Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

[Elvis]

was anyone reading here ill during the period of late December or early January through the month of February and into the first week of March

and if so what were the symptoms experienced

Yes come to think of it, sometime around Dec? I was very sick for ten days or so, mostly 'grippe'/ague/fever/chills/lethargy so not sure what is was. Got little or nothing done the whole time.

[Joe Hillshoist]

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phone tracking using location data




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq2zuE3ISYU


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This should actually terrify anyone who understands what they’re actually seeing here.

Mate it's two thousand and fucken twenty. If this didn't scare you two decades ago you weren't paying attention.

[Wombaticus Rex]

It will be nice once my life is back to normal, I'm going spend a few evenings sipping coffee in the kitchen and just catching up. Some jumbled notes in the meantime:

Per our convo about this peaking during the summer, Ralph "Blackface" Northam has taken the unusual step of communicating honestly and directly with his citizens instead of doing an endless rollout of false hope. Perhaps that is because he knows his demographic is, by nature, considerably better informed than the usual low-information voters? Note that Maryland did the same...

Virginia governor issues stay-at-home order

Virginia residents will live under a stay-at-home order until mid-June as the region around Washington DC moved towards a lockdown on Monday.

Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of Virginia, ordered the state's residents to stay at home "except in extremely limited circumstances" until June 10. Other states have generally issued orders that are scheduled to end in April.

The order on Monday followed a similar announcement by Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland. Both states border Washington DC and are home to many US federal workers who live in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs that surround the capital.

Next up, an issue that's been occupying my cranium when I need to be sleeping is price wars & economic competition. The need for emergency staff will be met according to ability to pay, so red zones full of Wall Street bankers and SV programmers will fare considerably better than, say, New Orleans could ever hope to. We haven't seen a lot of this get reported on in public yet -- but we will see this discussed much more overtly next week, most likely thanks to paid activist venues like Nation Institute or ProPublica.

Race for ventilators pushing up prices, says New York governor

US states, the federal government and private hospitals are all competing against one another to buy scarce medical supplies from China and driving up prices, according to Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York.

"We're creating a situation where you literally have hundreds of entities looking to buy the same exact materials, basically from the same place, which is China, ironically enough," Mr Cuomo said on Monday. "And we're fighting among ourselves."

Early attempts to quantify public sentiment indicate strong panic fundamentals, so don't expect that VIX to calm down anytime soon. People are indeed clamoring for more action, and that sentiment will turn to anger and despair as they come to appreciate how little their governments can really do to protect them. As I've said for far too long in this thread, the social contract is on fire and the long-term consequences here are ... well, fascinating. I don't have high hopes for the human species standing up and shedding their chains, but things will be turbulent, everywhere, for the rest of the decade.

Exclusive: People across globe want further government action

People across the world want further intervention from their governments to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a survey of 32,631 in 45 countries.

Some 43 per cent thought their government was doing too little in response to the crisis.

By contrast only 12 per cent thought there had been too much state intervention in their country, according to the survey by Dalia Research.

Countries where citizens thought the state was not sufficiently interventionist included Thailand (79 per cent), Chile (76 per cent), Spain (66 per cent), France (64 per cent) and Japan (64 per cent).

Only a small minority of people in any country thought their country was doing too much, although a handful of countries were above average in that respect. Countries where a relatively high proportion of people thought governments were doing too much included Saudi Arabia (34 per cent), Malaysia (26 per cent), Egypt (25 per cent) and the US (19 per cent).

As a cynical side note, this is why both progressives and libertarians are so stymied in democracies, whether direct, representative or kayfabe: nobody wants what you're selling. People, by and large, don't want to think about governance, they just want to be reassured they're safe. They're about to be taught, firsthand, that they're not. A golden moment for political opportunists of all stripes.

Speaking of the education to come: in my immediate, IRL social circle, people are still very much reeling from Trump's Press Conference of Death, which finally put some numbers to the deluge.

Donald Trump told Americans to be prepared for a "very painful, very very painful two weeks" as doctors on the White House's coronavirus task force unveiled models that showed fatalities in the US could reach 240,000 even in the best-case scenario.

Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, medical experts who have led the task force, said that even with "full mitigation", the US was likely to see 100,000 to 240,000 deaths, with fatalities reaching an apex in about two weeks and then extending well into June.

Both Dr Fauci and Dr Birx said they hoped that the total would be lower, noting that the current projections are based on data gathered from the hardest-hit states like New York and New Jersey as well as the course the disease ran in Italy.

Perhaps most important, Fauci conceded during the course of that press conference that taking sweeping steps earlier could have reduced those projected numbers. His only other choice was to tell an obvious lie, but there's been so much of that lately I cannot help but feel the tiny man deserves some big credit for that one.

The other two big overall trends: 1) Everyone's "country XYZ did it right" and "why isn't country XYZ being affected?" narratives fell apart this week and will continue to crumble for the rest of the month. Like I've already said far too often here, "news" is for discrete events, not ongoing complex phenomena. So the notion that a global coronavirus pandemic is unfolding at different paces in different places, on timelines that are weeks and often even months apart, well, that just doesn't compute in the world of daily deadlines and NARRATIVES NOW, Inc. Remember when Canada was a model of sensible response? When Mexico was fine and the US was the real "shithole country," ha ha ha? Remember when Sweden and Germany were bafflingly unaffected? Remember two days ago, when California's smart, savvy tech culture was keeping their numbers down?

All of that bullshit was bullshit. The problem we're facing is implacable and far more patient than we are.

2) There is going to be an international scramble for attention, sympathy, resources and money in the weeks to come. It will fall upon increasingly deaf ears. Countries with poor infrastructure and a low capacity to source their own food are simply fucked. Nobody is going to be in a position to bail them out -- in a meaningful sense, at scale. There will always be symbolic gestures for the sake of PR, but crates of stale, leftover PPE will not be enough for any of these developing economies to mitigate what's coming.

The scale of what is happening in NYC is horrifying, especially because it is full of laid off journalists and citizen reporters will phone cameras. But at least they've got money and hospitals and a robust first responder system. So, pray for Lagos, especially since that's about all you can really do for them.

[JackRiddler]

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That is a hell of text. Thank you. (Thank you?)

2) There is going to be an international scramble for attention, sympathy, resources and money in the weeks to come. It will fall upon increasingly deaf ears. Countries with poor infrastructure and a low capacity to source their own food are simply fucked. Nobody is going to be in a position to bail them out -- in a meaningful sense, at scale. There will always be symbolic gestures for the sake of PR, but crates of stale, leftover PPE will not be enough for any of these developing economies to mitigate what's coming.

Yes, that's one thing. Now imagine (it isn't hard to do, hafuckenha) that at least one country is predictably treating this as the opportunity, not to take its boot off someone's neck, for the sake of PR and because it would actually make a fucking difference, but to try stomping harder. We're seeing escalation against Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qcc4tCFSTI

Abby Martin on The Michael Brooks Show, starting at 30:00 (linked), describes the Venezuelan economic relief measures in response to the pandemic. The US sanctions war against Venezuela continues under Corona. The country's currency reserves are still frozen by US-UK banks, so that the government is not able to use its own money to buy needed medical supplies abroad. Pompeo doesn't care about lives, he is raising the pressure, offering to relieve sanctions in exchange for regime change. The Justice Department has announced charges that the democratically elected serving president of Venezuela is a narco-trafficker, and offered a $15 million reward for his capture. This recalls the maneuver used to justify the 1989 invasion of Panama. In an apparent accident, among the many accused parties the DoJ warrants also included a member of the right-wing, US-backed Guiado faction, which has staged several failed coup attempts over the last year. This has given Caracas a welcome pretext to open a trafficking investigation against Guaido and, perhaps, finally arrest the foreign agent. The sanctions war on Iran also continues. Even as the contagion kills thousands, the war party still lobbies for a regime change operation or direct attack. Both of these prospective wars of aggression remain as active Trump agenda options. I suspect whether they will be activated depends in part on the number of Corona casualties in the United States.


https://youtu.be/a7A-b2al6K4?t=1802

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[identity]

covid line.jpg

[Elvis]

Out of nowhere, my very basic cell phone was just loaded with 50,000 minutes.

[identity]

Out of nowhere, my very basic cell phone was just loaded with 50,000 minutes.

Yet another instance of COVERT-911 behaving in baffling, unexpected ways (hence the relevance to this thread)?

Are you planning to report this potentially fatal development to the appropriate authorities?

[Elvis]

Grade A post, thanks.

As a cynical side note, this is why both progressives and libertarians are so stymied in democracies, whether direct, representative or kayfabe: nobody wants what you're selling. People, by and large, don't want to think about governance, they just want to be reassured they're safe. They're about to be taught, firsthand, that they're not. A golden moment for political opportunists of all stripes.

[JackRiddler]

Spanish Flu Doc, Redux

The cartoon one from Extra History I posted somewhere earlier is the more analytic option, but this one, probably a student work, really dug up a lot of excellent images from the time (some stolen from PBS and other documentaries) and develops a lot more emotional power. Very in depth on Philadelphia madness.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDY5COg2P2c

[liminalOyster]

God I miss the days when I pretty much skimmed over this thread as low interest thinking it had simply piqued Rex's interest in covert geopolitical market fluctuations.....

[Nordic]

Okay class, this is required reading. Whitney Webb’s latest. One of the only real journalists in the English speaking universe.

https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com ... rk-winter/?

https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/top-news/all-roads-lead-dark-winter/?

[Grizzly]

^^^ Thanks Nordic


Simple, but valid question posed by someone elsewhere, but was interested to see if anyone here had any thought's on it:

"What's the point of storing all these deadly pathogens? We are told its to "create cures" and study, but when one escapes and is in the wild we are unprepared with a cure"???

[Joe Hillshoist]

Karl Wallinger had this to say about it Grizz

While we're busying ourselves with mines,
The chemists are working late.
They gotta breed an indestructible gene
To wipe us all away.
They're just following their inquisitiveness,
Well that's what they like to say.
But it sounds like they're just following orders
Like the Nazis used to say.

I see the gas clouds shake,
I see the rivers ache,
You know it's always on my mind

[chump]

Kinda in keeping with the r-r-r-resonance perspective posted elsewhere:

https://youtu.be/xhudT0Ssnt4
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And The Royal Rife Story is much watch video.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Kinda in keeping with the r-r-r-resonance perspective posted elsewhere:

https://youtu.be/xhudT0Ssnt4
-

And The Royal Rife Story is much watch video.

Ol mate Saul or whatever he calls himself these days needs to put his hair on the right way around. It's upside down.

A virus is more like a piece of malicious code that gets downloaded into your bodies operating system than a bunch of toxins. If you get fucked up by this you may end up drowning in your own immune response, but not because the cells are cleaning themselves out, it's cos your body is trying to clean the toxic cells out. It's slightly different but important. Hand washing and masks are the best firewalls we have at the moment.

How's that drone tho... Remember that video game Half Life 2... It's like a fucken man hack.

Nothing a well aimed shotgun wouldn't sort out tho.