Bind Moggling

Reviewing Screenshots,

Taiwan News has the same story that I posted from Zero Hedge and Natural news yesterday.

 On late Saturday evening (Feb. 1), the Tencent webpage showed confirmed cases of the Wuhan virus in China as standing at 154,023, 10 times the official figure at the time. It listed the number of suspected cases as 79,808, four times the official figure.
 The number of cured cases was only 269, well below the official number that day of 300. Most ominously, the death toll listed was 24,589, vastly higher than the 300 officially listed that day.
 Moments later, Tencent updated the numbers to reflect the government's "official" numbers that day. Netizens noticed that Tencent has on at least three occasions posted extremely high numbers, only to quickly lower them to government-approved statistics..

 Although some are chalking up the images to users tampering with their browsers, the 154,023 infections on Feb. 1 are remarkably close to the estimate predicted on that date by a scientific modeling study carried out by the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and published on the Lancet website.  

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3871594  

Citizen Journalist Exposes The Brutal Truth: China Is Losing The Battle In Wuhan
​ ​Recently, one self-styled 'citizen journalist' traveled to Wuhan to try and document the situation on the ground. What he discovered was even more alarming than he had feared: By quarantining the city, the government in Beijing had basically condemned the people of Wuhan to battle the virus on their own...
 Dr said we need to select which patients to do the test on. There are only I was told 100 or several hundred test-kits per hospital per day. There aren’t enough, so doctors need to select those to check. So some people have been to 5-6 hospitals trying to get tested.
​ ​All hospitals say they don’t have spare beds. I’m really scared now. People are scared.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/citizen-journalist-exposes-brutal-truth-china-losing-battle-wuhan  

This is exactly the kind of thing that DARPA's Skunk Works has been visualizing as an ideal targeted genetic weapon for decades.

​ ​In the ongoing 2019-nCoV epidemic across China, the deaths have been skewed two to one in favor of men. A new study, if confirmed by later research, may begin shining some light onto why this is happening.
​ ​A recent Chinese analysis of a single cell RNA-seq dataset suggests that men and Asian people may have higher expression of ACE2, the cell surface protein that 2019-nCoV uses to attack humans cells, on the alveolar epithelial cells inside the lungs that ACE2 usually infects.
​ ​The authors posit that this may be the source of the virus’s observed tendency to be more severe in men, and that the virus may be more severe in Asian people of both sexes for the same reason. The study is based on a tiny sample and is far from conclusive, but the hypothesis is intriguing and has some contextual support from data on influenza and SARS.

https://theprepared.com/blog/new-study-suggests-2019-ncov-may-hit-men-asian-people-harder/ 

​4 cruise ships are quarantined, and by the end of the month there will be a lot more reliable data on Wuhan coronavirus spread and fatality rate, independent of the existentially-threatened Chinese Communist Party. 

Nightmare At Sea - Japan Discovers 42 Additional Coronavirus Cases On Quarentined Cruise Ship​

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/nightmare-sea-more-7000-quarantined-two-cruise-ships-asia-amid-virus-outbreak 

 The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which as Nature in 2017 said studies the "world's most dangerous pathogens", has jointly with the Military Medicine Institute of the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Science, i.e. with China's Army, applied to patent the use of Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir to treat the current coronavirus outbreak.
 The company has partnered with Chinese health authorities to run a Phase III clinical trial to assess remdesivir for treatment of the virus. The drug was originally developed to treat the Ebola virus, but wasn’t effective. According to preclinical assays the drug might be effective against the coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, as was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The drug was given to a U.S. patient for compassionate use on day seven of the disease and their condition improved on day eight.
 The new clinical trial of an anti-Ebola drug to fight Coronavirus, will be conducted at Friendship Hospital in Beijing, China. The trial will enroll 270 patients with mild and moderate pneumonia caused by the virus.

https://www.zerohedge.com/health/wuhan-institute-virology-and-chinese-army-submit-patent-gilead-anti-ebola-drug-fight 

Kids really don't seem to get very sick from this virus, and we would all love to understand that a lot better.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/coronavirus-case-children-infants-low-disease-expert-explain-why-2020-2 

Antiviral cleaners for household surfaces are to be found among common commercial products.

https://www.nea.gov.sg/our-services/public-cleanliness/environmental-cleaning-guidelines/guidelines/interim-list-of-household-products-and-active-ingredients-for-disinfection-of-novel-coronavirus 

DNC wants a "recanvass" of votes as Bernie Sanders declares 6000 more votes makes him the winner, not prematurely-ejaculating-tweeter "I won!" mayor Pete Buttigieg, who declared victory a couple of days ago.

​ ​The state party's numbers showed that Pete Buttigieg would be awarded 564.012 SDEs, or state delegate equivalents, while Bernie Sanders would receive 562.497 SDEs. Sanders held a sizeable popular vote lead, though, and finished ahead of Buttigieg by a 43,671 to 37,557 vote margin. He fell behind in delegates due to Iowa's unusual voting system that gave different delegate weights to different precincts.
​ ​After the "second alignment" -- meaning the popular vote after the elimination of candidates who received less than 15 percent of the vote in the first round of caucusing -- Sanders was still ahead of Buttigieg, 45,826 votes to 43,195.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/iowa-democrat-final-caucus-vote-totals-buttigieg-sanders  

​Our girl Helen of DesTroy at RT has more:

Iowa disaster redux: DNC demands recanvass as more sordid details emerge about Shadow app’s backers

The straw that broke the camel’s back might have been the Iowa Democrats’ sheepish walk-back of a set of phony results for Black Hawk County on Wednesday night, which had mysteriously handed a large chunk of Sanders votes to billionaire Tom Steyer and former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. When the county supervisor published the actual results, the party dutifully updated their totals to reflect reality after promising a “minor correction.”  ​...

​ ​Nor did Perez's call for a recanvass pacify the angry mob. Instead, it merely sparked calls for him to resign.​..

​   The Buttigieg campaign had donated $40,000 to Shadow, whose app seemed to be handing him first place in spite of polls, and Shadow’s parent company Acronym’s founder Tara McGowan was married to a Buttigieg staffer herself.  

​https://www.rt.com/usa/480266-iowa-caucus-recanvass-rigging-irregularities/

Inadequately Disinfected

Falling Down

Honored,

A hero falls in the line of duty. He was threatened to shut up or face consequences in December, forced to retract his statements:

 The Chinese doctor who tried to raise the alarm about the new coronavirus before it was even identified has died of the deadly virus.
  Dr. Li, 34, was hospitalized on January 12 after contracted the virus from his patient, and he was confirmed to have the coronavirus on February 1, and The World Health organization has just confirmed his passing.

https://www.zerohedge.com/health/original-china-virus-whistleblower-doctor-dies 

 Dr Li is in good company if this story is true, and it has the look of truth trying to leak out. 

These numbers fit with the behavior of Chinese authorities much better than the official numbers do. 

Maybe the WHO is praising Chinese "transparency" with THEM, not the-little-people.

 Mike Adams has been working hard on the Wuhan coronavirus news. I am always careful accepting his work without careful analysis (he's excitable), but this is the second story of his which is impressively good. This story first broke in my world on Zero Hedge, but Adams has spent another day of filling it out. It seems that the computer program is automatically coming u with numbers from the database, and they have inadvertently been released for a few seconds, a couple of times, and captured in screenshots, before being replaced with officially sanctioned numbers. This death toll is over 24,000, 50 times higher than officially reported.

https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-02-05-china-two-sets-of-coronavirus-pandemic-numbers-leaked-data-deaths.html  

https://www.zerohedge.com/health/did-chinas-tencent-accidentally-leak-true-terrifying-coronavirus-statistics  

Charles Hugh Smith:

​ ​Will we wonder, what were we thinking? and marvel anew at the madness of crowds?
​ ​When we look back on this moment from the vantage of history, what will we think? Will we think how obvious it was that the coronavirus deaths in China were in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds claimed by authorities?
​ ​Will we think how obvious it was that the virus would spread around the globe, wreaking havoc on the global economy and social order, even as the authorities claimed only a handful of cases had arisen outside China?

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogfeb20/lies-videos2-20.html  

The DNC took over counting, reportedly counting precincts considered to be Sanders strongholds last, but I'm sure their numbers will be accurate... It's bedtime for Uncle Joe.

Buttigieg and Sanders separated by razor-thin margin with Iowa count nearly done
The former South Bend mayor is locked in a tight race with Sanders after a technical meltdown created havoc in reporting the results

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/05/buttigieg-sanders-iowa-results-110942 

 ​I​mmediately after President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's roll out of the 'deal of the century' Mideast peace plan on January 28, Turkey was the first country to condemn it internationally, and just days ago Erdogan’s director of communications, Fahrettin Altun, called it "a declaration of war, not a peace plan".
​ ​In a stunning revelation Wednesday, Bloomberg now reports that President Erdogan says the US is threatening him and Intelligence Chief Hakan Fidan over Turkey's rejection of the plan.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/erdogan-says-us-threatened-him-after-turkey-was-first-reject-trumps-peace-plan  

​Threatened​

After not freezing since mid November, the garden got snow in the night. Here's Jenny at dawn.

Billionaires Beat Bernie

Backing Buttigieg,

Behind the app that delayed Iowa’s voting results is a dark money operation funded by anti-Bernie Sanders billionaires. Its top donor Seth Klarman is a Buttigieg backer who has dumped money into pro-settler Israel lobby groups​.

The delay in the vote reporting denied a victory speech to Senator Bernie Sanders, the presumptive winner of the opening contest in the Democratic presidential primary. Though not one exit poll indicated that Buttigieg would have won, the South Bend, Indiana mayor took to Twitter to confidently proclaim himself the victor.  

​https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/04/pro-israel-buttigieg-seth-klarman-iowas-voting-app/

​ ​After a 2016 presidential primary race riddled with scandals, all of which worked against Bernie Sanders to the advantage of anointed establishment favorite Hillary Clinton, the 2020 Democratic presidential primary elections officially began with a massive scandal working against Bernie Sanders to the advantage of an establishment favorite.
​ ​The 2020 Iowa caucuses turned out to have been designed to depend on the use of a new, untested app with extensive ties to establishment insiders and to the Pete Buttig​ie​g campaign, and because of problems using this app as of this writing we are still waiting on the full results of the election. The Iowa Democratic Party has bizarrely released a partial result with 62 percent of 99 counties reporting, which just so happens to have favored the campaign of a Mr Peter Buttigie​g, who in the sample came out on top in delegates despite coming in second in votes.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/02/05/dnc-completely-loses-public-trust-in-its-primary-process-on-very-first-day/#comment-27117  

​Our Girl, Helen of DesTroy has these thoughts on the provenance of Wuhan coronavirus​:

While many alt-media outlets have fingered Event 201 as the replica "drill" that so often coincides with a false flag event, few are aware that on the day after that simulation, the 2019 Military World Games kicked off in Wuhan, bringing 300 US military personnel to the city. Former Malaysian PM Matthias Chang, however, zeroed in on the games as the likely entry point for what he described as a biological war waged by the US against China.

  http://www.helenofdestroy.com/index.php/146-two-birds-with-one-flu-coronavirus-weaponized-against-china-and-american-dissidents

​Considering the hypothesis that Wuhan coronavirus cannot remain "novel", but has jumped far enough and wide enough to become the 5th endemic coronavirus in our world.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-coronavirus-isnt-contained/ 

US Wuhan coronavirus pandemic spread seems likely. Crisis mitigation is evolving approach. (I have noticed there are no confirmed cases south of Texas in the Americas. It is likely spreading undetected. Brazil and Ecuador are watching a few people. It's hard to imagine that it does not become pandemic in the global south.)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-05/coronavirus-update-governments-prepare-for-pandemic 

Chloroquine is generic, and should be fairly cheap, a fading treatment for malaria.

Gilead designed remdesivir to fight bat-borne viruses.

 Notably, two compounds remdesivir (EC50 = 0.77 μM; CC50 > 100 μM; SI > 129.87) and chloroquine (EC50 = 1.13 μM; CC50 > 100 μM, SI > 88.50) potently blocked virus infection at low-micromolar concentration and showed high SI (Fig. 1a, b).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0282-0

Here is the global interactive map of Wuhan coronavirus cases

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 

Meanwhile, back in Pipelinistan...

Syrian Army Progress Leads To New Scuffle Between Turkey And Russia
The continuing Syrian army operation to liberate Idleb governorate is leading to a new clash between Turkey and Russia.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/02/syrian-army-progress-leads-to-new-scuffle-between-turkey-and-russia.html#more 

B student 

Fruit Bat Roundup

Roundup Ready,

Joe sends this article about the inserted genetic sequences in Wuhan coronavirus 2019-nCoV. It seems like part of this sequence is available online for under $100, worked out during 2008 research into SARS corona virus. The big insertion is the spke protein, that binds to ACE2 receptors deep in human lungs. This is the smoking gun of genetic engineering. The article goes into the firing of the Chinese employee from the Canadian level-4 viral research lab, suspected of borrowing the bat coronavirus without permission.

https://jameslyonsweiler.com/2020/01/30/on-the-origins-of-the-2019-ncov-virus-wuhan-china/  

Dr Francis Boyle says Wuhan coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon (but who did the critical engineering?)

https://greatgameindia.com/dr-francis-boyle-creator-of-bioweapons-act-says-coronavirus-is-biological-warfare-weapon/ 

Here is an interesting study with an innocuous enough name, published Halloween 2019, just after that Event 201 simulation of coronavirus pandemic was done. Filovirus is the family containing EBOLA. They looked at antibodies to filoviruses in bats and humans involved in a traditional yearly bat-harvest (roundup) in Nagaland, India. It looks like the humans caught these from the bats and made antibodies.

Filovirus-reactive antibodies in humans and bats in Northeast India imply zoonotic spillover

https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0007733  

​India is probing Wuhan Institute of Virology for doing that study on Indian citizens and Indian fruit bats ​without adequate informed consent or some such pretext. It seems that the Wuhan Institute did this study together with a mysterious American company, linked to the Defense Department, but without notification of the CDC, who knew nothing about it.

https://www.zerohedge.com/health/india-probe-wuhan-institute-virology 

Remdesivir is an experimental drug, produced by Gilead, specifically for treating filoviruses. One must wonder if Gilead was helping the military on their EBOLA-defense project. Remdesivir is now, suddenly in a massive human clinical trial in Wuhan. This is it's first clinical trial. Note: Vaccines against Coronaviruses seem to kill lab animals. Just be aware. That's in the first link above. This is just an antiretroviral, like treats AIDS and Hepatitis-c. Gilead leads in Hep-c treatment drugs. Good products.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-03/gilead-drug-to-undergo-human-trials-in-china-to-cure-coronavirus 

Here is the skinny on how Iran picked a list of revenge targets for the assassination of General Soleimani, and sort of negotiated the type of damage the US would get, to minimize loss of American life. Option #3 would have killed a lot of Americans, for instance. Thanks Eleni. It's not over until America is OUT.

 https://ejmagnier.com/2020/02/01/how-iran-decided-to-bomb-us-bases-and-how-trump-avoided-an-all-out-war/ 

Remember self-proclaimed President of Venezuela, Juan Guaido? Last year he was headlines. Michael sent this:

​ ​While Guaidó has been shrinking, Maduro has been growing stronger. Maduro has signed more than 500 bilateral agreements with China that put in place a long-term economic relationship. Russia has provided military, intelligence, and economic support. He has signed new agreements with Iran for medicine, food, energy, and healthcare. Venezuela has met its goal and delivered more than three million social housing units for more than 10 million people. This year economists are predicting the Venezuelan economy will expand and people are seeing the country as a paradox of stability. Some suggested that Maduro was the man of the year for successfully standing up to the Trump coup.  

https://popularresistance.org/guaidos-failed-foreign-tour-ends/ 

​Conservative former presidential aspiree Pat Buchanan looks at Bernie Sanders' rise to a moment in history.

​https://buchanan.org/blog/is-bernies-hour-of-power-at-hand-138097

We don't know how Bernie did in the Iowa Caucus at dawn because of some improvements recently made by the DNC. It looks like he got first or second though. I won't include the Fox News link I found.

Investigative Journalist, Whitney Webb has been giving us a lot of valuable insights in the past year. She says the American electorate is being prepared for a failed election in 2020, which would be one more way for the elite oligarchs to try to regain hold of the reins of power. (I'll point out, that they can't get along with each other, let alone hold-reins on the 4 horsies of the apocalypse.)

https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-israel-intelligence-2020-elections-cyber-security/264361/  

Running Amok

Pictured last evening at dusk after doing a lot of work in the Austin kitchen garden in recent weeks

First The Bad News

Genetically Targeted,

The Wuhan coronavirus, 2019-nCov, has been completely genetically mapped, and that data is published, openly shared.

Many other coronaviruses, like all of those common colds, SARS MeRS, Bat doronaviruses, have also been genetically mapped, and the genetic sequences published. This allows comparison of similarities and differences between viruses and helps to understand specifics of their function, including their shapes, and how they might attach to receptor proteins in a human body, for instance.

The Wuhan coronavirus is a lot like all the other coronaviruses, and especially a lot like a bat coronavirus it was compared to, but it has 4 unique and fairly long genetic sequences, not found in ANY of the other coronavirus. Where did they come from? stuff like that is supposed to evolve by individual replication-defect mutations over millions of viral generations, and a lot of other things should have shifted, and intermediate shifty things should be found in other viruses of the same family.

No, it's like those 4 gene sequences were cut and pasted from somewhere else.

OK, lets compare them to the wide world of RNA virus databases and see if they line up with anything that's published.

BINGO! Oh-Shit!

They are all found in the same exact place, the virus described in the mid 1980s as Human T-cell Lymphocyte Virus #3. HTLV3. 

They changed the name around 1990 to HIV, the most studied and best understood human viral pathogen ever. It's really well understood now. As declared by it's original name, it attacks the T-lymphocytes, immune system cells which destroy invading foreign stuff like bacteria and viruses. It wipes them out.

One of the big clinical features of people sick with this Wuhan coronavirus is Low Lymphocyte Counts

Tom and I both found this article on Zero Hedge, which has just been deplatformed from Facebook for "breaking rules" 

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/coronavirus-contains-hiv-insertions-stoking-fears-over-artificially-created-bioweapon 

This just in: Facebook and Twitter vow to CENSOR (er, "fact check") "misinformation" about Wuhan coronavirus/

https://www.theorganicprepper.com/social-media-censor-coronavirus/  

I was able to access the pre-print Coronavirus-HIV-homology paper this morning..

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.full.pdf  

Here's an analysis saying "I don't think it's military", but explaining what's going on.

​ ​The new paper’s authors took 28 sequences of the 2019-nCoV genome isolated from 28 different patient samples, and aligned them with the bat coronavirus genome which is 2019-nCoV’s closest known relative. Although the two viral genomes are 96% identical, this leaves about 1200 DNA bases, and a smaller number of protein residues, where they differ.
​ ​Among the differences, the Indian team identifies four insertions, where the 2019-nCoV genome contains a small extra sequence corresponding to a few additional amino acids in an otherwise similar protein. These insertions are as short as 6 residues.
​ ​All four insertions were located in the “spike protein” of 2019-nCoV, the projecting protein on the virus’s round envelope which recognizes the ACE2 receptor and enables the virus to penetrate mucous membrane cells, and also gives the coronavirus its name. The variable sequences of these recognition regions enable viruses to penetrate different types of cells in the human body.
​ ​The authors took the 2019-nCoV version of the spike protein sequence, and performed homology modeling to generate a likely 3D structure of the spike protein, using known 3D structure of the spike protein from the SARS virus as a starting point. They found that although the four sequences are distant in the 1D chain of the protein, the folding of the spike protein brings three of them together in 3D space, and that they are on the “tip” of the spike, at the ACE2 recognition site...
 The virus has a close 96% sequence overlap to a naturally occurring bat coronavirus, and coronaviruses have been known to jump from bats to humans by way of intermediates before, like the SARS coronavirus. The differences between the genome sequences, including the ones identified by the Indian study, are in variable regions of the genome that we’d expect to differ, and the 4% difference in the genomes is hard to call as “high” or “low,” given that we don’t know exactly which bats the 2019-nCoV strain came from or when it diverged from its closest known ancestor.

https://theprepared.com/blog/no-the-2019-ncov-genome-doesnt-actually-seem-engineered-from-hiv/  

Read up on the clinical features of this virus again in this Lancet article. "Lymphopenia" means low lymphocyte counts. 

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30211-7/fulltext 

​ ​Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas dismantled a claim from China’s communist regime Thursday that pinned the coronavirus outbreak on a market selling dead and live animals.
​ ​“China claimed — for almost two months — that coronavirus had originated in a Wuhan seafood market,” Cotton wrote on Twitter. “That is not the case.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/sen-cotton-shreds-chinas-official-virus-story-hints-super-laboratory/  

Highly consider buying vitamin D3 over the counter in the 5000 unit (largest) dose and taking 2 per day for a month or two, until you see how well the quarantines are going, and whether it seems to be excluded from your planetary region or not. Then take 1 per day forever, unless you live in the tropics and spend a lot of time outside nearly naked when the sun is shining. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3308600/ 

 While riding my bike to work Thursday around noon, I formulated an engaging Unified 2019-nCov Conspiracy Theory hypothesis, which plausibly combines the information we have to create a tale explaining how things could have come to appear as they do with Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

Let’s look at the article about Wuhan’s Institute of Virology, which we saw​ Wednesday​  https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavirus-pandemic
This institute was advertising on November 18 for a couple of hard working grad level research slaves, sleep​-​under​-​desk kinda; guys. 

The implication of this ZH article is that the​ ​fruit- bats-carry-deadly-coronavirus program was ramping up, but what if they just had to ​replace a couple of guys they recently fired in ​early​ November? ​(It's also possible that somebody just got real sick and couldn't work, of course.)​

Have you ever worked in animal research? I have, and sometimes people have to be fired for violating animal treatment protocols. It’s actually really important, and can go on a long time before anybody at the boss level finds out. (I’m thinking of somebody. Hi Larry. I presume you are not reading this.)
Lab animals are typically docile, raised and fed well by humans in captivity their whole lives, then “sacrificed” at the end of the study. Nobody paid much attention to the rat corpses I had to create in college and med school, but they were not infected with ​human pathogens​, either.
Imagine you are a hard working Chinese grad student guy, taking really good care of these lovely fat, pleasant fruit bats every day, and there are lots of them that you are just supposed to euthanize at the end of each project run, then cremate.
What a waste! These are prime dining, and no hassle at all to slaughter, and there is this guy at the exotic meat market who gives good money for each and every one, no questions asked.
It’s arguably un-Chinese to persistently ignore such an obviously efficient and virtuous business arrangement. It could be a real steady thing.
(Larry seemed to have mistreated monkeys and chimps for years, and lab primates are a sensitive issue.)
So for months there is an intermittent supply of live fruit bats delivered to the Wuhan ​wet​ market, variously infected with viral strains that have been tested in previous months. It’s a regular thing. Goes on for at least months, maybe years, until a researcher finds out one day. Unfortunately, it’s something like a month after the virus is already doing human-to-human spread at the ​wet​ market (RNA mutation regression analysis placed case-1 in October)
Case-temporarily-closed. Hire new qualified workers and let them know why the other guys got fired, so they don’t try it.
Event 201​ ​ http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/​ ,​making the world safe for coronavirus pandemics, was held October 18, which is about the time the virus started it’s journey of spreading and mutating in human hosts, one month before the job postings.

Well, what if you had ​spied upon​ the Chinese​ virology​ lab, and wanted to hoist it upon it’s own​ ​​petard, while unleashing a ​refined ​bioweapon on the Chinese economy? Just askin’.
​ Imagine​ you are a deep-state-economic-hit-man spook with flair, a boss who likes your style, plenty of budget, and you know these guys who take care of the infected fruit bats at the virology lab would really like to have girlfriends and money, and you know some guys who can show them a way to help make that happen, with ​"​nobody hurt​"​, and ​"​nobody the wiser​"​?
The sort of weakness with this simply scenario is that the world is ​not very well ​protected from whatever weaponized virus ​gets out and​ spread​s in hu​mans. There has been no real picking and choosing, unless your ​spy​ was so good that you actually knew the details of each ongoing experiment, and COULD pick and choose which bats went to market​.

Anyway the public health guys got together at event 201 to figure out how to quarantine entire continents when this kind of thing happens.

4 days ago Gail Tverberg, a professional  actuary, looked at the global economic impact which will develop with a quarantine of China, and any city with this virus. She thought it was just a naturally occurring virus.​ What if it's a bioweapon-of-trade-war? China gets hurt worst and blamed.

​ ​Unfortunately, there aren’t easy answers. We can easily see the likely outcome of under reaction. More people might die of the disease. More people might find themselves out of work for a couple of weeks or more with the illness. We tend to be especially concerned about ourselves and our own relatives.
​ ​The thing that is harder to see is that reacting too vigorously can have a hugely detrimental impact on the world economy. The world economy depends on international trade and tourism. China plays a key role in the world economy. Quarantines of whole regions that last for weeks and months can have a very detrimental impact on the wages of people in the area and profits of local companies. Problems with debt can be expected to spike. The greater the reaction to the coronavirus, the more likely the world economy will be pushed toward recession and job loss.

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2020/01/29/it-is-easy-to-overreact-to-the-chinese-coronavirus/comment-page-6/?unapproved=225154&moderation-hash=5141584fa5c5e6fd371ccbb2e251f42c#comment-225154  

​Quarantined Vegetable Gardener​

Fatal Mechanisms

Threatened by Contagion,

The Lancet has a case series, which leaves questions open, like what the effect of antiviral drugs, used on 3/4 of patients, might have been. Vitamin-D levels and treatment are not mentioned. 

(Don't be an older male smoker with chronic disease.)
 Of the 99 patients with 2019-nCoV pneumonia, 49 (49%) had a history of exposure to the Huanan seafood market. The average age of the patients was 55·5 years (SD 13·1), including 67 men and 32 women. 2019-nCoV was detected in all patients by real-time RT-PCR. 50 (51%) patients had chronic diseases. Patients had clinical manifestations of fever (82 [83%] patients), cough (81 [82%] patients), shortness of breath (31 [31%] patients)...  74 (75%) patients showed bilateral pneumonia...  17 (17%) patients developed acute respiratory distress syndrome and, among them, 11 (11%) patients worsened in a short period of time and died of multiple organ failure...
 The 2019-nCoV infection was of clustering onset, is more likely to affect older males with comorbidities, and can result in severe and even fatal respiratory diseases such as acute respiratory distress syndrome.  

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30211-7/fulltext 

Clif O. MD in Hawaii sent this very nice NIH paper on antiviral application of cheap, safe vitamin-D ("sunshine vitamin"). 

If you have not been taking it, and are not a surf lifeguard or outdoorsy nudist, then you may safely start taking 10,000 units per day for 1-3 months, then 5000 units per day after that. Vitamin D3 in 5000 unit dose, is available cheaply, over the counter. Buy it now, while supplies last!

​ ​Vitamin D has long been recognized as essential to the skeletal system. Newer evidence suggests that it also plays a major role regulating the immune system, perhaps including immune responses to viral infection. Interventional and observational epidemiological studies provide evidence that vitamin D deficiency may confer increased risk of influenza and respiratory tract infection. Vitamin D deficiency is also prevalent among patients with HIV infection. Cell culture experiments support the thesis that vitamin D has direct anti-viral effects particularly against enveloped viruses. Though vitamin D’s anti-viral mechanism has not been fully established, it may be linked to vitamin D’s ability to up-regulate the anti-microbial peptides LL-37 and human beta defensin 2  

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3308600/  

​Switching to poison as a purported cause of death, I am grateful to Tom for sending​ this essay explaining Joe Stalin's belief that FDR was poisoned to death by "the Churchill gang", as he explained to FDR's son, who he had met previously at a high level negotiation in Iran, during the war. My Grandmother Day was always of the belief that FDR was murdered, and may have seen this same interview summary.

​ ​Stalin took a few steps around the office, and almost in a rage roared, "They poisoned your father, of course, just as they have tried repeatedly to poison me."
"They, who are they," Elliot asked
"The Churchill gang!" Stalin roared, "They poisoned your father, and they continue to try to poison me…the Churchill gang!"  

http://www.prouty.org/coment11.html 

Cat sends this whimsical essay by CJ Hopkins, where he paints Trump as a ​"​Dead President Walking"​:

​ Relax, folks. I’m just kidding, of course. The Intelligence Community would never dream of doing anything … you know, illegal. The Community doesn’t assassinate people, and commit all sorts of other atrocities. That’s just a thing they do in the movies. In reality, they would never assassinate a president, especially not one they had been telling everyone is a “Russian asset,” and “literally Hitler,” and a “traitor,” and a “dictator,” for over three years.
​ ​OK, those are pretty harsh words, but they probably don’t really mean all that stuff. Odds are, they’re just horsing around. They’re a notorious bunch of jokesters, those CIA guys.

https://www.unz.com/chopkins/dead-president-walking/ 

​Craig Murray:  ​A persistent American lawyer has uncovered the undeniable fact that the FBI has been continuously lying, including giving false testimony in court, in response to Freedom of Information requests for its records on Seth Rich. The FBI has previously given affidavits that it has no records regarding Seth Rich.
 A Freedom of Information request to the FBI which did not mention Seth Rich, but asked for all email correspondence between FBI Head of Counterterrorism Peter Strzok, who headed the investigation into the DNC leaks and Wikileaks, and FBI attorney Lisa Page, has revealed two pages of emails which do not merely mention Seth Rich but have “Seth Rich” as their heading.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/01/the-fbi-has-been-lying-about-seth-rich/ 

Eleni sent a book review:

The book being reviewed was Rise and Kill First by New York Times reporter Ronen Bergman, a weighty study of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, together with its sister agencies. The author devoted six years of research to the project, which was based upon a thousand personal interviews and access to an enormous number of official documents previously unavailable. As suggested by the title, his primary focus was Israel’s long history of assassinations, and across his 750 pages and thousand-odd source references he recounts the details of an enormous number of such incidents.
 That sort of topic is obviously fraught with controversy, but Bergman’s volume carries glowing cover-blurbs from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors on espionage matters, and the official cooperation he received is indicated by similar endorsements from both a former Mossad chief and Ehud Barak, a past Prime Minister of Israel who himself had once led assassination squads. Over the last couple of decades, former CIA officer Robert Baer has become one of our most prominent authors in this same field, and he praises the book as “hands down” the best he has ever read on intelligence, Israel, or the Middle East.​.. ​

...some major gaps in his coverage are quite apparent to anyone who has even somewhat investigated the topic, and these begin in the early chapters of his volume, which include coverage of the Zionist prehistory in Palestine prior to the establishment of the Jewish state  

https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-mossad-assassinations/ 

Less than a week after millions of Iraqis took to the streets demanding the U.S. military leave for good, the United States announced that is planning to build three new military bases in Iraq, according to military news service Breaking Defense. The three sites chosen – Erbin, Sulimania and Halabja – are all extremely close to Iran, with Halabja (the site of the 1988 chemical weapons attack) just eight miles from the border.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-announces-three-new-bases-iraq-iraqis-demand-full-withdrawal/264466/ 

​Turkey is trying to rob French Oil & Gas giant, Total.

​France to send warships to support Greece in Turkish standoff
Greek PM welcomes move as row with Ankara over energy reserves intensifies

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/29/greece-turkey-standoff-france-send-warships-east-mediterranean 

French Riot Police wage street war against uniformed French Firefighters. RT has video. 

This is new. One uniformed branch has broken from another branch of government service. 

How long before Police change sides? 

Police got a better deal from the government, for sure, to buy their loyalty... 

https://www.rt.com/news/479409-france-police-firefighters-strike-paris/  

This elite betrayal is what is contested by French workers.

A new type of conflict: France’s ongoing struggle for pensions
Over 60% of French people support the strike that has lasted longer than any other such protest since May 1968. Why have we scarcely heard of it ?

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/a-new-type-of-conflict-frances-ongoing-struggle-for-pensions/  

​More information on recent story. How effective is the reverse osmolarity filtering in those machines I fill water jugs from?

Virtually All Major US Drinking Water Sources Likely Contaminated With PFAS

https://truthout.org/articles/virtually-all-major-us-drinking-water-sources-likely-contaminated-with-pfas/  

​Slowly Poisoned​

Predicting Interesting 2020

Engaging History,

 Larry,from Medina Texas, traveling between homesteads in Southwest Australia and Thailand, where wife Timi originates, has coronavirus protections in place for ride and arrival, including masks, wipes and vitamin-D.

"Bu-Hao" is the Chinese word-of-the-day, according to Larry. 

Hao is "good" or working properly, and Bu is a negation, so not good, or not right. 

The translation he provided was profane. 

Disgust or disapproval appears to be implied.

 Mel sends this Johns Hopkins continuously-updated map of Wuhan Coronavirus cases.

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6  

 The Wuhan coronavirus cluster in Starnberg, Germany grows to 4. (Nice town in Bavaria, not big. Hi Annette.)

http://recombinomics.co/topic/4557-ncov-onward-transmission-in-germany-cluster-grows-to-four/?tab=comments#comment-15327  

 I did not see many projection pieces for 2020 or even the 2020s, last month. Maybe I wasn't looking.

The 2020s is a crunch-decade. Everything has to change, no matter how you look at it, whatever your worldview, whatever your value-system. We can't continue exponential growth on a finite planet, and our biomass, humans and domestic livestock, is already some bizarre statistic like 97% of surface mammal & bird biomass. "Conventional oil" production still peaked in 2004-2005. They always knew the tight-oil and gas existed, but were not economically recoverable. Still true-ish. Shale oil is a government supported Ponzi-scheme, that gives the empire an oil-weapon to wield for awhile. "Investors" just have to keep getting dividend checks. 

Pollution and weather-weirding are never out of the news. Those chemtrails we've been seeing for 30 years are about to become official government policy. Calcium carbonate (bone-meal) haze will be the new-normal. Good sunsets...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02331-y 

The globalized economy will have to change drastically, but it can only make tiny little changes, as it has already maxed out, not only the present, but the next 30 years, with promises of dividends to investors and retirees. 

Those promises have been magically monetized into the present day to keep the system spinning, but once the spinning stops, and the dividends stop, the cookie jar will be seen empty. 

The future is empty of your-money-working-for-you. 

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/01/federal-reserve-admits-it-pumped-more-than-6-trillion-to-wall-street-in-recent-six-week-period/ 

That is the task before us, creating an economy that meets the physical needs of young people, who have to work productively, children, who need love, socialization, and preparation to work productively, middle aged people who have to work productively, not retire to luxury, and old people, who should grow vegetable gardens.

This radical systemic transformation has not been worked out yet. This stuff never gets worked out from the top down, because the interests at the top diverge from the pressing needs of the bottom, and the interests at the top are willing to sacrifice at least the bottom 40% of humans to maintain continuity of control, "ownership". (See "deplorables")

 Fortunately (?) there are divergent interest groups at the top of the financial heap, too, and they will happily sacrifice each other, but have to work out a way to do it, without sacrificing their own interests, and "it's all one big exclusive club and you ain't in it", as George Carlin said. 

In the US, we have Democratic corrupt elites, trying to do deals with Republican corrupt elites, and all they can agree on is Pentagon and CIA budgets, and aid to Israel. Print money!

 At least the rest of the world still needs dollars as the global reserve/oil-trading currency. Look how hard it is on countries that get cut off from dollar-banking, like Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and Iraq. Russia has had the noose tightened, but is somehow still breathing fine, and China is chafing at the noose being on her neck. Fortunately for Americans, there is no possible alternative to the $US backed by Saudi oil. 

None, today, January 29, 2020.

 Is the Wuhan coronavirus Goldilocks just-right to disrupt the global financial regime? Just askin'.

I don't know if it's military (Hi, Ft. Detrich, Maryland!), but it's a form of "war by fire", as classified by Sun Tzu, if it is.

Anyway, the virus is spreading globally, but China has a 3 month lead from a calculated origin in October.

China is hit hard and will be hit hardest, no matter what. Spread within China is assured.

This Chinese research into bat immune systems and SARS, and EBOLA host-tolerance is very interesting, and they were recently hiring new research assistants to work long hours...

Recall, RNA mutation regression analysis says this virus started spreading from an original October 2019 case.

Can China be attacked AND blamed? Is this a Chinese "own-goal"?
 In light of growing speculation, most of it within less than official circles, that the official theory for the spread of the Coronavirus epidemic, namely because someone ate bat soup at a Wuhan seafood and animal market  is a fabricated farce, and that the real reason behind the viral spread is because a weaponized version of the coronavirus (one which may have originally been obtained from Canada), was released by Wuhan's Institute of Virology (accidentally or not), a top, level-4 biohazard lab which was studying "the world's most dangerous pathogens", perhaps it would be a good idea for the same Wuhan Institute of Virology to remove the following "help wanted" notice, posted on November 18, 2019, according to which the institute is seeking to hire one or two post-doc fellows, who will use "bats to research the molecular mechanism that allows Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses to lie dormant for a long time without causing diseases."

https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavirus-pandemic 

 

Trade with China is hit at a critical time, as the world considers global supply and manufacturing chains, in the context of a permanent trade war. Chinese international business trips, both outward and inward, are severely curtailed until further notice.

 China has been the global-growth-engine for the past 12 years. That was already fading fast. 

Bye, bye growth model.

 China sort of gets blamed, but it's not China's fault, so Chinese elites are not really threatened, and all other elites can be cool with this.

 Donald Trump has long been the designated blamee in American politics for what is already dripping on the whirring fan blades, but boy is he a moving-target, huh? 

Trump can say his trade war limited American health risks, and can say the global-financial-crisis-permanent is China's fault. The $US will remain the cleanest-dirty-shirt (in 2020).

 Trump's election was already a sign of massive American societal discontent, which is no less. Bernie Sanders represents left-populism, not just an alliance between some of the elites and the f...-you deplorables. If Bernie Sanders is the Democratic nominee, it means neoliberal Democratic elites have thrown in the towel or jumped Schiff, or something.

 For Sanders to get the Democratic nomination, which he was denied last time (it WAS Hillary's turn) it will have to be on the first ballot. Recent adjustments in the DNC take a harder line against left-populism, much harder. The negative ads against Bernie have begun. He's the main threat. 

Tulsi Gabbard remains invisible, not invited to Town Hall by CNN, despite qualifying, based on a (laugh track) CNN poll.

 What would push Sanders forward in the primaries, other than the historical moment? Wuhan coronavirus biting in America, and overwhelming the health system might be good for Sanders, the main proponent of socialized medicine.

Financial crisis would sure be good for Sanders, but delaying that past the Democratic convention is like military spending, something ALL the elites can agree on.

 What would push Tulsi Gabbard (suing Hillary Clinton for $50 million) forward in the primaries is a fresh disgust for global war among American voters. I believe the strongest possible ticked for constructive change on our (once) fair planet would be Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, because the elite war party would have to capitulate for young, healthy, resolutely idealistic and principled Tulsi Gabbard to be the back-up if Bernie gets sick and dies.

Here is why you won't see this analysis on CNN, or anywhere that has big funding. Thanks Professor Hall.

Donie O’Sullivan and the ‘Garbage State’ of Media
The Disinfo Reporter at the CNN Disinfo Network Strikes out at American Herald Tribune

https://ahtribune.com/us/fake-news/3839-donie-osullivan-garbage-state-of-media.html  

​ Let's get back to that distaste for war, with some stories Professor Hall (aka "Tony") sent this morning. Iran's first payment in the retribution for General Soleimani's assassination was the missile attacks on the bases that are most important to American dominance in Iraq, and launched the drones that did it. The injuries were worse than the "headaches" our negotiator-in-chief alluded to. We don't know how worse. It's getting dribbled out slowly, and can be made to look like it happened elsewhere. There was no American missile defense against these attacks, even though the US was warned an hour earlier through the Swiss embassy that they were coming. 

Why no defense? Did some US military faction want more American casualties? 

Patriot missiles suck. We all know that, but they were purposely turned off.​

The Iranian targeting was pinpoint, targeting military assets, not bomb-shelters. Iran tried to avoid US casualties.

​ ​Some have speculated that the US government will instead opt for a safer approach in drip-feeding unrelated fatalities and injuries over an extended period.
​ ​As with the information war and propaganda, the truth is likely somewhere in the middle between Iranian and American narratives. Hinting towards further discoveries, the US Central Command said in a statement on Tuesday that “it is possible additional injuries may be identified in the future.”

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200124-the-truth-about-us-casualties-in-the-iran-attack-is-slowly-coming-out/  

White Pawn Takes Black Knight. Thanks Tony

​ ​Russian intelligence sources have claimed that Michael D’Andrea, head of CIA operations in Iran and who orchestrated the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, was killed in a US spy plane downed yesterday in Ghazni, Afghanistan.
​ ​The plane with US Air Force markings reportedly served as the CIA’s mobile command for D’Andrea, who earnt several nicknames including: Ayatollah Mike, the Dark Prince, and the Undertaker. He is one of the most prominent CIA figures in the region, appointed head of the agency’s Iran Mission Centre in 2017. Under his leadership, the agency was perceived to take a more “aggressive stance toward Iran”.

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/28/middle-east-monitor-cia-chief-behind-soleimani-assassination-killed-in-downed-plane-in-afghanistan/ 

​Video of downed mobile CIA Afghan command and control center:

The downed plane was the mobile CIA command for Michael D’ Andrea, head of operations against Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, America’s most advanced spy platform and mobile command center with all equipment and documents now in enemy hands

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/28/vt-had-it-first-pentagons-top-spy-plane-downed-by-taliban-crypto-gear-docs-captured-warning-unpleasant-photos/  

Charles Hugh Smith says the "Titanic" global financial system has already been breached by the Wuhan coronavirus iceberg, has stabilized, feels ok, has released a few half-full lifeboats, steams on, and is doomed.

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2020/01/coronavirus-and-unsinkable-titanic.html 

Topsoil Investor

Viral Valentine

Viral Culture Media,

It's good to understand what is going on with the novel Wuhan coronavirus, since you may very well contract it.

This virus likely originated somewhere around October 1, 2019, based on regression analysis of mutations from the studied cases, and the known rate of mutation. The cluster described in the Wuhan seafood and live-animal market came fairly late in that process. It could have stated anywhere, including there. 

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market-may-not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally 

The biggest factor facilitating global spread of the virus is asymptomatic infection, or very mild symptoms, which do not curtail the activity or travel of a carrier. Screening by checking for fever is in place, but it is already apparent that this virus has a long incubation period before symptoms, when people can travel, and it really seems that some people without fever or significant illness are spreading the virus. Since there is no known effective treatment, quarantine of cases is the main approach to limit spread. It may be expected that many cases will be missed and spread will go on. I have been keeping up with this and have looked at all I could again today. The incubation period looks like 7 to 14 days, a long one. We just don't know how many people in the world are carrying this virus, or where they are, or who they will pass it to. A case has been confirmed in Germany in a young man who has not been to China. How many cases have not been diagnosed in Germany? We sure don't have access to the test kits in Austin yet. We will not know how many people have the virus today until they get symptoms in 1-2 weeks, and we still won't know then, because many will have mild symptoms. 

https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/24/coronavirus-infections-no-symptoms-lancet-studies/ 

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-news-reports-that-the-china-coronavirus-may-spread-before-symptoms-show/  

 

The Ro ("R naught") of this virus is not really known, but it is seeming to spread faster than SARS, so estimates of 2.5 to 3.5 new cases per introduced case are the most common estimates. Let's say the Ro is 2.5, and half of those cases don't have a fever, so can't be isolated. If there is perfect isolation of people with a fever, some will already have spread it, and the half without fever will be spreading it, so Ro will still be 1.5 or greater. Spread will continue.

Coronavirus family is a rapidly mutating RNA-virus family, so particular features of the virus will change as it spreads from host to host and mutates. Some mutations may increase fatalities; others decrease them. Some mutations may make quarantine easier, and others may make it more difficult. 

As it is today, this virus is global, with a moderately high Ro, and is unusually hard to impose quarantine upon, due to long incubation period, and spread by those with little to no subjective illness. 

Infectious coronavirus particles can persist on a surface for 4 days. Washing hands and surfaces is an important control measure once the virus gains entry to an area.

Take 5000 units per day of vitamin D3, available for cheap where vitamins are sold. Get plenty of sleep, regular activity, and eat fresh fruits and vegetables. Don't smoke stuff.

You are likely to be exposed to this virus before summer, unless something changes fundamentally, which it could.

Public Health Doctor

Year Of The Rat Fink

Judged By Company,

 Belmarsh Prison inmates repeatedly protest solitary confinement torture of Julian Assange, resulting in his transfer to a regular cell-block with other dangerous criminals. 

(Something of a victory for Julian. As an Australian, he'll have no freedom of speech or press in USA, USA, USA.)

​ ​Belmarsh is a notoriously harsh maximum-security prison full of violent offenders and prisoners convicted under anti-terrorism laws, one of many reasons that Assange supporters have so vigorously opposed his confinement there. What does it tell you about the society you are living in that this population has a superior moral compass to the people who are actually running things?  

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/01/25/belmarsh-prison-inmates-prove-more-ethical-than-entire-western-empire/#comment-26619  

Thanks Eleni. How could such a terrible oversight have happened? What an embarrassment!

A French publisher has apologised after a history textbook that appeared in bookshops in recent weeks suggested the 11 September 2001 attacks were probably "orchestrated by the CIA"...
 ​ ​The textbook is described as a complete course on the last century in French, European and world history. It was written by Jean-Pierre Rocher, a teacher of history and geography and a graduate of the Sciences Po university in Paris, and aimed at Sciences Po undergraduates as well as students preparing for France's elite "grandes écoles".
​ ​Although the book came out in November, it was not until the daughter of one of the secondary school teachers bought a copy that one of them spotted the reference to the CIA.
​ ​On page 204 the author explains the context of the creation of the jihadist group, al-Qaeda and the "quadruple terrorist attack of 11/9 2001 on New York and Washington". He then makes the following statement.
​ ​"This global event - no doubt orchestrated by the CIA (secret services) to impose American influence on the Middle East? - hit the symbols of American power on its own territory."

https://www.sott.net/article/427777-France-apology-after-history-textbook-links-CIA-to-9-11  

​Michael sends this story about vast Iraqi street protests against American occupation.

​ Hashimi added that while U.S. forces are not welcome in the country, the American people in Iraq—most of them there on business—were.
 "We don't want Americans to leave, we want the troops to leave," said Hashimi. "We want America to support our country but with contracts, not troops."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/24/iraq-iraqis-hundreds-thousands-flood-streets-baghdad-demand-us-military-leave  

Moon of Alabama politely points out to the Associated Press that Millions of Iraqis marched in the streets against American occupation, not "hundreds".

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/01/associated-press-sees-hundreds-where-pictures-show-millions.html#more  

​Eleni sends this article from Eric Margolis, How The US Runs Iraq:

​ ​What ever happened to Iraq? Is it not an independent country with a democratic government thanks to the 2003 US invasion? So says Washington.
​ ​The murder of senior Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani suddenly shone a strobe light on ‘independent’ Iraq, and what we saw was not pretty.
Welcome to the new Imperialism 101...
​ ​Combined with Saudi Arabia – also controlled by the US – Iraq gives Washington control of the bulk of Mideast oil. The US no longer relies on oil from the Mideast, being self-sufficient – at least for now. But dominating the Mideast gives the US huge influence over China, Japan, India, and Europe, all of whom import oil from there. This is the main pillar of US world power and the supremacy of the dollar.

https://ericmargolis.com/2020/01/how-the-us-runs-iraq/ 

​This is also important, in that same context. Thanks again, Eleni (in Athens).

​ Turkey may have stolen technical data that enabled it to send drill ship Yavuz at a specific location south of Cyprus that energy companies Eni and Total had pre-selected to carry out their own exploratory drilling, Cypriot officials said Wednesday.
 The Cyprus government essentially confirmed a media report suggesting Turkey had somehow obtained studies carried out by Italian energy firm ENI prior to drilling for natural gas in an offshore field, block 8, off Cyprus’ south coast and in the Exclusive Economic Zone of Cyprus.

https://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2020/01/22/cyprus-tyrjey-gas-drilling-block8-yavuz/  

The western financial and military empire will be replaced, by what? Vladimir Putin has a general suggestion. 

(Absolutely CAN'T let Trump do business with this megalomaniac! :-o)

​ ​Culturally, the disconnection from the traditional values that gave western civilization it’s moral fitness to survive and grow has resulted in a post-truth age now spanning over three generations (from the baby boomers to today’s young adults) who have become the most confused class of people in modern history losing all discrimination of “needs” vs “wants”, “right” vs “wrong”, “beauty” vs “ugliness” or even “male” and “female”.
​ ​Without ranting on anymore, it suffices to say that this thing is not sustainable.
​ ​So the question is not “will we get a new system?” but rather “whom will this new system serve?”
​ ​Will this new system serve an oligarchical agenda at the expense of the nations and people of the earth or will it serve the interests of the nations and people of the earth at the expense of the oligarchy?

​ ​Calling for Russia, the USA, UK, China and France to organize a new architecture that goes far beyond merely military affairs, Putin stated:
​ ​“The founding countries of the United Nations should set an example. It is the five nuclear powers that bear a special responsibility for the conservation and sustainable development of humankind. These five nations should first of all start with measures to remove the prerequisites for a global war and develop updated approaches to ensuring stability on the planet that would fully take into account the political, economic and military aspects of modern international relations.”​...

​  Although the world devolved into an Anglo-American alliance with FDR’s death in 1945, the other Bretton Woods Institutions which were meant to provide international productive credit to those large scale infrastructure projects to end colonialism were taken over by FDR’s enemies who purged the IMF and World Bank of all loyalists to FDR’s international New Deal vision throughout the years of the red scare.​..

​ Putin (just like FDR before him) knows that neither Britain nor Britain’s Deep State loyalists in America can trusted. Yet, in spite of their mistrust, they both knew that a durable world order could only be accomplished if these forces were reined in under a higher law imposed by the authority of truly sovereign nations, and this is why FDR’s post-war plans involved a USA-Russia-China-UK partnership to provide the impetus to global development initiatives and achieve the goals of the Atlantic Charter.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/01/23/putin-calls-for-new-system-guided-by-un-charter-but-possible/  

​They Killed King For The Same Reason They Killed Kennedy ("National Security" can't afford peace breaking out.)

​ ​There is no doubt what both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. would have thought about a type of totalitarian-like governmental structure that has led our nation in the direction of state-sponsored assassinations, torture, invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, coups, alliances with dictatorial regimes, sanctions, embargoes, regime-change operations, and massive death, suffering, and destruction, not to mention the loss of liberty and privacy here at home.  

​https://www.fff.org/2020/01/20/they-killed-king-for-the-same-reason-they-killed-kennedy/

Bernie Sanders has 7 point lead in latest Iowa poll of Democratic voters.

"The Horror, The Horror" 

No wonder it's become open season on The Bern. He is presenting a credible threat to the Democratic party power machine, which is banking on a brokered convention, where they will choose a champion, as they did with Hillary Clinton in 2016. All those "superdelegates" know where their bread is buttered, and it ain't by Bernie. 

Sanders could win on the first ballot, and all the bread and butter would immediately vanish.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/bernie-sanders-surges-7-point-lead-iowa-times-poll  

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) on Tuesday criticized former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for saying “no one likes” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), with Gabbard seeking to defend her fellow Democratic presidential hopeful.
“It’s time to grow up. This isn’t high school,” Gabbard said in an interview with WMUR News 9. “We’re talking about real challenges that our country needs to address and the need for real leadership to focus on them​.​

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/479277-gabbard-knocks-clintons-jab-at-sanders-this-isnt-high-school  

​Charles Hugh Smith, on The Future of "Capitalism":

​The psychotic instability will resolve itself when the illusory officially sanctioned "capitalism" implodes.
Whatever definition of capitalism you use, the current system isn't it so let's call it "capitalism" in quotes to indicate it's called "capitalism" but isn't actually classical capitalism.

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan20/future-capitalism1-20.html 

Charles also points out, and oil markets are pricing it in, the potential disruption to global economy from the latest coronavirus at Chinese New Year. It's not highly fatal to healthy people. That's not the threat. 

The potential threat is a high infectivity rate in global crowds and travel. The infectivity rate of SARS was high. 

The Chinese government rates this medium. You can't check their work. It's questioned. 2 weeks will tell.

​ ​Don't be too sure that the coronavirus will blow over and have no effect on global growth.
If there is anything that characterizes this moment in history, it's complacency: everyone's so sure that current trend lines will continue, onward and upward, and risk has been tamed for the foreseeable future.

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan20/too-sure1-20.html 

​What about the Wuhan coronavirus, the uncommonly bad cold? It seems to have jumped species,  ​perhaps from bats, in a market selling live animals of various provenance to cook as delicacies.

The current fatality rate is around 4%, weighted heavily towards older, and sicker hosts. It seems to reach peak infectivity around day #10. It attacks the lungs more deeply, with less upper airway irritation, which might make it fly under the radar until it is bad, a viral pneumonia. Antibiotics don't work. There could be a vaccine by the end of the year, but...

It has spread in Chinese hospitals, and some are now turning people away with those symptoms. It's on the US east and west coasts, and I assume it's in Houston, too.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2759815 

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/please-help-us-supply-shortages-rock-wuhan-outbreak-overwhelms-chinese-healthcare

Ro is the number of additional cases , in a susceptible population, caused by one case of an infectious disease. This current Wuhan coronavirus could be between 1.5(ish) influenza, and 3.5(ish) SARS. Measles and chicken pox are more like 15.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/uk-researcher-predicts-over-250000-people-china-will-have-coronavirus-ten-days  

They've known about this stuff for 20 years, but it's really hard to get out of drinking water, so why measure it?

​ ​The contamination of U.S. drinking water with man-made “forever chemicals” is far worse than previously estimated with some of the highest levels found in Miami, Philadelphia and New Orleans, said a report on Wednesday by an environmental watchdog group.  

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-water-foreverchemicals-idUSKBN1ZL0F8 

​ ​F​rank​ took exception with the article I sent about burning plastics for municipal electricity generation, due to toxic byproducts in the smoke. That's clearly a problem with incinerating municipal waste on the east coast.

Mercury release from coal-fired electrical generation is a known poison. 

Burning plastics at the high heat used to generate electricity is "cleaner" than coal. 

It could be cleaner still, if there were a deposit on plastics at the point of creation, to pay for collecting and sorting them. Once collected and sorted, which is too expensive to do, they can be dealt with by burning or recycling. Doubling the cost of raw plastics up front would also reduce their use everywhere we look.

Meanwhile:

Other schemes for dealing with the plastics problem abound. Cement kilns—which power cement manufacture and burn at more than 1,400 °C—might offer the quickest fix, SWANA’s O’Brien says. “Cement kilns are always needing energy resources,” he says. “If I had to get rid of a million tons of nonmarketable recyclables this next year, they would be the first on my list.”  

https://cen.acs.org/environment/sustainability/Should-plastics-source-energy/96/i38  

​Reusing Waste​

Further Examination

Looking Back,​

Ron Paul​ stops short of saying that Hoover's FBI assassinated Martin Luther King​:​ ​

​ ​The FBI has a long history of targeting Americans whose political beliefs and activities threaten the FBI’s power or the power of influential politicians. The then-named Bureau of Investigation participated in the crackdown on people suspected of being communists in the post-World War I “Red Scare.” The anti-communist crackdown was headed by a young agent named J. Edgar Hoover who went on to become FBI director, a position he held until his death. Hoover kept and expanded his power by using the FBI to collect blackmail material on people including politicians.
​ ​In the 1930s and 1940s, the FBI spied on supporters of the America First movement, including several Congress members. Two of the most famous examples of FBI targeting individuals based on their political activities are the harassment of Martin Luther King Jr. and the COINTELPRO program. COINTELPRO was an organized effort to spy on and actively disrupt “subversive” organizations, including antiwar groups
​ ​COINTELPRO officially ended in the 1970s. However, the FBI still targets individuals and organizations it considers “subversive,” including antiwar groups and citizen militias.  

http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/january/20/how-expansive-is-fbi-spying/ 

 The more aggressive the U.S. becomes, the more it reveals its tactical, operational and strategic limits, which in turn only serves to accelerate its loss of hegemony.
​ ​If the U.S. could deliver a nuclear first strike without having to worry about a retaliatory second strike thanks to its ABM systems, then its quest for perpetual unipolarity could possibly be realistic. But Washington’s peer competitors have shown that they have the means to defend themselves against a nuclear first strike by being able to deliver an unstoppable second strike, thereby communicating that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) is here to stay. With that, Washington’s efforts to maintain its status as uncontested global hegemon are futile.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/01/20/the-end-of-us-military-dominance-unintended-consequences-forge-multipolar-world-order/ 

​Tom Luongo explains how "Putin Has Purged The West From The Kremlin"​, while adjusting the governance system better for Russia.

​ ​The end result of this move to devolve the cabinet appointments to the whole of the Duma is to ensure that a strong President which Putin believes is best for Russia is tempered by a cabinet drawn from the whole of the electorate, including the Prime Minister.
​ ​That neither opens the door to dysfunctional European parliamentary systems nor closes it from a strong President leading Russia during crisis periods.
​ ​Once the amendments to the constitution are finalized Putin will put the whole package to a public vote.

https://tomluongo.me/2020/01/17/putin-purged-west-kremlin/ 

 By having Iranian General Qassem Soleimani assassinated in Iraq, President Trump nearly provoked the Third World War. At least that is the version of the US opposition and the international press. For Thierry Meyssan, what happens behind the scenes is very different from the show on stage. According to him, there is a move towards a coordinated military withdrawal of the United States and Iran from the Middle East.​ Alternative insight from France. Thanks Eleni

https://www.voltairenet.org/article208858.html 

​Eleni also sends this article about the real Mideast Nuclear Threat:

​ The Israëli arsenal, shielded by a dense cloak of secrecy and omertà, is estimated at between 80 and 400 nuclear warheads, plus sufficient plutonium to build hundreds of others. Israël certainly also produces tritium, a radioactive gas with which it is building new generation nuclear weapons. Among these are mini-nukes and neutron bombs which, since they cause minimal radioactive contamination, would be more adapted to targets close to Israël. The Israëli nuclear warheads are ready for launching on ballistic missiles which, with the Jericho 3, have a range of 8 to 9,000 kilometres. Germany supplied Israël (in the form of a gift or for knock-down prices) with four Dolphin submarines modified for launching Popeye Turbo nuclear missiles, with a range of approximately 1,500 kilometres. Silent, and with the capacity to remain under water for a week, the Dolphins are cruising in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, ready on twenty-four hour alert for a nuclear attack.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article208876.html 

Who Targeted Ukraine Airlines Flight 752? Iran Shot It Down but There May be More to the Story, Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter-terrorism expert has lots of thought provoking details and context.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/who-targeted-ukraine-airlines-flight-752-iran/5700765 

French Intellectual Sentenced to 2 Months in Prison For Calling Mass Immigration an “Invasion”
Forced to pay 1800 euros to anti-racism organizations for his crime of opinion.

https://summit.news/2020/01/21/french-intellectual-sentenced-to-2-months-in-prison-for-calling-mass-immigration-an-invasion/ 

​Good thing these guys waited until after the trial of that dastardly French intellectual!

​Syrian fighters abandon Libyan War, flee towards Italy: report

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/syrian-fighters-abandon-libyan-war-flee-towards-italy-report/ 

Thanks Ray:  (Reuters Health) - U.S. insurers and providers spent more than $800 billion in 2017 on administration, or nearly $2,500 per person - more than four times the per-capita administrative costs in Canada’s single-payer system, a new study finds.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-costs-administration/more-than-a-third-of-us-healthcare-costs-go-to-bureaucracy-idUSKBN1Z5261 

Thanks Charles:

 “The effort of collecting, transporting and cleaning plastics for possible recycling has largely failed, created much more pollution and contributed massively to climate change. The idea of burning plastics and using the energy to heat our homes was proposed by the plastics company Dow more than 30 years ago: it suggested treating all plastics as “borrowed oil”. At that time, ordinary domestic waste had a calorific value of low-grade coal, so the suggestion was that this waste should be burned in efficient plants with heat recovery and treatment of the gases produced, perhaps even trapping the carbon dioxide produced, rather than trying to recycle the complex (and dirty) mix of plastics.  Today, with higher use of more complex plastics, this makes even more sense. Mixed plastics cannot really be recycled: they are long-chain molecules, like spaghetti, so if you reheat and reprocess them, you inevitably end up with something of lower performance; it’s called down-cycling.”
​ ​While this could be polluting if not done right, people will certainly turn to burning plastic and anything else they can get their hands on at some point of energy decline. Better to do it correctly now in an incinerator than in backyards in the future as well as to protect our land and waterways from plastic pollution right now.

http://energyskeptic.com/2019/vaclav-smil-on-natural-gas-ethane-and-plastics/ 

​The internet is responsible for about 10% of global CO2 production, headed for 20% in this decade. Most of that is due to pop-up ads and streaming video. Unfortunately, nothing at all can ever be done... well, uh...​ Thanks Charles.

https://newrepublic.com/article/155993/can-internet-survive-climate-change  

Revisionista