Coronavirus Pandemic: Apocalypse Now! Or exaggerated scare story?

[Aeneas]

I stand my ground. 'Gentlemen, either we take her in as agreed with your boss or nothing else happens here today other than we all stand about in this glorious sunshine and wait for the moon to rise', I say with a firm but nonthreatening smile of intent.

Sorry for your loss Michael and good on you to stand up to this nonsense.

Also great how you diplomatically found a compromise by the use of gloves. A compromise they probably wouldn't have thought of themselves.

 

[Pearce]

Coronavirus strikes again, this time helping Chris Cuomo grow a tiny seed of critical thought capacity.

Coronavirus-stricken Chris Cuomo trashes CNN gig during radio show meltdown

Chris Cuomo’s coronavirus-induced fever may have subsided but the CNN anchor was red hot on Monday. The longtime cable host, 49, had an existential mini-crisis on his SiriusXM show, lashing o…

nypost.com

After a story about being confronted the article says Cuomo
"wishes he could have acted like a regular Joe and told the biker to “go to hell.”

“That matters to me more than making millions of dollars a year … because I’ve saved my money and I don’t need it anymore,” he said.

“I want to be able to tell you to go to hell, to shut your mouth … I don’t get that doing what I do for a living."

[...]

Speaking about his job as the host of CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time,” the Queens-born anchor said he doesn’t want to spend his time “trafficking in things that I think are ridiculous.”

Such things include “talking to Democrats about things that I don’t really believe they mean” and “talking to Republicans about them parroting things they feel they have to say.”

He also wants to stop analyzing the president, “who we all know is full of s–t by design.”

As a public figure, Cuomo said, he has to tolerate other people’s opinions of him — and it’s just not worth it to him anymore.

“I don’t think it’s worth it to me because I don’t think I mean enough, I don’t think I matter enough, I don’t think I can really change anything, so then what am I really doing?”

“I’m basically being perceived as successful in a system that I don’t value,” he continued. “I’m seen as being good at being on TV and advocating for different positions … but I don’t know if I value those things, certainly not as much as I value being able to live my life on my own terms.”



Well I guess this could be one of those positive effects of the virus

 

[michaelrc]

Finally a little sanity is beginning to emerge. "Operation Gridlock", will happen in Lansing mi on Wednesday to protest governor Gretchen Whitmer's covid 19 policies.

Regarding Bill Gates and public sentiment, there's an article in Medium today. I can't open it because I'm not a paid subscriber. The title is interesting, for so many reasons. Mostly, I'd like to see the comment section. If anyone here has access, please let us know how the article was received by the Medium readership.
I didn't pay to join Medium because I don't need another reading distraction. I purposely requested topics not of particular interest to me for my feed there, so as to keep up with what other-minded folk were thinking/writing about these things. I just scan the titles.

My Mother Thinks Bill Gates Is Trying to Kill Us All And now she wants me to “respect her beliefs.” Shannon Ashley in Honestly Yours

 

[Agron]

Yes, maybe you're right. After all, it doesn't matter much if it means anything. The important thing is to unravel what these politicians are really doing, their works.

I also sell art to get by so I got the eye. Geometric abstractions are sought after and there is one famous Croatian school of it from 50s and 60s...
Cheers @Javi

 

[wmu9]

That german article on the propaganda tactics is very enlightening. Here's another propaganda piece right on time...

Sweden's Relaxed Approach to the Coronavirus Could Already Be Backfiring
Sweden's Relaxed Approach to the Coronavirus Could Be Backfiring

 

[MK Scarlett]

I'm far behind with 14 pages ahead, but in case of...

The article is from Karine Bechet-Golovko:

Pourquoi peut-on parler d'une instrumentalisation de la crise du coronavirus : de l'information à la propagande

Le coronavirus existe et remettre en cause la crise sanitaire n'a aucun sens. Pourtant, ce qu'elle nous révèle est autre. Impossible...

russiepolitics.blogspot.com

What I appreciate is that this article is well written, like a neutral observer. It's a good one to send/link to your relatives who are more running on the logic part (which means nothing in term of resistance to the actual paranoïa as we saw).
(I would say : this article has clearly its place on fr.sott - please admin, read and advise if yes - if you search on "Golovko" on the fr.sott site, you find already many articles written by her which were re-posted on sott.)

This one is part of an enormous list of articles that French editors have around. Thank you for bringing it up!

The video clip is also a very nice work :

This video is particular as the author is also listing all the possible consequences of all of this mess, and about the financial "things" that are occuring at this moment in the US with the FED, i'm wondering if he's right in his analyse of the situation and claiming that it's a BIG hold-up ? I do not have financial knowledge, thus if someone (french) here can comment this video about this. But for the rest, yes, this video is a must to send to your relatives who prefer a video from a reading. Maybe also to add on SOTT, and if judged good, maybe traduce it (sub-title) to english (?)

And this video has been published on French SOTT on March 31, 2020:
Coronavirus - À qui profite le crime ?

 

[biuta]

Thinking back at 9/11 and how Zbigniew Brzezinsky's book looked like a roadmap for the first decade of the 21st Century, I kept trying to find the book for the current decade and I bumped into this article, which seems to point to something interesting.

Globalisation is dead and we need to invent a new world order

A book excerpt and interview with Michael O'Sullivan, author of “The Levelling”

www.economist.com

Mr O’Sullivan’s book, “The Levelling: What's Next After Globalisation” offers a roadmap. He sees a multipolar world forming but international institutions unprepared for this. He voices worries about a world of low growth and high debt—and calls for a “world treaty on risk” so central banks only resort to measures like quantitative easing under agreed conditions.

The world, he believes, will cleave into “Leveller” countries that hew to rights and freedoms, and “Leviathan” ones that are content with state-managed growth and fewer liberties.

Globalisation is already behind us. We should say goodbye to it and set our minds on the emerging multipolar world. This will be dominated by at least three large regions: America, the European Union and a China-centric Asia. They will increasingly take very different approaches to economic policy, liberty, warfare, technology and society. Mid-sized countries like Russia, Britain, Australia and Japan will struggle to find their place in the world, while new coalitions will emerge, such as a “Hanseatic League 2.0” of small, advanced states like those of Scandinavia and the Baltics. Institutions of the 20th century—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation—will appear increasingly defunct.

Interesting that WHO is not mentioned, but he does have a focus on Finance, so it might be understandable.

The Economist: What killed globalisation?

Michael O'Sullivan: At least two things have put paid to globalisation. First, global economic growth has slowed, and as a result, the growth has become more “financialised”: debt has increased and there has been more “monetary activism”—that is, central banks pumping money into the economy by buying assets, such as bonds and in some cases even equities—to sustain the international expansion. Second, the side effects, or rather the perceived side-effects, of globalisation are more apparent: wealth inequality, the dominance of multinationals and the dispersion of global supply chains, which have all become hot political issues.

It may well be better that those who have grown fond of globalization get over it, accept its passing, and begin to adjust to a new reality. Many will resist and, like the thirty-five foreign-policy experts who published an advertisement in the New York Times on July 26, 2018, under the banner “Why We Should Preserve International Institutions and Order,” will feel that the existing world order and its institutions should be maintained. I disagree. Globalization, at least in the form that people have come to enjoy it, is defunct.

From here, the passage away from globalization can take two new forms. One dangerous scenario is that we witness the outright end of globalization in much the same manner as the first period of globalization collapsed in 1913.

Interesting that the first phase ended up in 1913 - does the formation of the Federal Reserve Bank have anything to do with this? If yes, it means that phase 1 was the institution of the dollar as the World's reserve currency, and now we will see the demise of the US$ and the start of a new reserve currency, as shown by @Ketone Cop in this earlier post.

This scenario is a favorite of commentators because it allows them to write about bloody end-of-the-world calamities. This is, thankfully, a low-probability outcome, and with apologies to the many armchair admirals in the commentariat who, for instance, talk willfully of a conflict in the South China Sea, I suggest that a full-scale sea battle between China and the United States is unlikely.

Instead, the evolution of a new world order—a fully multipolar world composed of three (perhaps four, depending on how India develops) large regions that are distinct in the workings of their economies, laws, cultures, and security networks—is manifestly underway. My sense is that until 2018, multipolarity was a more theoretical concept—more something to write about than to witness. This is changing quickly: trade tensions, advances in technologies (such as quantum computing), and the regulation of technology are just some of the fissures around which the world is splitting into distinct regions.

Interesting to note that it is Russia and China that we heard most from in the recent years in terms of a multi-polar world...

Multipolarity is gaining traction and will have two broad axes. First, the poles in the multipolar world have to be large in terms of economic, financial, and geopolitical power. Second, the essence of multipolarity is not simply that the poles are large and powerful but also that they develop distinct, culturally consistent ways of doing things. Multipolarity, where regions do things distinctly and differently, is also very different from multilateralism, where they do them together.

This is interesting as it goes back a long time, as shown in @Ketone Cop 's post - see the part about Zbigniew Brzezinski and Gorbachev.

China, in particular, is interesting in the context of the switch from globalization to multipolarity, not least because at the 2017 World Economic Forum the Chinese president claimed the mantle of globalization for China. China benefited greatly from globalization and its accoutrements (e.g., WTO membership), and it played a vital role in the supply-chain dynamic that drove globalization. However, trade flows into China increasingly betray a move away from a globalized world and toward a more regionally focused one. For instance, IMF data show that in 2018, compared with 2011, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Malaysia traded more with China and relatively less with the United States. These countries, together with Bangladesh and Pakistan, have allowed themselves to be enticed by trade- and investment-based relationships with China and are now in its orbit.

However, China is itself not globalized: it is increasingly hard for Western companies to do business there on equal terms with Chinese companies, and the flow of both money and ideas—out of and into China, respectively—is heavily curtailed. Flow of people is another indicator. Flows within China are dynamic and are perhaps more managed than before, but flows of foreigners into China are miniscule by comparison to other countries, and China has only recently established an agency (the State Immigration Administration created at the 2018 Party Congress) to cultivate inward flows. So as China has become a major pole, it has become less globalized and arguably is contributing to the trend toward deglobalization.

the European Union, the United States, China, and potentially India are poles, but Japan and Russia would not qualify as distinct poles. Russia, for instance, scores well on certain aspects of multipolarity (e.g., militarily), but in its current state it may never become a true pole in the sense employed here.

The path toward multipolarity will not be smooth. One tension is that since the Industrial Revolution the world has had an anchor point in terms of the locus and spread of globalization (Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth century). The fact that there are now at least three points of reference introduces a new and possibly uncertain dynamic to world affairs

The potential is high for friction, misunderstanding, and conflict among the increasingly different ways of doing things across the major poles. Essentially, multipolarity means that instead of speaking a common language, the major poles speak different policy languages. Trade-based tension is an obvious possibility here. Another form of tension is the crisis of identity created for countries that are not wholly within one of the poles—again, Japan, Australia, and the United Kingdom are the prime examples—and the crisis of ambition for countries, such as Russia, that want to be poles but lack the wherewithal to do so convincingly.

At a more grassroots level, the implications of the end of globalization as we know it and the path to multipolarity will become a greater part of the political debate. At the margin, the flow of people, ideas, and capital may be less global and more regional and in time could be reinforced by a growing sense of regionalization across the main poles. In a negative way, a more multipolar world may be the watershed that signals the peak of democracy and potentially the beginning of contests within regions for competing views of democracy, institutional strength, statecraft, and control.

So it seems to me that people in the know in terms of what's coming, are using these strange times to consolidate their power, from China's Xi Jinping, to Russia's Putin, to Hungary's Orban, etc. This also shows the potential re-polarization patterns emerging and things will get really interesting.

 

[Joan]

Today I was out and about, doing a bit of shopping, a few comments I heard going about. One old gentleman I overheard saying "This is like 1918". Another young woman I overheard saying to the checkout clerk "We will never go back to the way it was before"

I was waiting outside the post office, they sell cigarettes and lottery tickets on the other side of the area, there was a lineup only 4 people are allowed inside at one time.

I engaged in conservation with a woman waiting outside. I asked her how long she thought this lock down will last, She stated "months". I told her what I thought would happen, that we would be given a reprieve during the summer, then come October the start of the "normal flu season" we will again be back in lock down. She gave me a strange look, as though to say what are you talking about. Maybe I planted a seed, I don't know. But seems to me when interacting and making conservation we should inform what happens during a "normal" flu season. For those that are open, if a seed is planted, it may open them up question the absurdity of the psychodrama being played out.

I find it ironic, watching people walking around wearing masks, when I worked in healthcare (I have not had a flu vaccine for several years). Because I refused the vaccine, I had to wear a mask to protect the ones that were vaccinated, it was a form of public shamming.

Yesterday, I watched part of a live stream given by a Health officer from one of the Atlantic provinces, a question was posed from a reporter "How effective is the testing for COVID19, the reply given was (if my memory serves me) as 97% with a failure rate of 3%, she had what appeared to me a smirk on her face.

On the other hand, a similar question was posed to the Health Officer in BC, she stated, and I am paraphrasing very loosely, we are working on it, some patients test positive and then a few hours later they test negative. What a fiasco.

 

[biuta]

More from the script writers at The Economist. This time is an article from August 2019:

What comes after Bretton Woods II?

The world’s monetary system is breaking down

www.economist.com

What comes after Bretton Woods II?
The world’s monetary system is breaking down

International trade is complicated by the fact that most countries have their own currencies, which move in idiosyncratic ways and can be held down to boost competitiveness. Governments’ efforts to manage currencies are constrained by certain trade-offs. Pegging them to an external anchor to stabilise their value means either ceding control of domestic economic policy or restricting access to foreign capital flows. Systems of monetary order, which resolve these trade-offs in one way as opposed to another, work until they do not. The context for America’s economic showdown with China is a system that worked once but no longer does.

OK, so it seems point number one is that there it is too complicated to have too many currencies, so maybe the next step towards one global currency will be some regional currencies or baskets of currencies...

But in any event, back in August of last year it was already clear that the paradigm has to be changed. Interesting cover of The Economist for its March 2020 issue. Please note that this issue has been released on March 7, 2020, four days prior to the WHO declaring the Corona C-19 Pandemic.



Back to the article from Aug 2019.

Such things happen. The first great age of globalisation, which began in the late 19th century, was built atop the gold standard. Governments fixed the value of their currencies to gold, sacrificing some control over the domestic economy. This trade-off became untenable during the Great Depression, when governments reneged on their monetary commitments. As one after another devalued, angry trading partners put up tariffs, and the world retreated into rival currency blocs.

In 1944 Allied nations had another go at crafting a monetary order at a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Participating countries fixed their currencies to the dollar (with some room for adjustment). The buck, in turn, was pegged to gold. The truce survived a mere quarter-century. As America’s trade balance sagged and inflation rose in the 1960s and 1970s, faith in the dollar’s peg to gold waned.

Please note that this happened during a full scale raging World War!

On the next period it is interesting that they skip over the formation of OPEC and the creation of the petro-dollar...

Forced to choose between the domestic interest and the survival of the global monetary system, Nixon abandoned America’s Bretton Woods commitments.

The present system, often described as Bretton Woods II, slowly emerged from the ashes of the post-war order. The dollar’s dominance did not end. Much of the world’s commerce trades in greenbacks.

America began running large, persistent current-account deficits. In other words, its excessive consumption was funded by lending from the emerging world, which invested its dollars into American assets. This flow of money—from reserve-accumulating economies, China chief among them, to America, and from American consumers back to reserve-accumulating economies—defined Bretton Woods II.

America could not borrow from abroad for ever, and persistent current-account deficits ate away at its export industries. In the 2000s some economists worried that investors might lose faith in the greenback, precipitating a collapse in the dollar and a global crisis.

For a time, though, a benign end to Bretton Woods II seemed possible. As Europe’s economies became more integrated and China grew, the prospect of a multipolar world, in which the dollar shared reserve-currency duties with the euro and the renminbi, loomed.

History repeats
A minimally disruptive end to Bretton Woods II remains within the realms of possibility. Its fate might resemble that of Bretton Woods I, especially if Mr Trump loses office in 2020.

Democrats are more economically nationalistic than they used to be, but still mindful of the value of global co-operation. President Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren might seek a one-off depreciation of the dollar while recommitting America to a rules-based system of global trade. A recession in China could scare its leadership into offering concessions on trade that America would accept.

In the absence of a co-ordinated adjustment to exchange rates and a peaceful end to trade hostilities, the world could stumble into a cycle of competitive devaluations and tariff rises. As trading relationships unravel, countries may organise themselves into rival economic blocs. It is hard to imagine the world repeating such an ugly era of history. But not as hard as it used to be.

This last piece sounds more like a threat than a premonition...

 

[Oxajil]

Just a little note. A friend of mine who is a nurse told me that at the IC, he noticed that people (who allegedly have contracted covid-19) with shortness of breath are very fearful and at times are afraid not being able to breathe through mechanical ventilation. When he worked as a nurse years before, he didn't see this much panicky behavior in patients with shortness of breath. I think it's likely connected to all the media hype about how 'deadly' covid-19 is. I wouldn't be surprised if increased fear will make recovery more difficult.

 

[Gaby]

Today I did a telephone consultation to a woman that was completely hysterical. It was impossible to talk to her. I don't recall anyone that hysterical, and I have a track record for dealing with hysterical people. She was shouting something about "NO ONE WANTS TO SEE ME!!" "AND I HAVE CHILDREN!". After a heated exchange, I told her that I couldn't see her in the phone and invited her to come to the clinic.

When she came, I understood what was the hysterics about. She has cancer in her mouth until proven otherwise (100% sure is cancer even without the biopsy though). She said the lesion grew in her mouth throughout this month. She tried desperately to get medical assistance, went to a private dentist and all. Apparently, because of the lockdown, she was told to stay put in her home.

She went from shouting like a mad woman, to tears in her eyes because, finally someone saw her and was reassuring her despite the circumstances.

We were 3 doctors at the clinic today, still, we were unable to do all the telephone consultations that were requested from us. People are calling for anti-anxiety and anti-depressive meds because they lost their income and are barely coping. They can't afford anything alternative, just whatever is covered by health care. Benzos are super cheap. Melatonin costs them several euros that they don't have. It's pretty dire.

This is just a preview of what is to come for Primary Health Care, although I don't think they're planning to allow us to practice the way it used to be before. There are protocols now for teleconsultations with webcams, photos, etc. It can't simply be done. You have to either see the person, or you don't. At least, even when people can't afford something more healing, they feel better when interacting with someone that guides them or at least listens to them. Telephone consultations don't work for that.

I don't think is going to get any better.

 

[Nachtweide]

Meanwhile, several hundred conspiracy theorists in Mitte on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz demonstrated against measures to contain the pandemic on Saturday. The participants opposed the general ban on assembly, the police several arrestet any demonstrators. This included the former RBB presenter Ken Jebsen (KenFM), who spreads anti-American conspiracy theories.

Extremisten und Corona: Berliner Verfassungsschutz warnt vor rechten Anschlägen

Rechte hoffen, in der Krise rücke der Umsturz näher. In den USA wollte ein Rassist ein Corona-Krankenhaus angreifen. Der Verfassungsschutz befürchtet Nachahmer.

www.tagesspiegel.de

KenFM ist in Berlin verhaftet worden

Laut ersten Informationen die ich bekommen habe, wurde KenFM auf dem Rosa Luxemburg Platz in Berlin um ca. 15.30 Uhr von Polizisten abgeführ...

alles-schallundrauch.blogspot.com

 

[Nachtweide]

Something funny. Our Minister of Health, who has no idea what distance rules are. In Germany they say: preach water and drink wine.
It is on the left of the wall

 

[Cosmos]

Here is just one good example of someone on the alternative media sphere who usually is pretty much right on the money, but lost the plot here. There are many that have fallen for it in the alternative media landscape.

John Pilger starts of by responding to the question „Can we trust our governments in what they say to us about Corona Virus?“ emphatically by saying „No we can‘t; absolutely not!“ and then goes on a long winding excursion of believing the official narrative, never even coming close to the idea that they are essentially using a nothing burger for establishing a global tyranny. Essentially proclaiming that they haven’t done enough and weren’t good prepared for the „pandemic“.

 

[Ruth]

I think it's simpler than that. All the numbers creating the curve are false so they will flatten it when it suits them and they have done behind our backs what they wanted to do.

They're also trying to 'boost' numbers now (in the US anyway), with the CDCs recommendation that all people who die, who tested positive to COVID-19 (or are merely suspected of having it) get COVID-19 listed as their main cause of death.

Anyway these are the figures at my (not US) hospital:
tested: 3798, positive: 73 No. of inpatients: 4 (where previously this had been described as 'No. of admissions', curious).

My status is: virtually unemployed. Why is this? Well, they've cancelled all leave for regular and pool staff members as well as all elective procedures in anticipation of 'a surge'. We're also having less patients. Presumably they are sick at home with non-COVID-19 issues.

I'm casual, so I get work after it is allocated to regular and pool staff. And there is none. A conversation with allocations office revealed that there 'might be more work in May' when 'everyone gets sick of working' (usually they get sick from overworking). I looked at our roster sheet and the situation effects everyone. I'm wondering if I should post to our work forum that people who become 'unemployed by COVID-19 get a non-means tested payout from the Government? The hospital probably wouldn't want people to know that all their preparations (and there's been heaps!) may have been nothing more than an over reaction.