- Trump Fires Ukrainegate Inspector General Who Helped Initiate Impeachment
Trump Fires Ukrainegate Inspector General Who Helped Initiate Impeachment
President Trump on Friday fired the intelligence community inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who brought a hearsay whistleblower complaint to Congressional Democrats, kicking off President Trump’s impeachment.
Atkinson’s closed-door testimony was so troubling to House Republicans that they launched an investigation into his role into what President Trump and his allies coined the ‘impeachment hoax.’
Ranking member of the House Intelligence Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes (R-CA) told SarahCarter.com that transcripts of Atkinson’s secret testimony would expose that he either lied or needs to make corrections to his statements to lawmakers.
Trump notified the Senate and House Intelligence Committees of his decision to fire Atkinson, according to Politico, citing two congressional officials and a copy of a letter dated April 3.
“This is to advise that I am exercising my power as president to remove from office the inspector general of the intelligence community, effective 30 days from today,” wrote Trump, who added that he “no longer” has the fullest confidence in Atkinson.
“As is the case with regard to other positions where I, as president, have the power of appointment, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, it is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as inspectors general,” Trump wrote. “That is no longer the case with regard to this inspector general.”
Trump knocked Atkinson on January, noting that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) decision to withhold Atkinson’s testimony was a “major problem.”
….the Ukraine Hoax that became the Impeachment Scam. Must get the ICIG answers by Friday because this is the guy who lit the fuse. So if he wants to clear his name, prove that his office is indeed incompetent.” @DevinNunes @MariaBartiromo @FoxNews The ICIG never wanted proof!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2020
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Democrats had a fit at the news, with Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) calling Atkinson’s firing “unconscionable” while accusing Trump (with a straight face?) of an ongoing effort to politicize intelligence.
“In the midst of a national emergency, it is unconscionable that the president is once again attempting to undermine the integrity of the intelligence community by firing yet another intelligence official simply for doing his job,” wrote Warner in a statement.
Warner’s House counterpart, Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) called Atkinson’s firing “retribution” in the “dead of night” – adding that it’s “yet another blatant attempt by the president to gut the independence of the intelligence community and retaliate against those who dare to expose presidential wrongdoing.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck ‘six ways from Sunday’ Schumer (D-NY) said Atkinson’s firing was evidence that Trump “fires people for telling the truth,” according to Politico.
Whistleblower lawyer and Disneyland aficionado Mark Zaid – who once bragged about getting security clearances for pedophiles, called the firing “delayed retaliatory action” for Atkinson’s “proper handling of a whistleblower complaint.”
“This action is disgraceful and undermines the integrity of the whistleblower system,” said Zaid. “It is time GOP members of the Senate stand up for the rule of law and speak out against this president.”
The whistleblower complaint effectively kicked off the House’s impeachment inquiry, which began in late September amid allegations that Trump had solicited foreign interference in the 2020 election when he asked Ukraine’s president to investigate his political opponents, including Joe Biden.
Atkinson opposed the decision by then-acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire to withhold the whistleblower complaint from the House and Senate intelligence committees — in particular, Maguire’s decision to seek guidance on the issue from the Justice Department, rather than turn it over to Congress as required by law. –Politico
Tyler Durden
Sat, 04/04/2020 – 00:10 - The Shadow War Playing Out Behind The COVID-19 Crisis
The Shadow War Playing Out Behind The COVID-19 Crisis
Authored by Gregory Copley via OilPrice.com,
The rush to what is essentially a new wartime footing began consciously and urgently in the first quarter of 2020 between some of the most powerful geopolitical players of the modern era: the United States of America, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the United Kingdom.
It was not about the “battle” to cope with the COVID-19 (coronavirus) epidemic, or the global fear pandemic which it engendered, but those contagions broke the cycle of globalism and the belief in the indissoluble nature of interdependence. It allowed what was already emerging as a fundamental move toward a new, bipolar global competition to come out into the open.
By the end of March 2020, the global framework had changed sufficiently to become — behind the headlines about COVID-19 — about which system and ideology would triumph in the decades after the watershed. That meant a race by each of the major antagonists to determine how quickly national productivity could be resumed.
Even so, the failure of most major societies, including the PRC, to prepare for health pandemics, natural disasters, and associated contagions of fear was a significant function of the transformed realities of the “globalist”-dominated political structures over the earlier lessons of national self-reliance. I made this point in a report in Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis on November 24, 2008:
The unintended, or unforeseen, consequences of economic dislocation — as this writer has repeatedly noted — can be expected to lead to a rise in globalized (or at least regionalized) pandemic health challenges at a time when societies are weakened. These will lead to wealthier societies becoming more nationalistic and isolated, in some respects, merely to protect themselves. Pandemics will be matched by similar anomic social responses, including rising crime, of which the new era of maritime piracy is merely one aspect
Indeed, it is clear that the best avenue which nation-states can take is one marked by gaining as much control over their own destinies as possible. That requires a growing focus on domestic food self-sufficiency, and domestic market bases for manufactured goods and services. In other words: a return to a sense of the nation. The age of globalization is ending; it was a brief window in which the technologies which were created to fight the Cold War became the technologies of global social integration. Now, again, the luxury of internationalism is ending, and survival is based around the extended clan: the nation.
It was a year later that the global H1N1 pandemic emerged, fortunately without triggering the associated fear pandemic which acted as a force multiplier to the impact of the 2019-20 COVID-19 epidemic.
By 2020, a dozen years later, the transformed strategic landscape meant that information dominance (ID) warfare was far more enabled, particularly as social media evolved as a conduit for mass mobilization to force government actions in Western societies. So there was a general transformation in the social and technological context which prevailed when the panic arose around COVID-19.
But, in order to gain the post-epidemic political high ground, the PRC was first to “declare victory” in managing the COVID-19 epidemic and to send its population back to work, despite the reality of evidence which defied the national statistics on the continuing levels of contagion in the PRC. However, it was clear that the epidemic, having its origins in Wuhan in the PRC, would peak first and begin to recover first. Still, it was the degree of top-down control which PRC Pres. Xi Jinping enjoyed — in contrast to Western heads of government — which enabled the PRC to “declare victory”, and to resume his offensive against the West in a now fairly blatant fashion.
Even so, it was clear that the overall nature of the restructured strategic balance would be less affected by a few weeks (or even months) in the battle to restart economic activity than by underlying fundamentals in systems. Meanwhile, as the information dominance (ID) wars between the PRC and (particularly) the US ramped up, both sides were careful to ensure that the risk of actual physical challenge was minimized.
What were some of the fundamental immediate outcomes and questions raised by the 2020 Fear Pandemic?
1. The global economy and the economies of most states have been dramatically weakened, and they will remain relatively weakened and transformed for some years; in many cases for decades. This means that economic deprivation will reach more pervasively down into the mass of society, reversing the trend of the past seven decades. It will exacerbate the polarization of societies, but seems likely to push the trend toward forms of nationalism more than it will reinforce the ideology of globalism;
2. The power of central governments has been dramatically increased, and the rights and freedoms of individuals constrained. By late March 2020, the situation in most Western societies had approached a quasi-martial law environment, with little social resistance;
3. Funding for R&D, national security, and consumer spending will decline, further exacerbated by the reduction in core size/wealth of most populations in advanced economies. The question is whether the limitation in wealth will exacerbate or constrain inflammatory populism and social action;
4. The role of global bodies has been weakened, as have alliances. This will lead to a rethinking of alliance structures and how to manage them. It will, even if only for reasons of fiscal constraints, lead to an increasing momentum toward the bilateralization of trade, even to the point, once again of thinking in terms of structured barter or counter-trade dealings;
5. The reach of formal military structures will be inhibited by funding, and will this open seams in the global power framework? Will it allow space for more independent, regional actions?;
6. While the Communist Party of China (CPC) probably has the strength to enforce control over the People’s Republic of China (PRC), will the European Union (EU) have sufficient cohesion to enforce control over its member states? If the EU cannot “hold it together”, would this create a space for Turkey to revive its neo-Ottomanist expansions in the Eastern Mediterranean and Balkans? Did the United Kingdom escape from the EU just in time to preserve its economic base? Did the EU’s poor handling of the crisis end forever the chance of bringing Serbia into the Union? And what will this new dynamic do for the encouragement of separate geopolitical alignments, such as the creation of the Three Seas Initiative as a potentially viable successor to part of the EU? Can Three Seas gain traction if Serbia is excluded, given its regional hub importance for the north-south infrastructural needs of the Alliance?;
7. What skills will be necessary in the post-2020 environment? Has the economy sobered enough to embrace the restoration of practical skills training instead of ideological education which has no market, while an impetus toward revived domestic manufacturing (rather than foreign-sourced manufacturing) will see significant demand for trained personnel?;
8. There was a widespread belief that the crisis had caused a collapse in petroleum and gas prices to the point where the US domestic shale industry would be forced from the marketplace, re-opening the US to the need for imported energy. But this is likely both untrue and irrelevant, and the US would remain considerably less vulnerable to energy exposure than the PRC;
9. The PRC would continue to see extreme vulnerability to food and water shortages, which can only be ameliorated by (a) dependence on imported food and agricultural products, most of which would need to come from the United States (given that other suppliers cannot meet the demand), and (b) reduction in the lifestyles and numbers of the PRC population, a factor which could have significant social-political ramifications;
10. The longer the constraints on societies imposed by the crisis, the more pro-found were the likely post-crisis attitude changes likely to be. In other words, if the crisis lingered in various forms through 2020, it was likely that the year would be seen by society and historians as a breakpoint equivalent to the world wars of the 20th Century;
11. Nowhere in the world have we seen the development of economic theories or approaches to managing societies in decline in terms of economics as well as in terms of the downward transformation of market size and demand. Studies of recent-term lessons from Japan, Russia, and Germany would be helpful, even though these examples all predicated their economic thinking — despite market size decline — on growth in economic opportunity, but with notable shortcomings;
12. Africa, which had moved from a Continent gradually modernizing within the framework of a Western model to one dependent almost solely on the PRC, was likely to be left in an almost ruinous situation by late 2020 and beyond. African societies would themselves be forced to evolve new economic models. There was a likelihood that the US would strongly move, in the post-crisis period, to strengthening its dominance in the Americas (where the PRC, in particular, had built a strong presence), and also in Central Asia, as a means of providing an alternate path in the Eurasian Silk Road complex.
The COVID-19 pandemic will do little to impact the demographic trends in global population numbers. The trend toward population decline was set in place in the second half of the 20th Century and is only now becoming evident. Similarly, the disruption to the global economy also began before the COVID-19 crisis, largely as a result of the global demographic transformation, but the 2020 crisis became an iconic breakpoint.
The post-COVID-19 world would thus be markedly different, structurally, than the world which preceded it. But most significantly, the perception of that “new” world would have changed, ensuring that a linear extrapolation of older remedies or progressions of earlier thinking would no longer be acceptable.
It is important to stress that the two underlying strategic trends impacting the US-PRC competition had begun well before the 2020 pandemic scares. The PRC economy had been essentially in decline for several years, disguised by ongoing state-sponsored investments in infrastructure projects, which boosted the appearance of growth in the gross domestic product (GDP). Moreover, the PRC’s water shortage and quality problems had reached almost panic levels over that same timeframe.
In a talk in Perth, Western Australia, on October 23, 2019, I noted:
[The PRC] has almost 20 percent (18.4 percent) of the world’s population, and yet only seven percent of its water, and of that water some 25 percent, at least [as the PRC Government acknowledges], is polluted, along with much of its agricultural water table [to a far greater degree than the PRC Govt. acknowledges]. And the problem is getting worse. The great water source, the aquifers flowing from the melting snows of the Tien Shan Mountain range in Central Asia, is reducing for the moment.
The result of this, and the fact that Chinese agriculture has not modernized to any great degree, is that the People’s Republic of China is perhaps more strategically dependent on imported food than any great power since Rome. And Rome, arguably, collapsed, finally, for that very reason: its foreign sources of food became less dependable. The PRC Bureau of Statistics in the 1980s recorded that there were some 50,000 rivers in mainland China. But by 2017, there were only some 23,000. Beijing, serviced by the so-called “Three Gorges Dam”, recorded in 2017 that 39.9 percent of its water was so polluted as to be unusable. Tianjin, a principal port city of the north (and with a population of 15-million), had only 4.9 percent of its water in a potable state.
The growing urbanization of the constituent populations of the PRC have made the food and water crises more and more urgent. Urban populations use far more water than rural societies. They also demand more water-intensive food, such as pork and beef, especially as the city-dwellers become more prosperous. And the PRC’s urbanization rate continues apace: by the end of 2017, some 58.52 percent of its population was urbanized, compared with only 17.92 percent in 1978.
You can see where this is going. And we have not even touched on the impact of air quality on health in the PRC, or the fact that urban-related diseases, such as diabetes, are rising at a higher rate than in other industrial economies; or the fact that a rapidly-aging population is transforming the economic viability of the state.
And by late 2019, it became clear that the PRC was unable to continue the pursuit of military equivalence with the US. Minnie Chan, writing in The South China Morning Post on November 28, 2019, noted that the PRC Government had canceled plans for the People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN) to build two nuclear-power very large aircraft carriers to compare with the capability of US carriers. The PLAN has two carriers afloat with two more abuilding; all conventionally-powered. The reasons for the cancelations of the prestige super-carrier program were cited as “technical challenges and high costs”.
The PRC has significant technologies which had briefly leapfrogged the US, particularly in the areas of hypersonic weapons and space, but belatedly a more resilient US economy was beginning to redress the years of neglect by all US presidents between Pres. Ronald Reagan (1981-89) and Pres. Donald Trump (2017- ). The US was slowly beginning to compensate for the sense of smugness and hubris which pervaded its global thinking after the end of the Cold War in 1990.
But the US had, along with most European powers, subcontracted most of its manufacturing to the PRC in the post-Cold War era, and the COVID-19 epidemic — and the US-PRC “trade war” which immediately preceded it (and which was likely to resume significantly in late 2020) — saw the extent of global dependence on mainland China factories. Beijing was counting on this dependence to restart its economic push in the second quarter of 2020.
But will that manufacturing/export revival be sufficient to restart the PRC economy, which was essentially already hollowed out?
And was the US (and Western) dependence on the PRC manufacturing sector likely to be the same as pre-COVID-19? Unlikely, given the reality that global demand would have declined substantially for at least the remainder of 2020 because of the economic impact of the crisis, and because a number of efforts to restore domestic manufacturing of key products had already begun in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, and the like.
Moreover, the weakness of the PRC position, economically, seems to be borne out by the understanding that it had made dramatic cuts in the first quarter of 2020 to its investment in its Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) global supply chain. BRI had, in its origins, been conceived merely as a material and transactional form of maoist globalist ideology; a way to bind foreign states to the PRC as “tributary” states and to provide the PRC with its resource needs and markets. But most of the BRI contracts and loans to foreign states had not been calculated on a realistic market basis.
Reports from Beijing indicated that funding for BRI projects had dropped in early 2020 by some 80 percent over the same period a year earlier. But some of these cuts were already well underway by the time the COVID-19 crisis struck.
The Hong Kong-based newspaper, The South China Morning Post, reported on October 10, 2019, that investment in BRI had begun to drop in 2018. It noted: “The value of new projects across 61 countries fell 13 percent to US$126-billion in 2018 [compared with the previous year], with the figure falling further in 2019.” In fact, it said that investment had fallen a further 6.7 percent in the seven months leading up to August 2019, and existing contracts were reduced by 4.2 percent in the first eight months of 2019.
The Post article continued: “[I]n the first half of 2019, China’s investment and construction activity around the world plunged by over 50 percent compared to the first half of 2018, while new projects under the belt and road plan dropped sharply, according to a report published in July by Derek Scissors, resident scholar at the China Global Investment Tracker from the American Enterprise Institute. Scissors said Chinese SOEs were still moving car and steel capacity overseas and building new motorways and cement plants in developing economies, but that is now “on a smaller scale” compared to the 2016 investment peak.”
The cutbacks were not only caused by Beijing. By late 2019 and early 2020, a significant number of major programs in the BRI which had received commitments from foreign countries were canceled or scaled-back. These were particularly evident in Pakistan (which has a major strategic need to depend on Beijing), Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Sierra Leone. The arrival of the new Government in Ethiopia in April 2018 had already seen that country sour on involvement with new BRI projects.
To a degree, all this decline in the PRC’s economic reach was likely to see the PRC attempt to regain global market share by dumping of goods onto the global marketplace in a bid to ensure that nationalistically-oriented commitments in the US, Europe, Australia, and the like did not attempt to rebuild their own manufacturing sectors. So the response by client states to PRC attempts to recapture markets and prevent the rise of national or sovereign independence would be a measure as to how much Western leaders learned from the crisis period of early 2020.
For this reason, strategically, it was critical for the Communist Party of China (CPC) to ensure that US Pres. Donald Trump was not re-elected to the US Presidency on November 3, 2020, and that the Democratic Party in the US would strengthen its position in the US Congress. As a result, the CPC’s information dominance warfare against the US was geared specifically toward the downfall of Pres. Trump, and in this it sought to enlist the support of the anti-Trump sections of the US polity. There were clearly some elements of the US political community which were prepared to align with Beijing — albeit not overtly — in order to ensure the removal of Donald Trump and the ascendance of Democratic Party presumed candidate Joe Biden.
So the US elections would become the next major breakpoint in the now overt US-PRC war.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 04/04/2020 – 00:00 - New York City "Doesn't Have Any Dogs Left To Foster" In Latest COVID-19-Related Shortage
New York City “Doesn’t Have Any Dogs Left To Foster” In Latest COVID-19-Related Shortage
There’s been shortages of all types as New York City deals with the unprecedented lockdown as a result of the coronavirus. But one of the most surprising of these shortages has been dogs and cats.
There’s been a “run on pets” in the city, according to Bloomberg, ostensibly as lonely New Yorkers realize they’re going to be locked inside without anyone to monopolize the conversation with or boss around. So, many of them have adopted fostered animals.
Shelters in the city say they have received a surge in applications that is as much as “10-fold” their normal rates. New Yorkers apparently see owning pets as a way to calm their nerves during a difficult time. And this means that pets are finding new, and hopefully happy, homes at a record rate.
Anna Lai, the marketing director at Muddy Paws said: “For the moment we definitely don’t have any dogs left to match with foster volunteers. Which is a great problem to have.”
Shares of pet-related companies have been surging during the pandemic, as well. Online pet supplier Chewy.com has seen shares rise 7% this year, despite the market’s near 30% pullback. Its delivery lead times have been extended to between 7 and 10 days for most customers.
RBC Capital Markets said in a report: “Chewy’s in-home delivery model mitigates the public health concern of consumers shopping at brick-and-mortar retailers.”
PetMed Express is another name that’s been outperforming. Its shares are up more than 7% during the S&P’s decline.
And the run on pets seems to extend itself far beyond New York. For example, The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in LA says they have seen a 70% increase in animals going to foster care, also. Julie Castle, chief executive officer of Best Friends said: “We’re seeing people show up in droves to foster.”
But rescue organizations are also worried the opposite will happen once the pandemic is over or the economy plunges further. They fear they could see a rise in surrendered pets.
Lisa LaFontaine, chief executive officer of the Humane Rescue Alliance said: “We’re doing whatever we can to empty all of our shelter facilities. We don’t know what’s going to happen when the economic wave starts hitting.”
But one Washington D.C. couple said the time was opportunistic for them to welcome a new member to the family. Tom Drescher and his wife, Becky Nolin said: “It occurred to us it would be a good time to adopt a dog because we’d have the time and bandwidth to help it settle in. It’s been a blast for us so far — we’ve been thrilled to have her.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 23:40 - The US Military Is Preparing For "Worst-Case Contagion Scenarios" (But It's A Secret)
The US Military Is Preparing For “Worst-Case Contagion Scenarios” (But It’s A Secret)
Authored by Eric Felten via RealClearInvestigations.com,
The U.S. military is “preparing for worst-case scenarios with respect to the potential spread” of the COVID-19 virus, U.S. Air Force Gen. Tod D. Wolters told reporters Friday.
But just what those scenarios are is a military secret. At a time when the president and his advisers hold daily press conferences where worst-case scenarios for civilians are frankly and alarmingly discussed, the Pentagon is moving to tighten what information it shares about COVID-19’s impact on the military.
The Department of Defense has been providing running totals of military-related COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and mortality, with separate figures for service members, their families, and civilian contractors. For example, as of Monday, the Pentagon reported 1,087 cases, of which 569 involved troops. These figures were higher by two-thirds than they had been Friday. But the demands of epidemiological accuracy are beginning to clash with the imperatives of operational secrecy.
“I’m not going to get into a habit where we start providing numbers across all the commands and we come to a point six, seven weeks from now where we have some concerns in some locations and reveal information that could put people at risk,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told Reuters.
No one wants to give bad actors the idea that American troop strength is weakened on any particular front.
If not necessarily weakening forces, the virus is already causing complications. The commanding general of the U.S. Army in Europe, Christopher Cavoli, has spent most of March in self-isolation after coming into contact with someone infected with COVID-19.
Lt.. Gen. Cavoli is just one of many officers who have taken to the internet to communicate with their troops via video. But missing from the videos is the officer one would most expect to see in that part of the world, the chief medical officer for the European theater. Brig. Gen. Ronald Stephens was relieved of command Monday. He had been suspended Feb. 12. For what, the Army isn’t saying – it’s a different sort of military secret — but the timing is less than optimal. Regional Health Command-Europe is being headed on an acting basis by Stephens’ former chief of staff, Col. Andre Pippen.
Wolters, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, was relatively forthcoming when he said that “to sustain the current readiness posture,” he might have to “go outside the forces I currently command.” But if it happens, don’t expect it to be announced: Department of Defense spokesperson Alyssa Farah put out a statement last week saying, “If at some point in the future, a commander believes that the coronavirus could affect the readiness of our strategic deterrent or strategic response forces we would understandably protect that information.”
A senior defense official told Military Times on Monday that though the Pentagon would be reporting general figures, it would be “tamping down” on the release of “unit, region and installation” details.
Dealing with disease is key to military readiness. Wars in which the majority of fatalities are due to battlefield slaughter are something of a 20th century invention. The Civil War displayed a staggering carelessness with men’s lives, whether Pickett’s suicidal charge or just about any campaign waged by U.S. Grant. And yet for all the carnage, of over 600,000 fatalities, some two out of three died from diseases, including dysentery, typhoid, malaria and tuberculosis.
In Britain’s Thirty Years’ War, “deaths from disease far outstripped deaths from weapon in this as in every European conflict prior to the twentieth century,” writes historian William H. McNeill in the book “Plagues and Peoples.” The Continental Army was ravaged with smallpox until George Washington forced reluctant troops to be vaccinated. “Disease has destroyed Ten Men for Us,” John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, “where the Sword of the Enemy has killed one.”
The U.S. military doesn’t face anything like that with COVID-19 so far. But it is a reminder of the importance of keeping soldiers healthy to keeping them ready as a fighting force.
Some fronts have already been affected, if only marginally, as coalition forces have been drawn down. In the last week, hundreds of troops from the Netherlands, France, Spain and Portugal have left Iraq and Afghanistan, redeployed to their home countries to bolster civilian responses to the disease. U.S. and British training with Iraqi forces has been suspended and some U.K. soldiers have returned to Great Britain for emergency assignments.
The U.S. military has a deeper bench, of course, and can afford to assign the Army Corps of Engineers to outfit temporary emergency hospitals and the Navy to sail hospital ships to home-front hot spots. But that could eventually lead to drawdowns significant enough that the Pentagon wouldn’t want it known.
Still, a more detailed picture is painted by the information given to troops than that given the public. The Army’s acting regional health commander for Europe, Col. Pippen, held a virtual town hall with other medical officers to answer questions about COVID-19 and the Army’s response. Soldiers and their spouses emailed in. The answers they were given suggest the Army’s health system is stressed, even at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the largest military hospital in Europe.
“Every time I call the Landstuhl appointment line, I get a busy signal,” was one exasperated complaint.
Col. Randall Freeman, deputy commander for health readiness at Landstuhl, didn’t have much to offer:
“Our network is very heavily burdened right now, with a much higher volume of calls than we normally have,” he said.
“I encourage patients to keep trying. Sometimes it takes three, four, or five tries to get through.”
Freeman and the other Army health officials said the hospital was going to be focused on urgent care, and all other services would have to be online.
Soldiers can normally expect that their medical information and that of their families will be handled according to HIPAA principles. But not in the age of COVID-19. A soldier’s wife who had been tested for the virus emailed the town hall to ask what had happened to her privacy. The results of her test had been given first to her husband’s commanding officer, then to her husband, and only only after that to her. “In a public health emergency,” Freeman responded, “the command has to know certain things that affect the ability of the unit to carry out its mission.”
Some of the steps normally taken to clear troops as ready are being pushed off. For example, soldiers have to pass an annual dental exam to be considered deployable. But such routine care is no longer available. “We have stopped offering readiness exam appointments,” Col. Manuel Pozo-Alonso, the Army’s dental regional commander for Europe, said in the virtual town hall. Dental personnel are being seconded to COVID-19 duties. He admitted that because of even that minor consequence of switching to a COVID-19 footing, “There will be a little detriment to our readiness over time.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 23:20 - San Francisco Bans Reusable Bags To Counter Virus-Contagion Threat
San Francisco Bans Reusable Bags To Counter Virus-Contagion Threat
The San Francisco Bay Area is usually ahead of the curve when it comes to implementing environmentally-friendly policies to save the planet. However, city officials banned reusable shopping bags Wednesday as a way to enforce social distancing protocols imposed by the state government to limit the spread of COVID-19.
The reusable bag ban was enforced by the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) under a new social distancing protocol that was published Wednesday, which restricts people from using reusable shopping bags at supermarkets to prevent outside germs from entering.
The order says explicitly that store employees are not allowed to let “customers bring their own bags, mugs, or other reusable items from home” into essential businesses during the quarantine.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed on Wednesday said the citywide shelter-in-place public health order would be extended through May 3:
“I can’t reiterate enough how important it is for all of us to continue to comply, for all of us to continue to be good citizens, to cooperate,” Breed said.
Today we officially extended the stay at home health order through May 3. I want to thank the people of San Francisco for continuing to do their part to save lives. I know this isn’t easy but we will get through it together. pic.twitter.com/4rggISBnQv
— London Breed (@LondonBreed) March 31, 2020
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Climate alarmist Greta Thunberg is going to be absolutely furiously about the ban. She’s been organizing a climate strike online because of the social distancing measures enforced by governments across the world.
However, Thunberg should be happy that the global economy has crashed, and pollution across China and Italy has subsided.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 23:00 - Waves Of Mutilation: Medical Tyranny And The Cashless Society
Waves Of Mutilation: Medical Tyranny And The Cashless Society
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
Back in 2014 during the Ebola scare in the US I published an article warning about how a global pandemic could be used by the elites as cover for the implementation of an economic collapse as well as martial law measures in western nations. My immediate concern was the way in which a viral outbreak could be engineered or exploited as a rationale for a level of social control that the public would never accept under normal circumstances.
And this could be ANY viral outbreak, not just Ebola. The point is the creation of an “invisible enemy” that the populace cannot quantify and defend itself against without constant government oversight.
I noted specifically how the government refused to apply air travel restrictions in 2014 to nations where the outbreak had taken hold when they could have stopped the spread in its tracks. This is something that was done again in 2020 as the UN’s WHO and governments including our government in the US refused to stop air travel from China, pretending as if it was not a hot zone and that the virus was nothing to worry about.
This attitude of nonchalance serves a purpose. The establishment NEEDS the pandemic to spread, because then they have a rationale for strict controls of pubic activities and movements. This is the end goal. They have no care whatsoever for public health or safety. The end game is to acquire power, not save lives. In fact, they might prefer a higher death count in the beginning as this would motivate the public to beg for more restrictions in the name of security.
Authorities went from downplaying the outbreak and telling people not to bother with preparations like purchasing N95 masks, to full blown crisis mode only weeks later. In January Trump initially claimed he “trusted” the data out of China and said that “everything was under control”; as usual only a couple months down the road and Trump flip-flopped on both assertions. The World Health Organization refused to even label this outbreak a “pandemic” until the virus was entrenched across the globe. The question people will ask is, was this all due to incompetence, or was it social engineering?
The Ebola event six years ago seems to have been a dry run for what is happening today. I believe it is entirely deliberate, and I will explain why in this article, but either way, governments have proven they cannot be trusted to handle the pandemic crisis, nor can they be trusted to protect the people and their freedoms.
At the same time, the pandemic itself is tightly intertwined with economic collapse. The two events feed off one another. The pandemic provides perfect cover for the crash of the massive debt bubble central banks and international banks have created over the years. I noted in February that the global economy was crashing long before the coronavirus ever showed up. At the same time, economic chaos increases 3rd world conditions within each country, which means poor nutrition and health care options that cause more sickness and more deaths from the virus. As outlined in 2014:
“Who would question the event of an economic collapse in the wake of an Ebola (virus) soaked nightmare? Who would want to buy or sell? Who would want to come in contact with strangers to generate a transaction? Who would even leave their house? Ebola (viral) treatment in first world nations has advantages of finance and a cleaner overall health environment, but what if economic downturn happens simultaneously? America could experience third world status very quickly, and with it, all the unsanitary conditions that result in an exponential Ebola (pandemic) death rate.
…Amidst even a moderate or controlled viral scenario, stocks and bonds will undoubtedly crash, a crash that was going to happen anyway. The international banks who created the mess get off blameless, while Ebola (viral outbreak), an act of nature, becomes the ultimate scapegoat for every disaster that follows.”
As the double threat of financial collapse and viral pandemic accelerate, fear becomes widespread for those that never prepared ahead of time (and we’re talking about millions of people). When people are afraid they tend to sacrifice their freedoms to anyone that offers them a promise of safety, no matter how empty. For now, the public is being convinced to assume that lockdowns and restrictions are temporary, but this is a lie. The elites must maintain and increase restrictions with each passing month in order to prevent rebellion until they are ready to implement martial law measures.
You see, the establishment is going for broke with this event, and because of this there is the potential for them to face dire consequences. The facade is quickly evaporating; the collectivists and globalists are risking exposure of themselves and their political puppets in order to build a totalitarian system with extreme speed. The establishment must keep the pressure on for now, because if the public is allowed to breath for just a moment they might look around and wake up to the bigger agenda. The public has to be forced to beg for aid from the authorities; only then will the pressure be lifted for a short time. The public has to believe the control grid was THEIR idea.
A new process of mass conditioning is about to be set in motion, using “waves” of panic and then waves of release and calm. After studying the behavioral traits and methods of narcissistic sociopaths (psychopaths) for many years, I can tell you this form of conditioning is very familiar. This is exactly what they always do, just on a global scale – They create an atmosphere of crisis to keep people around them unbalanced and on edge, then “relieve the pressure” intermittently so that those same people relax and their anger is deflated for a time. Then, the process starts all over again…
This conditioning traps the narcopath’s victims in a constant state of flux and uncertainty, and the moments of calm become a placebo which prevent their rebellion against him. He can then feed off his victims at his leisure like a psychological vampire, and often these victims will see the narcopath as their only means of support. They have been convinced that all the threats are coming from the outside; they do not realize the source of the threats is the person standing right next to them.
The wave model of conditioning and control is starting to show up everywhere, and it is most blatant in the intended “solution” presented by establishment elites in response to the coronavirus outbreak. As Truthstream Media outlined in their excellent video ‘We Are Living In 12 Monkeys’, MIT recently published a paper written by their globalist editor in chief Gideon Lichfield titled ‘We’re Not Going Back To Normal’ which admits quite brazenly how the elites intend to use this crisis to their advantage.
Lichfield lays out a kind of programming schedule for the population based on waves of viral infection outbreaks, waves of tight social restrictions, followed by waves of limited economic activity and limited calm over the next 18 months. As Lichfield suggests:
“To stop coronavirus we will need to radically change almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members.
We all want things to go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet realized—yet will soon—is that things won’t go back to normal after a few weeks, or even a few months. Some things never will.”
He continues:
“As long as someone in the world has the virus, breakouts can and will keep recurring without stringent controls to contain them. In a report yesterday researchers at Imperial College London proposed a way of doing this: impose more extreme social distancing measures every time admissions to intensive care units (ICUs) start to spike, and relax them each time admissions fall…”
Understand that there are 7 billion people on the planet, and this process of control could go on for years while we wait for every person to overcome the virus or die from it. The only way for the public to escape this purgatory (according to Lichfield) is for them to submit to a biometric data grid. They must volunteer (or be forced) to participate in 24/7 tracking through their cell phones and through mass surveillance. In order to function in society, an individual must have the proper digital marker which tells the authorities that they are “clean” and devoid of infection. The system is being used in China right now:
This system achieves a number of things. Much like the social credit system China has been using for the past few years, the public is compelled to constantly appease the hidden but all seeing eye of government. Everything they do is watched by algorithms and surveillance. Any deviation might trigger scrutiny and a loss of simple freedoms to move around or participate in normal human interaction. Lichfield argues:
“Ultimately, however, I predict that we’ll restore the ability to socialize safely by developing more sophisticated ways to identify who is a disease risk and who isn’t, and discriminating—legally—against those who are.
…one can imagine a world in which, to get on a flight, perhaps you’ll have to be signed up to a service that tracks your movements via your phone. The airline wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infected people or disease hot spots. There’d be similar requirements at the entrance to large venues, government buildings, or public transport hubs. There would be temperature scanners everywhere, and your workplace might demand you wear a monitor that tracks your temperature or other vital signs. Where nightclubs ask for proof of age, in future they might ask for proof of immunity—an identity card or some kind of digital verification via your phone, showing you’ve already recovered from or been vaccinated against the latest virus strains.”
And there you have it.
The social and biometric control grid that globalists have been hungry to set up for years now has the perfect catalyst – a viral pandemic which could cycle indefinitely; all that would be needed is to release a designer virus every couple years which renews public fear. The populace becomes increasingly dependent on government for everything as their very survival depends on their ability to function within the new economy, and without a special mark granted by government saying you are not an infection risk, you could be shunned from all trade and participation.
Refuse to get vaccinated due to health concerns? You’re kicked out of the economy. Homeschool your children? They have not been monitored and are therefore an infection risk, and your whole family is kicked out of the economy. Hold political views that are contrary to globalism? Maybe you are listed as a danger to the system and wrongly labeled infected as punishment; and then you are kicked out of the economy. The establishment can use the threat of economic removal to condition many people into complacency or slavery.
The MIT editor goes on to drive his point home in rather arrogant fashion:
“We’ll adapt to and accept such measures, much as we’ve adapted to increasingly stringent airport security screenings in the wake of terrorist attacks. The intrusive surveillance will be considered a small price to pay for the basic freedom to be with other people.”
Beyond the effort to turn “social distancing” into a new cultural norm enforced by law, there is another agenda being quietly instituted – the cashless society. More and more businesses are starting to refuse cash payments, claiming that paper cash spreads the virus. Oddly enough, they still accept debit cards using pin pads which are much more likely than cash to spread disease.
This may force the public to keep their money in banks despite the threat of a credit freeze or bank holiday. What if you pull cash out of your accounts but are not able to spend it anywhere? Eventually, they will ban debit and credit card transactions in stores as well, and replace them with a non-interactive payment model. This will probably be done through your cell phone in the beginning using a scanning app. In the end, they will use your biometric data for all money transactions.
This forces the public, yet again, to carry a cell phone on them everywhere for their very survival. The tracking network for the virus as well as the new payment transaction system makes this device indispensable. If you want to participate in society, you will have no choice but to be tracked and traced at all times.
Unless, of course, you build your own system of trade and interaction.
The solution to medical tyranny and the cashless society is to not need the system at all for your own survival. This means people will have to build their own economies based on barter and local scrip. They will have to dump their cell phones and rely on other forms of communication such as radio, or establish a digital communication system separate and independent from the establishment system. They will have to become producers and achieve more self reliance. They will have to break free from the grid, and this has to start RIGHT NOW.
Of course, the establishment will claim that these independent people are a threat to everyone else simply by existing. They will perpetuate the lie of “herd immunity” and will claim that independent people will “spread the virus”, even to those who are supposedly protected through vaccination. And eventually they will try to stop decoupled and localized communities from existing using force. At that point we simply go to war with the elites, as we were always going to have to do anyway.
The alternative is slavery in the name of the “greater good”, but there is no greater good without freedom, and there is no society without individuality. Pandemic be damned.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 22:40 - Here's Every Vaccine And Treatment In Development For COVID-19, So Far
Here’s Every Vaccine And Treatment In Development For COVID-19, So Far
As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases continues to skyrocket, healthcare researchers around the world are working tirelessly to discover new life-saving medical innovations.
As Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley notes, the projects these companies are working on can be organized into three distinct groups:
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Diagnostics: Quickly and effectively detecting the disease in the first place
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Treatments: Alleviating symptoms so people who have disease experience milder symptoms, and lowering the overall mortality rate
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Vaccines: Preventing transmission by making the population immune to COVID-19
Today’s graphics provide an in-depth look at who’s in the innovation race to defeat the virus, and they come to us courtesy of Artis Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on life sciences and tech investments.
Editor’s note: R&D is moving fast on COVID-19, and the situation is quite fluid. While today’s post is believed to be an accurate snapshot of all innovations and developments listed by WHO and FDA as of March 30, 2020, it is possible that more data will become available.
Knowledge is Power
Testing rates during this pandemic have been a point of contention. Without widespread testing, it has been tough to accurately track the spread of the virus, as well as pin down important metrics such as infectiousness and mortality rates. Inexpensive test kits that offer quick results will be key to curbing the outbreak.
Here are the companies and institutions developing new tests for COVID-19:
The ultimate aim of companies like Abbott and BioFire Defense is to create a test that can produce accurate results in as little as a few minutes.
In the Trenches With Coronavirus
While the majority of people infected with COVID-19 only experience minor symptoms, the disease can cause severe issues in some cases – even resulting in death. Most of the forms of treatment being pursued fall into one of two categories:
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Treating respiratory symptoms – especially the inflammation that occurs in severe cases
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Antiviral growth – essentially stopping viruses from multiplying inside the human body
Here are the companies and institutions developing new treatment options for COVID-19:
A wide range of players are in the race to develop treatments related to COVID-19. Pharma and healthcare companies are in the mix, as well as universities and institutes.
One surprising name on the list is Fujifilm. The Japanese company’s stock recently shot up on the news that Avigan, a decades-old flu drug developed through Fujifilm’s healthcare subsidiary, might be effective at helping coronavirus patients recover. The Japanese government’s stockpile of the drug is reportedly enough to treat two million people.
Vaccine
The progress that is perhaps being watched the closest by the general public is the development of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Creating a safe vaccine for a new illness is no easy feat. Thankfully, rapid progress is being made for a variety of reasons, including China’s efforts to sequence the genetic material of Sars-CoV-2 and to share that information with research groups around the world.
Another factor contributing to the unprecedented speed of development is the fact that coronaviruses were already on the radar of health science researchers. Both SARS and MERS were caused by coronaviruses, and even though vaccines were shelved once those outbreaks were contained, learnings can still be applied to defeating COVID-19.
One of the most promising leads on a COVID-19 vaccine is mRNA-1273. This vaccine, developed by Moderna Therapeutics, is being developed with extreme urgency, skipping straight into human trials before it was even tested in animals. If all goes well with the trials currently underway in Washington State, the company hopes to have an early version of the vaccine ready by fall 2020. The earliest versions of the vaccine would be made available to at-risk groups such as healthcare workers.
Further down the pipeline are 15 types of subunit vaccines. This method of vaccination uses a fragment of a pathogen, typically a surface protein, to trigger an immune response, teaching the body’s immune system how to fight off the disease without actually introducing live pathogens.
No Clear Finish Line
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet for solving this pandemic.
A likely scenario is that teams of researchers around the world will come up with solutions that will incrementally help stop the spread of the virus, mitigate symptoms for those infected, and help lower the overall death toll. As well, early solutions rushed to market will need to be refined over the coming months.
We can only hope that the hard lessons learned from fighting COVID-19 will help stop a future outbreak in its tracks before it becomes a pandemic. For now, those of us on the sideline can only do our best to flatten the curve.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 22:20 -
- America, We Have To End The Wars Now
America, We Have To End The Wars Now
Authored by Scott Horton via The Libertarian Institute,
Can anyone think what our society might have spent six and a half trillion dollars on instead of 20 years of war in the Middle East for nothing? How about the trillion dollars per year we keep spending on the military on top of that?
Invading, dominating and remaking the Arab world to serve the interests of the American empire and the state of Greater Israel sounds downright quaint at this point. Iraq War II, as Senator Bernie Sanders said in the debate a few weeks ago, while letting Joe Biden, one of its primary proponents, off the hook for it, was “a long time ago.” Actually, Senator, we still have troops there fighting Iraq War III 1/2 against what’s left of the ISIS insurgency, and our current government continues to threaten the launch of Iraq War IV against the very parties we fought the last two wars for. This would almost certainly then lead to war with Iran.
The U.S.A. still has soldiers, marines and CIA spies in Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Mali, Tunisia, Niger, Nigeria, Chad and only God and Nick Turse know where else.
Worst of all, America under President Donald Trump is still “leading from behind” in the war in Yemen Barack Obama started in conspiracy with Saudi then-Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman back in 2015. This war is nothing less than a deliberate genocide.
It is a medieval-style siege campaign against the civilian population of the country. The war has killed more than a quarter of a million innocent people in the last five years, including at least 85,000 children under five years old. And, almost unbelievably, this war is being fought on behalf of the American people’s enemies, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
These are the same guys that bombed the USS Cole in the port of Aden in 2000, helped to coordinate the September 11th attack, tried to blow up a plane over Detroit with the underpants bomb on Christmas Day 2009, tried to blow up another plane with a package bomb and launched the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, France since then. In fact, CENTCOM was helping the Houthi regime in the capital of Sana’a target and kill AQAP as late as January 2015, just two months before Obama stabbed them in the back and took al Qaeda’s side against them. So the war is genocide and treason.
As Senator Rand Paul once explained to Neil Cavuto on Fox News back before he decided to become virtually silent on the matter, if the U.S.-Saudi-UAE alliance were to succeed in driving the Houthi regime from power in the capital city, they could end up being replaced by AQAP or the local Muslim Brotherhood group, al-Islah. There is zero chance that the stated goal of the war, the re-installation of former dictator Mansur Hadi on the throne, could ever succeed. And yet the war rages on. President Trump says he’s doing it for the money. That’s right. And he’s just recently sent the Marines to intervene in the war on behalf of our enemy-allies too.
We still have troops in Germany in the name of keeping Russia out 30 years after the end of the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Empire, even though Germany is clearly not afraid of Russia at all, and are instead more worried that the U.S. and its newer allies are going to get them into a fight they do not want. The Germans prefer to “get along with Russia,” and buy natural gas from them, while Trump’s government does everything in its power to prevent it.
America has expanded our NATO military alliance right up to Russia’s western border and continues to threaten to include Ukraine and former-Soviet Georgia in the pact right up to the present day. As the world’s worst hawks and Russiagate Hoax accusers have admitted, Trump has been by far the worst anti-Russia president since the end of the last Cold War.
Obama may have hired a bunch of Hitler-loving Nazis to overthrow the government of Ukraine for him back in 2014, but at least he was too afraid to send them weapons, something Trump has done enthusiastically, even though he was actually impeached by the Democrats for moving a little too slowly on one of the shipments.
We still have troops in South Korea to protect against the North, even though in economic and conventional terms the South overmatches the North by orders of magnitude. Communism really doesn’t work. And the only reason the North even decided to make nukes is because George W. Bush put a gun to their head and essentially made them do it. But as Cato’s Doug Bandow says, we don’t even need a new deal. The U.S. could just forget about North Korea and it wouldn’t make any difference to our security at all.
And now China. Does anyone outside of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps really care whether the entire Pacific Ocean is an American lake or only 95% of it? The “threat” of Chinese dominance in their own part of the world exists only in the heads of hawkish American policy wonks and the Taiwanese, who should have been told a long time ago that they are on their own and that there’s no way in the world the American people or government are willing to trade Los Angeles and San Francisco for Taipei.
Perhaps without the U.S. superpower standing behind them, Taiwanese leaders would be more inclined to seek a peaceful settlement with Beijing. If not, that’s their problem. Not one American in a million is willing to sacrifice their own home town in a nuclear war with China over an island that means nothing to them. Nor should they. Nor should our government even dream they have the authority to hand out such dangerous war guarantees to any other country in such a reckless fashion.
And that’s it. There are no other powers anywhere in the world. Certainly there are none who threaten the American people. Our government claims they are keeping the peace, but there are approximately two million Arabs and Pashtuns who would disagree except that they’ve already been killed in our recent wars and so are unavailable for comment.
The George W. Bush and Barack Obama eras are long over. We near the end, or half-way point, of the Trump years, and yet our former leaders’ wars rage on.
Enough already. It is time to end the war on terrorism and end the rest of the American empire as well. As our dear recently departed friend Jon Basil Utley learned from his professor Carroll Quigley, World Empire is the last stage of a civilization before it dies. That is the tragedy. The hope is that we can learn from history and preserve what’s left of our republic and the freedom that made it great in the first place, by abandoning our overseas “commitments” and husbanding our resources so that we may pass down a legacy of liberty to our children.
The danger to humanity represented by the Coronavirus plague has, by stark relief, exposed just how unnecessary and therefore criminal this entire imperial project has been. We could have quit the empire 30 years ago when the Cold War ended, if not long before.
We could have a perfectly normal and peaceful relationship with Iraq, Iran, Syria, Korea, Russia, China, Yemen and any of the other nations our government likes to pretend threaten us. And when it comes to our differences, we would then be in the position to kill them with kindness and generosity, leading the world to liberty the only way we truly can, voluntarily, on the global free market of ideas and results.
That is what the world needs and the legacy the American people deserve.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 22:00 - Delaware State Police Authorized To Pull Over Out-Of-State Drivers During Pandemic
Delaware State Police Authorized To Pull Over Out-Of-State Drivers During Pandemic
Delaware police have been granted the authority to pull over drivers displaying out-of-state tags to ask questions about why they’re on the road, before telling them that “they are required by law to self-quarantine for 14 days while in Delaware, or immediately return to their state,” according to Gov. John Carney’s state of emergency declaration.
According to CBS Philly, the order excludes out-of-state drivers on I-95, I-295 and I-495, as well as motorists entering the state to work for an essential business, care for a family member or for health care reasons.
“Now is not the time to visit Delaware. As a state and a nation, we are facing a serious situation that is getting worse each day. Our goal is to limit a surge in COVID-19 cases that would overwhelm our hospital system. Per the order, we must control and prevent the spread of COVID-19 in our Delaware communities coming in from other states. We’ll get through this – but everyone needs to do their part,” reads a statement from the Delaware State Police.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 21:40 - In The New Age Of Deception, COVID-19 Has Hastened The Old Collectivism
In The New Age Of Deception, COVID-19 Has Hastened The Old Collectivism
Authored by Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com,
“…..but the plan insidiously advances.”
“They are banned from churches and public spaces. They can’t hold hands to pray. LOL!”
At the very end of last year, I wrote a New Year’s piece entitled “America is Over But You Knew That Already”, whereby various “cracks and water in the nation’s foundation” were explored. In that article, I said: “winter is finally here” along with these words:
Exactly how and when America’s foundational stones will shatter in the coming months is anyone’s guess, but do know this: When Progressive Democrats, and an activist mainstream media, stage a third-world impeachment trial of a U.S. President while reverently citing the words of the nation’s long-dead founders who were, by their own definition, privileged white males and racist slave owners – the end is nigh.
In a later article, six reasons were explored as to why the COVID-19 virus failed “the sniff test” along with the coincidental timing that marked the rise of the virus:
…[the first COVID-19 death outside of China] was one day before the Iowa Caucuses were held (2-3-2020) where the results were massaged to raise Mayor Pete over Bernie and bump Biden to the bare minimum viability.
It was also two days before the Diamond Princess cruise ship was quarantined in Japan … and three days before Trump was acquitted in the Senate.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the 2019-nCoV outbreak a global health emergency on January 30, 2020 when China’s death count was 213. How did they know? Regardless, the next day, President Trump declared the outbreak a public health emergency and restricted travel from China even as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, cited “8,000 deaths in the U.S. this season” from influenza.
Yet, in spite of COVID-19 being deemed infectious enough for WHO to declare a global health emergency, and Trump to declare a public health emergency, American citizens were evacuated from ground zero in Wuhan China and flown to March Air Reserve Base in Southern California. Additionally, over “300 U.S. citizens and their immediate family members” were transported from the Diamond Princess ship to Travis Air Force Base in Northern California, Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, and the University of Nebraska.
Next, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) released a COVID-19 infected former Diamond Princess passenger who was “mistakenly” allowed to spend two hours at a San Antonio mall.
These are the paradoxes of the Coronavirus pandemic: We were told the virus was extremely contagious and, yet, just as global and national health emergencies were declared, Americans infected with COVID-19 were repatriated to four (4) separate locations around the United States simultaneously.
Even now, all across America… bars, restaurants, and small businesses are shuttered as no more than 10 people are allowed to gather together at any given time. But, American’s First Amendment Right to Free Assembly remains viable at Wal-Mart. No problem there. And grocery stores are also deemed “essential” around the country – even as “dead bodies are loaded into refrigerated trucks outside New York hospitals”.
Indeed, there have been many oddities during the Coronavirus outbreak. One peculiarity is how the same players consistently appear to advance the narrative; to wit, Bill Gates, John Hopkins University, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the World Health Organization (WHO). These show up almost everywhere Coronavirus tales are told and, perhaps unsurprisingly, participated in the October 2019 Event 201 Pandemic Exercise – a near-exact simulation which took place a mere few weeks before the current COVID-19 outbreak went viral globally.
Although Bill Gates acknowledged “it’s super painful”, he urged a “10-week nationwide lockdown” during a CNN Global Town Hall on March 26, 2020 and has since outlined three steps for the U.S. Government’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak to include lockdown, testing, and vaccination.
But wait… isn’t Bill Gates the computer software guy? Yet he is now advocating for a national lockdown and specific COVID-19 response measures. How did he get from there to here exactly? Because, at this point, would you be surprised if outer space aliens landed on earth tomorrow with the cure? I know I wouldn’t.
These frightening times have become surreal. And just as the photos of the dead bodies on the refrigeration truck were absolutely terrifying, endless headlines have increasingly generated more fear. One prevailing theme tells of how Coronavirus threatens young people and the stories quite often cite the ever-available John Hopkins data:
A 28-year-old who said she and her boyfriend tested positive for the novel coronavirus is speaking out in hopes to remind the public that young, healthy adults are still at risk.
Noemi Orofino and her boyfriend Julian, 31, are now in recovery after fighting the COVID-19 virus, the new respiratory illness in which hundreds of thousands have been diagnosed globally, according to data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
The COVID-19 monster has infected actor Tom Hanks and his wife, various celebrities and athletes, and even recently killed CBS News veteran, Maria Mercader, who was only 54 years old. Of course, there were some underlying issues:
CBS News said Mercader fought cancer and related illnesses for more than 20 years, and noted that numerous treatments and surgeries had left her among the most vulnerable to the disease.
In the video below, Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford University, provides some insights into the data behind COVID-19, underlying conditions, infectivity and mortality rates, as well as how various countries have handled the “outbreak”. Dr. Ioannidis also shares some observations as to why Italy was gobsmacked by the virus more than other nations.
Now, contrast that presentation to the hysteria and emotionalism we’ve seen in the daily reporting of COVID-19. But, when you think about it, hasn’t hysteria and emotionalism been utilized throughout history to hasten the agendas of collectivism? In America, the most recent histrionics have been over climate change, identity politics, gun control, Orange Man bad, Russian election hacking, Judge Kavanaugh rape fantasies, Ukraine, impeachment, and… now… social distancing.
But where the former fell short, the last one has succeeded; a Hail Mary, as it were.
Overreaction to the novel virus has had the support of both Left and Right politicos as well as the mainstream and alternative media universes. And, as a result, Virginians can now be jailed for a year for attending church services with 10 people. Certainly, COVID-19 has provided new energy to Leftist schemes with brave new headlines in the New York Times such as “The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Evangelicals”:
Today, the hard core of climate deniers is concentrated among people who identify as religiously conservative Republicans. And some leaders of the Christian nationalist movement, like those allied with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has denounced environmental science as a “Cult of the Green Dragon,” cast environmentalism as an alternative — and false — theology.
This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis.
The bipartisan $2.2 trillion Cornonavirus Relief Bill has, once again, bailed out banks and corporations with taxpayer funds. And, as local businesses fade to black, global distribution networks are energized, and centralized, as companies like Wal-Mart and Amazon have benefited by the new normal. Soon, the nation’s healthcare system will be nationalized as digital dinero sends paper cash the way of the dinosaur – right along with privacy. Every financial transaction will be tracked and taxed as private ownership of property and goods wanes like Joe Biden’s memory.
Instead of Coronavirus and COVID-19 the invisible threat could have been called Communistvirus or CHICOM-19.
In my previous article, I described how Coronavirus was an Orwellian-style PLANdemic that killed the Constitution:
COVID-19 is a perfect means for a global reset – and in the United States, it had to happen under a Republican president. Why? Because conservative Americans own the guns.
If all this was happening under Hillary, Biden, Sanders, et al, there would be politicians hanging from street lights in Washington DC. But Trump is the great anesthetizer. For the past couple of years I’ve been writing article after article on how everything we’ve been watching has seemed like a reality TV show; a movie in our mind’s eye.
So I ask you this: What if Hillary, Trump, Russiagate, Mueller, Ukrainegate, impeachment … all of it… was part of the plan; distractions and cover stories for the build-up to what is happening now?
It’s perfect. Too perfect. And the timing was impeccable.
Even more than that: It’s too insane not to be on purpose.
To be sure, the leftist agenda has progressed according to plan.
The collectivist activist, Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), in his early 1970s book “Rules for Radicals” included itemized strategies such as “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules” (# 4) and “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition”(#10). For decades, the Political Left has had a plan and they’ve worked that plan.
Accordingly, the Left has never held itself accountable as it relentlessly challenged its ideological opponents to meet the demands of their own code. It’s why Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northam can wear blackface but comedienne Rosanne Barr can’t tweet a Planet of the Apes joke about former presidential aide Valerie Jarrett. It’s why Former President Bill Clinton can stain a blue dress but Judge Brett Kavanaugh is proven guilty of rape by vague recollections, lurid smears, and zero evidence. It’s how a Republican president was impeached for actions taken years before by a Democrat Vice President.
Every day of the year, every hour, the pressure is steadily applied by the Collective and their Orwellian Media Ministry of Truth. One drama unfolds, after another, after another until, today, even the compassion and civility of the American people has been weaponized into six-feet of separation.
In previous articles I’ve stated that COVID-19 has become the new Terrorism® and it’s stunning how “See Something, Say Something®” has been taken to entirely new levels with Coronavirus:
A group of armed vigilantes cut down a tree and dragged it across a man’s driveway in Maine to force him to quarantine in his home amid fears he could be infected with the coronavirus, officials said.
Welcome to the revolution. The individual must now assimilate into the collective.
The COVID-19 outbreak has proven to be a perfect coup de grace on America, and in ways we’re only beginning to realize. It has caused We the People to turn on each other under the guise of caring for one another. Or, Essentialism, twisted from the words of collectivist revolutionary Karl Marx (1814 – 1883): From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Here is a personal example of the new age: A few days ago, a friend sent me some nasty texts because he was told I held a meeting with five other people on private property. He claimed I was minimizing the danger to others. I replied that he was hysterical.
In a few months, if not weeks, this guy will be begging for Government As God to save him, and, in so doing, I have no doubt he’d sell me out to any governing authority for any reason. We’re about to enter into a real Walking Dead scenario and the Dark Powers will be getting years of mileage out of COVID-19 in every aspect of post-American life.
Truly, the new age will be delivered by concentrically tightening circles of control – like a noose. The Powers That Be have successfully divided and dispersed what they have deemed a threat: the American people. All that remains now is the conquering, and it will come in waves, or seasonal cycles.
It has begun and will now continue as the month of April 2020 has been canceled.
April fools.
From now until further notice, the COVID-19 Overton Window should be compared to watching an action movie in a crowded movie theater. On our screens, we’ll see Trump, like Rambo, kicking ass and taking names. But challenging the Coronavirus narrative will be akin to mute persons donning tinfoil hats and waving lighted cell phones from the back row.
The poet T.S. Elliot framed it best:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Hello? Can anyone hear? Anyone?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 21:20 - Here's How You Can 3D-Print Masks At Home
Here’s How You Can 3D-Print Masks At Home
A little more than a month ago, the US Surgeon General tweeted, “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
https://t.co/UxZRwxxKL9— U.S. Surgeon General (@Surgeon_General) February 29, 2020
Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is expected to reverse the recommendation on wearing face masks.
President Trump suggested on Thursday that new CDC guidelines could require Americans to wear masks.
But there’s a problem: Masks are in short supply – the average American can’t find 3M N95s or higher, and if they do, some masks can cost upwards $10 to $20 per. Several months ago, the masks were on Amazon or at Home Depot for $1 per, but huge demand as a pandemic unfolded has extinguished all supply. Even major US hospital systems are lacking masks and other medical equipment as confirmed cases reach 245,658 and deaths breach over the 6,000 level.
For anyone who didn’t heed our warning about purchasing 3M N95 masks in January/February – here’s another option: You can now 3D-print masks at home thanks to the medical students and engineers of Rowan University.
“Rowan University engineering and medical students have developed a prototype for a durable, lightweight, reusable face mask to augment the supply of face masks during the current shortage of PPE during the COVID-19 outbreak. The mask is provided “as-is” and primarily acts as a mechanical barrier. It is not a replacement for N95 masks.
Developed in collaboration with medical professionals, the mask prototype may serve in clinical and field use. If printed, used and maintained correctly, the mask provides a durable, reusable mechanical barrier,” read the Rowan University website.
“This is part of a humanitarian effort by Rowan,” said Dr. Shreekanth Mandayam, an engineering professor on the university’s Glassboro campus who is leading the project.
“It’s not just New Jersey and South Jersey where we are. There are plenty of countries around the world where there’s a shortage of PPE. This is a low-cost, quick solution people can use,” Mandayam said.
Courtesy of Courier-Post, students at Rowan show how the masks are assembled:
In a separate print operation, here’s a timelapse video of the masks are being printed:
COMMUNITY DONATES OVER 200 3D FACE MASKS IN 3 DAYS AFTER POLICE PLEA
Each 3D Mask Takes 2 ½ Hours to Print pic.twitter.com/lwKOWVRwOB
— Provo Police (@ProvoPolice) March 30, 2020
The printed masks are made from polylactic acid and are not N95 grade. Anyone can slide in HEPA material for the filter — it’s a better option than wearing no mask.
3D-printed adult face mask instructions:
Here’s the 3D-printed adult face mask software:
- Small adult mask – small_rowan3dprintedmask_v2_1.stl (2.1MB)
- Medium adult mask – medium_rowan3dprintedmask_v2_1.stl (2.1MB)
- Large adult mask – large_rowan3dprintedmask_v2_1.stl (2.1MB)
- Filter – filter_rowan3dprintedmask_v2.stl (438KB)
We also mentioned guns and ammo are selling out across the country — forcing some people to print 3D guns at home.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 21:00 - It's Time To Track The FDA's Death Toll
It’s Time To Track The FDA’s Death Toll
Authored by James Bovard via The Mises Institute,
The Food and Drug Administration helped turn the coronavirus from a deadly peril into a national catastrophe. Long after foreign nations had been ravaged and many cases had been detected in America, the FDA continued blocking private testing. The FDA continued forcing the nation’s most innovative firms to submit to its command-and-control approach notwithstanding the pandemic.
South Korean is in a far better situation dealing with coronavirus, because its government did not preemptively cripple private testing.
One of the clearest lessons from the current pandemic is that nothing has changed at one of the nation’s most powerful regulatory agencies. The FDA is repeating the same mistakes and showing the same arrogance that I chronicled decades ago in articles for the Wall Street Journal, the American Spectator, and other publications.
Dr. David Kessler, who became FDA commissioner in 1990, quickly sought to intimidate the companies that his agency regulates. A laudatory Washington Post article concluded, “What he cannot accomplish with ordinary regulation, Kessler hopes to accomplish with fear.”
Kenneth Feather of the FDA’s drug advertising surveillance branch boasted:
“We want to say to these companies that you don’t know when or how we’ll strike. We want to eliminate predictability.”
Dr. Kessler’s heavy-handed tactics battered the American medical device industry—one of the nation’s export superstars. An American Electronics Association survey found that “40% [of medical device companies] reduced the number of U.S. employees because of FDA delays, 29% increased their investment in foreign operations, and 22% moved U.S. jobs overseas.” The survey also found that “57% of the firms said the FDA had applied guidance instructions retroactively to some of their submissions,” as Biomedical Market Newsletter reported.
The FDA’s stonewalling of new medical devices was sometimes politically motivated. A 1994 report by the Medical Device Manufacturers Association noted, “It is not unusual for [FDA] reviewers to express the position that excessive requests [for additional information] are made because of a concern or fear about how a particular member or members of Congress will react” to the approval of a new device. Sacrificing lives was a small price to pay for bureaucrats to avoid bothersome interrogatories from Capitol Hill.
FDA employees also sowed fear with a deluge of official Warning Letters (up more than 300 percent since Dr. Kessler took office) to private companies. Once the FDA issues a Warning Letter, it can seize a company’s products or get a court injunction to paralyze its operations. The FDA refused to establish clear guidelines or rules for issuing its letters. As a result, manufacturers could find themselves in a nightmare at the whim of a midlevel FDA employee.
Dr. Kessler did not spare the First Amendment in his grab for power, and cancer patients and other seriously ill people suffered as a result. Doctors, hospitals, and researchers often discover after FDA approval that a drug to treat one disease is also effective at treating other diseases. Drug companies have routinely publicized this news, alerting physicians to other possible ways to save lives. American Medical Association vice president Roy Schwarz estimated that “off-label” uses of drugs account for up to 60 percent of all drugs prescribed.
But in 1991 Dr. Kessler prohibited pharmaceutical companies from informing doctors of new uses for approved drugs. He announced that the FDA would enforce the ban with seizures, injunctions, and prosecutions. Though the agency never finalized its proposed regulations, it warned companies that they would face its wrath if they violated the draft proposals. Dr. Kessler, in a speech before the Drug Information Association, said: “I would urge all members of the pharmaceutical industry to take a long and hard look at their promotional practices. I do not expect companies to wait until this guidance becomes final to put their advertising and promotional houses in order.” The question of off-label treatments is becoming a key issue again as doctors search for effective treatments for the COVID-19 coronavirus.
The FDA even suppressed medical textbooks as part of its attempt to restrict what Americans learned about new treatments. In 1992, the FDA cracked down on a company for distributing, for free, portions of Cancer, Principles and Practice of Oncology. In 1993, the FDA stopped a pharmaceutical company from distributing free copies of The Chemotherapy Source Book—even though the company had already received FDA approval to give away thousands of copies. The FDA claimed that when a drug company gives doctors free textbooks that mention an off-label use of its products the drugs become subject to seizure.
Under Kessler, the FDA became far more restrictive in approving new drugs and medical devices. Stanford University professor Dale Geringer observed, “In terms of lives, it’s quite possible that the FDA bureaucracy could be killing on the order of three to four times as many people as it saves.” One study estimated that 150,000 heart attack victims may have lost their lives as a result of the FDA’s delays in approving the emergency blood-clotting drug TPA. National Cancer Institute officials accused the FDA of being “mired in a 1960’s philosophy of drug development, viewing all new agents as…poisons.”
Dr. Kessler bragged that his reforms had given FDA employees “a place where, once again, the good guys could win.” And how could Americans be sure that FDA enforcement agents were the good guys? Because they worked for the government.
Dr. Kessler declared in 1992: “If members of our society were empowered to make their own decisions…then the whole rationale for the [FDA] would cease to exist.” Kessler derided “freedom of choice” as an illusion unless people are presented only with government-approved choices. But the FDA “liberated” people by shielding them from information, devices, and drugs that could have saved their lives.
Many Americans could die in the coming weeks and months thanks to the FDA’s blockade on coronavirus testing. Should we consider those victims as martyrs for the principle of bureaucratic supremacy? The FDA’s current commissioner, Stephen Hahn, conceded last week: “There are always opportunities to learn from situations like this one.”
Perhaps the clearest lesson is that it is time to track the death toll of FDA regulatory debacles.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 20:40 - "Don't Nag Your Husband, Wear Makeup" During Lockdown, Malaysian Government Tells Women
“Don’t Nag Your Husband, Wear Makeup” During Lockdown, Malaysian Government Tells Women
The World Health Organization (WHO) expects COVID-19 cases and deaths in Malaysia to peak in mid-April as there are some signs of curve flattening. There are 3,116 confirmed cases and 50 deaths in the Southeast Asian country, by far, the most in the region. The country has imposed a travel ban, along with an extension of a nationwide lockdown through April 14.
During nationwide lockdowns, many countries around the world have put their unique spin on it. For example, Panama, on Wednesday, said men and women will only be allowed to leave their homes for two hours at a time, and on different days.
As for Malaysia, the Ministry for Women, Family and Community Development has requested that women do not nag their husbands during the lockdown, reported NPR.
The ministry advised women from being “sarcastic” if their husbands asked them to help out with household chores. The request urged women to look pretty for their spouses, by dressing up and wearing makeup.
The Malaysian All Women’s Action Society called the ministry’s campaign sexist and said they should focus on preventing domestic violence during these unprecedented times.
While dressing up to work is one way of maintaining discipline and a routine while working from home, the focus on LOOKS, DRESS, and MAKEUP is absolutely unnecessary.
Stop this sexist messaging @KPWKM and focus on #domesticviolence survivors who are at higher risk now! https://t.co/mU7nBqbkgk
— All Women’s Action Society (@AWAMMalaysia) March 31, 2020
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Women’s Development Department director-general Akhma Hassan said the message is to spread positivity during the lockdowns, according to state-run news agency Bernama.
“The approach used was to share methods and practices to maintain positive relationships within the family and during the phase of working from home,” Hassan said in a statement.
“We have taken note of numerous comments on some tips for women, which were promoted through posters via our social media accounts.
Here’s how some on social media reacted to the ministry’s request:
“Avoid wearing home clothes. Dress up as usual, put on makeup and dress neatly. OMG! This is what Rina, our Minister of Women, Family & Community Development thinks is important during the #COVID19 lockdown?” tweeted @honeyean.
“How did we go from preventing baby dumping, fighting domestic violence to some variant of the Obedient Wives Club?” wrote @yinshaoloong.
The Malaysian government should shift its attention to an imminent recession that could result in 2.4 million job losses and a spike in domestic violence cases.
We’ve been noting over the last several weeks that the evolution of the virus crisis will crack households across the world, lead to surging domestic violence cases, and possibly social unrest will follow.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 20:20 - Wuhan Residents Believe COVID-19 Is 100 Times Worse Than Chinese Government Says, Report
Wuhan Residents Believe COVID-19 Is 100 Times Worse Than Chinese Government Says, Report
Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,
Residents in Wuhan, the origin of the coronavirus outbreak, have told reporters that “nobody believes the official numbers” being touted by the communist Chinese government, and that the general consensus is it could be 100 times worse than the world is being told.
While Whuan is reopening its transport systems and businesses, residents are adamant that they have not been informed of the true scale of the situation, according to Spanish newswire service EFE.
“There are suspicions that many people died in their homes without being diagnosed and, at first, there were no kits to do the test,” one resident said, adding that “Many people would die, officially, of a cold or some other disease. But there are stories going around of citizens who were made to sign death certificates of relatives without any other explanation.”
“Nobody in Wuhan believes the official numbers. The real one, only they know,” the resident said, pointing to the sky.
The report states that while frustration has led to a huge number of residents questioning the official narrative in social media chat groups, it has also led to a massive increase in censorship by the government.
The Spanish reporters pointed to reports suggesting that the number of urns provided by just 7 funeral homes in Wuhan adds up to between 30,000 and 40,000, while the Chinese government says that less than 4000 people have died from coronavirus.
A report by the independent Chinese media outlet Caixin estimated that just one of the funeral homes handed out 5,000 urns in one day last week.
The Spanish journalists attempted to interview workers at one of the funeral homes, but were stopped and turned away by authorities guarding the facilities.
Other residents told anti-Communist newspaper The Epoch Times that they simply cannot believe the government’s assertions about the death toll.
“Just exactly how many Wuhan residents have died from the virus if the line at the cemetery is so long?” one resident said, adding “China’s official media reported over 3,000 coronavirus deaths. I think the real figure is at least ten times the official figure, and even 100 times is not impossible.”
“The citizens of Wuhan believe that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) concealed the true death toll,” the report states.
It continues “They made this judgment based on two facts: one, the lines outside the funeral home to collect the ashes are very long, and two, the medical standards of European and American countries are higher than those in China. But the reported death rates in these countries are higher than that of China.”
Another Wuhan resident told Radio Free Asia “They are saying that only a few thousand died here in Wuhan, but does that sound right?”
Both the US and the UK governments are of the belief that China is hiding the real scale of the pandemic, estimating that it could be 15 to 40 times worse than the communist state admits.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 20:00 - Duterte Orders Philippine Police To Shoot Dead Virus-Lockdown Violators
Duterte Orders Philippine Police To Shoot Dead Virus-Lockdown Violators
The Philippines could be on the brink of social chaos, sparked because the virus pandemic forced the government to lockdown 57 million residents, many of which are living in poverty and left jobless in the last month. Social unrest broke out mid-week in a Manila slum as food and health equipment are in short supply, reported AFP.
DZRH, Manila Broadcasting Company, posted a chilling video of the social unrest, as low-income folks clashed with government forces during the quarantine.
WATCH: Pwersa ng QCPD dumating na sa lugar kung saan nagra-rally ang mga miyembro ng Kadamay na residente ng Sitio San Roque, Brgy. Bagong Pag-asa, QC | via @dzrh5 Val Gonzales #DZRHat80 #COVID19Alert pic.twitter.com/TH13flb3Ng
— DZRH NEWS (@dzrhnews) April 1, 2020
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While other reports suggest social unrest could soon erupt in the country, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte made it very clear on government media on April 1 that police will shot any citizen defying the public health order to shelter-in-place.
“Shoot them dead”: After Filipinos defied a coronavirus lockdown to protest a lack of food, their president, Rodrigo Duterte, took to the airwaves declaring that he will order the military to shoot troublemakers deadhttps://t.co/dcJFXgsOua pic.twitter.com/ttbaXF3hml
— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 2, 2020
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“I will not hesitate. My orders are to the police and military, as well as village officials, if there is any trouble, or occasions where there’s violence and your lives are in danger, shoot them dead,” Duterte said. “Do not intimidate the government. Do not challenge the government. You will lose.”
“Instead of causing trouble, I’ll send you to the grave,” he warned, adding that COVID-19 is quickly spreading across the country despite a lockdown.
According to Johns Hopkins, the Philippines (on Friday morning, April 3) has recorded 3,018 confirmed cases of the virus and 136 deaths – much less than surrounding countries.
“It is deeply alarming that President Duterte has extended a policy of shoot-to-kill… Deadly, unchecked force should never be referred to as a method to respond to an emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic,” Amnesty International Philippines said in a statement.
On Thursday, Philippine National Police Chief Archie Gamboa defied Duterte and said his forces would not shoot people who are violating quarantine orders.
“Probably the president just overemphasized on implementing the law in this time of crisis,” Gamboa added.
It appears social unrest is developing in the Philippines – something that we’ve identified in the last several weeks that could be seen in the Western world.
FLASH REPORT: Umano’y mga nagugutom nang residente ng Sitio San Roque, Brgy. Bagong Pag-asa, QC, lumabas na ng kanilang mga bahay at hinahanap na si @officialqcmayor Joy Belmonte | via @dzrh5 Val Gonzales #DZRHat80 #COVID19Alert pic.twitter.com/9xaXjDbKHg
— DZRH NEWS (@dzrhnews) April 1, 2020
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LOOK: KADAMAY stages another protest in Sitio San Roque, Quezon City amid arrests made during enhanced community quarantine.
RELATED: https://t.co/Qbic3xrixs pic.twitter.com/h4yfvolCig
— CNN Philippines (@cnnphilippines) April 1, 2020
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“If you continue to jail the hungry poor people, expect more protests against this fascist, and elitist solution of the dictator Duterte”
21 hungry protesters from Sitio San Roque, Brgy. Bagong Pag-asa, Quezon City were arrested … pic.twitter.com/nlP5iTGGWa
— NUSP #5StudentDemands (@NUSPhilippines) April 1, 2020
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The evolution of the virus crisis isn’t just collapsed economies across the globe, but rather the social unrest that follows.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 19:40 - Jim Grant Warns The Fed "Firemen Are Also The Arsonists"
Jim Grant Warns The Fed “Firemen Are Also The Arsonists”
Having put put America straight on what we are facing and the consequences of these unelected and unaccountable officials terrifying experiments, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer editor Jim Grant is back with another warning that irresponsible policy from the Federal Reserve made the coronavirus crisis worse than it had to be.
As Grant notes, “it took a viral invasion to unmask the weakness of American finance.”
Distortion in the cost of credit is the not-so-remote cause of the raging fires at which the Federal Reserve continues to train its gushing liquidity hoses; but, as Grant exclaims, the firemen are also the arsonists echoing his earlier in the week comments that:
Jay Powell’s seemingly blinkered proclamation that “he sees no prospective consequences with regard the purchasing power of the dollar” as “very concerning” adding more pertinently that he thinks “that wilful ignorance is a clear-and-present-danger for creditors of The United States.”
It was the Fed’s suppression of borrowing costs, and its predictable willingness to cut short Wall Street’s occasional selling squalls, that compromised the U.S. economy’s financial integrity.
The coronavirus pandemic would have called forth a dramatic response from the central bank in any case. Not even the most conservatively financed economy could long endure an official order to cease and desist commercial activity. But frail corporate balance sheets and overextended markets go far to explain the immensity of the interventions.
Perhaps never before has corporate America carried more low-grade debt in relation to its earning power than it does today. And rarely have equity valuations topped the ones quoted only weeks ago.
“John Bull can stand many things, but he can’t stand 2%,” said Walter Bagehot, the Victorian-era editor of the Economist, concerning the negative side effects of a rock-bottom cost of capital. Needing income, investors will take imprudent risks to get it. And if 2% invites trouble, zero percent almost demands it.
Interest rates are the critical prices that measure investment risk and set the present value of estimated future cash flows. The lower the rates, other things being equal, the higher the prices of stocks, bonds and real estate—and the greater the risk of holding those richly priced assets.
In 2010 the Federal Reserve set out to lift market prices through a rate-suppression program called quantitative easing. Chairman Ben Bernanke was forthright about his intentions. “Easier financial conditions will promote economic growth,” he wrote at the time. Lower interest rates would make housing more affordable and business investment more desirable. Higher stock prices would “boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending.” The Fed commandeered investment values into the government’s service. It seeded bull markets in the public interest.
But investment valuations don’t exist to serve a public-policy agenda. Their purpose is to allocate capital. Distort those values and you waste not only money but also time – human heartbeats.
Like a shark, credit must keep moving. Loans fall due and must be repaid or rolled over (or, in extremis, defaulted on). When the economy stops, as the world’s has effectively done, lenders are likely to demand the cash that not every borrower can produce.
To resolve the devastating panic of 1825, the Bank of England rendered “every assistance in our power,” as a director of the bank testified, “and we were not upon some occasions over nice.”
In a still more radical vein, the Fed has set about buying (or supporting the purchase of) commercial paper, residential mortgage-backed securities, Treasurys, investment-grade corporate bonds, commercial mortgage-backed securities and asset-backed securities. It has abolished bank reserve requirements. Through a new direct-lending program, the Fed has become a kind of commercial bank.
If not for the buildup of the financial excesses of the past 10 years, fewer such monetary kitchen sinks would likely have had to be deployed. No pandemic explains the central bank’s massive infusions into the so-called repo market that followed this past September’s unscripted spike in borrowing costs. For still obscure reasons, a banking system that apparently is more than adequately capitalized was unable to meet a sudden demand for funds on behalf of the dealers who warehouse immense portfolios of government debt.
The superabundance of Treasury securities is the spoor of America’s trillion-dollar boom-time deficits. Persistently low interest rates have facilitated that borrowing, as they have the growth of private-equity investing (ordinarily with lots of leverage), the rise of profitless startups, the raft of corporate share repurchases, and the unnatural solvency of loss-making companies that have funded themselves in the Fed’s most obliging debt markets.
For savers in general, and the managers of public pension funds in particular, lawn-level interest rates confer no similar gains. On the contrary: To earn $50,000 in annual interest at a 5% government bond yield requires $1 million of capital; to earn the same income at a 1% yield demands $5 million of capital. To try to circumvent that forbidding arithmetic, income-famished investors buy stocks, junk bonds, real estate, what have you. It worked as long as the bubble inflated.
In a bubble, performance is the name of the investment game. Over the past 10 years, skeptics of our debt-financed prosperity have had to fall in line. To keep up with the Joneses, fiduciaries have sought an edge in lower-quality assets. Managers of investment-grade bond portfolios dabbled in junk bonds. Junk-bond investors slummed it in lower-rated junk or in the kind of bank debt that is senior in name but structured without the once-standard protective legal fine print.
Investing at positive nominal yields, Americans are still comparatively lucky. The holders of some $10.9 trillion of yen-, euro- and Swiss franc-denominated bonds are paying for the privilege of lending. “Investors seeking safety were prepared to face a guaranteed loss when holding the debt to maturity,” was how the Financial Times last summer tried to explain the nearly inexplicable.
Negative nominal bond yields are a 4,000-year first, according to Sidney Homer’s “A History of Interest Rates,” republished for a fourth edition with co-author Richard Sylla in 2005. Topsy-turvy investment-grade bond markets aren’t without precedent, but the extent of the upheaval today is startling. If adversity is the test of the quality of a senior security, as old-time doctrine held, segments of today’s corporate bonds and tradable bank loans have already flunked. On March 20, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, the volume of such loans quoted below 80 cents on the dollar topped the peak distress level of 2008. While the panic subsequently abated, many supposedly senior corporate claims are proving to be fair-weather investments, not so different from common equity.
Deceived by ultralow interest rates, Americans borrow and lend in the kind of false economy that candidate Donald Trump properly condemned in 2016. Covid-19 will sooner or later beat a retreat. For the sake of honest prices and true values, it would be well if the central bankers did the same.
Simply put, Grant concludes, credit and equity markets “have become administered government-set indicators, rather than sensitive- and information-rich prices… and we are paying the price for that through the misallocation of resources.”
Grant ends on a hanging chad of a rhetorical question “what do corrections correct? Is there no salutary role for recessions and bear markets?”
Of course there is, he answers, “they separate the sound from the unsound, they separate the well-financed from the over-leveraged and if we never have these episodes of economic pain, we will be much the worse for it.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 19:20 - "I Found The Source Of COVID-19…"
“I Found The Source Of COVID-19…”
“After living and working in China for over 10 years and speaking fluent Chinese, you get to know a society pretty well… and let me tell you this – if you’re applauding or admiring the political leadership of China, you’re all deluded beyond belief.“
That is how “laowhy86” begins this succinct video exploring the ‘facts’ – not conspiracies – behind the source of the coronavirus that is ravaging the earth.
“China doesn’t operate like ‘your’ country,” he warns, “the Chinese government is a face- and greed-driven government that relies on lies and bullying to maintain leadership.”
Furthermore, he notes, the Chinese government layers are “broken and fragile” and so it didn’t surprise him when he was able to follow breadcrumbs – as begun by our inquisition about the roles that certain individuals played in Wuhan – to discover the “very suspicious” fact that the Wuhan Bio lab had a job opening from November 18, 2019, asking for scientists to come and research the relationship between the coronavirus and bats.
However, after ZeroHedge was permanently suspended from Twitter for daring to suggest anything but the official narrative handed down, laowhy86 notes that another job opening appeared on December 24th (remember this is before any news broke of the virus publicly), which basically says ‘we’ve discovered a new and terrible virus and would like to recruit people to come deal with it’…
So, he decided to dig a little bit more into the staff… and that’s where it gets interesting… as he discovers silenced scientists, disappeared doctors, and constant propaganda…
“…it’s quite clear that the Chinese government needs to close its mouth and acknowledge that this virus did in fact come from Wuhan, Hubei, China.”
As he concludes,
“I did not get into any conspiracy theories, I’m not talking about bioweapons or biolabs; this is all public information on the Chinese internet published by researchers, scientists, and doctors.”
“Despite the CCP’s all-powerful ability to hide everything it can, the truth usually finds its way out – the Chinese government should cover their tracks better next time if they’re going to blame this on Italy or the US or whatever is convenient to your narrative.”
“…the CCP’s incompetence and its understanding of the danger of the virus on a pure scientific level – and then going on to silence those who wanted to warn the public… and letting the virus spread for months… is the reason the Chinese government must be held accountable!“
Watch the full breakdown below:
What is really fascinating, however, is that while this thread was dismissed and censored as utter nonsense just two months ago (and got many banned for even daring to mention it), none other than David Ignatius, The Washington Post’s favorite establishment columnist, is now questioning China’s narrative and raising his own doubts as to the origin of the virus, writing that …as China dished wild, irresponsible allegations of its own.
On March 12, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao charged in a tweet: “It might be [the] US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.”
He retweeted an article that claimed, without evidence, that U.S. troops might have spread the virus when they attended the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.
A competing theory has been gathering momentum – of an accidental lab release of bat coronavirus…
Less than 300 yards from the seafood market is the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers from that facility and the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology have posted articles about collecting bat coronaviruses from around China, for study to prevent future illness. Did one of those samples leak, or was hazardous waste deposited in a place where it could spread?
Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and biosafety expert, told me in an email that “the first human infection could have occurred as a natural accident,” with the virus passing from bat to human, possibly through another animal. But Ebright cautioned that it “also could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with, for example, an accidental infection of a laboratory worker.” He noted that bat coronaviruses were studied in Wuhan at Biosafety Level 2, “which provides only minimal protection,” compared with the top BSL-4.
Ebright described a December video from the Wuhan CDC that shows staffers “collecting bat coronaviruses with inadequate [personal protective equipment] and unsafe operational practices.” Separately, I reviewed two Chinese articles, from 2017 and 2019, describing the heroics of Wuhan CDC researcher Tian Junhua, who while capturing bats in a cave “forgot to take protective measures” so that “bat urine dripped from the top of his head like raindrops.”
Ignatius unapologetically admits that what’s increasingly clear is that the initial “origin story” – that the virus was spread by people who ate contaminated animals at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan – is shaky.
“Shaky” indeed, David!
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 19:00 - Facial Recognition Companies Profit From COVID-19 By Adding Thermal Imaging
Facial Recognition Companies Profit From COVID-19 By Adding Thermal Imaging
The biometrics industry has never been known to miss an opportunity to make a profit. Especially when it comes at the expense of everyone’s privacy.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, facial recognition companies have been hard at work creating a new sales pitch that will allow them to maximize their profits.
Across the globe, facial recognition companies are hard at work trying to convince politicians, law enforcement and the public that thermal imaging cameras will help stop the spread of COVID-19.
Forbes.com is all too eager to jump on the thermal imaging bandwagon, claiming that Athena Security’s facial recognition/thermal imaging software can scan 1000 people per hour.
“With Covid-19, you see the problem at airports today,” Athena Security CEO Lisa Falzone explains. “Passengers are waiting in lines to manually take their temperatures, which slows traffic down. With our technology, we can analyze 1000 people per hour.”
In fact, Athena Security has gone so far as to combine fever detection, facial recognition and gun detection into an all-in-one screening system.
“Our Fever Detection COVID19 Screening System is now a part of our platform along with our gun detection system which connects directly to your current security camera system to deliver fast, accurate threat detection – including guns, knives, and aggressive action. Our system can also alert you to falls, accidents, and unwelcome visitors.”
As Forbes.com points out, what makes Athena’s software so unique is their ability to send out real-time alerts to authorities.
“What’s different about Athena’s system, explains Falzone, is its ability to send out immediate alerts to the appropriate parties, who can then make an informed decision on how to act.”
The scariest thing about the proliferation of facial recognition/thermal imaging cameras is it gives law enforcement near god-like powers to identify and quarantine anyone they choose.
Real-time facial recognition being offered to universities and hospitals for free
The biometrics industry has put a new spin on marketing by offering universities and hospitals free real-time facial recognition.
A recent Jumio press release revealed that they are donating their facial recognition identity verification services to U.S. and U.K. hospitals and universities.
“Starting today, Jumio will provide free identity verification services through our AI-powered, fully automated solution, Jumio Go, to any qualifying organization directly involved in helping with COVID-19 relief including (but not limited to): Hospitals and Universities. This free offer is powered by Jumio Go, our real-time, fully automated identity verification solution.”
DroneUp suggests that law enforcement could use thermal imaging drones as an excuse to monitor people for COVID-19.
“Assurance is key in uncertain times. That is why DroneUp is functioning in conjunction with FAA regulatory precautions as we collaborate with state and local officials to ensure safety for all. We strongly encourage our fellow drone operators to also become keenly aware of the protocol and regulations as the pandemic evolves.”
That same scenario is being played out across the country, with more than 1,500 police departments using drones to monitor the public. In Michigan, the Hillsdale Sheriff’s Office recently purchased a DJI Matrice 210 drone equipped with thermal imaging.
Three police departments in particular have taken drone surveillance to a whole new level.
The Owensboro Police Department in Kentucky has created a 10-member thermal imaging drone surveillance team.
“The Owensboro Police Department recently created a 10-member Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Team who were trained and certified to fly the department’s $2,300 drone inside city limits.”
In Texas, the Public Safety Unmanned Response Team has partnered with the Airborne Incident Response Team to help expand police drone surveillance.
“The objective is to create a robust network of drone responders and geographic information systems experts capable of rendering direct assistance and location intelligence during complex emergencies, rapidly expanding incidents, and major disasters. Increased communication and cooperation are essential to the successful deployment of drones and other unmanned systems in support of public safety operations,” said Travis Calendine, chairperson of the Public Safety Unmanned Response Team North Texas.
The Chula Vista Police Department (CVPD), arguably the most famous drone surveillance police department in the country, is creating a 52 square mile drone surveillance zone.
“The CVPD can proactively cover about 17 of the 52 square miles of our city with drones launched from two sites. Our goal this year is to add launch sites to provide 100% aerial support coverage during daylight hours 7 days a week by the end of the year,” Vern Sallee, patrol operations captain said.
The worldwide fear of the cornavirus is so widespread that MIT, Harvard and The Mayo Clinic have designed a new COVID-19 warning app called “Private Kit.”
credit: Private Kit
As Fast Company explains, Private Kit will allegedly alert a user when someone infected with the COVID-19 virus is close. Maybe they could use this app to alert them when a “Walking Dead” zombie is close by?
“Researchers just released an app in beta that alerts people when they come into contact with someone who’s been diagnosed with COVID-19, potentially reducing the virus’s spread if the app is downloaded by a large chunk of the population.”
Of course there is a catch to using Private Kit: users will lose their privacy.
“After you download the app and consent to sharing your location (which is necessary in order for the app to work), the app starts tracking you. Should you cross paths with someone who’s been diagnosed with the coronavirus who also has the app, you’ll receive a notification telling you when and for how long.”
Facial recognition companies like Veriff show how little they care about everyone’s privacy by offering universities and health care providers 1 million free identity verification’s.
“Potential beneficiaries of free verification’s range from universities who need to verify people taking exams to marketplaces that have volunteers who help people in need and to registries that could tackle fake accounts and set up reliable databases about people in quarantine. But also, digital health care service providers, organizations fighting fake news and beyond.”
If corporations, politicians and law enforcement can convince an apathetic public that facial recognition, thermal imaging and gun detection cameras can keep us safe, then our privacy will vanish before COVID-19 runs its course.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 18:40 - Google Search Activity Shows The U.S. Is Entering A Depression
Google Search Activity Shows The U.S. Is Entering A Depression
A record 6.6 million people applied for unemployment benefits this week as the coronavirus crisis forced the biggest number of layoffs around the U.S. in history, a roughly 83-sigma event and one which visualized looks as follows:
Updated: Initial jobless claims as number 1/2 pic.twitter.com/VoQ3hye1LT
— 📈 𝙻𝚎𝚗 𝙺𝚒𝚎𝚏𝚎𝚛 📊 (@lenkiefer) April 2, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
And with JPMorgan now predicting a 7mm print next week, the bedrock of the US economy – plentiful jobs – is suddenly imploding, as the latest google searches for “Unemployment benefits” shows.
Which reminded us that in times of stress, Google trends is a wonderful resource into what is on people’s minds. SEMrush, a data analytics company, has been tracking Google search volume and found the public’s curiosity over the “doomsday” items exploded between February 20 and March 20, 2020: “unemployment” grew by 400% and, similarly, “recession” grew by 376%.
Here are some other phrases that triggered spikes in online search activity, which show that the global financial crisis of 2008 was a simple garden-variety slowdown by comparison, and that what is taking place now is nothing short of a depression:
“How do I file for unemployment”: Since March 14, there has been a 900% increase in search volume
“Will i get fired”: Since March 19, there has been a 233% increase in search volume
“Can I file for unemployment online”: Since March 13, there has been a 614% increase in search volume
“When will I get my unemployment check”: Since March 20, there has been a 104% increase in search volume
“What if I can’t pay my mortgage”: Since March 12, there has been a 104% increase in search volume
“How can I pay my rent”: Since February 4, there has been a 194% increase in search volume
Finally, in addition to jobs, there’s money. Or rather, there isn’t: searches for “Business Loans” have exploded, and they will surge more if the banks don’t figure out how to make the small and medium business bailout loan available to all.
But it’s not just America – the entire world is scrambling for funding – Jamaicans are the most interested in a business loan with a Google search popularity score of 100. South Africa comes second with a score of 59 followed by Nigeria with a score of 56. Other countries with more interest in business loans include Australia (54), Singapore (49), India (47 ), New Zealand (43), UK (42) Pakistan (42) and the United States (40).
The above hardly needs much commentary: not only the US, but the entire world is rapidly sliding into depression. The only question is just how will global government make sure this crisis, the biggest in our lifetimes, does not go to waste.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/03/2020 – 18:20
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