Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

[Elvis]

the case in Washington State

[semper occultus]

i'm staying cool until & unless Betelgeuse goes super-nova. THAT'S the sign folks...that's when we head to the mountain tops to wait it all out

[8bitagent]

Wombat Rex, holy shit that was some God-tier level posts and dissemination on the prior page. Those need to be posted in a blog or somewhere.

I don't come on here much, but this COVID-19 thing feels like more of a tipping point that SARS, MERS, H1N1 and even Ebola. There is a "Hey let's put this into perspective" idea that's shored up in the media lately. The narrative of "Well, the flu infects and kills more people every year" argument and the "SARS and MERS had a much higher fatality right" are both false in comparing to Covid-19/Corona. If even these untrustworthy government numbers are near correct, the fatality right is plague level when comparing the number of death ratio to infected in just Italy and Iran alone. The argument that "well, the symptoms are mild and typical of the flu or cold in a lot of Coronoa-virus patients compared to Ebola/SARS/Mers" is another misnomer. SARS, MERS, Ebola etc were able to be contained because the symptoms were so extreme. A mass pandemic happening because the symptoms are similar to the common cold(yet turns into fatal respiratory symptons) is a lot scarier because it can easily pass detection. World leaders, doctors, journalists, etc are now being reported as being infected.

Can someone point out the last time entire large countries were placed under total lockdown and the world began to look like something out of a dystopic sci fi movie? Just the optics of hazmat soldiers patrolling empty sprawling metropolis cities is quite strange.

[identity]

New from Spiro Skouras:

In this interview, Francis Boyle, who is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois, College of Law, uncovers four separate studies which he claims confirm as ‘smoking gun’ evidence the Wuhan coronavirus, now known as COVID-19, was in fact weaponized. Professor Boyle is the man who drafted the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which was unanimously approved by Congress and signed into law by President George Bush.

Professor Boyle believes he has been blackballed by the mainstream media due to blowing the whistle on the Anthrax attacks on the U.S. in the wake of 9/11, stating he believes the Anthrax originated from American BSL-4 (Biosaftey Level 4) labs, which are the highest level of labs that conducts research and development on the most deadly substances known to man.

Professor Boyle does not hold back, as he makes his position clear on the origins of the coronavirus and what he believes to be an ongoing coverup of a deadly bioweapon, which has escaped the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan China. (Another interview covers the suspicious timing of the coronavirus outbreak following the high-level pandemic exercise simulating a global coronavirus outbreak only about 6 weeks before the actual coronavirus outbreak occurred. Event 201 was held by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.)



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_TPjbu4FAE

[identity]

Boyle earlier was a guest of AJ. Fortunately, there is a transcript so we don't have to actually listen to AJ.

Excerpts:

Dr. Boyle: That is correct. Nat Med, that’s it. Now, if you look through this carefully, first notice who was involved in this DNA genetic engineering of SARS, which is already a biological warfare agent to give it gain of function activities. And it has all these people there from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It has someone from the Food and Drug Administration, so you can’t trust the Food and Drug Administration. And then at the very bottom of the list, who is involved? Zhengli-Li Shi, Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China. So it’s very clear to me that this scientist from the Wuhan Institute of Virology got this gain of function technology for SARS from this University of North Carolina lab. And he didn’t steal it – or he or she didn’t steal it. What happened was, if you read carefully to the end of the article acknowledgements, they acknowledged a National Natural Science Foundation of China award. In other words, the Chinese government paid them to have one of their top biological warfare experts involved in this type of–

Dr. Boyle: I noticed they acknowledged National Natural Science Foundation of China Award. In other words, these best scientists at the University of North Carolina took dirty money from China to allow that one of their top biowarfare experts from this Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan, which has the BSL-4 facility, they knew exactly what they were doing, and they permitted this Chinese scientist to work with them to give gain of function biowarfare DNA genetic capability to SARS, which is dangerous enough to begin with. And let me just go through some of the language here. It is truly a smoking gun; clearly that laboratory must be shut down of immediately and all those scientists investigated by the United States government for this and their responsibility here and for violating my Biological Weapons and Terrorism Act of 1989. But let me continue. This is what they said. “We built a chimeric virus that encodes a novel zoonotic spike protein in the context of viable SARS. This approach characterized the threat posed by SARS coronavirus spike–

Dr. Boyle: Well, let me just discuss one more scientific article with you. Archives of Virology 2010, 155. And here, Wuhan was working with an institute in Australia to DNA genetically engineer a super bioweapon involving SARS and HIV. That’s right in here; you can read it, okay. And apparently it was successful. So as far as I can tell, Alex, what happened was, the Wuhan is to the virology took the– and this was the Australian government knew all about this. And it says this work was jointly funded by the State Key Program for Basic Research Grants from the Chinese Ministry of Science, Technology and the Knowledge. And the other writer here, Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Australia. So as far as I can figure out here, what happened here, Alex, is that the Wuhan scientists took the North Carolina SARS with gain of function, which is already a biological warfare weapon, and they took the technology here behind this well-developed SARS HIV weapon and they all brought it back to the Wuhan a BSL-4 and tried to DNA genetically engineer it into a chimera, into a biological warfare weapon involving the coronavirus, the HIV virus and gain of function.


Dr. Boyle: Right. This is the latest study. It just came out this week. Possible origins of 2019 nCoV coronavirus. What is significant here- you can get it at ResearchGate. What is significant here is that it is by two professors at the South China University of Technology – they’re all professors. And their conclusion of this study is that the Wuhan coronavirus leaked out of that BSL-4 facility. Let me repeat – even Chinese scientists are saying now, independently of me, it leaked out. And I believe it was probably an accident that there was a one of these death scientists there at the Wuhan BSL-4 facility trying to DNA genetically engineer the North Carolina technology, the Australian technology, HIV, SARS, gain of function together into the super biological warfare weapon and somehow got infected. There’s been speculation by these authors that animal residue, or they breathed it in or something like that. That person then got infected, but since it’s asymptomatic, they weren’t aware of it. And now, even though they’re saying it’s 14 days, a British healthcare expert estimate it could be 24 days. Whoever this expert was, this death scientist went out around and did his normal life activities for the next 14 to 24 days and it was spread all around Wuhan.

https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-02-20-full-transcript-smoking-gun-interview-prof-frances-boyle-coronavirus-bioweapons.html

[Wombaticus Rex]

"We shouldn't have illusions. We can't stop this but we can try to reduce the speed of expansion and reduce mortality." - Shigeru Omi

Since Whitney Webb has come up already in this thread, I found her latest to be pretty illuminating -- not that it was good, but it was an indication of how journalists like this work: they get handed the goods, a portfolio of connected dots, and they write about them and they publish them. I really think that's how her superb Epstein series happened, because she's badly out of her depth here:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/wall-stre ... ds/265264/

Journalists provide valuable insulation for state/private actors who want to leak their work, and without that guidance, well, you get articles like this. Quoting pop sites like Quartz, "forecaster" Martin Armstrong ... but I don't want to dunk on Webb, it's just a useful example of how "journalism" actually happens, A Few Good Men bullshit aside. It's mostly someone in an intelligence or law enforcement agency getting pissed off, deciding to do something about it, and finding a vessel. (Same is true for most of the "hackers" that get celebrated as heroes.)

Now, granted the bonds are a scam, but they're a half-billion dollar scam. The contracts that are already being contested as a result of nCoV fallout are in the neighborhood of $15b, and even a basic napkin math projection puts the current cost of all this chaos at over $100b. And that's if the spread of this stops, today, and the consequences wash out as the casualties end and the infected recover.

That's not going to happen.

What's really been delaying the "pandemic" announcements -- as well as a lot of other curious wrinkles -- is force majueure defaults. You'd think they happen a lot more often than they actually do, because sovereigns generally take any lawfare measures possible to avoid honoring this. Consider terror attacks, spectacular events with massive consequences. But they're not acts of war, which is why a bunch of corporations were left holding their dicks after, say, 9/11 or the Mumbai attacks. Get fucked! Terrorism, after all, is not both "inevitable and unforeseeable," the current standard in fancy business court.

Neither are pandemics. It will be trivially easy to prove in court that everyone saw this coming, using data points that have come here already.

FT recently ran a great piece examining this, including a dynamite paragraph:

Remember that in 1989, after tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square on June 4, some companies were unable to claim force majeure. That’s because Chinese government bodies refused to certify that something abnormal had happened in Beijing. This time, several questions need to be answered before assessing the feasibility of force majeure claims.

I had to take a break to stop laughing and crack a beer, so I'll afford you the same. Further:

First, many of the restrictive measures, such as quarantine or denying access, were actually imposed by local police, city governments and provincial governments. Although many decisions were reported to and cleared by the Chinese central government, the opacity of the decision-making process may well impede Chinese companies from using force majeure claims to cancel contracts with foreign entities. Beijing would do well to streamline and increase the transparency of its decision-making process so that local companies can prove the existence of a force majeure situation.

Second, some Chinese local and central government officials have given very reassuring statements on the limited impact of the outbreak. These are intended to bolster domestic confidence in face of this terrible epidemic. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs even criticised the US and some other western governments for the wave of travel restrictions. These statements could be used to argue that the impact of the outbreak has been somewhat limited, and are therefore not a justification for cancelling contracts. The WHO’s decision not to impose travel restrictions is also problematic.

So there's a certain ass-covering logic to all the institutional foot-dragging, and every bit of it comes with dollar-valuated bottom line. Yet the sheer scale of this is truly new, and this will necessitate something very different. How things wash out here has been my main focus lately, even though most of my friends and family still want to argue about "why is this worse than the flu?" I don't want to argue about much of anything.

First: How do you prevent people from going broke, losing their apartments and homes, and starving to death? I heard rumblings about Italy doing direct deposit subsidies to affected people inside the hot zones, but I haven't seen confirmation. We did, however, get confirmation this week that Hong Kong is disbursing HK 71b to 7m people in order to keep them buying food and paying bills. We also know that China is offering long-term credit holidays, through June I believe but nothing is immediately at hand.

It would be poignant if we got UBI because nobody can leave their fucking homes, but it's also possible at this point.

Remember the grim failures of the Katrina aftermath -- FEMA ain't particularly good at helping Americans who get their lives destroyed once it scales past what they're ready for. This could create another, huger, diaspora of desperate poor people being shuffled from city to city (one bus ticket at a time) and losing all their possessions and connections in the process.

The horizon for businesses is a just as bad. Big corporations will go into Chapter 11, but small business will be fucked by this and so will non-essential employees.

It's also worth considering the specific plight of the airline industry, many of whom are still recovering from 9/11. This is going to be much bigger than 9/11, in the absence of reliable screening procedures for nCoV (or a working vaccine). My bet would be that municipal governments will be going into debt in order to keep airports open, domestically and globally. (And those bonds will come with no small amount of uncertainty -- ie, will this happen all over again next year?)

This leads into the question of coordinating border closures and travel restrictions. These measures will always be effective to some extent, but when they're piecemeal, the impact will be hugely reduced. If 10 countries enact travel bans against Country X in light of their outbreak, that won't matter much 30 days from now if 183 other countries don't. I'm betting that existing diplomatic and economic ties will be the best barometer of who is in a position to coordinate that.

That also means that existing conflicts and rivalries will be the best barometer for the schisms. Which leads into another really interesting question: What happens when nCoV hits a conflict zone? Will Lung AIDS finally bring us peace in Syria? Unfortunately the historical precedents here aren't great, since WWI raged straight through the "Spanish" Flu outbreak -- both waves, too! What does get disrupted is supply chains and financing, and in Syria, that will probably turn the tides in favor of Assad. Finally.

None of this has been particularly cheerful, so let's turn our focus to more promising possibilities. First of all, epidemiologists have been ready for this. The core of competence at CDC doesn't depend on Donald Trump, they're disbursed throughout academic and private research institutions, they're constantly in touch, and they're coordinating with teams of modelers and researchers and investigators. The US definitely still has problems on the detection/surveillance level, but even my cynical ass is confident those will get fixed in the face of citizens, dying.

Also, what epidemiologists have already accomplished so far is imposing and impressive. Even if you think Salk gave us all cancer and WHO are Nazis, you've got to give the field credit for what they've been able to nail down and map out so far in 2020. The biggest problems they're facing are institutional and bureaucratic disconnects, which leads to huge testing gaps. Those will become news stories, those news stories will enrage both informed observers and the general public, and that should lead to necessary changes.

Another cheerful precedent: when SARS was tearing ass through Hong Kong, citizens set up a parallel tracking / information system, 'so sick dot org.' It wound up being a compliment to official channels and efforts, too. Reading through the transcript of the Event 201 gaming, I was concerned about how often "containing misinformation" and working with social media platforms to remove accounts came up. There will be some headwinds against this. Censorship will always be easier than leadership. But I don't think it can ultimately be contained.

CDC prep calls have been big on "telemedicine," which is basically video conferencing with a doctor (and still paying just as much for the privilege, I'm sure). That's a sad sack half-ass option, but it's going to be the only option on the table for millions of people if nCoV takes off in earnest in America, too. This is an interesting opportunity for machine learning to get a massive, massive, massive injection of training data. There will be a lot of implementation problems this time around, as ever, but one more of these global pandemic events and systems like IBM's Watson might really be able to replace med students at scale.

This may also normalize remote working, which would be great since most English speakers have bullshit jobs anyway. Jokes aside, this will devastate the retail and service sectors, which are ... let me check my notes ... oh shit, nevermind, that's bad. That is horrible. Retail provides 29 million jobs and service sector provides 23 million. The Road to Serfdom, indeed.

Then again, under Bernie or Warren, we can hire 50 million Americans to just work for the government assessing diversity quotas, right? Right? We're fucked. (There's also the question of whether US internet infrastructure can actually sustain everyone working from home.)

Finally -- I should go to sleep -- there's the question of where the US will really get hit by nCoV. I've seen a lot of persuasive cases from mammals far smarter than myself that there important factors affecting both virulence and fatality, and the big two are population density and air pollution. The US has made big inroads on reducing smoking (and air pollution, vs. our all-time highs) but there are still areas that are obscenely bad: southern California, the East Coast along the Boston - to - Washington "Acela Corridor," the remnants of the industrial Midwest, spanning approximately from Chicago to Buffalo, NY, and the dirty south, especially the oil processing sectors in Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Texas.

Where industrial and financial infrastructure overlap, you inevitably have millions of jobs, which leads to millions of people packed like sardines into poorly maintained cities. Outside of those bubbles, though, I wish everyone luck. We're gonna need it.

In closing, a couple good resources:

Long treatise on pandemic communication as a phased system -- I found this site extremely helpful in terms of understanding the gap between facts and messaging over the past month:
http://www.psandman.com/col/panflu4-1.htm

CDC framework from 2017 - metastudy of published papers on pandemic responses and mitigation:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/rr/rr6601a1.htm

And the new Australian "COVID-19 Plan" - I don't have high hopes for them but it's an important blueprint:
https://www.health.gov.au/resources/pub ... s-covid-19

[Cordelia]

A Solano County resident appears to be the nation’s first case of coronavirus infection from an unknown source, fueling concern that the virus could spread undetected in the general population.

Unlike other cases, the person did not recently return from a foreign country or have contact with a person who was known to be sick or infected, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

https://www.thereporter.com/2020/02/26/ ... -tells-us/

[Iamwhomiam]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Wombat. It's frightening, envisioning what's to come, if any but the very best outcome possible is realized. 3-4% fatality rate in our population of 7.8 billion souls equates to the deaths of 234 to 312 millions. Certainly, those counts would be much higher in the areas of concentrated population and/or have high levels of air pollution, as you mentioned.

Change is coming. (If this is not soon contained and controlled)

Would you get vaccinated, should they claim to have created one? Free. Just line up over there.

edited to add: Corrected typo 1.8 billion to 7.8

[stillrobertpaulsen]

.

Since the S protein of 2019-nCoV shares closest ancestry with SARS GZ02, the sequence coding for spike proteins of these two viruses were compared using MultiAlin software. We found four new insertions in the protein of 2019-nCoV- “GTNGTKR” (IS1), “HKNNKS” (IS2), “GDSSSG” (IS3) and “QTNSPRRA” (IS4) (Figure 2). To our surprise, these sequence insertions were not only absent in S protein of SARS but were also not observed in any other member of the Coronaviridae family (Supplementary figure). This is startling as it is quite unlikely for a virus to have acquired such unique insertions naturally in a short duration of time.

The insertions were observed to be present in all the genomic sequences of 2019-nCoV virus available from the recent clinical isolates. To know the source of these insertions in 2019-nCoV a local alignment was done with BLASTp using these insertions as query with all virus genome. Unexpectedly, all the insertions got aligned with Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1). Further analysis revealed that aligned sequences of HIV-1 with 2019-nCoV were derived from surface glycoprotein gp120 (amino acid sequence positions: 404-409, 462-467, 136-150) and from Gag protein (366-384 amino acid) (Table 1). Gag protein of HIV is involved in host membrane binding, packaging of the virus and for the formation of virus-like particles. Gp120 plays crucial role in recognizing the host cell by binding to the primary receptor CD4.This binding induces structural rearrangements in GP120, creating a high affinity binding site for a chemokine co-receptor like CXCR4 and/or CCR5.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 0.927871v1

This is scary to read, and I'm not quite sure what the full implications are. We know there are drugs to treat HIV that can reduce the level to an amount undetectable in the bloodstream, but that the virus is still there. I'm wondering if that "insertion alignment" of COVID-19 with HIV could explain a story like this:

14% of recovered coronavirus patients in China's Guangdong tested positive again

Published Feb 26, 2020, 10:06 am SGT

By Li Liuqian, Huang Shulun and Han Wei
(CAIXIN GLOBAL) - About 14 per cent of patients who recovered from the novel coronavirus and were discharged from hospitals in southern China's Guangdong province were tested positive again in later check-ups, according to the local health authority.
A positive test suggests the recovered patients may still carry the virus, adding complexity to efforts to control the outbreak.
There is no clear conclusion on why it happens and whether such patients could still be infectious, said Song Tie, deputy director of the Guangdong Centre of Disease Control And Prevention (Guangdong CDC), at a Tuesday (Feb 25) briefing.

According to the preliminary assessment, experts believed the patients are still recovering from lung infections and have yet to be fully healthy, according to Song.
According to the latest treatment guidelines for the Covid-19 issued by the National Health Commission, patients can be considered recovered and released from hospital when their throat or nose swabs show up negative in two consecutive tests, with a CT scan indicating no lung lesions, and when they have no obvious symptoms such as fever.
The guidelines suggest recovered patients should monitor their health and limit outdoor activities for two weeks after leaving the hospital, and check in for retesting in following weeks.


Some patients' test results returned to positive in the follow-up checks, said Li Yueping, director of the intensive care unit at Guangzhou No.8 People's Hospital at the briefing.

The No.8 People's Hospital has found 13 discharged patients that tested positive again, although none showed renewed symptoms, according to Li. Nucleic acid tests for 104 close contacts of the patients all found negative results, said Li.
Cai Weiping, director of the Infectious Diseases Division of the No.8 People's Hospital, told Caixin that the positive results in the recovered patients were all found from anal swabs, a method rarely used in other parts of the country. Their results were in the "weak positive" range, said Cai.

The national treatment guideline only requires tests from throat or nose swabs for suspected patients as the virus is believed to spread mainly via respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes.

But research by Guangzhou Medical University found the virus in fecal samples, suggesting a new path of transmission. Some hospitals in Guangdong have since adopted the anal swab in virus tests.
Cai said it is still unclear whether the virus detected in the recovered patients is still active. There is also the possibility of a discrepancy in samples, he said.
Song at Guangdong CDC said the province is preparing to put those recovered patients who re-tested positive under concentrated observation. Health authorities will also step up monitoring of discharged patients and their condition as they recover, said Song.
By the end of Monday, Guangdong reported 1,347 infections and 805 recoveries. The death toll reached seven, official data showed.
Similar cases of recovered patients testing positive have been reported elsewhere in China.
Last week, a patient initially discharged after recovering in southwestern Sichuan province's Chengdu city was readmitted after testing positive again in later check-ups.
Health authorities in the southern island province of Hainan also confirmed that some recovered patients had tested positive again. The authorities required discharged patients to stay home under quarantine for 14 days, and allowed them to be released after both throat and anal swab tests showed negative.

And this:

Japan confirms first case of person reinfected with coronavirus

The reinfection has health officials worried the illness could stay dormant after signs of recovery.

By Joseph Guzman

Japan is reporting its first case of a person becoming reinfected with the coronavirus after showing signs they had fully recovered, according to Reuters.
Osaka’s prefectural government confirmed Wednesday a woman working as a tour bus guide tested positive for coronavirus for the second time after developing a sore throat and chest pain. The woman, who is said to be in her 40s, first tested positive in late January and was discharged from the hospital on Feb. 1 after showing signs of recovery.
Reuters reports Health Minister Katsunobu Kato said the government would need to monitor the condition of others who were infected and later discharged as health experts investigate testing positive for COVID-19 after an initial recovery.

As much remains unknown about the virus, cases of reinfection have health experts worried that the illness could remain dormant after an apparent recovery.
“Once you have the infection, it could remain dormant with minimal symptoms,” Philip Tierno Jr., professor of microbiology and pathology at New York University, told Reuters.
“And then you can get an exacerbation if it finds its way into the lungs,” he said.

There have been a number of cases of reinfection in China, particularly in Wuhan province where the coronavirus outbreak originated in late December.
There are more than 200 confirmed cases of the flu-like illness in Japan, excluding the 639 cases from the Diamond Princess cruise ship under quarantine in Yokohama.
The country’s schools are being asked to close from March 2 until their upcoming spring break in an effort to contain the virus, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday.
The outbreak has spread rapidly, infecting about 80,000 people worldwide and leaving nearly 2,800 dead, the majority of which have been in mainland China.

Published on Feb 27, 2020

[Grizzly]

hXXps://richardhennerley.com/2020/02/27/invest-in-coronavirus-bonds-make-money/

From MOA

Could the World Health Organisation's reluctance to declare Covid 19 a pandemic, even though it fulfills its own definition as such, have anything to do with the World Bank holding $425 million of 'Pandemic Bonds' (I kid you not, this is how twisted our elites are..)that are due to mature in July of this year?...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-25/coronavirus-give-pandemic-bonds-a-chance


https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/pandemic-bond-debate-inside-look-world-bank-coronavirus-relief-investment-2020-2-1028906657
coronavirus pandemic
A Scheme Like No Other
Is Wall Street Behind the Delay in Declaring the Coronavirus Outbreak a “Pandemic”?
https://www.mintpressnews.com/wall-street-behind-delay-declaring-coronavirus-outbreak-pandemic-bonds/265264/


So, I take it, they went ahead with 'terror stock trading' , like they named it during Bush the lessor years, which got folks upset, so they dropped the idea, to only go ahead with it. Nice world we got, here...

Tangentially related..


Interview with Marc Chesney, Professor for Quantitative Finance at the University of Zurich, on the topic of 9/11 insider trading.

[Elvis]

Great thread. The Prof. Boyle video is somewhat eye-opening.

[Wombaticus Rex]

So, I take it, they went ahead with 'terror stock trading' , like they named it during Bush the lessor years, which got folks upset, so they dropped the idea, to only go ahead with it. Nice world we got, here...

Our world is far worse than all that, but: no. 9/11 insider stock trading has nothing to do with John Poindexter's proposed prediction markets to predict terrorist attacks, and neither have anything to do with the World Bank's pandemic bond scheme.

9/11 insider stock trading was huge moves in "put options" focused on specific stocks, mostly airlines, that got hit hard in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, which is what indicated the insider knowledge; the investigation was of course called off so we'll never know.

Poindexter's terrorism futures idea was a contained market where you could place bets about the probability of upcoming attacks and be rewarded for it. Neither stocks nor bonds were involved at all, this would have been a DARPA run scheme that was basically a mix between open source intelligence (getting informed analysts to make wagers and looking at the aggregate results) and a big-ass honeypot ("gosh, Mohammed, you just keep getting it right! that's why we just renditioned you out of your home in Zurich and won't tell you where you are now") and, publicity aside, it was one of Poindexter's least stupid ideas.

The pandemic bonds were a fundraising mechanism the incentivized people to put up money for a future payoff on the bet that nothing serious would happen between the initial investment and the posted maturity (finish) date.

[kelley]

i'd have never thought twenty years ago the 'war on terror' would've had such a short shelf life

this mounting hysteria is an authoritarian wet dream

with ambiguities endlessly malleable

so synergy

such tidy


ps-- this thread is on fire

almost like the old days

[Grizzly]

PNAC MASTER PLAN NEVER CEASED.

[kelley]

a rebranding

if you will