Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby JackRiddler » Fri May 22, 2020 9:12 pm

We all miss a lot but I get plenty of right-wing media, so I don't know what prompts that. True that my listing of Obama's "scandals" may differ from Breitbart's, but I certainly never saw a shortage of'em during that time.
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri May 22, 2020 9:13 pm

JackRiddler » Fri May 22, 2020 8:12 pm wrote:True that my listing of Obama's "scandals" may differ from Breitbart's, but I certainly never saw a shortage of'em during that time.


Very fair, and indeed, the best coverage of the absolute horrorshow of Syria was driven by left -- real, actual left -- partisan journalists and activists.
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Fri May 22, 2020 11:46 pm

Belligerent Savant » 22 May 2020 09:30 wrote:
Wombaticus Rex » Thu May 21, 2020 2:54 pm wrote:
the CDC's slight update


Holy Fuckin' Soft Sell, buddy. Yeah. Biggest victim of nCoV is definitely gonna be public trust in institutional expertise.


Good. Deserved.



Wombaticus Rex » Thu May 21, 2020 2:54 pm wrote:
Also want to re-post this link, definitely the best article on the subject I've read in the past month, hands down: https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-ri ... avoid-them


Agreed. A few excerpts:
Note: the author is a Comparative Immunologist and Professor of Biology (specializing in Immunology) at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
I regularly hear people worrying about grocery stores, bike rides, inconsiderate runners who are not wearing masks.... are these places of concern? Well, not really. Let me explain.
...

When assessing the risk of infection (via respiration) at the grocery store or mall, you need to consider the volume of the air space (very large), the number of people (restricted), how long people are spending in the store (workers - all day; customers - an hour). Taken together, for a person shopping: the low density, high air volume of the store, along with the restricted time you spend in the store, means that the opportunity to receive an infectious dose is low. But, for the store worker, the extended time they spend in the store provides a greater opportunity to receive the infectious dose and therefore the job becomes more risky.

Basically, as the work closures are loosened, and we start to venture out more, possibly even resuming in-office activities, you need to look at your environment and make judgments. How many people are here, how much airflow is there around me, and how long will I be in this environment. If you are in an open floorplan office, you really need to critically assess the risk (volume, people, and airflow). If you are in a job that requires face-to-face talking or even worse, yelling, you need to assess the risk.

If you are sitting in a well ventilated space, with few people, the risk is low.

If I am outside, and I walk past someone, remember it is “dose and time” needed for infection. You would have to be in their airstream for 5+ minutes for a chance of infection. While joggers may be releasing more virus due to deep breathing, remember the exposure time is also less due to their speed. Please do maintain physical distance, but the risk of infection in these scenarios are low.

I found that article great for assisting thinking about situations...eg...

If you are in an office by an open window and two metres from the window is an infected person who can spread the virus then ...

If the air pressure is greater outside than in the airflow will be away from you minimising your exposure to infected material.

If the air pressure is greater inside than outside then the air will flow toward and past you, increasing your potential exposure significantly.
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby SonicG » Sat May 23, 2020 12:50 am

Very interesting article about the Vietnamese response. It feels very bizarre to have been so little affected personally, so far - although my translation work from Japan went to zero two weeks ago, as I was working at home fairly normally even during the tightest shutdown here in Saigon (could walk my dog with no problems!)...Even though Vietnam is moving fairly quickly "back to normal", things are still a little slow around here and the main tourist areas are still completely dead.
This article is relevant to the Coming War with China thread in regards to relationships in the area moving forward. I think there are a lot of gray areas still, but it is possible that Vietnam and China will be forced to become more integrated depending on how mired and just effed up supply chains and markets become...

Behind Vietnam’s COVID-19 Response, Deep Distrust of China
Despite public health cooperation, analysts say the Vietnamese Communist Party has little trust in the word of its Chinese counterparts.

On February 1, Vietnam made what, at the time, was a drastic decision. All flights from China, Hong Kong, and Macau were ordered cancelled over concerns about what would later be named COVID-19. Three days before, the decision had been made to cease issuing tourist visas for the same three passports. Coming just one day after the Trump administration announced tightening restrictions on travel from China, Vietnam was among the first to halt flights entirely — to China’s chagrin. It began shutting its 1,300-kilometer border with its largest trading partner the same day.

Although its case numbers were still only in the single digits, Vietnam did not stop there. Schools were set to reopen on February 3 after the week-long Lunar New Year holiday – the first new school week since the virus was first detected in Vietnam on January 23. But classes nationwide were scrapped, despite only eight diagnosed cases at the time in a country of 95 million. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc called the fight against COVID-19 the “Spring General Offensive of 2020,” a reference to the name of North Vietnam’s final push against Saigon in 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War.

By the middle of April, community spread had apparently stopped. As of May 14, Vietnam has notched 29 consecutive days without a locally transmitted case. The country has reported a total of 288 cases of COVID-19, with no deaths.

While Vietnam’s success has been attributed to a multitude of factors – prompt action, bitter lessons learned from SARS, and a recent history of mass mobilization – those who are well acquainted with the Vietnamese Communist Party point to a ruling political organization that intimately understands, and deeply mistrusts, its brethren to the north.

“I don’t think [the Chinese] could convince anyone in Vietnam, even the Communist Party members,” said Nguyen Quang A, a retired businessman in Hanoi and well-known human rights activist. Once a loyal Party member and distinguished banker – he co-founded what would become Vietnam’s largest private bank in 1993 – Quang A said that it is all but certain that the country’s leaders were not reassured by early, optimistic reports from China doubting the virus’ pandemic potential.

With both parties operating similar internal structures in their respective states, which regularly hold interparty exchanges and events with each other, Quang A said Vietnamese officials understand well the thinking behind announcements and policy decisions coming out of Beijing.

“The Vietnamese communists know them very well; they have had a lot of lessons from their so-called friends in the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.

Close Ideological Neighbors, Bitter Geopolitical Rivals

As the only other single-party communist state with a large, market-oriented economy, Vietnam is China’s closest ideological neighbor. But following Vietnam’s reunification in 1975, Hanoi found itself in the Soviet bloc at a time when China and the United States were partnering against the Kremlin in the latter years of the Cold War. After repelling a short but bloody Chinese invasion in 1979, Vietnam spent the 1980s fighting China’s Khmer Rouge proxies in Cambodia amidst occasional skirmishes with China on both land and at sea.

Relations were only normalized in 1991. Vietnam today considers China its biggest existential threat as the two countries lock horns over Chinese maritime claims in the South China Sea. The popular consensus in Vietnam is that China has been Vietnam’s enemy for millennia.

“I think both the government and the people of Vietnam have always well understood China and the Chinese government and thus, they never trusted what Chinese leaders had said regarding the pandemic,” said Nguyen Tien Lap, a senior partner at the NHQuang & Associates law firm in Hanoi and a former Party member.

“The Vietnamese Party leaders understand well that they should be independent from China as far as the protection of the Vietnamese people is concerned,” he added.

....
But even in the midst of Vietnam’s nationwide lockdown in April, the focus of the bilateral relationship switched back to geopolitical rivalry in the South China Sea.

On April 3, Vietnam accused the Chinese Coast Guard of deliberating sinking a Vietnamese fishing vessel near the contested Paracel Islands. China retorted that the Vietnamese boat had rammed the coast guard vessel. Later that month, China named around 80 features in disputed waters in the South China Sea, including submerged banks, to Vietnam’s ire, and established two new government districts in the Paracel and Spratly Islands. Newspapers in both countries have accused the other side of using COVID-19 as a distraction to further their maritime claims.

“The calculations between Vietnam and China are very complicated,” said Le Dang Doanh, a retired economic adviser to five Vietnamese prime ministers.

“On one hand, the two sides enjoy a very intense economic exchange, and on the other hand, during the pandemic, Chinese marine patrols have intensified their presence in the East Sea,” he added, using the Vietnamese term for the South China Sea.

Thayer said Vietnam’s attitude toward China amid both the pandemic and the South China Sea flareup is typical of the country’s philosophy of “cooperation and struggle” toward world powers.

“Vietnam ‘cooperates’ with China to contain the coronavirus because of the impact this pandemic could have on Vietnam’s economy and society and because Vietnam is ASEAN Chair and COVID-19 requires a regional response,” he said, adding that such cooperation had no bearing on geopolitics in the South China Sea.

“Vietnam ‘struggles’ against China on this issue,” said Thayer.
https://thediplomat.com/2020/05/behind- ... -of-china/
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby mentalgongfu2 » Sat May 23, 2020 9:33 am

Related, QAnon research communities are going to expose a lot of human trafficking networks by the end of this year, and their best cover is going to be "this was just some QAnon bullshit" -- because mainstream media will be grateful for that excuse.


If QAnon research communities, as you put it, can accomplish anything beyond making their true believers into an army of militant and misguided members of the Individual Eleven, I may have to give them more credit than I expect. I rather expect a Pizzagate 2.0. I'm willing to be proven wrong. But I have read Q's BS and watched his followers more than I could stomach. Frankly, I don't expect much beyond Hillary this and Hillary that, and if that is what they mobilize and weaponize, I fear for the innocents caught in the path.
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby alloneword » Sat May 23, 2020 9:37 am

JackRiddler » Sat May 23, 2020 1:50 am wrote:(this is also for the data thread but it seems like a major development)

WTF!

Almost one-quarter of the death in New York has been at nursing homes. And this?!

I expect it's happening elsewhere too.

https://apnews.com/5ebc0ad45b73a899efa81f098330204c


Yep. Certainly been happening in the UK. Malcom Kendrick highlighted it a month or so back.

I'm struggling to attribute this 'policy' to mere incompetence.
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat May 23, 2020 3:10 pm

.

I'm struggling to attribute this 'policy' to mere incompetence.


Indeed. Especially since they sent an f'ing floating hospital to dock in NYC that was left largely EMPTY of patients and has since been sent on its merry way to the memory hole.



Last patients leave USNS Comfort as it readies to leave New York

It's expected to depart this week.

April 27, 2020

...

The ship floated mostly empty since it docked on March 30, part of an effort to increase New York’s hospital capacity in the face of the coronavirus outbreak to assist in an overflow of patients that hasn’t reached the levels experts feared.

...

https://www.lohud.com/story/news/corona ... 031879001/



Sorry folks, i'm increasingly leaning towards this event being manufactured (perhaps not from the onset; the origins of this new strain remain in question, but it increasingly appears to be the case that the reactions/clampdown measures implemented by world leaders -- as facilitiated/pushed by the F'ing WHO -- was not as 'reactionary" as initially presented) as part of a large-scale economy realignment exercise. The decision was made to expedite movement into the next 'revolution' ("smart" cities, remote workers, AI, mass-monitoring/tracking, higher profit margins for the few at the expense of the many, etc.), and so far, it's working out quite well for the few.

Other factors may have contributed to the timing of this. The economy may well have been on the verge of imminent collapse/in dire need of a 'reset' regardless of this event. This pandemic is either highly fortuitous timing, or again, part of a larger objective for re-alignment planned for the coming years, fast-tracked by lockdown measures.

Perhaps i'm applying brush strokes too broadly (well, yes, i'm definitely doing that). Time will tell.

I leave you with a few snippets from a source that may elicit groans, and while I disagree with aspects of this opinion piece, there are certain lines that ring true - in my view, at least.


...

The previous shift of such magnitude occurred in late 18th century; it is called the Industrial Revolution. Then the factory owners had begun to replace their skilled labour with inexpensive machines, and the workers were losing their jobs, livelihoods and self-esteem. In 1811, the workers formed the Luddite movement. The Luddites would break into factories and smash textile machines. It lasted until 1816, when the movement ran out of steam. The workers were defeated, (a lot of them escaped to America), and the British bourgeoisie prospered. It took many years until the workers regained some of their previous positions in society, mainly due to the threat of Communist revolution.

Now we are coming to the new Digital Revolution, with workers being replaced by smart computers and an AI future. Millions of office workers already function as a human interface to the computer. You may have noticed this as you talk with them: they are trained to avoid making decisions; they say sentences that were scripted for them, and the decisions are made by the computer that was programmed to do their master’s will. As lockdown had forced millions to communicate with computers directly, a lot of workers became superfluous.

The process of shedding millions of workers in the existing economic system is likely to be painful for the unemployed. The virus-blamed lockdown and digital control allows the owners of the digital companies to carry out the revolution with minimal risks for them. What would need an army and police involvement against riotous unemployed workers, can be achieved with greater ease under threat of the pandemic. The economy will be modernized and made more efficient. Alas, for us this script presages the fate of highly qualified weavers in 18th century England, even if we shall avoid the total AI takeover Terminator-style.

...

The scariest piece of news is that Zoom is worth more than the seven biggest airlines. These airlines with their accumulated labour (millions of working hours, hundreds of thousands of employees, highly trained pilots, masses of sophisticated equipment) just can’t be worth as much as a job done in a month by a few programmers and which can be done anew in a month. Money and stock market prices are useful tools if they measure human efforts; they do not that anymore. What began with bankers earning more money in a day than a hundred qualified workers and engineers in their lifetime, ended with the hi-tech lords earning more than a million workers in their lifetime. It means that Money had banked on the Digital Economy, a Union made in Hell, while the real economy came up for grabs. Money decided that we won’t fly anymore. They, the new masters, will fly in their private jets; the era of mass access is over. You will get satisfied with Zoom and PornHub, instead of the real thing.

Added to this the negative oil future price and the emission centres issuing more and more money, trying to smother the fire with gasoline, and you will get a picture of the coming world. There is probably no place for you and me in this world.

Is the great AI update of technology an objective need, and will it eventually bring good for mankind? Perhaps. But it does not mean the process should be drafted by Money and the Digital Economy, explained by MSM, justified by bio-horrors and carried on at public expense.


...

If the virus is the great destroyer as presented, why didn’t poor countries with little value and no hi-tech suffer? Why is poor Cambodia not devastated by Covid? Cambodians have little medical care, and they accepted a whole boat-load of “infected” passengers from The Diamond Princess. They also have thousands of Chinese tourists. And they have no Covid in their poor country. Why does Mongolia, China’s neighbour with its very strong connections with China, have no Covid?

Why do only rich countries suffer? Why is it only the countries with a powerful liberal press, with a positive connection to the WHO, with developed hi-tech infrastructure and their own digital lords? Could it be simply that they have something to loot? It makes sense to loot Belgium, and Belgians have a lot of Covid. But it makes no sense to loot Mongolia or Cambodia. If you follow me thus far, you will also see that such things can’t happen by themselves. GAFAM is the prime mover and the beneficiary, while Gates is the link between them and the WHO.

Without the WHO’s blessing, no country would entertain the idea of lockdown. The WHO has learned much since 2009, and eventually decided to play Covid as hard as it could. President Trump has good instincts, even if he provides wrong explanations. The WHO is indeed a central player in the conspiracy. They even had to kill their own top executive in January 2020, who notably objected to classifying Covid as a pandemic. The WHO offered a $60 million bribe to Belarus President Lukashenko for locking down his nation, but the president refused the bribe as he felt responsible for the wellbeing of Belarus. And indeed, free Belarus has roughly the same share of Covid infections and deaths as its locked down neighbours Ukraine and Poland. Poland is a bit worse off because it is a fatter prey than lean Belarus. The WHO even tried to bribe Madagascar which developed its own medical low-tech treatment for Covid sufferers with surprisingly good results. The WHO offered a bribe to their president to say that people died of the treatment. (Not that Madagascar, being poor, had much to worry about it.)

President Trump has had reason to be unhappy about China, as this great country invented lockdown as a tool to fight epidemics in 2009, when the world was worried about the swine flu H1N1. Then China began to practice massive lockdowns, quarantining whole cities, declaring that hundreds of thousands are infected, restricting air travel and producing a vaccine. The measures were taken when only 30 persons succumbed to the flu, and the WHO objected to the Chinese actions. Eventually 3,000 died in the US, and 800 in China. The profits from marketing the vaccine were enormous. “Windfall for the Big Pharma”, reported Reuters. WHO also profited, and did not report about their own involvement. Thus the partnership of Big Pharma – China – WHO had been formed, and they were willing to repeat the old script on a larger scale. They did it in 2020.

The Chinese didn’t hesitate to lock down Wuhan in 2020, and this time, their example has been followed by other countries. Enemies of China say that by spreading their model the Chinese wanted to attack the economies of other states in order to buy their assets on the cheap. Others add that China locked down troublesome cities like Wuhan, which were seen as likely to rebel following Hong Kong model. Friends of China say that the critique of China is connected with the US desire to default on its $1.3 trillion debt to China. And besides, China had been attacked many times by US bioweapons, so it had to be careful.

Let us say that China didn’t and couldn’t force any state to use its model. On the other hand, the WHO and assorted forces in other countries were quick to recognise the advantages of lockdown for them, and it was not for any epidemiological reasons. Some wanted to profit like they did in 2009, but on a bigger scale; some had political reasons, elections, civil unrest; some wanted to put ordinary people down under their control. They succeed, at our expense and at the expense of the Real World.

The present lockdown had brought the world to the brink of a grim totalitarian dystopia. Even though the actual disease had been contained, and the perpetrators of the scheme need more and more crude falsifications to prove the opposite; their drive for control has just increased.

In Israel, everyone has to install and use the Mossad-prepared app tracing all your contacts. The app can send you a text message saying “You passed by a corona-infected person; you have to immediately proceed to your home and stay there in seclusion for a fortnight”. You can’t argue with the app, and the app won’t pay your mortgage and your grocery bills.

In Moscow the regime of control is also by an app. A person who visited hospital or even a doctor, has to install the app, and send a selfie whenever the app demands, even in the middle of the night. An omission to comply within one minute is punished by a 4000 roubles (US$55) fine. If you sleep soundly, you’ll wake up in the morning with a heap of these fines.

The Moscow regime of surveillance and control is exceedingly strict. You have to apply for a QR pass to leave your home, marking your destination and the reason. Churches and parks are not listed as permitted destinations. Only a few people disagree with the arrangement. People in general take it easy. They share on Facebook their satisfaction with the system, enthusing that it was easy to apply and receive the pass. Is it Stalin’s training of their parents, or slavery (until 1861) of their more remote ancestors that installed this compliance and obedience, I mused, but then I noticed the report from the freedom-loving State of Washington:

“Washington Governor Jay Inslee (D) indicated that people who refuse to cooperate with contact tracers won’t be allowed to leave their homes, even to go to the grocery store or pharmacy”.

Alas, people all over the world are easily bendable to the will of the authorities, especially if they are scared by medical jargon. Latin Americans, supposedly hot-tempered folk, placidly complied with Covid regulations; but before that, they obeyed their tyrants and dictators. In democratic New Zealand, a bill passed giving police sweeping powers to potentially enter homes without warrants to enforce Covid rules despite opposition objections, though the Human Rights Commission said it was “a great failure of our democratic process”. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the book and the film, remind us there aren’t many rebels. The Majority agrees even to the most awful regimes. I am against lockdown because I value freedom more than I value life, but it is just a personal preference.

In order to convince people, the Covid enforcers say they do it “to save the old and vulnerable”. This is a pathetic lie. Actually they created an extremely uncomfortable regime for old people. In Israel, there is a plan (yet to materialise) to issue a ‘green patch’ to people over 60. Only persons displaying the green patch are allowed to go into public space. An elderly person is liable to arrest and fine if he fails to display the patch. The patch will be issued by police after a medical check-up, and will be valid for a year. Even green patch bearers will be forbidden to fly. It does not sound like protection of the elderly. Israel is not alone: in American Samoa, people over 60 must stay at home, imprisoned. You can view the limitations of natural freedom in various countries to see how they compete over who will make their citizens more miserable. It makes for depressing reading.

Was the lockdown necessary at all for purely medical reasons? Did it save lives? I do not think so, but the jury is still out. We shall know the exact answer in a year’s time. If Covid-19 will be gone like its predecessors Avian flu (2003) and swine flu (2009), the lockdown was not too bad an idea. Perhaps it was not really necessary, for it saved a few people at huge social cost, but it wasn’t too bad. However, if Covid-19 has come to stay and will invade regularly, the lockdown makes no sense at all.

Covid adepts tend to think we should expect the second wave, and more waves afterwards. Some of them preach to extend quarantine for a year or longer. It can’t be done – we shall not survive such a long house arrest as a species. What is annoying is that they insist on imposing the wearing of masks, even gloves and social distancing right now and forever. They also block international travel. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov predicted that our pre-Covid freedom of movement won’t come back.

While we can’t possibly derail progress and stop the Digital Revolution, we can end the accompanying fraud and extra-legal restrictions on our freedom to move.


https://www.unz.com/ishamir/coronavirus-conspiracies/


And here, one of numerous suggestions and hints of what will follow:

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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sat May 23, 2020 11:48 pm

Belligerent Savant » 24 May 2020 05:10 wrote:.

I'm struggling to attribute this 'policy' to mere incompetence.


Indeed. Especially since they sent an f'ing floating hospital to dock in NYC that was left largely EMPTY of patients and has since been sent on its merry way to the memory hole.



Last patients leave USNS Comfort as it readies to leave New York

It's expected to depart this week.

April 27, 2020

...

The ship floated mostly empty since it docked on March 30, part of an effort to increase New York’s hospital capacity in the face of the coronavirus outbreak to assist in an overflow of patients that hasn’t reached the levels experts feared.

...

https://www.lohud.com/story/news/corona ... 031879001/



Sorry folks, i'm increasingly leaning towards this event being manufactured (perhaps not from the onset; the origins of this new strain remain in question, but it increasingly appears to be the case that the reactions/clampdown measures implemented by world leaders -- as facilitiated/pushed by the F'ing WHO -- was not as 'reactionary" as initially presented) as part of a large-scale economy realignment exercise. The decision was made to expedite movement into the next 'revolution' ("smart" cities, remote workers, AI, mass-monitoring/tracking, higher profit margins for the few at the expense of the many, etc.), and so far, it's working out quite well for the few.

Other factors may have contributed to the timing of this. The economy may well have been on the verge of imminent collapse/in dire need of a 'reset' regardless of this event. This pandemic is either highly fortuitous timing, or again, part of a larger objective for re-alignment planned for the coming years, fast-tracked by lockdown measures.

Perhaps i'm applying brush strokes too broadly (well, yes, i'm definitely doing that). Time will tell.

I leave you with a few snippets from a source that may elicit groans, and while I disagree with aspects of this opinion piece, there are certain lines that ring true - in my view, at least.


...

The previous shift of such magnitude occurred in late 18th century; it is called the Industrial Revolution. Then the factory owners had begun to replace their skilled labour with inexpensive machines, and the workers were losing their jobs, livelihoods and self-esteem. In 1811, the workers formed the Luddite movement. The Luddites would break into factories and smash textile machines. It lasted until 1816, when the movement ran out of steam. The workers were defeated, (a lot of them escaped to America), and the British bourgeoisie prospered. It took many years until the workers regained some of their previous positions in society, mainly due to the threat of Communist revolution.

Now we are coming to the new Digital Revolution, with workers being replaced by smart computers and an AI future. Millions of office workers already function as a human interface to the computer. You may have noticed this as you talk with them: they are trained to avoid making decisions; they say sentences that were scripted for them, and the decisions are made by the computer that was programmed to do their master’s will. As lockdown had forced millions to communicate with computers directly, a lot of workers became superfluous.

The process of shedding millions of workers in the existing economic system is likely to be painful for the unemployed. The virus-blamed lockdown and digital control allows the owners of the digital companies to carry out the revolution with minimal risks for them. What would need an army and police involvement against riotous unemployed workers, can be achieved with greater ease under threat of the pandemic. The economy will be modernized and made more efficient. Alas, for us this script presages the fate of highly qualified weavers in 18th century England, even if we shall avoid the total AI takeover Terminator-style.

...

The scariest piece of news is that Zoom is worth more than the seven biggest airlines. These airlines with their accumulated labour (millions of working hours, hundreds of thousands of employees, highly trained pilots, masses of sophisticated equipment) just can’t be worth as much as a job done in a month by a few programmers and which can be done anew in a month. Money and stock market prices are useful tools if they measure human efforts; they do not that anymore. What began with bankers earning more money in a day than a hundred qualified workers and engineers in their lifetime, ended with the hi-tech lords earning more than a million workers in their lifetime. It means that Money had banked on the Digital Economy, a Union made in Hell, while the real economy came up for grabs. Money decided that we won’t fly anymore. They, the new masters, will fly in their private jets; the era of mass access is over. You will get satisfied with Zoom and PornHub, instead of the real thing.

Added to this the negative oil future price and the emission centres issuing more and more money, trying to smother the fire with gasoline, and you will get a picture of the coming world. There is probably no place for you and me in this world.

Is the great AI update of technology an objective need, and will it eventually bring good for mankind? Perhaps. But it does not mean the process should be drafted by Money and the Digital Economy, explained by MSM, justified by bio-horrors and carried on at public expense.


...

If the virus is the great destroyer as presented, why didn’t poor countries with little value and no hi-tech suffer? Why is poor Cambodia not devastated by Covid? Cambodians have little medical care, and they accepted a whole boat-load of “infected” passengers from The Diamond Princess. They also have thousands of Chinese tourists. And they have no Covid in their poor country. Why does Mongolia, China’s neighbour with its very strong connections with China, have no Covid?

Why do only rich countries suffer? Why is it only the countries with a powerful liberal press, with a positive connection to the WHO, with developed hi-tech infrastructure and their own digital lords? Could it be simply that they have something to loot? It makes sense to loot Belgium, and Belgians have a lot of Covid. But it makes no sense to loot Mongolia or Cambodia. If you follow me thus far, you will also see that such things can’t happen by themselves. GAFAM is the prime mover and the beneficiary, while Gates is the link between them and the WHO.

Without the WHO’s blessing, no country would entertain the idea of lockdown. The WHO has learned much since 2009, and eventually decided to play Covid as hard as it could. President Trump has good instincts, even if he provides wrong explanations. The WHO is indeed a central player in the conspiracy. They even had to kill their own top executive in January 2020, who notably objected to classifying Covid as a pandemic. The WHO offered a $60 million bribe to Belarus President Lukashenko for locking down his nation, but the president refused the bribe as he felt responsible for the wellbeing of Belarus. And indeed, free Belarus has roughly the same share of Covid infections and deaths as its locked down neighbours Ukraine and Poland. Poland is a bit worse off because it is a fatter prey than lean Belarus. The WHO even tried to bribe Madagascar which developed its own medical low-tech treatment for Covid sufferers with surprisingly good results. The WHO offered a bribe to their president to say that people died of the treatment. (Not that Madagascar, being poor, had much to worry about it.)

President Trump has had reason to be unhappy about China, as this great country invented lockdown as a tool to fight epidemics in 2009, when the world was worried about the swine flu H1N1. Then China began to practice massive lockdowns, quarantining whole cities, declaring that hundreds of thousands are infected, restricting air travel and producing a vaccine. The measures were taken when only 30 persons succumbed to the flu, and the WHO objected to the Chinese actions. Eventually 3,000 died in the US, and 800 in China. The profits from marketing the vaccine were enormous. “Windfall for the Big Pharma”, reported Reuters. WHO also profited, and did not report about their own involvement. Thus the partnership of Big Pharma – China – WHO had been formed, and they were willing to repeat the old script on a larger scale. They did it in 2020.

The Chinese didn’t hesitate to lock down Wuhan in 2020, and this time, their example has been followed by other countries. Enemies of China say that by spreading their model the Chinese wanted to attack the economies of other states in order to buy their assets on the cheap. Others add that China locked down troublesome cities like Wuhan, which were seen as likely to rebel following Hong Kong model. Friends of China say that the critique of China is connected with the US desire to default on its $1.3 trillion debt to China. And besides, China had been attacked many times by US bioweapons, so it had to be careful.

Let us say that China didn’t and couldn’t force any state to use its model. On the other hand, the WHO and assorted forces in other countries were quick to recognise the advantages of lockdown for them, and it was not for any epidemiological reasons. Some wanted to profit like they did in 2009, but on a bigger scale; some had political reasons, elections, civil unrest; some wanted to put ordinary people down under their control. They succeed, at our expense and at the expense of the Real World.

The present lockdown had brought the world to the brink of a grim totalitarian dystopia. Even though the actual disease had been contained, and the perpetrators of the scheme need more and more crude falsifications to prove the opposite; their drive for control has just increased.

In Israel, everyone has to install and use the Mossad-prepared app tracing all your contacts. The app can send you a text message saying “You passed by a corona-infected person; you have to immediately proceed to your home and stay there in seclusion for a fortnight”. You can’t argue with the app, and the app won’t pay your mortgage and your grocery bills.

In Moscow the regime of control is also by an app. A person who visited hospital or even a doctor, has to install the app, and send a selfie whenever the app demands, even in the middle of the night. An omission to comply within one minute is punished by a 4000 roubles (US$55) fine. If you sleep soundly, you’ll wake up in the morning with a heap of these fines.

The Moscow regime of surveillance and control is exceedingly strict. You have to apply for a QR pass to leave your home, marking your destination and the reason. Churches and parks are not listed as permitted destinations. Only a few people disagree with the arrangement. People in general take it easy. They share on Facebook their satisfaction with the system, enthusing that it was easy to apply and receive the pass. Is it Stalin’s training of their parents, or slavery (until 1861) of their more remote ancestors that installed this compliance and obedience, I mused, but then I noticed the report from the freedom-loving State of Washington:

“Washington Governor Jay Inslee (D) indicated that people who refuse to cooperate with contact tracers won’t be allowed to leave their homes, even to go to the grocery store or pharmacy”.

Alas, people all over the world are easily bendable to the will of the authorities, especially if they are scared by medical jargon. Latin Americans, supposedly hot-tempered folk, placidly complied with Covid regulations; but before that, they obeyed their tyrants and dictators. In democratic New Zealand, a bill passed giving police sweeping powers to potentially enter homes without warrants to enforce Covid rules despite opposition objections, though the Human Rights Commission said it was “a great failure of our democratic process”. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the book and the film, remind us there aren’t many rebels. The Majority agrees even to the most awful regimes. I am against lockdown because I value freedom more than I value life, but it is just a personal preference.

In order to convince people, the Covid enforcers say they do it “to save the old and vulnerable”. This is a pathetic lie. Actually they created an extremely uncomfortable regime for old people. In Israel, there is a plan (yet to materialise) to issue a ‘green patch’ to people over 60. Only persons displaying the green patch are allowed to go into public space. An elderly person is liable to arrest and fine if he fails to display the patch. The patch will be issued by police after a medical check-up, and will be valid for a year. Even green patch bearers will be forbidden to fly. It does not sound like protection of the elderly. Israel is not alone: in American Samoa, people over 60 must stay at home, imprisoned. You can view the limitations of natural freedom in various countries to see how they compete over who will make their citizens more miserable. It makes for depressing reading.

Was the lockdown necessary at all for purely medical reasons? Did it save lives? I do not think so, but the jury is still out. We shall know the exact answer in a year’s time. If Covid-19 will be gone like its predecessors Avian flu (2003) and swine flu (2009), the lockdown was not too bad an idea. Perhaps it was not really necessary, for it saved a few people at huge social cost, but it wasn’t too bad. However, if Covid-19 has come to stay and will invade regularly, the lockdown makes no sense at all.

Covid adepts tend to think we should expect the second wave, and more waves afterwards. Some of them preach to extend quarantine for a year or longer. It can’t be done – we shall not survive such a long house arrest as a species. What is annoying is that they insist on imposing the wearing of masks, even gloves and social distancing right now and forever. They also block international travel. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov predicted that our pre-Covid freedom of movement won’t come back.

While we can’t possibly derail progress and stop the Digital Revolution, we can end the accompanying fraud and extra-legal restrictions on our freedom to move.


https://www.unz.com/ishamir/coronavirus-conspiracies/


And here, one of numerous suggestions and hints of what will follow:

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I don't necessarily disagree with much of the underlying premise but things like that piece irritate me cos of the secret dog whistles and disinformation they contain.

For example the stuff about why only rich countries get this virus. It's just bullshit.

Even most rich countries can't keep track of what is actually going on in terms of numbers, cases and deaths, so the idea that poor countries can, when often they don't even have the infrastructure to enable testing in the first place, is dumb as fuck or an attempt to manipulate the reader into misinterpreting what is happening so they can buy into the author's premise. (It also reminds me of the old White male idea that there is a level playing field for other people as well. My personal observation is that now Neo liberalism is finally starting to actually most white working men (instead of quietly screwing them) they've finally noticed that it is a fundamentally flawed system.)

The rest of the world doesn't have the sort of health care set up most western nations have, even with as fucked a system as the US one it's still better than places where health care is rudimentary at best. How the fuck would they know who has the virus and who doesn't?

Not to mention the fact there is a relationship between economic power and the ability to move freely. As this author is noticing as he releases he might be able to fly wherever and whenever he wants. The virus has taken advantage of this relationship to spread, which is why in countries like mine it's wannabe Stazi types like our homeland security shithead, Peter Dutton, who brought it into the country after a five eyes meeting, or the wealthy upper middle class types who can afford constant travel that brought it in. Cruise ships are also pretty luxurious by most of the planets population standards so they count too. Tho in Australia most people could afford a cruise holiday if the scrimped and saved.

Ie it's the elite - the ruling class and their upper middle class wannabes - that have spread this virus internationally, at least into Australia. The people who can afford travel. When it was poorer people spreading it internationally its workers travelling from China to Italy, essentially to enable the elite and their wannabe mates to get more work for less wages. Or poorer workers in Singapore or the Middle East. In India it's been spread by poorer workers who have been sent home by their elite masters.

So if there was merit in the idea the mega rich are taking advantage of this situation to loot the world and re organise the world to their liking he's just dis credited it with such a flawed statement.

It's dog whistling to the people who have been hardest hit, working poor, lower middle and working class people, even now the under employed and the new members of the underclasses, blaming tech giants for what is actually the end result of Neo liberalism's structural flaws. Once upon a time most (white) working class people could live the dream, ie own their own house, all sorts of consumer items from cars and appliances to entertainment appliances from tells to version to digital and information based stuff we have today, and still afford fairly modest holidays but holidays that were way beyond even the elite of a couple of generations earlier.

That's been taken away, not by this virus but by three decades of voodoo economics.

But it's not accurate, it just seems accurate from that point if view. It's reframing a lot of good ideas in the service of poor ones.
Joe Hillshoist
 
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby 0_0 » Sun May 24, 2020 5:42 am

Duck and Cover and Burn the Heretics: the Modern-Day Cult of Corona
Written by Helen Buyniski
Published: 17 May 2020

Fear and uncertainty have dominated the media coverage of the Covid-19 epidemic. The novel coronavirus is depicted not as a pedestrian pathogen certain to be beaten into submission by the miracles of modern science any day now, but as an invisible evil lurking everywhere, formidable enough to inspire a respectful terror even in the leading lights of the medical establishment. And in case Americans had any doubt about how they were supposed to regard this new viral threat, the establishment talking heads many rely upon for the self-assured delivery of their news have swapped their usual swagger for apprehension. Amid this ‘confidence vacuum,’ the popular response to the pandemic has taken on a religious cast. Protective measures like masks have taken on a talismanic quality, hand-washing has been elevated to a ritual performance, and a cult built on naming and shaming ‘heretics’ has seized the minds of many - while their rights are quietly stripped away and a paternalistic police state substituted in their place.

Unable to see the microscopic “enemy” they are told threatens the lives of them and their family and deprived of a scientifically proven cure, individuals seeking deliverance from Covid-19 are left with only their faith that the protective measures prescribed by health experts –our scientific priest class– can keep it at bay. If it ended there, the Corona Cult would merely be a curiosity - humans have turned to religion in troubled times since before written history began. But its dark side has already reared its ugly head - those who buck the new orthodoxy are already being blamed for the plague.

We've been here before. In the Middle Ages, pious peasants were kept in line by priests who told them God was watching their every move. When a plague appeared, it was interpreted as divine punishment, the wrath of God visited upon a sinful population. Those who wished to stand out as especially devout whipped themselves in public, or wore painful garments called “hair shirts” - in both cases with the aim of ‘mortifying the flesh,’ literally ‘putting to death’ their sinful natures.

It’s no coincidence that self-flagellation reached its height of popularity during the Black Plague. It was assumed by its practitioners that if they underwent penance by inflicting pain on themselves, they would be spared the God-given pain of the plague. Those who publicly refused to participate in the religious rituals of the day were called out as infidels, heretics, witches or other servants of the devil. They might be chased out of town; many were tortured and even killed, often in shockingly gruesome ways, as the centuries progressed and the Inquisition rose to power. The pious were regularly told their misfortunes were due to the presence of a satanic influence among them, with complex problems declared to be solved by simply casting out the offending presence.

While western society may tell itself it has left those Dark Ages far behind, the lure of simplistic explanations and the desire to find fulfillment in shared suffering - inflicted or endured - are as potent as ever.


Mask of the red death
Face masks have become both the visual symbol of the Covid-19 epidemic and the dominant religious fetish for the Cult of Corona. While cities from New York to Laredo, Texas have adopted regulations mandating them in public places and chain stores like Costco have barred unmasked customers from their premises, it’s hard not to notice those individuals so devoted to the mask-wearing ritual that they sport the face-coverings in their own cars (with the windows rolled up) and when running down epidemic-emptied streets. Poor messaging is partly to blame - the Centers for Disease Control has repeatedly changed its narrative on who should wear masks, from “sick people” to “only healthcare workers” to “everyone.” However, the Cult of Corona’s devotion to the mask extends far beyond following the recommendations of a mere public health agency.

The mask has taken on a supernatural significance that far outweighs its utility in disease protection. Even the N-95 masks health authorities have recommended to protect society from virus-positive individuals have been found largely ineffective in protecting the uninfected from carriers in their surroundings, and the flimsy surgical masks that have become ubiquitous for sale on American street corners are next to worthless in stopping virus transmission. Indeed, some doctors have warned that wearing a mask is counterproductive due to the false sense of security it creates, while others suggest it's actually dangerous due to the risk of hypoxia (lack of oxygen) and hypercapnia (excess carbon dioxide). Yet it’s impossible to walk into a supermarket in many cities without something covering the mouth - even as one’s eyes remain unprotected and ready to receive whatever viral particles are lingering in the air. Mask requirements thus have nothing to do with health and everything to do with religious faith. They provide a way for the faithful to telegraph their virtue at a distance and recognize one another instantly, while flagging the non-compliant as infidels to be avoided.

In the same way that garlic and a cross were supposed to ward off vampires in times past, the face mask is supposed to fend off the “invisible enemy” lurking everywhere at once. One might feel a little silly driving around with a mask on (or stringing a clove of garlic above one’s window), but better safe than sorry - and if you haven’t been infected, or had any vampires show up at your bedside, who’s to say it isn’t working?


Ritual, snitchual
A bevy of rituals has sprung up among Corona Cultists, from the benign if eccentric (swabbing all exposed surfaces with Lysol wipes) to the sinister (reporting neighbors for perceived violations). Even the simplest, most scientifically-sound measures like hand-washing have taken on a ritualistic cast, as the virus-fearing infuse them with a terrified zeal. How else to explain the popularity of the dozens of “hand-washing apps” available for smartphones but that the shock of the epidemic has caused us to question that which we once took for granted? Just as peasants of a previous era might have been spooked into regular church attendance by the specter of the Black Death, their descendants pore over videos of hand-washing on YouTube, determined to live a “cleaner” life.

But another holdover from the Dark Ages has risen its ugly head. While our ancestors might have turned in their oddball neighbor as a “witch,” claiming to have seen the merry old spinster cavorting with Satan under the full moon, modern-day snitches are picking up their smartphones and dialing specially-designated lines to report violations of social distancing orders. These services are disturbingly popular - New Zealand’s snitch site crashed repeatedly within its first week in late March as over 4,000 people scrambled to turn in their neighbors for violating that nation’s harsh lockdown regulations, which separated people into “bubbles” based on their living arrangements and forbid them from interacting with those outside their “bubble.”

Snitches come in several stripes. There have always been busybodies who call the police when their neighbor’s music is too loud rather than knocking on their door and politely asking to turn it down. But in the Cult of Corona, these miscreants are joined by those driven half-crazy with fear, convinced that the act of turning in rule breakers will somehow protect them from contracting the virus. They’d never say such a preposterous thing out loud, of course - if asked, they merely claim to be concerned for the community, or worried their victim’s irresponsible behavior is spreading Covid-19 willy-nilly, perhaps even stating that their decision to turn their neighbor in was “for their own good.” Just as the Inquisitor’s concern for those they tortured on the rack was supposedly for their victim’s “immortal soul,” so does the modern snitch rationalize their betrayal of their neighbors by reasoning that the virus police are concerned only for the health of the heretics they rat out - while secretly breathing a sigh of relief that they aren’t the ones being tortured (or placed on a ventilator), this time. Following orders becomes a source of comfort for the snitch deprived of life's normal pleasures by the lockdown - providing an avenue for transformation from victim to hero.

Fueling this schadenfreudisch frenzy are media headlines celebrating the karmic punishment of lockdown violators. Whether it’s spring-breakers testing positive for Covid-19 after throwing caution to the wind and partying down on the beach or social-media showoffs boasting about refusing to social-distance, the public smiting of heretics has been a popular topic among Corona Cultists isolated in their homes. John McDaniel, an Ohio man who criticized his governor for shutting down the state, reportedly died in April of coronavirus only for social media mobs to dance on his grave and use his death to attack other “doubters” (including Donald Trump, whose insufficient reverence at the altar of the virus continues to set zealots frothing with rage). CNN’s Jake Tapper claimed that “practically every day” he read about a corona doubter succumbing to the virus, blaming conservative media and politicians for their deaths - heresy, apparently, is as contagious as the virus. The New York Post, which ran a moralizing story free of any identifying details about a nameless Kingston, New York barber who’d caught the virus after supposedly flouting lockdown for several weeks to cut hair, also rushed to connect a spike in coronavirus cases in Kentucky with an anti-lockdown protest a few days earlier - even though the virus’ lengthy latency period (and the fact that a significant chunk of the new cases were in nursing homes) made it next to impossible the two events were linked. And Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, one of the most fanatical government figures in the US' corona cult, implied in a press conference that protests were more likely to contribute to the spread of the virus than other forms of “congregating.”

UK PM Boris Johnson was perhaps the most public example of the “divine punishment” phenomenon - his conversion to the Corona Cult (after a few days of timidly suggesting herd immunity might be a better path to public health) came too late to keep him out of intensive care at the hands of the NHS his party has so ruthlessly sought to privatize. When actress Miriam Margolyes declared following his recovery that she had wanted to see BoJo dead, some in the media appeared to agree with her - while making a point of casting such agreement as gleefully subversive. Not only do Corona Cultists find a commonality in rooting for the virus against the dissidents who challenge their worldview, but their own adherence to an exhaustingly cognitively-dissonant dogma is affirmed as the correct path by the heretics' misfortune. Enforced austerity tends to be unpopular with its victims, but when that privation is reframed as a noble sacrifice made by all [except the wealthy] for the common good, it becomes easier to bear the suffering - and much more difficult to tolerate those who refuse to go along.

The real danger comes when zealots feel compelled to “help” the virus smite the heretics (sure, I could wait for God to punish this evildoer in the afterlife, but why not take some of that work off His hands?). The Daily Mail cheered on an elderly woman who threatened to “kick the ass” of a stranger for merely calling the pandemic a “hoax.” An elderly patient died in a Brooklyn hospital after another patient knocked her to the ground, cracking her head open - supposedly because she "didn't stay more than six feet away." The violence need not be physical - a British woman told SkyNews she was “named and shamed” by neighbors on Facebook when she accidentally slept through her town’s weekly “clap for the NHS” ritual, in which participants lean out their windows and applaud at a fixed time every week in a choreographed celebration of the healthcare workers they believe protect them from the virus. Even viral videos of police abuses, which have been a dime a dozen during lockdowns that embolden the worst elements on the force, have been deluged with comments in support of the cops, charging the unarmed man/woman/child being arrested or brutalized “deserved it” because they were out without a mask/protesting/not standing 6 feet away from the nearest human. Never mind that the cops in the videos are almost never masked themselves, or that it’s impossible to maintain six feet of distance while making an arrest - certainly never mind the Kafkaesque paradox of arresting someone for not social-distancing, only to throw them in a jail cell with several other humans per square foot - these poor souls have sinned, and they must be punished. Don’t agree? You might end up in there with them.


Gotta have faith
For those whose faith is flagging after two months of lockdowns sapping both their bank accounts and health, polls are being churned out confirming upwards of 80% of Americans and nearly 9 out of 10 Britons support continuing the lockdowns, which combined with social media's growing censorship of anti-lockdown speech gives the false impression of a universal public consensus that government policies are both popular and lifesaving. Fanatical religious adherence is required to enforce belief in such absurdity, given the appalling track records of the High Priests of Lockdown. Imperial College corona czar Neil Ferguson was caught gallivanting with his mistress in defiance of his own policies after two months lecturing Brits about the importance of staying home, but his wildly irresponsible disease model - produced using a defective computer program that was more glitch than code - lives on, haunting the minds of lockdown-lovers who screech BoJo is letting Brits leave home too soon. Indeed, based on his resumé, Ferguson never should have been allowed near public policy. His terrible miscalculations regarding foot-and-mouth disease in 2001 led to the unnecessary destruction of over 6.5 million livestock, decimating the nation’s farming industry, while a similar but fortunately unheeded prediction in 2002 that mad cow disease would kill as many as 150,000 Britons was shown up by the reality of 178 killed. As the years went on, his apocalyptic visions only intensified - in 2005, he declared bird flu would kill some 200 million people worldwide - when reality saw some 455 people, total, killed over the past 15 years according to the WHO. His hysterical 2009 prediction that 65,000 Brits would die of swine flu encouraged the government to embrace GlaxoSmithKline’s unsafe Pandemrix vaccine, which caused permanent brain damage in thousands of people (mostly children, plus a good deal of NHS workers conned into taking the jab with false claims of its safety and effectiveness) - quite a bit more than the 283 killed by the actual swine flu.

Not that the UK is alone in embracing faith-based “science” as health policy. Trump even appointed the man who led GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine division during the Pandemrix debacle to lead “Operation Warp Speed,” his unhinged program to develop a vaccine by the end of 2020 (a process that normally takes five years being crammed into eight months). Like Ferguson, Anthony Fauci - the face of the US’ pandemic response - has decades of epidemic failures under his belt at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Starting with the thousands of otherwise-healthy HIV positive people who died in the 1980s thanks to Fauci’s shameless advocacy for AZT, which refashioned the toxic drug (too poisonous for terminal cancer patients) into a miracle pill for AIDS, and passing through at least one episode of perjury that saw him deny the existence of encephalitis as a possible side effect of the MMR vaccine (before remembering he was under oath and acknowledging it was “rare”), Fauci has displayed such breathtaking avarice and incompetence at the helm of the NIAID that the US life expectancy has actually declined noticeably under his watch for the first time in history. Yet like the followers of an end-times cult leader who remain loyal even as the appointed date for the end of the world comes and goes, devotees of these public health priests have not dared to learn their lesson. Instead, they ramp up their predictions of doom for heretical countries like Sweden and Belarus that have refused to fall in line with the universal lockdown doctrine.

One level above the public health priesthood is Microsoft billionaire and Pandemic Pope Bill Gates, whose lack of medical credentials or even a college diploma have not stopped the world from hailing him as a prophet based on his “prediction” of a pandemic in 2015 - and his claim to have both the answers and the ability to pay for them. Gates’ deep pockets - he’s the number-one funder of the WHO, ever since Trump pulled US support - have given him the power to almost singlehandedly direct global health policy, steering it into a pharmaceutical iceberg even as real doctors protest his many conflicts of interest. Since diving into the money-pit of “philanthropy,” Gates has more than doubled his fortune; his foundation is heavily invested in the drug companies that make the vaccines that other groups he funds purchase for poor countries. He’s also very, very generous with the media, buying the silence of establishment outlets around the world - big names like the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Financial Times, and National Public Radio - so their journalists don’t recoil when he can barely keep from gibbering and squealing while discussing the economic hurt his lockdown policies are inflicting on hapless populations - or research the trail of suffering his foundation has left through the Global South.

Yet even the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex - vaccine advocates like Peter Hotez, the bowtie-sporting tropical disease specialist who was ubiquitous on TV during the 2018 “measles epidemic” attacking so-called “anti-vaxxers” - have expressed alarm at the decision to scrap the animal-testing phase for the Covid-19 vaccine that is supposed to save the world, noting that “there is a risk of immune enhancement” with vaccines for any coronavirus. During animal trials for an aborted SARS vaccine, mice who got the shot developed a severe version of the virus when exposed to it after they were inoculated, while ferrets similarly challenged post-vaccination with the virus suffered “enhanced liver damage.” Perhaps trying to get around these roadblocks, Moderna, the drugmaker currently leading the vaccine pack, is banking on a totally new kind of vaccine, one which, rather than lob a softball at the immune system in the form of a dead or weakened form of the virus, will attempt to reprogram our genetic material to create the pieces of the virus, so that the immune system can learn to fight them off. That’s how Gates himself describes this “promising” method, at least. Did we mention Moderna has never brought a vaccine to market before? What’s the matter - where’s your faith?

We may not be turning our eyes heavenward and praying for deliverance, but the leaders of the western world have declared society cannot fully return to normal until a magical perfect vaccine arrives from on high, an absurd one-stop solution that carries echoes of the “duck and cover”-type prescriptions for surviving a nuclear blast, drilled into people’s heads during the Cold War. The effect of instilling a powerful capacity for cognitive dissonance - teaching children to hide under their desks even as they were taught the laws of physics, i.e. an understanding that their desks couldn’t protect them - turned Americans into gold medalists in cognitive dissonance. Were it an Olympic sport, no one would even come close.


Omnipotence & Omniscience in the 21st century
The contact-tracing platforms - both digital and human-based - being rolled out around the world have their philosophical roots in religious rites of confession, cross-bred with the police-state logic of the National Security Agency (“if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear”) and coupled with the religious notion of an all-seeing, all-knowing deity. All deviation from lockdown dogma is logged and reported, including consorting with known heretics, and this Panopticon - attacked when it debuted in China as totalitarian police-state control - is now being embraced in western media as the work of benevolent governments concerned with citizen welfare. While this transformation was laid out chillingly in ‘Lock Step,’ a hypothetical future outlined in 2010 in the Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network’s “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” any discussion of predictive programming is off-limits. Indeed, Corona Cultists are encouraged to cut off their “conspiracy theorist” relatives, because, in the words of Canadian broadcaster CBC, “conspiracies can be just as infectious, just as dangerous as a virus - so you have to guard against them.” Parents in Wales are being warned that conspiracy theorists are a greater threat than pedophiles on the internet. Compounding the seriousness of wrongthink, the WHO has popularized the term “infodemic” - implying ideas are as dangerous to one’s health as pathogens - and recommended a “vaccine for misinformation.”

Soon, the Corona Cultist will no longer have to self-report their symptoms on a Facebook survey or confess their sins to a contact-tracer. Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed clothing with embedded sensors to monitor the wearer’s vital signs. Enabled by the 5G networks being fast-tracked while any potential opposition is locked down, these sensors will communicate in real time with surveillance smart grids, pinpointing the offender and alerting others to give them a wide berth, refuse to serve them, and eventually have them "neutralized." Their bank account may be frozen until they return home, or even debited a certain fine based on the degree of disobedience ("that’ll be 20 Hail Bills…or $20 per minute outside the home, your choice"). Eventually, these sensors will be implanted inside the body - in what sounds like the plot of a science fiction dystopia, Microsoft secured a patent in March for a system that mines cryptocurrency based on physiological signals, theoretically permitting the corporation to ‘reward’ users based on desirable responses to certain stimuli. While the example they gave was banal - a reward for watching an advertisement - it’s no great leap to imagine equivalent punishments for those who respond with disgust to the ruling class’ propaganda. The all-knowing, all-seeing God micromanaging His followers, a religious trope that has been used to keep large populations in line for millennia, has finally been realized in the form of the Covid-19 police state. Big Brother wields technology as both carrot - gently shepherding His flock toward transhumanist perfection by offering a facsimile of freedom in return for downloading an app, accepting a “quantum dot tattoo,” or showing a “certificate of immunity” on demand - and stick, digitally and literally imprisoning those who deviate from His shining future.

A breathtakingly wealthy coalition of billionaires and their pet statesmen have seized their own slice of the divine by appointing themselves Big Brother’s agents on earth. From the messianic glow of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen as she solicits money from cash-strapped European nations, to the aforementioned sweater-vested Gates channelling Nostradamus with predictions of "Pandemic Two," to second-generation New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (whose PR people have laid it on thick with hashtags like #Cuomosexual and #CuomoForPresident even as his state leads the world in infections and deaths and his policies of mandating nursing homes accept Covid-19-positive patients literally "kill Grandma") epitomizing "New York Tough" by acting out #resistance to Trump even as his brother was supposedly laid low by the virus, there's no end of ruling-class Heroes™ basking in the admiration of the Corona Cultists, who offer up their (and everyone else's) rights on a silver platter, never to be seen again.

Can constant surveillance stop the virus? No more than one-way sidewalks, bleaching the beach, or ratting out your neighbor does. There’s nothing wrong with clinging to ritual in a time of uncertainty - certainly hand-washing doesn’t have a downside, presuming one stops short of wearing the skin off one’s hands. But when that ritual harms others, it must be questioned. Covid-19 zealots would argue that they have science on their side, but the science is far from settled on the effectiveness of social distancing and sweeping economic shutdowns.


Pseudoscience on a rampage
As social media censors tighten the screws on what information is permitted to enter the public sphere, it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend the Cult of Corona is based on science. Actual science relies upon constant inquiry, testing, and hypothesizing, and even those claims generally attested to by its practitioners are considered “theories” as opposed to unchangeable truths. Science-as-religion, on the other hand, denounces those who put forth dissenting theories as heretics, using slurs like “quack,” “charlatan,” and “anti-vaxxer” to marginalize, for example, medical practitioners who heal people without the use of pharmaceutical drugs. The social media platforms’ decision to unilaterally deplatform content that contradicts the WHO’s narrative is anti-scientific in the extreme, sacrificing the spirit of inquiry for the strictures of groupthink. It’s rendered even more Kafkaesque due to continuing shifts in the WHO’s own narrative, which has changed as more is learned about the virus (as scientific understanding tends to do).

The idea that YouTube’s content moderators know better than a medical doctor how to treat Covid-19 would have been considered laughable just six months ago, yet Google’s video platform has repeatedly removed videos of licensed, practicing clinicians discussing their experiences. A pair of “rogue” doctors in Bakersfield, California who held a lengthy press conference laying out their findings and questioning the wisdom of prolonged lockdowns - broadcast on a local network TV station - went viral, only for YouTube to remove nearly every copy while pundits denounced the pair as “coronavirus truthers.” Their video did not attempt to project their own experiences onto the world - indeed, where they did cite statistics outside of Bakersfield, they used “official” statistics from health authorities, in Sweden and elsewhere, to support their claim that the fatality rate was being significantly overestimated because most cases were asymptomatic. Their video was literally broadcast on “mainstream media,” an “authoritative source” in the eyes of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. But its incompatibility with prevailing coronavirus dogma meant it had to be destroyed.

The orthodox narrative also jettisons long-accepted science about immunity. Vitamin D - obtained from sunlight absorbed through the skin - has been proven in study after study to be integral to a healthy immune system, and several recent studies have demonstrated its importance in surviving Covid-19 infection. Likewise, loneliness has been linked to diminished immune function and poor health in general, especially in elderly people (i.e. those most susceptible to Covid-19), and even those who are quite content with being alone are experiencing diminished immune stimulation due to not interacting with other people. The link between isolation and ill health is so strong that even the media establishment has quietly acknowledged it, and solitary confinement is considered cruel and unusual punishment in many countries. No less than the World Economic Forum, co-organizer of the notorious Event 201 simulation that served as a dress rehearsal for Covid-19 itself, has called the stay-at-home orders that have confined more than half the world’s population to their homes “the world’s biggest psychological experiment.” The ruling-class conclave warned “we will pay the price” in a secondary mental-illness epidemic, one which its members - heavily invested in the pharmaceutical companies that are among the biggest winners of the pandemic - are no doubt poised to cash in on with antidepressants, benzodiazepines and antipsychotics aplenty. Nevertheless, questioning the wisdom of prolonged isolation in the form of extended lockdowns is still seen as anathema.


Deprogramming
To begin to free humanity from the influence of the Corona Cult, it’s important to understand how its programming took hold. Guilt - environmental guilt, racial guilt, class-based guilt - is the primary route of attack. The media establishment initially attempted to link the coronavirus outbreak to climate change, with even the Pope climbing on board the narrative, though no scientific basis exists to support it and it has since been somewhat de-emphasized. Heretics are repeatedly accused of prioritizing their own convenience over the health of society, especially its most vulnerable members - the elderly, the sick, even poor and non-white populations. Depending on the target audience, anti-lockdown heretics are said to be scientifically-illiterate "covidiots" or heartless monsters consigning the disadvantaged to die for capitalism. Guilt and shame are powerful conversion tools, and even those who remain unconverted are likely to hold their tongues in a sociological phenomenon known as the spiral of silence.

At the same time, humanity’s innate religious tendencies (present in even atheists - millennia of programming don’t vanish just because a person comes to the realization they live in a godless universe) - have been hijacked. It’s no coincidence that governments imposing lockdowns have singled out places of worship for particular animus - anyone attending religious services is presumably content enough with their god(s) that they’re unlikely to ditch their faith for a virus-venerating cult-come-lately. Constantly bombarded with messages of uncertainty and kept from communing with their usual faith, even people normally secure in their religion will reach for the stability the Corona Police State provides - authoritarianism’s flip side is paternalism, and comfort is found in the arms of Big Brother. Among the non-religious, liberal and libertarian populations alike are targeted with the weaponization of medical jargon - a simple “what’s the matter, you don’t believe in science?” sends weak-willed groupthinkers into shameful silence while their freedoms are methodically amputated.

It is supremely ironic that in this Inquisition, the “real” church has been sidelined. Aside from the Pope, who has wholeheartedly embraced the New Normal, a group of Catholic leaders recently issued a statement calling out governments, the media, and public health experts, denouncing the Covid-19 narrative as cover for “infringing on the rights of millions of people around the world.” Cynical scholars of religious history might suggest they’re motivated by jealousy - “stop using dogma to control people, that’s our job!” - but their concerns are no less valid, and the feeling of envy cuts both ways. The single-minded determination of police to break up even those church services scrupulously observing social distancing with worshipers sitting isolated in their cars can only be explained by eschatological jealousy. To truly force the Cult of Corona down the throats of the people, the competition must be eliminated, whether it’s “traditional” religion or logic, reason and the (real) scientific method.

Deprogramming the world from the Cult of Corona cannot be done by force - its backers have too much power, including total control of both establishment and social media. It must be approached strategically. Just as traditional “deprogrammers” will isolate a cult member from the group, reasoning there’s a much better chance of re-awakening the original personality when the person is not experiencing the pressures of groupthink, deprogramming Corona Cultists is best done one-on-one, keeping in mind that cultists will ferociously defend their dogma with thought-stopping techniques which can be extremely irritating to outsiders trying to convey dissenting information. Former "Moonie" Steven Hassan's BITE model (above) describes how cults exert undue influence and is useful in approaching deprogramming.

The notion of deprogramming entire societies may seem daunting, but it is the only chance humanity has to retain some semblance of freedom and turn back from the dark path down which our species is heading. The ruling class is imposing a comprehensive, multilayered control grid that has been in the works for decades, and when it is complete, revolution will not be an option. Such a future must be avoided at all costs.


Read with proper formatting, links, illustrations and comments here: Duck and Cover and Burn the Heretics: the Modern-Day Cult of Corona

Earlier i posted Against the Corona Panic Part XII: Is Corona a religious cult? An anthropological study. (Or, Corona as virus-centered apocalypse cult; its ascent to state religion; the mass-conversion event to the cult; a study of the cult.) which is an article posted on a different blog that approaches corona from the same cult angle, also well worth a read!

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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby liminalOyster » Sun May 24, 2020 6:31 am

mentalgongfu2 » Sat May 23, 2020 9:33 am wrote:I rather expect a Pizzagate 2.0..


3-2-1.......

Journalist Says She Would Vote Biden Even ‘If He Boiled Babies and Ate Them’
By Charlie NashMay 21st, 2020, 3:45 pm
1032 comments

The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt claimed on Wednesday she would vote for presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden even “if he boiled babies and ate them.”

In a heavily-criticized article, Pollitt shrugged off former Senate staffer Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation against Biden, declaring, “I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them. He wasn’t my candidate, but taking back the White House is that important.”

“I cannot believe that a rational person can grasp the disaster that is Donald Trump and withhold their support from Biden because of Tara Reade,” Pollitt wrote. “I would say this even if I had no problems with Reade’s account. I take women’s accusations very seriously, but there have always been reasons to be skeptical about this one. To believe Reade, you have to believe that Biden put her up against a wall and penetrated her with his fingers on the spur of the moment in a hallway in the Capitol complex, where she says she was looking for him to give him his gym bag. This corridor, which she can’t precisely identify, is a public space,” she wrote. “To believe Reade, you have to believe Biden would take that risk.”

She added, “Whether or not you believe Tara Reade … you should vote for Joe Biden if he is the nominee. … We do not have the luxury of sitting out the election to feel morally pure or send a message about sexual assault and #BelieveWomen. That will not help women at all. Or anyone else.”

The article was criticized by others in the media, including by The Hill Rising co-host Krystal Ball, who commented, “Democrats used to have contempt for what they viewed as stupid MAGA cultists who would vote for Trump even if he shot someone on 5th ave. Now they have become what they hated.”

[snip] .... more at link

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/journalist-says-she-would-vote-biden-even-if-he-boiled-babies-and-ate-them-taking-back-white-house-is-that-important/


My money is on Ai-Wei-Wei getting roped in (Chinese dissident and all) viz his 2000 curatorial connection to the notorious Zhu Yu stunt.
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby Nordic » Sun May 24, 2020 5:39 pm

https://mynorthwest.com/1889564/rantz-g ... us-deaths/

Rantz: Gun shot victims counted as Washington coronavirus deaths

In a telephone press briefing last week, public health officials with the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) acknowledge their data collection is unusual.

“So our method that we use to give up to date counts related to COVID death is not our usual process for how we track data for deaths in Washington,” Dr. Katie Hutchison, Health Statistics Manager for DOH. “We had to modify what we normally do in order to quickly meet the data and informational needs of the pandemic. We’re aware that there is some confusion about how this works and whether or not this modified process is accurate.”

It seems obvious that their data is not accurate. They imply as much: “Our dashboard numbers do include any death to a person that has tested positive to COVID-9.”

That means, if a COVID-19 patient dies of a gun shot wound or in a car crash, the data lists that patient as a coronavirus death. If a tree falls on a coronavirus patient and kills them? It’s listed as a coronavirus death.


“We currently do have some deaths that are being reported that are clearly from other causes,” Dr. Hutchison admits. “We have about five deaths, less than five deaths, that we know of that are related to obvious other causes. In this case, they are from gunshot wounds.”
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby JackRiddler » Sun May 24, 2020 6:17 pm

Journalist is an extremely dubious term to apply to Pollitt. She doesn't report, doesn't research, just comments. So she's a columnist, and a pretty bad one, and has been doing the same liberal contrarian schtick (pretending to be controversial but consistently doing it in the service of conventional wisdom and against the left) for 30 years. But yeah, the level of Pizzagate would be to pretend a dumb oh-so-daring phrase of hers about eating babies should be taken literally, and to whole-cloth fabulate a grand conspiracy narrative out it that involves her in a baby-eating conspiracy with leading Democrats and only Democrats. And you know what? She doesn't deserve that. She deserves to not be published in The Nation or The New Yorker or any other relatively high-profile pub, but again, that's also 30 years too late. (How are we talking about this on this thread again?)
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby Grizzly » Mon May 25, 2020 1:23 am

CoronaVirus Roots - 50 Years Of NATO Bioweapons Proxies




Australian scientists find COVID-19 binds to human cells "far more" than to other animals, suggesting virus came from a lab, not nature
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby Belligerent Savant » Mon May 25, 2020 12:47 pm

Joe Hillshoist » Sat May 23, 2020 10:48 pm wrote:
Belligerent Savant » 24 May 2020 05:10 wrote:.

I'm struggling to attribute this 'policy' to mere incompetence.


Indeed. Especially since they sent an f'ing floating hospital to dock in NYC that was left largely EMPTY of patients and has since been sent on its merry way to the memory hole.



Last patients leave USNS Comfort as it readies to leave New York

It's expected to depart this week.

April 27, 2020

...

The ship floated mostly empty since it docked on March 30, part of an effort to increase New York’s hospital capacity in the face of the coronavirus outbreak to assist in an overflow of patients that hasn’t reached the levels experts feared.

...

https://www.lohud.com/story/news/corona ... 031879001/



Sorry folks, i'm increasingly leaning towards this event being manufactured (perhaps not from the onset; the origins of this new strain remain in question, but it increasingly appears to be the case that the reactions/clampdown measures implemented by world leaders -- as facilitiated/pushed by the F'ing WHO -- was not as 'reactionary" as initially presented) as part of a large-scale economy realignment exercise. The decision was made to expedite movement into the next 'revolution' ("smart" cities, remote workers, AI, mass-monitoring/tracking, higher profit margins for the few at the expense of the many, etc.), and so far, it's working out quite well for the few.

Other factors may have contributed to the timing of this. The economy may well have been on the verge of imminent collapse/in dire need of a 'reset' regardless of this event. This pandemic is either highly fortuitous timing, or again, part of a larger objective for re-alignment planned for the coming years, fast-tracked by lockdown measures.

Perhaps i'm applying brush strokes too broadly (well, yes, i'm definitely doing that). Time will tell.

I leave you with a few snippets from a source that may elicit groans, and while I disagree with aspects of this opinion piece, there are certain lines that ring true - in my view, at least.


...

[Snip]

While we can’t possibly derail progress and stop the Digital Revolution, we can end the accompanying fraud and extra-legal restrictions on our freedom to move.


https://www.unz.com/ishamir/coronavirus-conspiracies/


And here, one of numerous suggestions and hints of what will follow:

Image


I don't necessarily disagree with much of the underlying premise but things like that piece irritate me cos of the secret dog whistles and disinformation they contain.

For example the stuff about why only rich countries get this virus. It's just bullshit.

Even most rich countries can't keep track of what is actually going on in terms of numbers, cases and deaths, so the idea that poor countries can, when often they don't even have the infrastructure to enable testing in the first place, is dumb as fuck or an attempt to manipulate the reader into misinterpreting what is happening so they can buy into the author's premise. (It also reminds me of the old White male idea that there is a level playing field for other people as well. My personal observation is that now Neo liberalism is finally starting to actually most white working men (instead of quietly screwing them) they've finally noticed that it is a fundamentally flawed system.)

The rest of the world doesn't have the sort of health care set up most western nations have, even with as fucked a system as the US one it's still better than places where health care is rudimentary at best. How the fuck would they know who has the virus and who doesn't?

Not to mention the fact there is a relationship between economic power and the ability to move freely. As this author is noticing as he releases he might be able to fly wherever and whenever he wants. The virus has taken advantage of this relationship to spread, which is why in countries like mine it's wannabe Stazi types like our homeland security shithead, Peter Dutton, who brought it into the country after a five eyes meeting, or the wealthy upper middle class types who can afford constant travel that brought it in. Cruise ships are also pretty luxurious by most of the planets population standards so they count too. Tho in Australia most people could afford a cruise holiday if the scrimped and saved.

Ie it's the elite - the ruling class and their upper middle class wannabes - that have spread this virus internationally, at least into Australia. The people who can afford travel. When it was poorer people spreading it internationally its workers travelling from China to Italy, essentially to enable the elite and their wannabe mates to get more work for less wages. Or poorer workers in Singapore or the Middle East. In India it's been spread by poorer workers who have been sent home by their elite masters.

So if there was merit in the idea the mega rich are taking advantage of this situation to loot the world and re organise the world to their liking he's just dis credited it with such a flawed statement.

It's dog whistling to the people who have been hardest hit, working poor, lower middle and working class people, even now the under employed and the new members of the underclasses, blaming tech giants for what is actually the end result of Neo liberalism's structural flaws. Once upon a time most (white) working class people could live the dream, ie own their own house, all sorts of consumer items from cars and appliances to entertainment appliances from tells to version to digital and information based stuff we have today, and still afford fairly modest holidays but holidays that were way beyond even the elite of a couple of generations earlier.

That's been taken away, not by this virus but by three decades of voodoo economics.

But it's not accurate, it just seems accurate from that point if view. It's reframing a lot of good ideas in the service of poor ones.



I'm in general agreement with your commentary. I had my own objections with portions of that piece, per my preface.

Dog whistles abound, particularly in mainstream media narratives. Part of the gameplan for events of this scale.

I won't care to/presume to speak for the author, but Re: his bit on 'no covid in poor countries' (compared to wealthy countries), i interpreted that as a generalized statement on the 'magic' of targeted optics/information management.

We know that, at least in the U.S. and other first-world countries, the metrics are unreliable: deaths are being attributed to covid, and marked as a covid-death, even when primary cause of death was due to other factors (cancer, etc); they're even assigning covid deaths for anyone that had flu-like symptoms but weren't tested.
Infection rate/count is limited by the amount of tests administered, so mortality rate will seem higher than it actually is.

Compare that to a 'poor' country that may well have covid-related deaths but
1. Aren't tracking it, or
2. Aren't taking similar measures due to a variety of factors, perhaps largely economical;
3. Less 'incentive' by the WHO/global mandate authorities to track/enforce measures in poor nations, etc.

If the media/govts treated this latest strain as nothing more than another type of flu, would the 'excess death rate' (which is generally going to be higher during flu season) have been as markedly higher as projected/reported? High enough to have justified the devastation to lives, livelihoods, and small/medium business (due to extent of lockdown measures)?

I'm only offering half-baked replies here -- in a lazy mood at the moment -- but this former Isreali politico touches on some of these themes as well.




‘Nothing can justify this destruction of people’s lives’
Yoram Lass, former director of Israel’s Health Ministry, on the hysteria around Covid-19.




Countries across the world have been in lockdown for months in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The costs of the policy are enormous – in terms of life, liberty and the economy. But is it worth it to save lives? Yoram Lass was once the director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Health. Lass is a staunch critic of the lockdown policy adopted in his native Israel and around the world. He has described our response to Covid-19 as a form of hysteria. spiked caught up with him to find out more.

spiked: You have described the global response to coronavirus as hysteria. Can you explain that?

Yoram Lass: It is the first epidemic in history which is accompanied by another epidemic – the virus of the social networks. These new media have brainwashed entire populations. What you get is fear and anxiety, and an inability to look at real data. And therefore you have all the ingredients for monstrous hysteria.

It is what is known in science as positive feedback or a snowball effect. The government is afraid of its constituents. Therefore, it implements draconian measures. The constituents look at the draconian measures and become even more hysterical. They feed each other and the snowball becomes larger and larger until you reach irrational territory. This is nothing more than a flu epidemic if you care to look at the numbers and the data, but people who are in a state of anxiety are blind. If I were making the decisions, I would try to give people the real numbers. And I would never destroy my country.

spiked: What do the numbers tell us, in your view?

Lass: Mortality due to coronavirus is a fake number. Most people are not dying from coronavirus. Those recording deaths simply change the label. If patients died from leukaemia, from metastatic cancer, from cardiovascular disease or from dementia, they put coronavirus. Also, the number of infected people is fake, because it depends on the number of tests. The more tests you do the more infected people you get.

The only real number is the total number of deaths – all causes of death, not just coronavirus. If you look at those numbers, you will see that every winter we get what is called an excess death rate. That is, during the winter more people die compared to the average, due to regular, seasonal flu epidemics, which nobody cares about. If you look at the coronavirus wave on a graph, you will see that it looks like a spike. Coronavirus comes very fast, but it also goes away very fast. The influenza wave is shallow as it takes three months to pass, but coronavirus takes one month. If you count the number of people who die in terms of excess mortality – which is the area under the curve – you will see that during the coronavirus season, we have had an excess mortality which is about 15 per cent larger than the epidemic of regular flu in 2017.

Compared to that rise, the draconian measures are of biblical proportions. Hundreds of millions of people are suffering. In developing countries many will die from starvation. In developed countries many will die from unemployment. Unemployment is mortality. More people will die from the measures than from the virus. And the people who die from the measures are the breadwinners. They are younger. Among the people who die from coronavirus, the median age is often higher than the life expectancy of the population. What has been done is not proportionate. But people are afraid. People are brainwashed. They do not listen to the data. And that includes governments.

spiked: Do the lockdowns have any positive effect on people’s safety?

Lass: Any reasonable expert – that is, anyone but Professor Ferguson from Imperial College who would have locked down everybody when we had swine flu – will tell you that lockdown cannot change the final number of infected people. It can only change the rate of infection. And people argue that by changing the rate of infection and ‘flattening the curve’, we prevented the collapse of hospitals. I have shown you the costs of lockdown, but this was the argument in favour of it. But look at Sweden. No lockdown and no collapse of hospitals. The argument for the lockdown collapses.

spiked: Why have some countries suffered so much more than others from Covid-19?

Lass: For example, you can compare Italy to Israel. In the Middle East, this virus is not really working. There are two reasons. One is that there is a very young population, and the other is that the climate is different. In the latitude of 50 degrees, which is Europe, and 40, which is the north-eastern United States, the virus is much more viable. Italy has the oldest population in the world apart from Japan. Italians are also are heavy smokers and very social people – they keep hugging and kissing. If you look at the numbers, in 2017, 25,000 Italians died from flu complications. Now you have around 30,000 dying from coronavirus. So it is a comparable number. You should not ruin a country for comparable numbers.

spiked: What has it been like in Israel?

Lass: In Israel, we have two layers of fear. The hysteria is similar to the rest of the world. However, we have a prime minister who has been resuscitated by coronavirus by adding another layer of fear. I do not think there is any other prime minister who has spoken about coronavirus in terms of the medieval Black Death, the Holocaust and the end of humanity in this way. Did Boris Johnson mention the Black Death? I do not think so. That is the special situation in Israel.

spiked: How does coronavirus compare to past pandemics?

Lass: If you look at the 1950s, we had the Asian flu. In the 1960s, there was the Hong Kong flu. These were worse than this pandemic. Also, look at the story of swine flu in 2009, which began exactly the same as coronavirus. A new virus originated in Mexico. There was no vaccine so it was very frightening. It spread all over the world. It infected one billion people. A quarter of a million people died. But there was no lockdown, no Ferguson, nothing – people were far more interested in the economic crisis that hit a year before in 2008. They did not have time to give attention to this nonsense.

spiked: Will the pandemic be over soon?

Lass: The virus, like the influenza virus, is saying farewell to western Europe for sure. The same in the Middle East. In the United States, we do not know yet, so we should talk in a month from now. But nothing can justify this destruction of people’s lives. It is unbelievable.

Yoram Lass was talking to Fraser Myers.


https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/2 ... les-lives/

We may not be in a position to speak with as much confidence as Yoram Lass does here, but in a year's time i imagine we'll have a clearer view as to degree of the fuckery we're currently enduring.
Last edited by Belligerent Savant on Mon May 25, 2020 1:20 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

Postby stickdog99 » Mon May 25, 2020 12:49 pm

I have noticed throughout my life that a large plurality of people just love to judge other people by whatever standards (religious, moral, political correctness, insurance, environmental, dietary, supposed healthiness of habits, reasonable, unreasonable or completely arbitrary) any authority figures announce.

And it's amazing how malleable the standards of judgment of most of these people are. The main reason these people seem to follow the news is to learn the currently approved standards of thought and behavior and rigorously adhere to them so that they can enjoy the pleasure of damning anyone they encounter who does not. And thinking about the Middle Ages, I can't help but wonder whether this condition is congenital. How long has human society genetically selected for Pharisees?
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