more. 
The wave function can be modulated by isolation protocols, massive testing and treating, maybe a vaccine some day, but there has never been a workable coronavirus vaccine in 19 years of trying. (It always kills too many lab rats.)

Eastern Virginia Medical School has this flow sheet of protocols for treating COVID, which is the best I have seen, and clearly designed to help doctors help patients, instead of obstructing medical diagnosis and treatment, as we see the CDC and WHO doing. 
"Captured agencies", those seem to be, trying to keep things bad for Gilead to get remdesivir to market, or get all the new AI-police-state protocols in place. 
What is their intention?. Thanks for this link, Sharad.

Thought Police tighten up:
YouTube sides with World Health Organization on coronavirus
YouTube says it will take down any videos that contradict what the World Health Organization says about the coronavirus.  
https://www.valuewalk.com/2020/04/youtube-world-health-organization-coronavirus-conspiracy/  

History might be rhyming again, a century later. Gilad Atzmon said that the "Spanish Flu" started in china, which was completely new to me, but it looks like it really may have started there in winter 2017, and was likely carried to Canada and the UK by massive contingents of Chinese laborers from Northern China, where "Winter Illness" had been killing so many people. From Canada, it spread to the US, and was further carried to Europe by American, Canadian and British troop movements. When the "Spanish Flu" finally got to China, the deaths were far fewer (likely the "third-wave" for China, by that time).

The timeline for American  deaths is starting to get pushed back farther with autopsy tissue analysis. This was a bad winter for deaths, and there was not a novel-coronavirus test in November/December, when one of my patients almost died in a teaching hospital, with "coronavirus". That was just an obscure-but-interesting finding in Austin, in December 2019.

Science Magazine has a good tutorial on how and where novel-coronavirus marches through your body, and what it does when it camps in your organs. Ilargi, at the Automatic Earth, found this article, and so many of the others I have used in this pandemic. Good blog.
 
Small Business Firings Are About to Start, also from The Automatic Earth. 
Small businesses got head-faked with the promise of relief loans that would get forgiven if they kept employees on payroll. Only inside dealing corporations seem to have gotten that money, and before you could say "Jack Robinson". 
It's gone. Here comes the wave of firings and closings. 
Those actual small business people average about as much money as school teachers. 

Taleb lived through the Lebanese civil war. He wants an antifrgile world, stable at each level, not subject to global systemic collapse, like we are about to experience.
​ ​Anyone who has read the Federalist Papers can see what he’s getting at. The “separation of powers” is hardly the most efficient form of government; getting something done entails a complex, time-consuming process of building consensus among distributed centers of authority. But James Madison understood that tyranny—however distant it was from the minds of likely Presidents in his own generation—is so calamitous to a republic, and so incipient in the human condition, that it must be structurally mitigated. For Taleb, an antifragile country would encourage the distribution of power among smaller, more local, experimental, and self-sufficient entities—in short, build a system that could survive random stresses, rather than break under any particular one.​..
 We should discourage the concentration of power in big corporations, “including a severe restriction of lobbying,” Taleb told me. “When one per cent of the people have fifty per cent of the income, that is a fat tail.” Companies shouldn’t be able to make money from monopoly power, “from rent-seeking”—using that power not to build something but to extract an ever-larger part of the surplus. There should be an expansion of the powers of state and even county governments, where there is “bottom-up” control and accountability.  

Yes, the elite global rent-collecting-bankers-and-"investors" need to lose all of their claims to rent payment from all of the rest of us. That is what is fair in this reset. Ben Hunt righteously mocks their PR Spokespersons.
​ ​“I think we all agree with you that more money for Main Street is needed. But maybe not in spite of the money to all of these companies and whatever that make up the economy, as well. More money is needed everywhere, perhaps.
​ ​Why does anybody deserve to get wiped out from a crisis created like this? It’s like a natural disaster! Why does anyone deserve to be wiped out? Wouldn’t that be immoral itself?”
​ ​“Mr. Clarida also dismissed a question about whether the central bank had created a “moral hazard” that encouraged risky investor behavior when the Fed moved quickly to backstop swaths of credit markets.
​ ​“This is entirely an exogenous event,” said Mr. Clarida, noting how the virus—not private-sector behavior—had forced widespread business closures and revenue losses.”
I, for one, am delighted to learn of the “Through No Fault of Their Own” exemption to stock market risk.  
https://www.epsilontheory.com/through-no-fault-of-their-own/ 

How could oil cost -$40 per barrel on Monday? Thanks, Eleni. (Uh, could this happen in other places?)
How is this possible?
This is possible because of derivatives: financial instruments that trade in opaque markets, with little oversight, and which regulators, including Congress, have permitted to become a systemic problem.
In its simplest rendering, yesterday oil traders who owned oil derivatives realized that if they continued to hold these derivatives, they (the traders) would have to actually take delivery on the physical oil they owned. We’re talking thousands and thousands of oil barrels being delivered.
The traders don’t want the actual physical oil. They simply want to be able to trade oil prices. So, they dumped their derivatives at any price… including PAYING someone to take the derivatives off of their hands.

​This time IS "different":
 It makes no sense to try to sustain demand at earlier levels at a time when production can’t keep up, since it is not yet safe — and won’t be safe for some time — for people to return to work. The time for demand stimulus is later. The task for now is income maintenance — targeting public support at the unemployed so that parents can feed their children. Third, this crisis will be most acute in low-income countries. These countries have weak health systems. They are being hit by weak commodity prices, falling remittances, capital flight, a shortage of trade credit and collapsing currencies all at once.  
https://economic-historian.com/2020/04/the-analogy-trap-in-economic-policy/  

Silver Linings start to pop up:
“We’re screwed, just like everyone else in the world.” A spokesman for Peru’s anti-drugs agency said it may funnel more development aid to hard-hit areas. 
​ ​The coronavirus outbreak has upended industries across the globe. The international narcotics trade has not been spared. From the cartel badlands along the U.S.-Mexico border and verdant coca fields of the Andes, to street dealers in London and Paris, traffickers are grappling with many of the same woes as legitimate businesses...

​Your defense in times of drastic change is food security, water and fuel security, for you and your clan.​
​Field Of Opportunity, Neil Young ... "It's plowing time again"​

​Prepper


Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Waves Bye Bye

Considering Scenarios,

Gilad Atzmon wrote and sent an article about recent waves of influenza-like illness causing deaths in the US. He asks "Is this the second wave?" That's a provocative opening for some pandemic analysis. I replied to him.

Good sirs, Gilad and JA, please allow me to tweak this second-wave-hypothesis a little. 
I like the hypothesis, but the waves are too far apart. Waves of contagion are closely temporally connected, confluent.
A "novel" (new) virus will reach saturation in a population within about 2 years, and then it is "endemic" (established).
As it continues mutating (a virus can't keep itself from mutating), it may create new variants that work around the immunity the herd has developed.

If the US is in the second wave, then the first wave, usually a milder wave, as pandemics go, would have been last fall/winter.
There was a "3 to 4 week cold" circulating here in Austin from late summer on. People would come see me in week 3, 
worried that it had lasted too long. My wife, Jenny, a school librarian, got it, then I got it. 
The second distinguishing feature was the irritation deep in the chest, and the non-productive and unsatisfying cough that prompted.
I had a patient almost die in the (teaching) hospital late-November/early-December, and all they found was "coronavirus", 
a viral pneumonia, which brought on systemic collapse in his body. He lived, so I got sent the discharge summary. "Hmmm, interesting..."
"Coronavirus" was just an ordinary "cold virus", in December.

The guy who described the virus that causes AIDS says this virus had to be spliced together in a lab and the evidence of splicing is all through it. 
I'll just accept that as "fact", if I may. My own analysis from January through February had led me promptly to the same conclusion.

The infamous Ft. Detrick, Maryland US Army bioweapons lab was shut down in August for a serious "breach of containment", but "nobody was harmed", according to official statements. It was all fixed back up by November and reopened for business.

In mid October 300 US military service members traveled to Wuhan, China to participate in worldwide military games, 
an Olympics type thing, as I understand it. The US never went to these games before last October, a debut...
Apparently the US contingent stayed in a hotel very close to the wet-market and Wuhan Biolab.
By one report, 5-6 US military participants were so sick with "viral pneumonia" as to need hospitalization during the games.
This is the "who was patient-zero" question that the Chines keep raising. 
This was concurrent with "Event 201" by Bill Gates and Johns Hopkins, "What if a bad coronavirus got loose in the world" simulation. Major governments all attended and all scored poorly.

Look at this South China Morning Post story about a Chinese researcher who has been tracking the viral mutants and seeing how deadly (or not) each mutant is in human-cell culture. Thanks for these 2, Jeff.
 Li took an unusual approach to investigate the virus mutation. She analysed the viral strains isolated from 11 randomly chosen Covid-19 patients from Hangzhou in the eastern province of Zhejiang, and then tested how efficiently they could infect and kill cells.
 The deadliest mutations in the Zhejiang patients had also been found in most patients across Europe, while the milder strains were the predominant varieties found in parts of the United States, such as Washington state, according to their paper.
Let me point out that the virus was not yet big in New York and New Orleans when Dr Li was doing this analysis. 
I read that the East-coast viral types are more like those in Italy, more virulent. New Orleans has had a bad strain, too.

If this lab virus came from a military lab, Ft Detrick or Wuhan, it could come as an attack or as an accident in the initial release. 
An accidental release might prompt the leaking country to go ahead and use the weapon against a foe, before the opportunity was lost.
If it was an intentional release, it would surely be used against a foe, and with the ideal timing for maximum impact.
Wuhan, a massive Chinese transport hub, at Chinese New Year, was an ideal target.
Iran, especially top leaders, got hit very hard, right after all those big outdoor events for General Soleimani's assassination.  (Drone aerosolized virus attacks?)

What if the US virus, the weak one on the west coast, was released very early as a vaccine? 
That would be the logical defense an advanced bioweapons lab would use, while keeping everything hush-hush.
Too bad New York and New Orleans got a dose of the bad stuff. 
Accidents happen in war.

Ron Unz looks at the relative veracity of US and Chinese governments in recent decades, with focus on lies about military attacks. Thanks Marjorie.

Why was I not informed of this? Thanks Eleni.
Trump adapts US energy strategy , by Thierry Meyssan
 A showdown between Riyadh and Washington, which was already disrupting the world economy before the spread of Covid-19. President Trump considered taking control of Saudi and Venezuelan oil, which apparently led him to forge new alliances.  

How China Sees The World, H.R. McMaster 
 This is useful context, and it really refers to how Xi Jinping and Communist Party elites see the world, through the historical lens of the empire that ruled everybody (with lapses) for many thousands of years, at least from the vantage of Chinese ("world" to them) history. China tends to have Hundred Year Plans as her main focus, though shorter plans, too, that serve the goals of The Middle Kingdom. (What about the Chinese people's needs and views?)
 McMaster is clearly a military partisan, and this opinion piece is weaponized, but I don't think that means he is being inaccurate about his trip to China with Donald Trump, mainly that he has a whole lot of the hubris of the Western Empire to sweep under the rug. (It doesn't show at all.)
 The take-home message is that the natural order of the world got messed up a couple of hundred years ago, but it's back on track to it's normal condition, where China rules firmly and all others pay tribute, as they should, or get taught their lessons. That's Chinese history. (What about the periodic Chinese uprisings and power struggles?)

American coronavirus case numbers are deftly manipulated by strict restrictions on testing only the sick, and limits on numbers of tests. Tests so far have only tested for acute illness, in a much larger pool of cases, most with minimal symptoms. This has made for a tailoring of the numbers, though things definitely went ballistic in New York and New Orleans. Here is a sideways glance at that.

Moscow is up to 60% of positive tests being asymptomatic, which reveals that they either have milder strains of virus, or are getting ahead of the crisis on testing asymptomatic contacts, or both.

 Globally, where antibody tests are starting to be done, about 3% of people have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2.
About 70% of people who got infected developed antibodies in other studies, so maybe 4% of global humans have had the illness, or variants of it. That sounds like early spread, with most of the damage yet to be done, unless the mild strains predominate.

 LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Some 4.1% of adults tested positive for coronavirus antibodies in a study of Los Angeles County residents, health officials said on Monday, suggesting the rate of infection may be 40 times higher than the number of confirmed cases. (The milder stuff?)

Vitamin D helps protect the endothelium, blood vessel linings. Why is nobody looking at vitamin-D levels?
Coronavirus attacks lining of blood vessels all over the body, Swiss study finds

​Revolutionary Times and Systemic Collapse, "The System Cannot Handle It",  Alastair Crooke

What is needed to reopen the US economy for business as usual? Who knows? Here is an estimated guess:
20 million tests a day
​ ​Test producers will need to deliver 5 million tests per day by early June to safely open parts of the economy by late July, according to the report. To "fully re-mobilize the economy," the country will need to see testing grow to 20 million a day, the report suggests.

E​conomic Alternative​

(Pictured in Austin garden)

Sunday, April 19, 2020

Seething With Virus

Considering Spring,

The global-powers-that-be need to do things on their terms, on their timetable, with their agenda. 
An event, like Event 201 coronavirus pandemic, makes that controlled-financial-reset possible on a global scale. 
I think history will have it otherwise. 
The level of resource extraction to supply the elites and the current system is too high to sustain.
That is the core problem forcing reset.
We are seeing the failure of a complex system. 
The higher levels of complexity, which allow global control, are the ones that cost the most compared to systemic benefit. They are clearly wasteful and destructive, when graded by measures of pollution, ecology, human cost vs human benefit, inefficient use of limited resources, and so on.
People's minds do not stay still when their bodies sit still in their houses.
People's minds devise new paths out, when their bodies are frozen in place.
Our minds are already squirmy like that.

COVID-19 Is A Man-Made Virus: HIV-Discoverer Says "Could Only Have Been Created In A Lab"
 GilmoreHealth.com's Robert Miller writes that contrary to the narrative that is being pushed by the mainstream that the COVID 19 virus was the result of a natural mutation and that it was transmitted to humans from bats via pangolins, Dr Luc Montagnier the man who discovered the HIV virus back in 1983 disagrees and is saying that the virus was man made.  

If you look at the mutation-family graph, the first, and very longest jump, which would actually be far off the page, if proportional, is from bat to first human. 
 When questioned, the researcher says, "If I am pressed for an answer, I would say the original spread started more likely in southern China than in Wuhan."   
It's not a question the study is designed to answer, but to not answer. 
(The question of viral origin is answered by genetic sequence analysis: "LAB".)
Covid-19 outbreak started months EARLIER and NOT in Wuhan, ongoing Cambridge study indicates

Navy Reports Alarming 'Stealth Transmission' Rate: 60% Of Infected Carrier Crew Symptom-Free
This suggests the virus could be spreading more frequently by stealth mode in the broader population, with many more people than is known walking around walking around with the disease unawares.  

​If I needed to get in to the shelter I would say I felt fine.
​ The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now “actively looking into” results from universal COVID-19 testing at a Boston homeless shelter.
 The broad-scale testing took place at the Pine Street Inn homeless shelter in Boston’s South End a week and a half ago because of a small cluster of cases there.
 Of the 397 people tested, 146 people tested positive. Not a single one had any symptoms.

​ ​An analysis of the blood of some 3,300 people living in Santa Clara county in early April found that one in every 66 people had been infected with SARS-CoV-2. On the basis of that finding, the researchers estimate that between 48,000 and 82,000 of the county’s roughly 2 million inhabitants were infected with​​ the virus at that time — numbers that contrast sharply with the official case count of some 1,000 people reported in early April ...  
​ News of the Santa Clara analysis follows preliminary results from a similar study in Germany, released on 9 April, that tested some 500 people in a village of more than 12,000 and found that one in seven had been infected with SARS-CoV-2. The German team also looked for active infections, using diagnostic tests based on the polymerase chain reaction, and when those figures were combined with those who had antibodies, estimate that the town’s overall infection rate was 15%.​..
 The Santa Clara team estimated an IFR for the county of 0.1–0.2%, which would equate to about 100 deaths in 48,000-82,000 infections. As of 10 April, the county's official death count was 50 people..​.
...​But with that ratio of false positives to true cases, a large number of the positive cases reported in the study — 50 out of 3320 tests — could be false positives, says Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious disease researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz.​ [That would not change the overall meaning of the study.]

​This virus is killing a lot more nursing home patients and elderly than any government wants to acknowledge.
Coronavirus: Care home deaths 'far higher' than official figures

Vaccines for this family of viruses have been tried for almost 20 years (SARS), but they kill too many of the lab rats. That's why I don't want one.​ Also, they don't seem to be protective.​
Here's Why A Coronavirus Vaccine Might Not Happen Within 18 Months
"One of the problems with corona vaccines in the past has been that when the immune response does cross over to where the virus-infected cells are it actually increases the pathology rather than reducing it," said Frazer. "So that immunisation with SARS corona vaccine caused, in animals, inflammation in the lungs which wouldn't otherwise have been there if the vaccine hadn't been given."  

​We know that about 30% of people do not get much of an antibody response, and we presume they are not protected, but we also presume that people with an antibody response ARE protected. We don't actually know that for sure.
South Korea confirms 111 cases of coronavirus reinfection

 ​ ​This age of battling narratives tends to conceal the broken consensus behind it. What’s gone is a broad social agreement that there are certain fundamental realities, and then codes of conduct that follow from them. When anything goes, don’t expect people to do the right thing, or even know what it is.
​ ​The Covid-19 debacle presents just such a set of quandaries and puzzles. For many people stewing in quarantine, the virus is just another evil phantom lurking in the permanent twilight zone of television, and even there, among the familiar jabbering figments, there’s little agreement about it. The statistical projections mutate weekly. It’s no worse than any annual flu… It’s a savage illness that attacks every organ in the body, leaves survivors maimed, and you can even catch it again… The lockdowns are imperative… the lockdowns amount to economic suicide…  There’s no sorting it all out, and the uncertainty itself is intolerable.
​ ​The only certainty is that most of the people in lockdown are going broke fast. By any ordinary rules, they are wiped out. They can’t even pretend anymore to keep juggling all those monthly payments for rent or mortgages, food, the cars, the medical insurance, the electricity, the cable, and on and on. The $1200 mad money checks promised by Uncle Sam are little consolation for that, and the small business “loans” ­– if you can even jump through the infuriating hoops to get them – just pile on an additional layer of obligation in a lifetime of debt serfdom. You don’t have to leap too many steps ahead mentally to imagine utter personal ruin on that glide path.​..
...​We’re not going to replace all those growings, makings, movings, and services by just giving people money. Money may produce more money by the magic of compound interest, but money is not necessarily wealth, it just represents our ideas about wealth, and interest stops compounding anyway when the trend is clearly for reduced growings, makings, movings, and servicings. That’s exactly how and why capital vanishes. The hocus-pocus of Modern Monetary Theory can only pretend to work around that reality.
The world never reached such a pitch of activity up to the blow-ups of 2008, and it went through the motions for a decade after that. Now that it’s stopped, all that’s left is the law of gravity, and it doesn’t get more basic. The “wealth” acquired in the decade since by the so-called “one-percent” was loaded onto a defective aircraft, like a Boeing 737-MAX, and an awful lot of it will fall to earth now on broken wings. Their agents and praetorians on Wall Street are working feverishly to stave off that crash-landing, like a band of ​magicians casting spells on the ground, while ​
that big hunk of juddering metal augers earthward .

​"Helping Small Businesses" lie... Matt Taibbi
“The cost of caring for this small slice of the wealthiest one percent is greater than the CARES Act funded for all hospitals in America,” says Texas Democrat Lloyd Doggett. “It’s greater than CARES provided for all state and local governments.”
​ ​The JCT analysis found that 80% of the benefit of the bill went to just 43,000 taxpayers each earning over $1 million a year. The average tax break for those 43,000 individuals was $1.6 million, an interesting number when one considers the loudness of the controversy over $1,200 relief checks for everyone else.

Biophysical Economics and the Coronavirus Pandemic​ 
(The radical concept that the science of econmics must effectively model "reality")

Don’t Be Scared About The End Of Capitalism–Be Excited To Build What Comes Next​ ​
​ ​Capitalism has become a dogma, and dogmas die very slowly and very reluctantly. It is a system that has co-evolved with modernity, so it has the full force of social and institutional norms behind it. Its essential logic is even woven into most of our worldviews, which is to say, our brains. To question it can trigger a visceral reaction; it can feel like an attack not just on common sense but on our personal identities.
​ ​But even if you believe it was once the best system ever, you can still see that today it has become necrotic and dangerous. This is demonstrated most starkly by two facts: The first is that the system is doing little now to improve the lives of the majority of humans: by some estimates, 4.3 billion of us are living in poverty, and that number has risen significantly over the past few decades. The ghostly responses to this tend to be either unimaginative–“If you think it’s bad, try living in Zimbabwe”–or zealous: “Well, that’s because there’s not enough capitalism. Let it loose with more deregulation, or give it time and it will raise their incomes too.”

​SPAM factory closes...
​ ​A cluster of COVID-19 cases forced health officials in Illinois to shutter Hormel's Rochelle Foods plant on Friday.
​ ​Ogle County Health Department (OCHD) said the food processing plant would be closed for at least two weeks. On Friday (April 17), the facility was linked to 19 cases across Ogle County, three in Whiteside County, and two in Winnebago County, reported Daily Chronicle.
​ ​The facility employs more than 800 workers, many of whom have been sent home on paid leave. The facility will have 48 hours to comply with new health measures to mitigate the spread of the virus.

​Vegetarian​