May 162020
 


John French Sloan Backyards, Greenwich Village 1926

 

China Unauthorised Labs Were Told To Destroy Early Coronavirus Samples (SCMP)
French Doctors Think They May Have Treated COVID19 Patients Last Fall (Hill)
How ‘Overreaction’ Made Vietnam A Virus Success (BBC)
China Ready To Put Apple, Other US Companies In ‘Unreliable Entity List’
Dems’ Health Insurer Bailout Follows Bundled Checks from Lobbyists (RS)
Gilead To End Coronavirus Drug Trials, Adding To Access Worry (R.)
FDA Halts Bill Gates Coronavirus Testing Program (Hill)
Trump Names Big Pharma Exec Linked To Bill Gates To Head Vaccine Efforts (LAV)
Ohio Stops Denying Workers Unemployment After Hacker Targets Its Website (V.)
Coronavirus Could Deliver $8.8 Trillion Hit To Global Economy – ADB (Ind.)
Obamagate Is Not a Conspiracy Theory (NR)

 

 

• US in past 24 hours: 26,337 new cases, 1,680 new deaths. Total deaths 88,507.

• Russia dives below 10K new cases for the 2nd time in 14 days with 9,200. China reports 8.

 

 

• Sweden on May 15 had 625 new cases and 117 new deaths. Total 29,207 cases, 3,646 deaths.
• Denmark had zero new deaths and a total of 537.
• Deaths per million: Australia 3.92. Sweden: 346.5
• Finns and Danes are apprehensive about opening the border to Sweden because of Swedish coronavirus protocols

 

 

 

Note: total daily new cases are rising towards 100,000, while deaths are getting lower

Cases 4,645,386 (+ 99,316 from yesterday’s 4,546,070)

Deaths 308,980 (+ 5,117 from yesterday’s 303,863)

 

 

 

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-

 

 

From Worldometer

 

 

From SCMP:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

You would think you’d want to preserve those at all cost, lest you lose a view of the virus’s history.

China Unauthorised Labs Were Told To Destroy Early Coronavirus Samples (SCMP)

China on Friday confirmed it had ordered unauthorised laboratories to destroy samples of the new coronavirus in the early stage of the outbreak, but said it was done for biosafety reasons. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has repeatedly said that Beijing declined to provide virus samples taken from patients when the contagion began in China late last year, and that Chinese authorities had destroyed early samples. Liu Dengfeng, an official with the National Health Commission’s science and education department, said this was done at unauthorised labs to “prevent the risk to laboratory biological safety and prevent secondary disasters caused by unidentified pathogens”. “The remarks made by some US officials were taken out of context and intended to confuse,” he said at a briefing in Beijing.

When the pneumonia-like illness was first reported in Wuhan, “national-level professional institutes” were working to identify the pathogen that was causing it, Liu said. “Based on comprehensive research and expert opinion, we decided to temporarily manage the pathogen causing the pneumonia as Class II – highly pathogenic – and imposed biosafety requirements on sample collection, transport and experimental activities, as well as destroying the samples,” he said. Liu added that this was in line with China’s standard practice for handling highly pathogenic samples, which should not be done by labs that do not meet the requirements.

[..] According to a provincial health commission notice issued in February, those handling virus samples were ordered not to provide them to any institutions or labs without approval. Unauthorised labs that obtained samples in the early stage of the outbreak had to destroy them or send them to a municipal centre for disease control and prevention for storage. Chinese magazine Caixin reported in February that some hospitals had sent samples to private gene sequencing companies to identify the mystery virus early in the outbreak. Some of those results came back as early as December 27 and were identified as being from the same coronavirus family as Sars, the report said. One company had been told to destroy all virus samples, according to the report.

[..] The health commission also rejected claims by US officials that China denied a request by the WHO to visit the high-security Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is at the centre of conspiracy theories that the virus was engineered or escaped from the lab. Li Mingzhu, a senior official with the health commission’s international cooperation department, said the WHO did not make any request to visit the lab during two trips to Wuhan, in January and February. “The WHO has never made a request to visit a certain laboratory, so the statement that the WHO was denied a visit to the Wuhan laboratory is untrue,” Li said.

Read more …

One reason why you would want to preserve samples.

French Doctors Think They May Have Treated COVID19 Patients Last Fall (Hill)

In what would mark a massive shift in the timeline of coronavirus spread, French researchers believe there is evidence coronavirus may have been in Europe as early as November 2019. X-rays obtained exclusively by NBC News show two patients with symptoms in their lungs consistent with the novel coronavirus dated Nov. 16 and Nov. 18, months before COVID-19 was believed to be spreading in the country. Researchers from Colmar, France, announced the X-rays last week and are working to confirm whether the patients had coronavirus. France had originally believed its first case to have been Jan. 24.


The study comes in conjunction with a study by other French scientists who discovered last week that a coronavirus patient had been treated in the country in December. The doctors from the Groupe Hospitalier Paris Seine in Saint-Denis said a sample taken from a 42-year-old fishmonger admitted to the emergency room on Dec. 27 had tested positive for the coronavirus. Similarly, the U.S. recently discovered coronavirus had spread among citizens earlier than previously expected when a medical examiner’s report reclassified a California woman’s death in February as being due to COVID-19 — the disease caused by the novel coronavirus — three weeks prior to what was originally believed to be the first U.S. coronavirus death.

Read more …

All winning countries have been told at some stage that they were overreacting.

How ‘Overreaction’ Made Vietnam A Virus Success (BBC)

Despite a long border with China and a population of 97 million people, Vietnam has recorded only just over 300 cases of Covid-19 on its soil and not a single death. Nearly a month has passed since its last community transmission and the country is already starting to open up. Experts say that unlike other countries now seeing infections and deaths on a huge scale, Vietnam saw a small window to act early on and used it fully. But though cost-effective, its intrusive and labour intensive approach has its drawbacks and experts say it may be too late for most other countries to learn from its success. “When you’re dealing with these kinds of unknown novel potentially dangerous pathogens, it’s better to overreact,” says Dr Todd Pollack of Harvard’s Partnership for Health Advancement in Vietnam in Hanoi.

Recognising that its medical system would soon become overwhelmed by even mild spread of the virus, Vietnam instead chose prevention early, and on a massive scale. By early January, before it had any confirmed cases, Vietnam’s government was initiating “drastic action” to prepare for this mysterious new pneumonia which had at that point killed two people in Wuhan. When the first virus case was confirmed on 23 January – a man who had travelled from Wuhan to visit his son in Ho Chi Minh City – Vietnam’s emergency plan was in action. “It very, very quickly acted in ways which seemed to be quite extreme at the time but were subsequently shown to be rather sensible,” says Prof Guy Thwaites, director of Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU) in Ho Chi Minh City, which works with the government on its infectious disease programmes.

Vietnam enacted measures other countries would take months to move on, bringing in travel restrictions, closely monitoring and eventually closing the border with China and increasing health checks at borders and other vulnerable places. Schools were closed for the Lunar New Year holiday at the end of January and remained closed until mid-May. A vast and labour intensive contact tracing operation got under way. “This is a country that has dealt with a lot of outbreaks in the past,” says Prof Thwaites, from Sars in 2003 to avian influenza in 2010 and large outbreaks of measles and dengue.

Read more …

The Global Times piece itself is too over the top.

China Ready To Put Apple, Other US Companies In ‘Unreliable Entity List’

China is ready to put U.S. companies in an “unreliable entity list,” as part of countermeasures against Washington’s move to block shipments of semiconductors to Huawei Technologies, the Global Times reported on Friday. The measures include launching investigations and imposing restrictions on U.S. companies such as Apple Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Qualcomm Inc as well as suspending purchase of Boeing Co airplanes, the report said here citing a source. The Global Times is published by the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party. While the Global Times is not an official mouthpiece of the party, its views are believed to reflect those of its leaders. Earlier in the day, the U.S. Commerce Department said it was amending an export rule to “strategically target Huawei’s acquisition of semiconductors that are the direct product of certain U.S. software and technology.”

Read more …

But no M4A.

Dems’ Health Insurer Bailout Follows Bundled Checks from Lobbyists (RS)

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, progressives have argued that a single-payer health care system would prevent people who lose their jobs from going without health care and further exacerbating the public health crisis. “Medicare for All means never losing your health insurance if you lose your job,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted on March 26, the day the Labor Department announced that a record 3.3 million people had filed for unemployment insurance. (The unemployment figure has since risen to 17 million, and it is expected to keep increasing.) But the Democratic leadership in Congress, none of whom are among the 118 cosponsors of the Medicare for All Act, have embraced a different approach.

The leaders are planning to include a measure in the next coronavirus package to expand subsidies for the COBRA health insurance program, allowing people who lose their jobs to keep the same insurance plan that their employer had made available to them. Under the plan, which was viewed by Vox, the federal government would pay the full cost of the premiums to private health insurance companies to keep laid-off people on their plans. The COBRA expansion would not provide coverage to people who become unemployed but were not receiving coverage through their employers. It would also not cover people’s deductibles.

“The Democrats could push to simply expand Medicaid, but instead they are pushing new subsidies for private health insurance companies,” David Sirota, a journalist and former Sanders campaign staffer wrote on Twitter. [..] The Democrats’ proposal mirrors a recommendation put forward recently by the health insurance industry. Less than a week before the Democrats floated their plan, the presidents and CEOs of Blue Cross Blue Shield and America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the health insurance industry’s top lobbying group, sent a list of policy proposals to Congress including a recommendation that it provide full federal subsidization of COBRA premiums.

Read more …

Yeah, let’s worry about NOT having access to a drug that does NOT work.

Gilead To End Coronavirus Drug Trials, Adding To Access Worry (R.)

Gilead Sciences Inc’s two clinical studies of its potential coronavirus treatment remdesivir will wind down by the end of May, closing off a path of patient access to the antiviral medication, according to U.S. researchers involved in the studies. The drug was given emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on May 1, but hospitals are concerned about access. “We would like to see equitable and transparent distribution of this very precious resource,” Dr. Helen Boucher, chief of infectious diseases at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, told Reuters. Gilead’s studies – one in patients with severe COVID-19 and the other in moderate disease – have enrolled around 8,000 subjects, according to FDA statistics.

The trials are “open label” meaning they do not compare the treatment to a placebo and participants know they are getting the drug. Interest in Gilead’s drug has been high given some promising early data and the lack of approved treatments or preventive vaccines for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that has infected over 4 million people and killed more than 305,000 worldwide. Preliminary results from a trial conducted by the U.S. National Institutes of Health showed that remdesivir cut hospital stays by 31% compared to a placebo. The NIH is now studying remdesivir alone compared to remdesivir in combination with Olumiant, an anti-inflammatory drug approved for rheumatoid arthritis and sold by Eli Lilly and Co.

Remdesivir is still available on a compassionate use basis for pregnant women or children under the age of 18, but most COVID-19 patients will soon have access only under the emergency use authorization. “We participate in the Gilead clinical trials here at Tufts,” Dr. Boucher said. “We were notified that they will wind down … no later than the end of May.” Gilead told Tufts it is transitioning to product distribution under the emergency use authorization.

Read more …

The tests used at the White House don’t appear very accurate, either. Can we shift some of the billions spent on elusive vaccines to better testing?

FDA Halts Bill Gates Coronavirus Testing Program (Hill)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) halted a coronavirus testing program promoted by billionaire Bill Gates and Seattle health officials pending reviews. The program sought to send test kits to the homes of people both healthy and sick to try to bring the country to the level of testing officials say is necessary before states can begin safely reopening. The program, which had already gone through thousands of tests, found dozens of cases that had been previously undiagnosed. The Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN) said on its website that the FDA had asked it to pause testing while it receives additional authorizations, but maintained its procedures are safe.

“[T]he Food & Drug Administration (FDA) recently clarified its guidance for home-based, self-collected samples to test for COVID-19. We have been notified that a separate federal emergency use authorization (EUA) is required to return results for self-collected tests,” the program said. “The FDA has not raised any concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of SCAN’s test, but we have been asked to pause testing until we receive that additional authorization.” The pause is emblematic of the fractured national response to the coronavirus, with federal officials proposing guidelines but leaving much of the implementation and administering of tests to states and localities.

Concerns have recently arisen over the reliability of coronavirus antibody tests, which can gauge if someone previously had the illness. However, the SCAN tests do not test for antibodies, and the program said it is working to get back up and running. “We are actively working to address their questions and resume testing as soon as possible,” the program said. Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft who has dedicated much of his personal fortune to global health issues, said the program could be an effective tool in guiding public health responses. “Not only will it help improve our understanding of the outbreak in Seattle, it will also provide valuable information about the virus for other communities around the world,” Gates wrote in a blog post this week.

Read more …

This just about has it all: Bill Gates, forced vaccinations, nanochip implants. Only thing missing is a secret plan to depopulate the planet,

Trump Names Big Pharma Exec Linked To Bill Gates To Head Vaccine Efforts (LAV)

On Friday, Donald Trump announced his appointment of Moncef Slaoui, a former executive with vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline, to lead “Operation Warp Speed”, Trump’s plan to fast track the development of vaccines for COVID-19. Slaoui will serve in a volunteer position, assisted by Army Gen. Gustave Perna, the commander of United States Army Materiel Command. According to the Trump administration, Operation Warp Speed program is focusing on four vaccines, with the hopes of testing and producing 100 million doses by October 2020, 200 million by December, and 300 million doses by January. At Friday’s press conference, Slaoui said he believes the goal of vaccines by January 2021 is a “credible goal”.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was more adamant, stating that, “winning matters and we will deliver, by the end of this year, a vaccine”. Operation Warp Speed and the calls for public-private partnerships mimic the National Institutes of Health’s recent call for bringing together pharmaceutical companies to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. The NIH plan, Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) partnership, emphasizes “a collaborative framework for prioritizing vaccine and drug candidates, streamlining clinical trials, coordinating regulatory processes and/or leveraging assets among all partners to rapidly respond to the COVID-19 and future pandemics.”

The appointment of Slaoui follows previous statements regarding Trump’s desire to have vaccines available to Americans by the fall. “I think we’re going to have a vaccine by the end of the year, and I think distribution will take place almost simultaneously because we’ve geared up the military,” Trump said Thursday afternoon. Trump also told the Fox Business Network that because of the “massive job to give this vaccine” the military is now being mobilized. “We’re going to be able to give it to a lot of people very, very rapidly,” Trump concluded.

At Friday’s press conference Trump said his team has been working 24 hours a day to develop treatments for COVID-19. Despite the heavy focus on vaccines, Trump did state that his administration is working on other treatments, including “therapeutics”. “It’s not solely vaccine based, other things have never had a vaccine and they go away. I don’t people to think this is all dependent on a vaccine, but it would be tremendous,” Trump stated.

Read more …

Big Tech Rules.

Ohio Stops Denying Workers Unemployment After Hacker Targets Its Website (V.)

The state of Ohio won’t deny unemployment benefits to people who refuse to work during the COVID-19 pandemic after people targeted the website it was using to track these workers, according to officials at the state’s Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS). The state previously set up a “fraud” website encouraging employers to report those who refused to go back on the job, angering workers and labor rights advocates. State officials say they are now reconsidering the policy after Motherboard reported that a hacker created a script to flood the “COVID-19 Fraud” website with junk data, with the goal of making it impossible to process these claims.


“No benefits are being denied right now as a result of a person’s decision not to return to work while we continue to evaluate the policy,” ODJFS Director Kimberly Hall told Cleveland.com. “Because Ohio is still examining its policies in this area, no adjudications concerning a refusal to return to work have been initiated,” Bret Crow, a spokesperson for the department, told Motherboard in an email. The anonymous hacker previously told Motherboard they created the script as a form of direct action in support of working people. Ohio is among several states that have prematurely reopened against the advice of health experts, forcing many workers to return to their jobs and put themselves at risk of contracting the deadly virus.

Read more …

Or 88? Your guess is as good as theirs.

Coronavirus Could Deliver $8.8 Trillion Hit To Global Economy – ADB (Ind.)

Coronavirus could cut global economic output by as much as $8.8 trillion, with the outlook having worsened significantly in the past month, the Asian Development Bank has said. The bank warned on Friday that Covid-19 would result in $5.8 trillion to $8.8 trillion of lost gross domestic product – or 6.4 per cent to 9.7 per cent of the world’s output. That’s more than twice as bad as the ADB forecast in April. However, government measures to mitigate the economic impact could reduce that figure by as much as 40 per cent, ADB’s chief economist Yasuyuki Sawada said. As some countries, including the UK, lay out plans to ease lockdowns and get more people back to work, Mr Sawada cautioned that containing the pandemic is key to reducing the economic cost.


Testing, tracing, isolation, effective social distancing, and securing protective and medical equipment are all “essential elements” of containing Covid-19, he said. He also pointed to the importance of government support for struggling families and businesses to lessen the adverse effects of the pandemic and to avoid long-term consequences for growth and development. “Rapid and effective containment will allow for a faster recovery,” he said. [..] His words came as the UK government faced criticism from scientists over its easing of lockdown restrictions this week. The Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) warned on Tuesday that the UK faces “inevitable” future lockdowns if the government implements its “potentially dangerous” coronavirus strategy.

Read more …

People who still see it as such will be badly surprised.

Obamagate Is Not a Conspiracy Theory (NR)

Those sharing #Obamagate hashtags on Twitter would do best to avoid the hysterics we saw from Russian-collusion believers, but they have no reason to ignore the mounting evidence that suggests the Obama administration engaged in serious corruption. Democrats and their allies, who like to pretend that President Obama’s only scandalous act was wearing a tan suit, are going spend the next few months gaslighting the public by focusing on the most feverish accusations against Obama. But the fact is that we already have more compelling evidence that the Obama administration engaged in misconduct than we ever did for opening the Russian-collusion investigation.

It is not conspiracy-mongering to note that the investigation into Trump was predicated on an opposition-research document filled with fabulism and, most likely, Russian disinformation. We know the DOJ withheld contradictory evidence when it began spying on those in Trump’s orbit. We have proof that many of the relevant FISA-warrant applications — almost every one of them, actually — were based on “fabricated” evidence or riddled with errors. We know that members of the Obama administration, who had no genuine role in counterintelligence operations, repeatedly unmasked Trump’s allies. And we now know that, despite a dearth of evidence, the FBI railroaded Michael Flynn into a guilty plea so it could keep the investigation going.

What’s more, the larger context only makes all of these facts more damning. By 2016, the Obama administration’s intelligence community had normalized domestic spying. Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, famously lied about snooping on American citizens to Congress. His CIA director, John Brennan, oversaw an agency that felt comfortable spying on the Senate, with at least five of his underlings breaking into congressional computer files. His attorney general, Eric Holder, invoked the Espionage Act to spy on a Fox News journalist, shopping his case to three judges until he found one who let him name the reporter as a co-conspirator. The Obama administration also spied on Associated Press reporters, which the news organization called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.”

And though it’s been long forgotten, Obama officials were caught monitoring the conversations of members of Congress who opposed the Iran nuclear deal. What makes anyone believe these people wouldn’t create a pretext to spy on the opposition party? If anyone does, they shouldn’t, because on top of everything else, we know that Barack Obama was keenly interested in the Russian-collusion investigation’s progress.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1261378778464309249

Read more …

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Home Forums Debt Rattle May 16 2020

Viewing 23 posts - 1 through 23 (of 23 total)
  • Author
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  • #58838

    John French Sloan Backyards, Greenwich Village 1926   • China Unauthorised Labs Were Told To Destroy Early Coronavirus Samples (SCMP) • French Do
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle May 16 2020]

    #58839
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    John French Sloan Backyards, Greenwich Village 1926

    Love that picture; the cats, the girl in the window, the clothes hanging on the clothes lines, and the kids building a snowman…
    Wonderful…

    #58841
    zerosum
    Participant

    SENIORS.
    Don’t wait until its time for someone to change your diaper

    Be a mentor – Teen power

    Online education
    Foreign student tuition fee don’t apply to online education.

    Students will need to grow up fast and realize that they are responsible to learn and teach themselves, to decide what they want to do with their lives,
    to stop being lazy.

    Earning money is determined by doing something for someone with money, who is willing to pay you,
    because
    1. they don’t want to do it
    2. they don’t know how to do it.

    Practicum, on hand experience, apprenticeship, retraining, upgrading.

    Start mentoring.
    Elders can make their end of life better or worst
    Over 80% of seniors are dying with dirty diapers

    #58842
    Doc Robinson
    Participant

    How ‘Overreaction’ Made Vietnam A Virus Success (BBC)

    With the benefit of hindsight, some ‘overreactions’ can still look like overreactions, while some others can end up looking like under-reactions. That’s the thing about uncertainty and limited information. Precautions, based on the best information available at the time, can later be seen as mistakes, when the situation becomes more clear. Rational caution could retrospectively be construed as irrational fear.

    If a family pays for 12 months of auto insurance, but is not involved in any car accidents during the entire year (and they are not stopped by the police during that year), then was the money wasted? Was it a mistake for them to pay for car insurance that year? Were they too fearful about the small possibility of being in a car crash?

    #58843
    Maxwell Quest
    Participant

    “China Unauthorised Labs Were Told To Destroy Early Coronavirus Samples (SCMP)”
    “French Doctors Think They May Have Treated COVID19 Patients Last Fall (Hill)”

    I’m reminded of all the bank heist movies over the years in which the thieves douse the getaway car with gasoline and torch it. They certainly are destructive, going out of their way to destroy a perfectly good vehicle just for kicks. Or is there something I’m not seeing here? Left behind fingerprints or DNA evidence perhaps that could be used to put the authorities on their trail?

    In a related story, it appears that during the week of October 14-19, 2019, there was no cellphone activity around the Wuhan Institute of Virology or any of the roads leading to it, almost as if an emergency containment perimeter were set up around the lab after an accident had occurred. Of course, I’m sure it was nothing, and that there is a good explanation coming from the CCP. Possibly an emergency street fair or gay pride parade while the local cell towers were being recalibrated?

    #58844

    So what’s the solution to ennui?
    Lust, passion, fervor, purpose.
    War works, doesn’t it?
    What’s the solution to 30 million workers without a job?
    War works again.
    What’s the solution to a nation divided?
    What’s the solution to cowardice?
    War.

    Rattle those bright shining sabers.
    Their soulmates await in the distance.
    Let’s join with our friends and our neighbors
    And alter our state of existance.
    [bitter/s]

    War. It may not be the usual response to an enigmatic pathogen, but it is the historical answer to economic upheaval.
    I don’t see how China is at fault for the West’s ineptitude. Of course, if they played us for Keystone Cops (six feet apart, of course), does that make them bad, or smart?
    Currency war; trade war; cold war, hot war. “The Art of War” is short enough for even generals and politicians to read. It is the Alpha Dog’s handbook.

    #58845
    kimyo99
    Participant

    This just about has it all: Bill Gates, forced vaccinations, nanochip implants

    what is the difference: 1) bill gates forces you to get a vaccine / nanochip implant
    2) bill gates denies you access to society unless you carry a smartphone running a tracking/contact app

    is it ‘force’ if you can be jailed for failing to carry your covid-safe e-papers?

    you keep mocking this ‘conspiracy theory’. why? the result is exactly the same.

    bonus question: what is the appropriate punishment for a person who leaves their house without their immunity certificate?

    #58846

    “The very idea of global social and economic shutdown as a means to fight an illness is itself the most vile example of Doublethink ever devised. The whole concept places the entire human race at risk of starvation and economic ruin in order to prevent some small fraction of humanity from getting sick.
    “Even more absurd is the notion that isolating those who have survived the virus, thus depriving the rest of us from sharing their immunity.”
    This from a site called The Far Side from Bernard Grover(“augenguy”). Those who think the world has been put under an evil spell by Fauci and Ferguson would appreciate it. It wouldn’t hurt those who think we are being “compassionate” with his nightmare behavior to read it, as well.

    #58847

    Sorry: “Life on the Far Side”.

    #58848
    lasttwo
    Participant

    my parents said know

    Yes Smells like War. Would explain the whole thing wouldn’t it ?

    A little poem called world war 3 – a little poem wrote by me.

    The war machine and the .1% agree, they no longer need you and me.

    Unleash a virus, lock down the world, blame it on China. that’s not absurd.

    fill up the factories building destruction. the final point to democracies abduction.

    for the 1% half the worlds not enough. They will only be happy when they have all the stuff.

    #58849
    Arttua
    Participant

    In my mail box today, (Vt, USA) an 8 page newspaper, The Epoch Times. Every article is an attack piece on China. Title articale “How the Chinese Communist Party Endangered the World” ,
    The drum beats of war.

    #58851
    John Day
    Participant

    http://www.johndayblog.com
    Forgive me for posting what was posted here yesterday, but it’s part of the political discourse.

    “A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent” William Blake opens for Ben Hunt       A political narrative of betrayal is always a top-down application of social abstraction, where a behavioral model is treated as the thing unto itself, falsely elevated as the subject and object of policy, rather than relegated to the analytical toolbox where it belongs. A political narrative of betrayal will always use “model” as a noun rather than “model” as a verb. A political narrative of betrayal always BEGINS with a prescriptive model of mass behavior – a model that by the most amazing coincidence serves the institutional advantage of the narrative creator – and ENDS with a forced fit to the individual citizen.  All political narratives of betrayal start like this, with a disembodied, modeled abstraction like “the American way of life” or “the economy” or “the market” or “public health” or “national security”. An abstraction that is then defined for you in such a way as to logically require the willing abdication of your individual rights, first as an American and ultimately as a human being…  The American Way of Life™ does not exist. It’s not a thing.   What exists is the way of life of Americans.https://www.epsilontheory.com/a-truth-thats-told-with-bad-intent/ 

    Gail Tverberg has the completely valid other horn of the dilemma:  We are finding that using shutdowns to solve COVID-19 problems causes a huge amount of economic damage. The cost of mitigating this damage seems to be unreasonably high. For example, in the United States, antibody studies suggest that roughly 5% of the population has been infected with COVID-19. The total number of deaths associated with this 5% infection level is perhaps 100,000, assuming that reported deaths to date (about 80,000) need to be increased somewhat, to match the approximately 5% of the population that has, knowingly or unknowingly, already experienced the infection.
      If we estimate that the mean number of years of life lost is 13 years per person, then the total years of life lost would be about 1,300,000. If we estimate that the US treasury needed to borrow $3 trillion dollars to mitigate this damage, the cost per year of life lost is $3 trillion divided by 1.3 million, or $2.3 million dollars per year of life lost. This amount is utterly absurd. (Note: It IS Absurd and completely unreal, making the zombie system keep walking forward by plugging impossible black holes of debt due today with even more vast impossible IOUs of future payment.)
    Understanding Our Pandemic – Economy Predicament

    Want a fast recovery? Invest in tests, Fed’s Kaplan says
    Even with tens of millions of jobs lost and a historic decline in output projected this quarter, the U.S. economy could still pull off a relatively quick recovery, Dallas Federal Reserve President Robert Kaplan said on Thursday…
    “The highest return on equity investment we can make in this country is testing.”  (He doesn’t know about Vitamin-D) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-kaplan-idUSKBN22Q3NW  

    5000 IU/day of vitamin-D cuts COVID morbidity and mortality by something like half. It’s the lowest hanging fruit of public health and personal choice. I gave away 1250 doses at work yesterday for coworkers to share with their families. It’s what I could get my hands on. I ordered 3000 more doses to do the same thing when it arrives. This will be my 4th or 5th  round of that intervention. 

    #58852
    zerosum
    Participant

    We are at war. We need a war time budget. USA has a +36 Million casualties.
    Democrats push new $3T coronavirus relief bill through House

    #58853
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Democrats push new $3T coronavirus relief bill through House

    Welcome to the hall of mirrors…

    #58854
    Huskynut
    Participant

    Doc R
    With the benefit of hindsight, some ‘overreactions’ can still look like overreactions, while some others can end up looking like under-reactions. That’s the thing about uncertainty and limited information. Precautions, based on the best information available at the time, can later be seen as mistakes, when the situation becomes more clear. Rational caution could retrospectively be construed as irrational fear.
    Your point is well made, and in the face of such ambiguity, there can only be uncertainty. In the face of uncertainty, we can only expect (hope) for transparency of information and rationale. The reason I keep banging on about NZ’s response being an over-reaction is because it was based on shonky advice (a decision paper that a high school debating student could have driven a truck through. And that advice was withheld from the public until the lockdown was fait accompli. So in no way could there be any kind of public concensus on the need for (harsh L4) lockdown. As the decision was taken pre-emptorily, the burden of proof for the need for harsh lockdown should rest entirely with the government, and not with the lockdown critics. From this starting point, the government is a long and ever-increasing way from demonstrating that proof.

    John Day
    If we estimate that the mean number of years of life lost is 13 years per person, then the total years of life lost would be about 1,300,000.
    I’ve seen the reports estimating mean lost life at 13 years, and I can’t reconcile it with other reports that the mean age of death is 79 or 80 yo. (but I agree with you btw on the ludicrously high monetary value placed on each year). Obviously deaths of younger people will skew the means in this direction, but by 13 years? The corollory of course (never mentioned in the media) is that excess deaths due to lockdown (untreated medical conditions, suicide etc) will almost certainly skew far younger (ie greater lost life years) than victims of Covid (who tend to be old). So if we’re going to measure/discuss this way, let’s fix the goalposts and start reporting the lost life years of lockdown victims. /sarc yeah like, that’s gonna happen… /endsarc

    #58855
    John Day
    Participant

    @Huskynut,
    Well, I see that my artifice of presenting Ben Hunt and Gail Tverberg as the horns of a dilemma, then cutting that Gordian knot with vitamin-D may not have gone off as successfully as planned.
    More tomorrow.
    Tomorrow morning I’ll drop the truth-BOMB about our friendly new coronavirus.

    #58856
    WES
    Participant

    Up here in Toronto, I went with my daughter to Home Depot to get some drywall compound and paint.

    We both wore N95 masks and gloves.

    At best mask wearing about 50:50. Some even wearing masks partly down! One person removed their mask at cashier!

    Respecting social distancing inside the store? Not so much! Only in the waiting line into the store!

    Oh by the way, the store was busy!

    My daughter said it was scary, people behaving as if the virus never existed! This was her first trip outside of the house since she came home from University!

    #58857
    WES
    Participant

    I am appalled that Canada’s and US’s top health officials are still saying masks don’t work!

    Everywhere where masks are worn by most of the people, they have the numbers to prove it does work!

    #58858

    How is a 5% infection rate indicative of a HIGHLY contagious virus? The health officials are dancing around tests- “not-for-diagnosis” RT-PCR tests, 0-100% accurate antibody tests…
    Is this a fiercely contagious pathogen or not? If it’s so contagious, then it isn’t particularly lethal. If it’s incredibly lethal, then it isn’t so contagious. Health “officials” want it both ways and the numbers simply won’t support them. Vague and sparse test results work to keep the narrative intact.
    When the narrative falls apart, there are always the squirrels of war.
    I still can’t believe that Big Mother told us to stay away from each other, and we said “okay”.

    #58859
    zerosum
    Participant

    I’ve driven more than a dozen time beside my home depot and, to my amazement, the parking lot has always been full. (Lots of people spending money.)

    I cannot tell if our experts and leaders are telling the truth.

    Trillions of dollars have been given out.
    Claims of billions upon billion of dollars were being lost by the entertainment, hotels, casinos, airlines, etc., .
    Question:
    1. Are the consumers richer and sitting upon a pile of cash just dying to go on a spending spree?
    2. Can all those claims of loss be an exaggeration?
    3. Why did those trillions of dollars that were given out not replace those billions of dollars than were loss?

    Who is telling the truth? I cannot tell.

    #58860
    Huskynut
    Participant

    @ John Day
    I read your earlier post quickly and didn’t properly grasp what you were saying. On a close re-read I do get it and – so looking forward to tomorrow’s next installment!
    PS, sarc in my earlier comment wasn’t directed at you, of course.

    #58862
    Dr. D
    Participant

    China must know what it was or they wouldn’t want to destroy it. Or if they were trying to claim it wasn’t theirs, they would have said so then, not months later. This says “lab” to me, although it doesn’t have to be malicious. At least we got the dreadful pangolin thing gone. At this rate we can tell the truth by 2056, after 99.95% of us die of something unrelated.

    Winning nations said they were overreacting, but the U.S. was told that too. Vitamin D has proven to be strangely more relevant than one might expect, which helps explain the distribution worldwide, as the distribution in Viet Nam, but also Florida, America’s waiting room. And is another point of how the medical advice has been 180 wrong out of all the institutions and therefore governments. No masks, send patients TO nursing homes, stay inside as far away from vitamin D as possible. Lupus patients do indeed have better immunity: don‘t look at HCQ. WHO says don’t give immune suppressants to fight the overreaction, etc. Has expert advice killed 1/3 of the people? Half? We may never know. That could be part of the strange distribution as well.

    “Medicare for All means never losing your health insurance if you lose your job,”

    Before 1990, our health care mostly worked and only needed a seasonal overhaul. Since government-lobbyist complex got involved, it doesn’t work at all, doubly since ACA, a lobbyist wish-list, as expected. And with 10 years of 10% increases leading up to and after. Gosh if lobbyists and government co-created this against doctors, what’s the solution? “pushing new subsidies for private health insurance companies,”

    an anti-inflammatory drug approved for rheumatoid arthritis”

    Huh. Isn’t HCQ also used for RA and a lot cheaper?

    Seems strange that the military could give doses faster than the ten-thousand existing hospitals we already have, sounds more like a PR exercise, showing we’re “doing something”. Yes, something irrational and oversold. But I’m sure they’re helpful, they’re just a LOT smaller than all doctors and hospitals combined. The number difference is so massive, they could probably beat the U.S. military in lasertag by sheer numbers.

    24% unemployment. How long do you think we can live when nobody is doing any work? Guess we won’t find out now, and so much the better. They’re trying to stop the planting, so I’m glad they won’t get the chance. They wouldn’t like the results of their initiative.

    ICU room: is Denmark a success or a failure? If they hold off having any virus will they never have immunity and be hiding and at risk for 20 more years? While Sweden goes back to life? Not declaring here, just asking. What’s the plan?

    People aren’t protesting for the right to BE waitresses and hairdressers, they’re fighting for the right to HAVE them. This is about white people demanding service.”

    Wow. #OppositeLand, how wrong can you be? The people protesting were the WORKERS, willing to put themselves in danger to WORK. FOR you. The chronic complainers who clearly don’t grow food and deliver it. The people complaining were all the people who aren’t essential and don’t work, as they didn’t have any trouble or worries sitting at home. It’s pretty amazing. I feel there’s a certain divide that pairs up with a certain outlook: one group hates work and their dream and goal in life is to never work or do anything useful again. That’s the UBI, etc group, anti-capitalism, all that stuff. The other group WANTS to work, and is constantly annoyed and dodging the first group trying every method – regulation, rules, helping – to STOP work, to STOP others from doing what they want, which is expressing themselves, helping other people…through work. Okay, fine, although you’re trampling the rights of the workers…in the name of the worker’s rights. We’ll see how that works in the election, as attacking the working class didn’t work so well in ‘16. However, if you go system-wide with one group vs the other, it’s pretty easy to see what will happen. One method will stop all production and collapse us into the stone age, the other would move us forward to over-abundance. …And that’s been proven out every time, dozens of times, since October 1917.

    No, they’re fighting you – on the edge of using guns – for the right TO cut YOUR hair, not their own. To support THEIR kids, not fighting to have someone else, you, support them. Please don’t diminish how radically different this is. Some people love life and want to go live it. Some people love others, and put themselves at risk to help them. Some people live bravely and don’t cower in their basements fearing death. They don’t stop you from hiding and shirking work, so give them the same courtesy.

    They’re radically anti-worker. That’s just amazing to me. Especially when they still want all that stuff — iPhones, tacos — that work provides. They just don’t want to pay? Is that why they use 3rd world and slave labor abroad and promote 2nd class citizens at home? Don’t sweat it, man, just do some nobility of work and feel better about yourself. Don’t consume: create.

    #58863
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Yeah, the lockdown has been a joke. I’m not kidding about Pottersville. If every WalMart and Home Depot is packed, why bother? Just to keep drug dealers, liquor stores, dispensaries, prostitutes and Amazon in business but close every barber and Joe Tile Shoppe? It’s everything opposite of what you’d want from an economically and socially healthy nation, and we’re legally requiring it and subsidizing it. Then, clearly no one believes the experts and authorities, as they don’t really wear masks, and WI bars are packed the day Prohibition ended. That means they’re just not afraid, despite everything they could do, 24/7 for 21 weeks. Smart or other, I won’t say, just that they don’t believe you. You’re a hack, a nobody, a zero to them. Experts and authorities should probably look into why that is, before science itself is defunded and replaced with gawd-‘elp-us due to a total, screaming, lack of credibility. You know, like the WHO. I’m not that optimistic. Like other cults and religions, they have a hard time with internal reform, disciplining their own, which is odd, because that’s the basis of it.

    Anyway, no masks, no gloves, DGAF, and now they’re so at it, governments are courting riots and lightposts. Why bother? They had to step aside to retain the credibility that they are “in charge” before the people take the reins and kick them out or worse.

    Smart? Stupid? That’s not the point. The point is, the culture, the nation, is never going to be better than itself, and they’re constantly at this. Somehow a science, or a government, or an expert drawn from the population is going to be better than its inputs and its environment: the population. It can’t be. It’s like “People get the government they deserve”, because it reflects who THEY are, what’s inside the people in aggregate. Nothing can dodge that, not all the harassing and scolding in the world. Certainly not law and a Constitutional amendment, as seen in Prohibition. Alcohol use and problems went UP, as with the “War on Drugs” but they never learn. Just say “I told you to obey.” They are who they are. Stop ordering them around and bugging them. It wastes your time and annoys the pig. The only way is to provide something new, an alternative, so they can voluntarily elevate themselves. And despite current trends this was happening and worked great several times in U.S. history, until the “experts” are re-installed by a extractive minority of disaster capitalists again.

    You’re quite right about CV: 21 weeks in both can’t be true: it’s either contagious or dangerous, but not both. Their science is a rat’s nest: it makes no sense. Random countries succeed, and each thing that “worked” has an opposite exception to the rule. We just refuse to look at the examples that challenge our opinions. Each thing we know, no children, etc, shows an opposite. They still know nothing, and still the numbers, cases, locations, and processes contradict themselves, allowing each person to pick a constellation at random and support their random personal opinion. That screams data pollution and manipulation. If any case is equally plausible, something far deeper is happening, and need to step back another level.

    Anyway, if 66% of quarantines had it, DID the masks work? Why were they bothering? That says very contagious to me, just like coronas, just like common colds. Which means very, very not-dangerous, as the numbers seem to bear out, although we have strange, single-spot outliers like NYC. That means I suspect the test isn’t picking up the cases fully, and the exposure/antibody rate is higher. But there’s my bias, drawing same random conclusions based on criminally faulty data. The only thing worse than that would be doing fancy math on it. Good news would be: since you get it just as fast hiding at home with your mask on, then when we take masks off, it won’t make much difference. http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=239297

    Like it or not, we’re about to find out. Thankfully, we have decided this before we all starve.

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