Euphemized as “wealth”

"Why Did the World Health Organization Wait Until March to Declare a Global Pandemic?" (Prashad):

"Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden, as well as a host of other U.S. politicians, made the argument that the WHO did not act fast enough with its declaration. Whatever problems posed to the United States by the virus were not the responsibility of the U.S. government, they suggested; the fault lay with the Chinese government and with the WHO.

Our investigation finds that this argument has little foundation. The WHO’s reporting mechanisms are sound, but the WHO’s own ability to make these formal declarations—a public health emergency and a global pandemic, which come with serious financial consequences for member states—has been circumscribed; those who have constrained the World Health Organization—the United States and European nations—are the very same countries whose leaders are now complaining about Chinese influence over the WHO.

By the 1990s, it had become clear that the WHO’s old International Health Regulations—originally issued in 1969, with only a few minor updates and new editions over the two decades after that—were inadequate. For one, these regulations were produced before the emergence of very infectious, lethal, and recurrent infections such as Ebola and the avian influenzas. Secondly, these old regulations were made before air travel began to move about 4.3 billion passengers per year, the scale of air traffic now making the movement of viruses so much easier.

In May 2005, the 58th World Health Assembly revised the 1969 regulations, pointing out that the new regulations would “prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks, and which avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade.”

The North American and European states, in particular, insisted that the declaration of a PHEIC or global pandemic only be made after it was clear that air travel and trade would not be unduly interrupted. This restriction, essentially the core foundations of globalization, has constrained the WHO since 2005.

The new WHO regulations were tested when a new influenza emerged out of Mexico and the United States in mid-April 2009. This H1N1 was a combination of influenza virus genes that had links to swine-lineage H1N1 from both North America and Eurasia (thus the 2009 outbreak was commonly known as “swine flu”). It was first detected on April 15. On April 24, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uploaded a gene sequence onto a publicly accessible influenzas database. On April 25, ten days after the first detection of the virus, the WHO declared the 2009 H1N1 outbreak a PHEIC. On June 11, the WHO said that a global pandemic was underway.

In 2020, the WHO took a month to declare a PHEIC for the coronavirus and took an additional two months after that to pronounce a global pandemic. It was slower to announce the emergency, but it took the same time to declare a global pandemic.

By July 2009, the dangerous H1N1 virus had a less lethal impact than the WHO had feared. However, for the full year from its first detection, 60.8 million people were infected and 12,469 died.

Almost immediately, the WHO was attacked for the June 11 description of the outbreak as a pandemic. When the WHO declares a pandemic, governments are expected to do a variety of things including mass purchase of drugs and vaccines. These are costly.

That December, members of parliament in the Council of Europe opened an inquiry into the WHO declaration. Fourteen members of the Council charged the WHO with what was essentially fraud. They said that “pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards, to alarm governments worldwide. They have made them squander tight health care resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the rise of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.” “The definition of an alarming pandemic,” they wrote, “must not be under the influence of drug-sellers.”

The criticism of the WHO stung. It had declared a pandemic, but the virus had stabilized very soon after the declaration. The WHO responded to such criticism with humility. “Adjusting public perceptions to suit a far less lethal virus has been problematic,” the WHO responded. “Given the discrepancy between what was expected and what has happened, a search for ulterior motives on the part of the WHO and its scientific advisers is understandable, though without justification.”

A WHO official told one of us that the agency had been shaken by the assault in 2009. Over the past ten years, the agency has struggled to regain its confidence, working through the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and then Zika in 2016. In neither of those cases was there a need to make any global declaration.

This year, the WHO declared a global pandemic within three months of the first cases. But there is no doubt that the attack on the WHO a decade ago has made an impact. 

Former WHO employees tell us that fear of being attacked like this by the main donors seriously hampers the independence of the WHO and its scientific advisers. Trump’s current attack is going to weaken further the ability of the WHO to operate at its own pace and with credibility."

"China’s Detection and Reporting of the Covid-19 Outbreak" (Stoll):

"It is tragic that much of the west, especially the US, squandered the time gained through China’s efforts. In our hemisphere, the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have acted quickly and successfully to control the virus. But most other governments (including our own), in thrall to neoliberalism, have not.

In a display of contempt for human life at home and abroad, the US government has failed to protect its own population from the disease, while continuing longstanding (and bi-partisan) wars and sanctions against peoples in both hemispheres that effectively turn the pandemic into a bio-weapon. Historians will undoubtedly view this moment of US history with particular revulsion."

Chinese paper airplanes:  "State Capacity Libertarianism with Progressive Characteristics".

"The Gates Millepus: A Thousand Tentacles of Money Entwine the Nation"  (Mackenzie).  This is interesting, but the claim about 500,000 (!) cases of Gate's vaccine causing child paralysis in India is obvious nonsense - and a little racist, as if the Indians wouldn't notice, or care - on the face of it that has been floating around anti-vaxxer sites.  Actually, the program seems to have been a huge success.  There is more than enough creepy about Gates that we don't need to make shit up.

Tweet (Bean):

"'The political nature of Julian Assange’s extradition process to the US can be proven beyond any reasonable doubt, as it involves large-scale espionage operations, violations of attorney-client privilege & cross-Atlantic legal pressures'—Baltasar Garzon head of Assange legal team"

"Coronavirus: Up to 60 bodies found piled in New York trucks after 'foul odour' reported" (Merrifield).  Tweet (Borzou Daragahi):

"The Sweet Smell of Success"

Tweet (Ben):

"Cherie Blair is not sure a long inquiry into the government's handling of COVID-19 is necessarily the right way to go because if inquiring into political decisions which lead to people needlessly dying her scum bag husband would be in prison"

Celebrating the 75th in pure Nazi style:  "Germany bans Hezbollah, conducts raids to find suspected members".  "Can You Trust Historians?" (Durocher).

"Finance Capitalism vs Industrial Capitalism: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Are Destroying Us" (Vrettos interview with Hudson; also at Unz, where I suspect it won't go over as well; it's always a good idea to start with an 'anti-Semitic' joke):

"The Chicago School says any government spending is the road to the gas chambers. I’ve heard that said literally."

and:

"There’s still not much discussion of the economic problem that really is at the root of this. People complain about the symptoms of inequality, even rich people do that. Everybody has books documenting inequality. But what they don’t want is a discussion of what’s creating it. Does the world have to be this way? What policies are needed to reverse it?

If you discuss that, and find that the root of inequality is the financial system indebting the economy and financializing real estate instead of making it the tax base, then you realize that you have to change the system. Today’s wealth is mainly financial and rent-extracting, taking the form of indebtedness for 90% of the population.

The only way to recover is to wipe out this debt. You can’t recover the real economy of production and consumption without wiping out the debt overhead, without rolling it back. That is what people are unwilling to see. They’re unwilling to look at the solutions, because that’s beyond the Overton window. It’s cognitive dissonance. Actually curing the problem is no simply rubbing your hands and saying, “Oh, isn’t that too bad?” If you criticize the debt system, however, you lose the coverage and the public media. That is why we’re on the Internet, not on The New York Times or Wall Street Journal."

and:

"We are in a permanent depression. There can be no recovery without wiping out the debt overhead (euphemized as “wealth”). As long as you leave the 1% with the lion’s share of wealth (creditor claims) and property ownership, the economy cannot recover. Without realizing that, there cannot be a class consciousness regarding today’s world

Marx talked about the class consciousness of labor vis-a-vis its employers. That took place within the production and consumption sector. But today’s class consciousness of wage earners has to see that industrial companies have been turned into financial companies. They’ve been financialized. A relevant class consciousness must realize that it’s up to socialists to do what industrial capitalism failed to do – namely, to free society from the rentiersector, from the landlord class, the monopolists and financial creditor class. Without freeing society from them, you’re going to have a neofeudal economy. As Rosa Luxemburg said, it’s either socialism or barbarism. Barbarism is a permanent depression. All the classical economists warned against the landlord class, banks and the monopolists continuing to run society into the ground."

"Save America, Throw the Landlords Under the Bus" (Rall).  The only way to save Assholia, but Assholia is not for saving.

"What about the banks and landlords? I’m not suggesting that they should be stuck with the whole tab for COVID-19. Municipalities should waive real estate taxes. They should receive relief to cover their utility and maintenance expenses. Lobbying organizations for property owners point out that their members often have underlying mortgages themselves; those mortgages too should be subject to the payment holiday. Banks should receive infusions of interest-free cash from the Fed. But the U.S. can no longer afford to let these entities continue to collect real estate profits as usual. 

Landlords should take the biggest bath for the simple reason that they are social and economic parasites. Value is added via the production process; landlords add no value whatsoever. If a revolution were to turn renters into homeowners by transferring titles, and abolish bank liens and property taxes and so turn homeowners into full owners, no one would miss landlords. Former renters and mortgage borrowers could easily assume the cost of maintenance that they currently pay to landlords and banks for pennies on the dollar."

"Why The Left Keeps Losing And What They Must Do To Win" (Welsh):

"The left, bless their hearts, tend to think that there are rules, and that they can play by them, win, and be allowed to rule. But all along the process, the left’s opponents will not and do not play by the rules when facing the left.

This has a long history. The US overthrew multiple elected government overseas if they considered them left wing. At home, coincidentally, JFK, RFK, MLK and Malcom X were all assassinated in a period of less than ten years, and we are expected to believe the security apparatus had nothing to do with that. (This doesn’t even pass the laugh test.) There was a LOT of violence in the late 60s and early 70s, to the point of bombs going off every day, because there was, in fact a war going on and when the left realized their leaders were being killed and that peaceful victory would not be allowed, some of them fought.

They lost.

This is war. It is not a game.

Corbyn was deliberately sabotaged by his own bureaucracy, because he thought there were rules. His MPs sabotaged him. The press lied about him over 75% of the time. Sanders was taken out when every opponent except Biden all dropped out at the same time: a coordinated action which I can’t remember a precedent for. It was NOT normal, it is not what would have happened if a centrist had been beating Biden, they would have been allowed to win, and there would have been no nonsense about how that was happening because of a split field, because split fields are normal.

So, as with the seven rules, which include facts like having to restructure and (non violently) purge the press, the same is true of being a left winger. If you get into a place like Corbyn, you have to get rid of all the internal enemies. Not people who just disagree. This means all staffers who are not ideologically aligned. As for MPs, test them, the moment they do something traitorous (as Labour’s MPs did over and over again), remove them from the party. For all MPs, re-select. Note that Boris Johnson removed all MPs who challenged him on Brexit (his main issue) immediately when they crossed him. He then won the election handily.

You do this because neoliberals and conservatives cannot be trusted because they do not believe that left wing government is, or can be, legitimate. They already view it as war and they will cheat, lie and put you in jail if you can. All that failing they will engage in coups and assassination if they can.

You can’t play a game by the rules if the other side is determined to cheat and thinks you shouldn’t be on the field.

Oh, and if it’s not obvious, the police and the military always must be brought under control. This is a somewhat delicate process, but you cannot leave the violent institutions run by right wingers, as they are today. The second they have an excuse they will turn on you. (This is one of the things that Venezuela got right and why Maduro has not yet been overthrown.) 

This is a violent conflict. Centrists and right wingers don’t even see old-style New Deal liberals as legitimate, and will do anything they can to destroy them. This is how it always was: they always hated FDR, they always hated the New Deal, they always hated and wanted to destroy the welfare state. They bided their time, used their power in conservative institutions of the deep state like the FBI and intelligence outfits, and they won. They learned by starting in peripheral nations like Iran, then they transferred what they learned back home."

9/626

"Coronavirus Deaths 3" ('Hunter Wallace', who remains a surprising light in the darkness):

"The world now has 1,223,227 global closed cases which have ended in 995,927 recoveries (81%) and 227,300 (19%). The curious thing about this is that the global death rate of confirmed cases stabilized around 20% a month ago. Is this our true case fatality rate?

Note: If 20% of our current active cases end in death, an additional 169,984 Americans will die from this, not including the 61,112 who are dead now. The death rate of confirmed closed cases in Italy is still 28%."

"More From the Annals of Excess Mortality" (Marshall).  A few of these will be people who, for example, in fear of the virus and not wanting to go to the hospital, ignore heart attack symptoms and die, when they otherwise, with proper medical attention, would not have died.  That's going to be relatively rare, and most of these excess deaths, in the absence of any other explanation, are directly caused by the virus.  Excess deaths cuts through all the nonsense with insufficient testing, faulty tests, faulty sampling, bad math, and so on, all of which are the playground of the denialists.

"French coronavirus strain may be local and may not have come from China" (van der Made).  Puts a crimp in Trump's kung flu distraction theory.

"A cult within a cult: Falun Gong and the Trump administration" (Madsen).  Like the Assholian relationship to the MEK.

Ford's now taking credit for undoing some of his damage:  "Ontario scaled back comprehensive, annual inspections of nursing homes to only a handful last year" (Pedersen/Mancini/Common). ·  9/626.  Ford should be in jail.

Canada's favorite crooked engineers:  "SNC-Lavalin execs get $2.6 million in bonuses while cutting employee salaries, laying off workers" (True North Wire).

The only shocking thing about this is that it is BBC reporting!:  "BBC Panorama exposes government responsibility for UK health worker deaths" (Scripps).

"COVID-19 infection at sporting fixtures underscores criminality of Johnson government’s herd immunity policy" (Mason).  Whenever you hear 'herd immunity' you know that some politicians fucked up really badly, and irreparably, and are looking for some plausible lie to cover their asses.

"COVID-19 origin: Virus shrouded in mystery, here’s why" (Hilotin).  It's interesting that the French were involved in building the Wuhan lab.  Also, it's a bit difficult to shake off Montagnier as 'whimsical'.

The professional Russia pundits in the West are spectacularly, comically, bad at predicting anything, all because their job isn't to be right, but to supply anti-Russian PR/wishful thinking:  "Crisis? What Crisis?" (Robinson).  Tweet (Max Blumenthal):

"Carpenter happens to be Joe Biden's chronically wrong, hyper-confrontational Eastern Europe/Russia advisor"

"Unsealed FBI Handwritten Notes, Emails Reveal Agents Plotted Perjury Trap On Flynn" ('Sara Carter').  These perjury traps are standard FBI operating procedure (lying to the FBI shouldn't be a crime in itself, and if there was any desire for real progress, the law should be changed, and, for that matter, the FISA courts eliminated), with the extra twist here being evidence they were plotting for this to occur ahead of time.  On top of everything else, they were going to improve their odds of getting a lie by threatening Flynn's son.

Doctorow:  "NSO Group employee used Pegasus cyberweapon to stalk a woman" (see also) and  "Bayesian reasoning and covid-19" and "Cigna claims to be rolling in dough and on the verge of bankruptcy" and "Founder of AI surveillance company was a Nazi who helped shoot up a synagogue".  Despite playing a role in shooting up a synagogue, he appears not to be a Khazar (bizarre and impossible to believe, I know):  "Banjo app CEO Damien Patton reportedly has KKK past, helped in synagogue shooting" (Barone).

Famous old American unsolved murder case, solved:  "Delaware County authorities solve 1983 cold case of 15-year-old boy's murder".

"Round two of the “Paycheck Protection Program”: Another disaster for US small businesses and their employees" (Grey).  It's funny that every single aspect of the Assholian government financial reaction to the pandemic, including those few initiatives that appeared to be intended to help groups other than the 1% or 0.1%, all end up, when the smoke clears, just going into the pockets of the 1%/0.1%.

Kleptomania as an organizing political principle:  "Hating Arabs as a Common Ground: Why Israel’s Coalition Government is Likely to Survive" (Baroud).

"JOHN KIRIAKOU: ‘Tough Luck’ for US Prisoners During COVID-19".

"Freedom Rider: Fighting COVID-19 with mass action and a people’s strike" (Kimberley).

"Post-Corona World: Recrimination and Defederation" (Madsen).  Individual Assholian states, literally in order to get around Khazar gangsterism and organized crime, has to conduct their own secret foreign affairs in order to obtain necessary supplies.  Federalism should be under considerable strain in Assholia and other places where the central government isn't fit for purpose.

"Welcome to the Era of the Great Disillusionment" (Cook):

"There has been a handful of staging posts over the past two decades to our current era of the Great Disillusionment. They include:

• the lack of transparency in the US government’s investigation into the events surrounding 9/11 (obscured by a parallel online controversy about what took place that day);
• the documented lies told about the reasons for launching a disastrous and illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003 that unleashed regional chaos, waves of destabilising migration into Europe and new, exceptionally brutal forms of political Islam;
• the astronomical bailouts after the 2008 crash of bankers whose criminal activities nearly bankrupted the global economy (but who were never held to account) and instituted more than a decade of austerity measures that had to be paid for by the public;
• the refusal by western governments and global institutions to take any leadership on tackling climate change, as not only the science but the weather itself has made the urgency of that emergency clear, because it would mean taking on their corporate sponsors;
• and now the criminal failures of our governments to prepare for, and respond properly to, the Covid-19 pandemic, despite many years of warnings.

Anyone who still takes what our governments say at face value … well, I have several bridges to sell you.

But it is not just governments to blame. The failings of experts, administrators and the professional class have been all too visible to the public as well. Those officials who have enjoyed easy access to prominent platforms in the state-corporate media have obediently repeated what state and corporate interests wanted us to hear, often only for that information to be exposed later as incomplete, misleading or downright fabricated.

In the run-up to the 2003 attack on Iraq, too many political scientists, journalists and weapons experts kept their heads down, keen to preserve their careers and status, rather than speak up in support of those rare experts like Scott Ritter and the late David Kelly who dared to sound the alarm that we were not being told the whole truth.

In 2008, only a handful of economists was prepared to break with corporate orthodoxy and question whether throwing money at bankers exposed as financial criminals was wise, or to demand that these bankers be prosecuted. The economists did not argue the case that there must be a price for the banks to pay, such as a public stake in the banks that were bailed out, in return for forcing taxpayers to massively invest in these discredited businesses. And the economists did not propose overhauling our financial systems to make sure there was no repetition of the economic crash. Instead, they kept their heads down as well, in the hope that their large salaries continued and that they would not lose their esteemed positions in think-tanks and universities.

We know that climate scientists were quietly warning back in the 1950s of the dangers of runaway global warming, and that in the 1980s scientists working for the fossil-fuel companies predicted very precisely how and when the catastrophe would unfold – right about now. It is wonderful that today the vast majority of these scientists are publicly agreed on the dangers, even if they are still trapped in a dangerous caution by the conservatism of scientific procedure. But they forfeited public trust by leaving it so very, very late to speak up.

And recently we have learnt, for example, that a series of Conservative governments in the UK recklessly ran down the supplies of hospital protective gear, even though they had more than a decade of warnings of a coming pandemic. The question is why did no scientific advisers or health officials blow the whistle earlier. Now it is too late to save the lives of many thousands, including dozens of medical staff, who have fallen victim so far to the virus in the UK.

Worse still, in the Anglosphere of the US and the UK, we have ended up with political systems that offer a choice between one party that supports a brutal, unrestrained version of neoliberalism and another party that supports a marginally less brutal, slightly mitigated version of neoliberalism. (And we have recently discovered in the UK that, after the grassroots membership of one of those twinned parties managed to choose a leader in Jeremy Corbyn who rejected this orthodoxy, his own party machine conspired to throw the election rather than let him near power.) As we are warned at each election, in case we decide that elections are in fact futile, we enjoy a choice – between the lesser of two evils.

Those who ignore or instinctively defend these glaring failings of the modern corporate system are really in no position to sit smugly in judgment on those who wish to question the safety of 5G, or vaccines, or the truth of 9/11, or the reality of a climate catastrophe, or even of the presence of lizard overlords. 

Because through their reflexive dismissal of doubt, of all critical thinking on anything that has not been pre-approved by our governments and by the state-corporate media, they have helped to disfigure the only yardsticks we have for measuring truth or falsehood. They have forced on us a terrible choice: to blindly follow those who have repeatedly demonstrated they are not worthy of being followed, or to trust nothing at all, to doubt everything. Neither position is one a healthy, balanced individual would want to adopt. But that is where we are today."

and:

"The only alternative to a future in which we are ruled by Big Brother technocrats like Tony Blair, or by chummy authoritarians who brook no dissent, or a mix of the two, will require a complete overhaul of our societies’ approach to information. We will need fewer curbs on free speech, not more.

The real test of our societies – and the only hope of surviving the coming emergencies, economic and environmental – will be finding a way to hold our leaders truly to account. Not based on whether they are secretly lizards, but on what they are doing to save our planet from our all-too-human, self-destructive instinct for acquisition and our craving for guarantees of security in an uncertain world.

That, in turn, will require a transformation of our relationship to information and debate. We will need a new model of independent, pluralistic, responsive, questioning media that is accountable to the public, not to billionaires and corporations. Precisely the kind of media we do not have now. We will need media we can trust to represent the full range of credible, intelligent, informed debate, not the narrow Overton window through which we get a highly partisan, distorted view of the world that serves the 1 percent – an elite so richly rewarded by the current system that they are prepared to ignore the fact that they and we are hurtling towards the abyss. 

With that kind of media in place – one that truly holds politicians to account and celebrates scientists for their contributions to collective knowledge, not their usefulness to corporate enrichment – we would not need to worry about the safety of our communications systems or medicines, we would not need to doubt the truth of events in the news or wonder whether we have lizards for rulers, because in that kind of world no one would rule over us. They would serve the public for the common good."

Hegemonic fatigue

The philosophers are already suffering from nostalgia for globalism (not to mention all the free junkets where they crossed the planet to tell each other in person how great they all were):  "Will the Coronavirus Change the World? On Gramsci’s ‘Interregnum’ and Zizek’s Ethnocentric Philosophy" (Baroud/Rubeo) and "How to think post-Planet Lockdown" (Escobar).  I think the good parts of globalism - if there are any - are dead and buried.

This is so fucking awful I've permanently given up on this guy, and am very close to giving up on the whole site:  "The Corona Chronology Vindicates Donald Trump by Larry C Johnson".  Ludicrous!

The real world is messing with the dreams of the crazies:

1. "Turkey's Economic Troubles Give Putin Another Chance To Squeeze Erdogan" (Moon);
2. "The Gulf Kingdoms Are Finally Waking Up to Hindu Extremists’ Inherent Islamophobia" (Korybko); and
3. "Middle East: How is the UAE Changing Its Geo-Political Game?" (Sheikh).

"Democrats Will Have To Answer Questions About Tara Reade. The Biden Campaign Is Advising Them To Say Her Story “Did Not Happen.”" (Cramer/Gray).  Tightrope walking.

"Trump cuts U.S. research on bat-human virus transmission over China ties" (Owermohle).  This looks an awful lot like cleaning up the crime scene.

""Playing Into Putin's Hands" - Critics Lash-Out At Joint US-Russia Declaration On Historic Elbe Meeting" (Ditz).  Trump's doing a whole lot better with history than his pathetic proxies in Eastern Europe, not to mention the (((neocons))).

"‘No Consequences for Negligence That Kills’: McConnell Wants Corporate Immunity From Covid-19 Lawsuits" (Johnson).  Peak McConnell!

"Corruption Scandals Could See Bolsonaro Removed from Power Quicker than One Could Expect" (Antonopoulos).  Given what we're already seen, you do have to wonder if there is anything he might do or say so awful that it might result in his being dislodged.  Since they've got a new general running things, the Brazilian Powers That Be don't seem to care what Bolsonaro does.

Even at this late date, the partisan attacks on Trump and associates continue to fall apart, sometimes in spectacular ways:

1. tweet (Matt Taibbi):
   

   "This is from the IG report: “The FBI investigated whether there were cyber links between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, but had concluded by early February 2017 that there was no such link.” That’s definitive. And yet the story kept being leaked for over a year after."

2. "EXCLUSIVE: Dossier Author Christopher Steele Had Previously Undisclosed Meetings With Lawyers For DNC, Clinton Campaign" (Ross); and
3. "Tuesday Surprise Rocks Flynn Case: Former Lawyers Failed To Produce Another Pile Of Evidence" (Solomon).

"Boris Johnson’s Recuperation at His Prime Ministerial Country Estate" (Surin).  With Britain, all you have to do is describe the facts, and it's automatically hilarious.  Surin has received the highest humanitarian award imaginable, a page on Canary Mission.

"UK drops bombs during coronavirus crisis, defying global ceasefire it claims to support" (Lockley).  On Iraq, so it naturally falls under the Bombs For The Jews exception to any peace initiative, due to stuff that may have happened in Europe in the 40s, or something.

"The U.S. Wants to “Purchase” Greenland from Denmark" (Korybko).  Starts out promising than turns into psychodrama revolving around Korybko's one-sided feud with the 'alt-media'.

Other possible titles for today:  "Previously undisclosed meetings" or "Dreams of the crazies" or "Did Not Happen".

Big scofflaw funeral

'Hunter Wallace' rekt Andrew Anglin:  "Live Thread: Greg Johnson Debates Andrew Anglin" (Griddin).  You'd think 'neo-Nazi' 'anti-Semite' Anglin would spend all his time discussing the single biggest (((theft))) in world history, but instead he spends all his time with retarded denialism, as if his boss (((weev))) has instructed him to do everything he can to change the subject.  He can't possibly have lost that many IQ points that fast.

"Experts demolish studies suggesting COVID-19 is no worse than flu" (Mole).  Stanford University appears to be the headquarters for denialism (I'm going to take a wild guess and say it has something to do with funding by the Silicon Valley sociopaths).  Massive problems with the 'science' (both the math and the sampling), yet you'd think from the denialists that Ioannidis in particular was the world's greatest researcher and the acknowledged world leader in the field.

Big scofflaw funeral:  "Bill de Blasio Has Had It With Hasidic Jews" ('Hunter Wallace').  De Blasio is literally Hitler, and on Khazaria's birthday!

It appears like Killary, who endorses Biden while simultaneously having her lackeys attack Biden on senility and #Metoo, is planning to stab Joe in the front, instead of, as with Bernie, in the back.

Ha ha ha, attention to detail!:  "Orwellian ‘memory hole’ in action? Stealth removal of CNN clip supporting Biden sex assault claim proves MSM’s double standards" (Buyniski):

"Not only was the August 11, 1993 episode quietly removed, but whoever was responsible actually renumbered the subsequent episodes in an apparent effort to make the deletion less obvious."

The problem is they are doing exactly what NATO pays them to do:  "It is time to replace the OPCW with a new uncompromised version".

Tweet (Robbie Jaeger):

"BREAKING:

The Intercept's parent company, First Look Media, got $31 Million in funding from billionaire backed Silicon Valley Community Foundation in 2018—per recent IRS filings.

That accounted for 95% of that year's funding—an increase of over 100% from 2017."

and:

"According to Forbes, Silicon Valley Community Foundation (who took in over $2 Billion in 2018) donors include:

—Facebook founders Mark Zuckerberg & Dustin Moskovitz

—Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey

—Netflix CEO Reed Hastings

—Oracle CEO Larry Ellison"

and:

"The Silicon Valley Community Foundation funds many other prominent nonprofits, including but not limited to:

—American Enterprise Institute

—Center For American Progress

—Center For Popular Democracy

—Third Way Institute

—Sunrise Movement"

"Will the US be Sued over COVID-19? Or what have Pentagon’s Biolabs been Up To?" (Kulikov).  Assholians are talking big about huge lawsuits against China, but every country in the world has massive claims against Assholia (and not just for this!), and by rights should be able to seize all Assholian assets around the world.  The irony is that the Assholians, unable to do their research domestically due to sloppy labs, may have sub-contracted some of their dirty research to the Wuhan lab (hence all the back-and-forth with smuggled biological material)!

The enemy

"Exclusive: OPCW insiders slam ‘compromised’ new Syria chemical weapons probe" (OPCW Insiders).  A long list of problems with the latest PR production.

The Golden Age of 'journalism':  "Politico Quietly Admits Their 'Trump Owes China Millions' Article Was Fake News With Midnight Correction" (Durden).  "Hungarian Minister Challenges CNN's "Fake News" About Suspending Parliament" (Watson).  "COVID-19: New York Times Revives its Role in Chinagate" (Lauria).

"Ukraine’s Opposition Accuses US of Scrubbing Info About Biolabs’ Activities on Ukrainian Territory".

The 'moral hazard' from Canada!:  "John Ivison: Trudeau's lavish handouts risk turning workers into welfare slackers".  "POILIEVRE: The state reigns supreme as never before in Canada".

"Petition to decriminalize magic mushrooms and psychedelic plants in Canada initiated in House of Commons" (Pablo).

"Food-delivery app Foodora announces exit from Canada two months after historic worker win" (Mojtehedzadeh).  One good thing about the pandemic is that restaurants are banding together to create their own delivery services, thus bypassing the 40% shylocks who run these food couriers.  They charge way too much, use way too much packaging, treat their employees ('independent contractors') like shit, and often deliver the food in inedible condition.  They even glom on to restaurants which want nothing to do with them, showing up with delivery orders the restaurants have to fill in order not to disappoint customers.

"ASSANGE EXTRADITION: Espionage is the Charge, But He’s Really Accused of Sedition" (Lauria):

"Assange did not pass state secrets to an enemy of the United States, as in a classic espionage case, but rather to the public, which the government might well consider the enemy."

"Judge Rejects Reality Winner’s Request for Release as COVID-19 Spreads at Women’s Prison" (Gosztola).

"A Navy Destroyer Is Heading To Port, Crippled By Another COVID-19 Outbreak At Sea" (Durden).

A sign of a flagging empire is rationalization of soft power and even asymmetrical warfare in lieu of the heavy hitting of the recent past: "Toward a New Theory of Power Projection" (Mazaar).

It's amazing how rare it is to see this called out:  "The Great Wall Street Heist of 2020" (Kishore):

"US billionaires, since mid-March, have increased their wealth by $282 billion. The collective fortune of these 614 individuals, which totals $3.2 trillion, has been buoyed by the continued rise of share values on Wall Street, which increased sharply again on Monday.

A headline in the German newsweekly Der Spiegel yesterday captured the economic situation: “The death toll in the US is rising—so are the markets.” Noting that while businesses remain shut down and joblessness exceeds by far anything seen in American history, Der Spiegel writes: “So if the fundamental economic data actually offer so little incentive to buy, what is behind the rally? The solution to the riddle has three letters: Fed.”

The Fed—that is, the US Federal Reserve—has made clear that it will do anything in its power to support Wall Street. As a consequence, the markets keep going up. “If you wanted to bet on price losses,” Der Spiegel remarks, “you would have to bet against an institution whose funds are practically infinite.”

Beginning in March, as the Trump administration and the media were downplaying the danger posed by the coronavirus pandemic, the Federal Reserve began funneling money into the markets—first by reducing interest rates to zero, then by initiating a raft of programs to buy up assets from banks and corporations, providing them with cash to purchase stocks.

The activity of the Federal Reserve was endorsed unanimously by the US Congress in late March, when it passed the “CARES Act,” which allocated $454 billion to finance up to $4 trillion in asset purchases. Every single Senator voted for the CARES Act, including the erstwhile “democratic socialist” from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.

The Fed is spending something on the order of $80 billion every day. The central bank’s balance sheet is expected to increase up to $11 trillion, from less than $4 trillion last year and less than $1 trillion before 2008. This would bring the overall value of assets held by the Fed to nearly half the entire annual economic output of the United States.

One should call things by their right names. Terms such as “asset purchases” and “quantitative easing” tend to obscure what is happening. This is plunder, thievery, robbery on an unprecedented scale. Since stock ownership is overwhelmingly concentrated in the rich, it is the rich who are benefiting."

I can't believe this!

"How does coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body, from brain to toes" (Wadman/Couzin-Frankel/Kaiser/Matacic).  This is the kind of wide spectrum of symptoms that causes people to think the virus was designed.

"Netanyahu Is Back Yet Again" (Giraldi):

"A vote on West Bank annexation will reportedly be taken by the Knesset at the beginning of July followed immediately by steps to incorporate Jewish settlements into Israel proper. According to the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz, the planned annexation has raised some concerns among a few liberal American Jewish organizations because it will convince many progressives in the U.S. that Israel has truly become an apartheid state. J Street warned that annexation “would severely imperil Israel’s future as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people, along with the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship” and has even suggested cutting U.S. aid if that step is actually taken. Most other ostensibly liberal groups have adopted the usual Zionist two-step, i.e. condemning the move but not advocating any effective steps to prevent it. And it should also be noted that the largest and most powerful Jewish organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) have not raised any objections at all.

Unaffiliated individual liberal Jews, to include those who consider themselves Zionists, have generally been concerned about the move, though their argument is quite hypocritical, based on their belief that annexation would pari passu destroy any possible two-state solution, damaging both Palestinian rights and “Jewish democracy.” Some have even welcomed the change, noting that it would create a single state de facto which eventually would have to evolve into a modern democracy with equal rights for all. Such thinking is, however, nonsense. Israel under Netanyahu and whichever fascist retread that eventually succeeds him regards itself as a Jewish state and will do whatever it takes to maintain that, even including dispossessing remaining Arabs of their land and possessions, stripping them of their legal status, and forcing them to leave as refugees. That is something that might be referred to as ethnic cleansing, or even genocide."

This represents the end of the remarkable lie that there are Khazars who aren't kleptomaniacs. (((They))) no longer have need of this whopper anyway, as (((they))) will have stolen almost everything.  The lie was only needed to buy time for the thievery.

The kleptomania is so strong that Gantz gave up his future political career for it:  "Netanyahu’s Coalition Deal paves the Way to Annexation" (Cook).

Nicest people in the world, and don't forget it, or the concentration camp guard's internet police will be around to remind you:  "Settlers exploit coronavirus to increase violence against Palestinians" (Kate).

"In a Slap in the Face to Progressives, Biden Appoints Larry Summers, a “Literal Architect of Neoliberalism,” to Economic Advisory Role" (Neuburger).  Biden's big 'fuck you!' to Sanders supporters.

The remarkable uptick in Assholian aggression continues, when you might think they would have other things to think about:  "To Finally Kill The Nuclear Deal With Iran The U.S. Will Try To Rejoin It" (Moon).  I assume this is a sign of the weakening Assholian position (the spectacular failure of Trump versus the virus, as metaphor for imperial decline, may be stronger than anybody yet realizes), as they already tried to use the 'snapback' using their Eurotrash proxies/lackeys, and apparently struck out.

"How Threatening Iran Works for Trump" (Sheikh).  We're reached the odd point where the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, and the subsequent wrecking of the world economy, is much less of an issue, due to the virus, and due to the fact that oil prices are so low anyway.  On top of that, Trump needs to protect the American banking system by protecting the Assholian frackers, and to do that he needs to push up oil prices.  On the other hand, the unknown is just how weakened the American military is by the virus.  Also, if Trump thinks he can beat Biden, and I think he does, any kind of huge disruption can have unpredictable consequences, consequences which Trump won't want as we approach the election.

This is in the Atlantic, and it is by Frum, and it's quite good, so we must be about to face the Apocalypse:  "Why Mitch McConnell Wants States to Go Bankrupt".

"Boaventura de Sousa Santos: “Moro is the U.S.’ candidate for 2022”." (Falci/Domingos).  Trading up your stooge, as the current one increasingly looks to be unfit for purpose.

"Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton With Michael Hudson: How The US Makes Countries Pay For Its Wars – Economics Of American Imperialism":

"MICHAEL HUDSON: Well I wrote “Super Imperialism” in 1972, and it was published exactly one year after President Nixon took America off gold in August of 1971. he reason he took America off gold was that the entire balance-of-payments deficit from the Korean War to the Vietnam War was military in character.

Especially in the ’60s, the money that America was spending in Vietnam and Southeast Asia had to be spent locally. And the banks were French banks, because it was French Indochina. So all the money would be sent to Paris, to the banks’ head offices, turned over from dollars into francs, and General de Gaulle would end up with these dollars. Then every month he would send the dollars and want payment in gold. And Germany would do the same thing.

So the more America fought militarily, it depleted its gold stock, until finally, in August 1971, it said, “We’ve been using gold as the key to our world power ever since World War I, when we put Europe on rations. So we’re going to stop paying gold.”

They closed the gold window. And most of the economists were all saying, “Oh my heavens, now it’s going to be a depression.” But I said, “Wait a minute, now that other countries can no longer get gold from all this military spending” — and when you talk about the balance-of-payments deficit, it’s not the trade deficit, it’s not foreign investment; it’s almost entirely military in character.

So all this money that wasspent abroad, how are we ever going to get it back? Well, these dollars we spend around the world, mainly for the 800 military bases and the other activities we have, these dollars end up in foreign central banks.

The question is, what are these foreign central banks going to do with these dollar inflows? Well we wouldn’t let foreign central banks buy American industries. We would let them buy stocks, but not become a majority owner.

A former mentor, the man who taught me all about the oil industry at Standard Oil, became undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs. When Herman Kahn and I went to the White House, he said, “We’ve told the Saudi Arabians that they can charge whatever they want for their oil, but all the money they get, they have to recycle to the United States. Mostly they can buy Treasury bonds, so that we’ll have the money to keep on spending.” They could also buy stocks, or they can do what the Japanese did and buy junk real estate and lose their shirts.

So basically, when America spends money abroad, central banks really don’t speculate. They don’t buy companies. They buy Treasury bonds. So we run a monetary deficit; the dollars are spent abroad; the central banks lend them back to the Treasury; and that finances the budget deficit, but it also finances the balance-of-payments deficit. So we just keep giving paper IOUs, not gold

I think President George W. Bush said, “We’re never really going to repay this. They get counters, but we’re not going to repay it.” And then, as a matter of fact, you have Tom Cotton a senator from [Arkansas] saying, “Well you know China holds savings of $2 trillion or so in US Treasury bonds. Why don’t we just not pay them? They gave us the virus; let just grab it and nullify it.”

We can nullify Iranian assets, Venezuelan assets — it’s like a bank can just wipe out other deposits you have, if it wants militarily. So the United States doesn’t have any constraint on military spending, as it did uner the gold standard.

Now Herman Kahn and I on another occasion went to the Treasury Department, and we talked about what the world would look like on a gold standard. I said, “Gold is a peaceful metal. If you have to pay in gold, no country with a gold standard can afford to go to war anymore. Because a war would entail a foreign exchange payment, and you’d have to pay this foreign exchange in gold, not IOUs, and you would end up going broke pretty quickly.”

Needless to say, someone from the Defense Department said, “That’s why we’re not going to do it.”

Here’s an example: Let’s suppose that you go to the grocery store and you buy food and then sign an IOU for everything that you buy. You go to a liquor store, IOU. You buy a car, IOU.

You get everything you want just for an IOU. But when people try to collect the IOUs, you say, “That IOU isn’t for collecting from me. Trade it among yourselves. Think of it as your savings, and trade it among yourselves. Treat it as an asset, just as you treat a dollar bill saved in a cookie jar and not spent.”

Well you’d get a free ride. You’d be allowed to go and write IOUs for everything, and nobody could ever collect. That’s what the United States position is, and that’s what it wants to keep. 

And that’s why China, Russia, and other countries are trying to de-dollarize, trying to get rid of the dollar. They are buying gold so that they can settle payments deficits among themselves in their own currency, or currencies of friendly countries, and avoid dollars altogether."

and (note the reference to Beardboy and his boss, The Nazi):

"What makes China so threatening is that it’s following the exact, identical policies that made America rich in the 19th century. It’s a mixed economy. Its government is providing basic infrastructure at subsidized prices to lower the cost of living and doing business, so that its export industry can make money. It’s subsidizing research and development, just like the United States did in the 19th century and early 20th century.

So America basically says to the rest of the world, “Do as we say, not as we do, and not as we’ve done.”

China has a mixed economy that is working very well. You can just see the changes occurring there. It realizes that the United States is trying to disable it, that that the United States wants to control all the sectors of production that have monopoly pricing — information technology, microchip technology, 5G communications, military spending.

The United States wants to be able to pay for goods from the rest of the world with overpriced exports, American movies, anything that has a patent that yields a monopoly price.

America, in the 1950s tried to fight China by sanctioning grain exports to China. You mentioned sanctions earlier, the first sanctions were used against China, trying to starve them with grain. Canada broke that embargo, and China was very friendly to Canada, until Canada’s prime minister now takes his orders from a small basement office in the Pentagon, and has agreed to grab Chinese officials. Canada is not a country anymore. So China does not feel so friendly towards Canada now that it’s become a US satellite.

China realized that it can’t depend on America for anything. The US can cut it off with sanctions like it has tried to do with Iran, with Venezuela, with Cuba. So the idea of China, Russia and other countries in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has been: “We have to be independent within ourselves, and make a Eurasian trading area, and we will take off because we are successful industrial capitalism, evolving into socialism, into a mixed economy, with the government handling all of the monopoly sectors to prevent monopoly pricing here.” 

“And we don’t want American banks to come in, create paper dollars, and buy out all of our industries. We’re not going to let America do that.”"

and:

"MICHAEL HUDSON: The World Bank has one primary aim, and that’s to make other countries dependent on American agriculture. This is built into its articles of agreement. It can only make foreign currency loans, so it will only make loans to countries for agricultural development, roads, if it is to promote exports.

So the United States, through the World Bank, has become I think the most dangerous, right-wing, evil organization in modern in history — more evil than the IMF. That’s why it’s almost always been run by a secretary of defense. It has always been explicitly military. It’s the hard fist of American imperialism.

Its idea is to make Latin American, and African, and Asian countries export plantation crops , especially plantations that are US or foreign owned. The primary directive of the World Bank to countries is: “You must not feed yourself; you must not grow your own grain or your own food; you must depend on the United States for that. And you can pay for that by exporting plantation crops that can’t be grown in temperate zones like the United States.”

So China and Russia are not really agricultural economies. The buttress of America’s trade balance has been agriculture, not industry. Obviously, we de-industrialized. Agriculture, since World War II, has been the foundation of the trade balance. 

The US demands foreign dependency on its grain, technology and finance. The purpose of the World Bank is to make other countries’ economies distorted and warped to a degree that they are dependent on the United States for their trade patterns."

"Betrayed by Bureaucrats? That Leaked Labour Report and the Disappearing Daily Mirror Article" (Elf).  (((They))) are obviously on the witch hunt for the leaker and for any Labour members sufficiently angered to complain about the Zionist campaign against Corbyn (note that (((Elf))) calls them 'Blairites'!).  These days, the main outcome of outrageous behavior is the persecution of those who make the outrageous behavior known, and the persecution of those who don't like it and dare to say so out loud.

"I can't believe this!"

Discouraging discussion

"Narrative Managers Argue China-Like Internet Censorship Is Needed" (Johnstone).  The concentration camp guard lays down the new concentration camp rules for speech.  To be fair, the masterminds and predominant recipients of the greatest heist in world history, and the same people about to commit a big land theft in the Middle East, aren't going to be keen about people talking freely about such things, which aren't really the concern of farm animals anyway.

"History Teacher Fired for Allowing Students to Question "Holocaust" Loses Lawsuit On Appeal" (Striker).  Encouraging discussion is just the kind of thing the farm animals can't be allowed to do.

"Coronavirus a gift to Israeli colonization" (Murphy).  I'm sure (((they))) think their G-d sent the virus to make the theft easier.

"Pompeo, Gantz and the End of the Two-State Solution" (Fisk).

"COVID-19: In NYT, US Intelligence Portray Veteran DC Columnist’s Report as Chinese Disinformation Meant to Sow Panic" (Lauria).  It appears the US national security state used a right-wing columnist to run some fascist proposals up the flag pole to see if anybody salutes, the Chinese repeated part of the proposals word for word, which sounded so crazy the Chinese then got blamed with spreading 'disinformation'!

"We Still Don’t Know How the Coronavirus Is Killing Us" (Wallace-Wells).  Some 'flu'!

"Saudi Arabia: What Happens When the Oil Stops" (Hearst).  Lots of good details.

We want to live life, too

"Coronavirus Deaths Likely 60% Higher Than Official Numbers Reflect, FT Finds" (Durden).  The retards - well, typical Assholians - commenting are quite something, they just don't want to hear it.

"How the Tiny ‘Reopen’ protest movement was Astroturfed and boosted by Fake Grassroots Tactics" (Ambinder).  "This Iowa family is behind the 'Reopen' protests popping up across the country" (Gruber-Miller).  With a completely crooked (((media))) in place, as amplification, this shit is just too easy.  Note that the 'Tea Party' guys have worked their way up and are now on the verge of running everything.  If you think things are bad now . . .

"The "Iron Law" Of Oligarchy - Always Pick The Policy-Makers" (TheChicagoEconomist.com).  It's kind of amazing, give them hundreds of billions of dollars, and they end up hundreds of billions of dollars richer:  "‘Heads we win, tails you lose’: how America’s rich have turned pandemic into profit" (Rushe/Chalabi).  It's magic!  It must be their superior intelligence and hard work.  "Maybe Karl Marx Was Right After All" (Armstrong).

"The unbearable lightness of China" (Escobar):

". . . he explains to Americans the recent erosion of global trust in the former “indispensable nation,” and how the US dollar is its Achilles’ heel.

So once again we have to wallow in the interminable mire of reserve currency status; its “exorbitant privilege,” the recent all-out weaponization of the US dollar and – inevitably – the counterpunch: those “influential voices” now working to stop using the US dollar as reserve currency.

Enter blockchain technology and the Chinese drive to set up an alternative currency based on blockchain. Mahbubani takes us to a China Finance 40 Forum in August last year, when the deputy director of the People’s Bank of China, Mu Changchun, said the PBOC was “close” to issuing its own cryptocurrency.

Two months later, President Xi announced that blockchain would become a “high priority” and a matter of long-term national strategy. It’s happening now. The digital yuan – as in a “sovereign blockchain” – is imminent. 

And that leads us to the role of the US dollar in financing global trade. Mahbubani correctly analyzes that once this is over, “the complex international system based on the US dollar could come tumbling down, rapidly or slowly.” China’s master plan is to accelerate the process by connecting its digital platforms – Alipay, WeChat Pay – into one global system."

"Saudi Arabia is broke, and nobody cares".

"The Pessimistic Style in American Politics" (Frank).  "Corporate Media Deny Their Own Existence, Despite Driving Biden’s Primary Victory" (Cho).  "Bernie-Supporting Young Millennials and the Looming Economic Crisis: Prospects for Change" (Olson).  "Diseased System in Shut-Lockdown: Never a Better Time to Fight for Socialism" (Ford).  Optimism in Assholia is kind of endearing, as if this time things will get so bad that something good might happen, yet every crisis just makes things worse, including, now, the biggest theft in world history, and more attempts at WWIII.

"The Gates Foundation and the “War on Cash”: ‘Financial Inclusion’ in an Age of Neoliberalism" (Todhunter) (excellent piece, hugely damaged by gratuitous, and credibility destroying, denialism):

"It is clear that ‘financial inclusion’ really means eliminating the main competitor of digital payments and finance sector profits – cash. In capitalism, every aspect of human life is to be commodified in the quest for fresh markets and profit – in this case, securing payments from payments.

Norbert Haring quotes Dan Schulmann, CEO of PayPal, who has stated:

“The major competitor we have is cash. Right now, 85 percent of the world’s transactions are done in cash. That is really what we are trying to attack right now.”

He also quotes Strive Masiyiwa, chairman and founder of Econet, a large African mobile phone company with a payment platform:

“Our major competitor is cash. Cash is what we seek to eliminate.”

It seems ‘financial inclusion’ really means denying sections of society their preferred method of payment – cash – to benefit the bottom line of these corporations.

Did Gates and his associates succeed in pushing Indians off cash? By April 2018, the volume of digital payments had doubled. At the same time, however, at the end of May 2019, currency notes in circulation had increased by more than 22% over the pre-demonetisation level. The use of cash was expected to reach $2.45 trillion by 2021, up from $1.5 trillion in 2016, although demonetisation helped digital payments advance by three to four years.

The 2016 policy adopted a callous and ill-thought-out blanket approach. And it was not as though Indians were clamouring for digital – it was imposed on them. 

Under cover of COVID-19 lockdowns, can we expect to see cash being pushed right to the margins when countries emerge from the current crisis (for instance, in an ongoing pandemic culture of fear and paranoia, it would be easy to convince people that notes and coins are potential transmitters of disease, or with mass unemployment we may have universal basic income schemes linked to digital payment systems)? It can already be seen with large stores asking customers to pay by card whenever possible."

It's funny that back in the Microsoft days, everybody on the planet knew that Bill Gates was a huge piece of shit.  Huge.  He shouldn't ever be allowed near any public policy.  Here's his role in forcing big agribusiness on the world:  "Toxic Agriculture and the Gates Foundation" (Todhunter).  Huge. Piece. Of. Shit!

"The US is no Longer the World’s Science Leader: Trump Fiddled While South Korea, Germany, China Swung into Actions" (Hiro).  A clear test of fitness for purpose between the governments of China and Assholia.  The realization that Assholia failed so badly is behind why it is acting even crazier than usual.

"Netanyahu confident Trump will Let him Annex vast Swathes of Palestinian Territory" (Cole). Of course he's confident, the MEGA Group has the Epstein tapes.  Trump literally has no choice if he wants to avoid disgrace and jail.  Although I consider the Khazars to be simply a race of thieves, you could also consider them to be a race of blackmailers: "Facebook says Israeli spyware company ran vast hacking operation in the United States" (Arria).  It is the key to all their success.

"A Tale of Two Cruise Ships: The Cuban Difference" (Anderson).

Peak Assholia:  "Hundreds turn out for military flyover at Suburban Hospital — that doesn’t take place" (Hull/Schere):

"Eva Kanupke of Chevy Chase was standing in the hospital parking lot with her son, Adrian. “I thought it was ironic that we are standing in a crowd in front of a hospital,” she said. “Still, we want to live life, too.”"

I mean, gathering a crowd unsafely packed together for a useless parade in the sky of your fetishized military equipment, the ridiculous cost of which means, amongst other things, you can't have a proper health care system, and which doesn't show up, to 'honor' the health care workers who receive inadequate supplies, and are having their pay reduced by the corporadoes who run the health care system.  It all fits!

"Open Post: Hosted By The Grim Reaper Visiting Florida’s Reopened Beaches" (Adam).

Lovable rogue

"Johnson’s Cheery ‘wounded in Action’ Persona May Yet Save Him" (Cockbuen):

"Yet it is important to keep in mind, as Johnson enjoys physical and political rejuvenation, that his jolly but self-confident amateurism is all too genuine and, unlike 2011, his mistakes cause real misery and loss of life. Note, for instance, that the death rate for Covid-19 in the Republic of Ireland is two-thirds of that in Northern Ireland and the explanation for this is that on 12 March, Britain – including Northern Ireland – abandoned contact tracing and restricted testing, which it is now desperately trying to resume, while the Irish government followed WHO guidelines and expanded testing and contact tracing. In other words, if 18,738 people have died from coronavirus in the UK, then as many as 6,000 may have died unnecessarily because of mistakes by Johnson and the government that he has created in his own image."

If you kill one person by your feckless negligence, you go to jail, but kill 6,000 and you're a lovable rogue.

"An often overlooked region of India is a beacon to the world for taking on the Coronavirus" (Prashad/Dennis) (also).  "Without a single COVID-19 death, Vietnam starts easing its coronavirus lockdown" (Bengali).  Note the 'submissive Asian' trope.

Tweet (StrongerStabler):

"Tory Dominic Raab was a member of a Facebook group, The Ultras, that stated 'selling off council housing, ending free healthcare, and bringing back workhouses for debtors are policies that "have found their time to enter Britain'. He is now running the country!
#marr #ridge"

"The coronavirus crisis is way worse than feared" (VandeHei/Allen).  "Canada's top doctor warns against relying on herd immunity to reopen economy" (Patel).

"Israel and World Jewry" (Jones):

"The Covid-19 pandemic hits the world. Undeterred, the Israeli forces of Occupation (including the settlers) escalate the rampage and the outrages. Murders, harassment and arrests, home demolitions, destruction and/or theft of virus aid equipment and food and brutalizing of aid workers, Gaza crop poisoning on a grand scale, West Bank crop destruction, etc. Spitting on Palestinians is now de rigueur. Business as usual. Sadism on a grand scale. Whence the motivation? And the collective psychological reward? The Jewish God is a militant deity.

Israel is a pariah state. It is an apartheid state in its construction, [1] from its inception as an ethnocracy, not one for which the label ‘apartheid’ is merely a dangerous prospect on the horizon with a completely colonized West Bank.

How does Israel survive as such, given that apartheid South Africa has disappeared into history. It survives essentially because of support from the institutionalized structures of establishment world Jewry. Period.

Don’t talk Christian Zionists, as they are a side issue, crazies succoured to dilute the central causal lineage.

The US umbrella is tangibly of enormous importance. But behind the White House compliance is the Zionist lobby, from Truman onward (albeit with occasional wobbles). The Zionist lobby owns Congress; those members they don’t own they simply extrude (starting with William Fulbright in 1974, Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, Cynthia McKinney, etc.). The massive role of the US in supporting Israel is a product of institutionalized American Jewry – now centred on the peak body AIPAC.[2] The argument that US support of Israel is an instrumental means of projecting US power in the Middle East is diversionary; the posited hierarchy of master and proxy won’t wash. Cui bono?

The Zionist lobby only recently destroyed what was left of the integrity of the British Labour Party, installing a functionary at its head. The British state is Zionist-occupied territory; ditto that of France, Germany (hobbled by the Jewish holocaust), Canada and Australia.

Israel, as a racist state, is engaged in criminality sui generis. It was a guaranteed outcome known from the start. Theodore Herzl noted (1896):

‘An infiltration [of Jewish migrants to Palestine] is bound to end badly. It continues to the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened … Immigration is consequently futile unless based on an assured supremacy’. Violence was implicit in Zionism from the outset.[3]

The native population felt itself threatened immediately, but the Zionist movement found solace and then salvation in the arrival of World War, the Balfour Declaration and subsequently the British Mandate over Palestine. Until the Zionists could muster the firepower to create its ‘promised land’ unilaterally by terrorism. That firepower was acquired from British training en masse, just prior to World War II (to quell the Arab rebellion) and during the War itself.

As David Hirst notes, regarding the massacres and bombings by Jewish forces in response to the MacDonald White Paper of May 1939: [4]

‘The ideological roots of ‘gun Zionism reach back to Theodor Herzl himself. It was inevitable, as he foresaw, that armed force would eventually come into its own as the principal instrument of a movement which, in its earlier and weaker phase, could only rely on the protection of an imperial sponsor. That phase was now drawing to a close.’

Israeli criminality must be sheeted home to the personnel within the institutions of the Israeli state – politicians, the military and intelligence services, the judiciary, etc. They are crimes of individuals, groupings, institutionalized, the personnel being uniformly Jewish.

Isn’t this criminality bad for world Jewry and what it means to be Jewish? Apparently not. Establishment Jewish institutions, with one voice, sign up for Israel’s crimes. More, support of Israel is their raison d’être – all while simultaneously shedding crocodile tears about anti-Semitism. The global Jewish community, whether Jewish individuals like it or not, is implicated in Israeli criminality by the dominant Jewish organizations who claim to speak for national Jewish communities."

"Renouncing Israel on Principle" (Salaita).

"Trump’s Jerusalem plan rewards suspected killer of Alex Odeh" (Sheen).

"A Machiavellian Fiasco: How ‘Centrist’ Gantz Resurrected Netanyahu, Israel’s Right" (Baroud).  "An Israeli government for Likudniks to love" (Ofir) (Gantz, as a Khazar, and thus a rabid kleptomaniac, simply couldn't resist any deal that would result in Israel stealing land, even to the point of sacrificing his own political future on the sacred altar of theft):

"So the bottom line here: This is a deal that most Likudniks love. They have reduced the opposition, and laid a path to ensuring the Netanyahu legacy of a major colonialist consolidation: the annexation of large parts of the West Bank, materializing de jure that which Israel has been striving for since 1967 (and in the bigger picture since 1948), the Bantustanization of Palestine.

The Zionist takeover of Palestine is not nearly over, but Netanyahu is taking steps to be remembered for securing a major win in the Zionist venture."

"German censorship campaign targets scholar over BDS and applies ‘antisemitism’ charge" (Ofir).

The use of racism to union bust: "Leaked Documents From Amazon’s Whole Foods Reveal Plan To Force Diversity To Divide Employees And Halt Unionization" (Bieber) and "Diversity and the Death of Labor" (Striker).

"Rewriting History – Xenophobe’s New Weapon" (Platov).  "Trump and Putin revisit the “Spirit of the Elbe”" (Bhadrakumar).

Baaaaa

"COVID-19: UN Chief Decries ‘Dangerous Epidemic of Misinformation’ About Coronavirus" (Consortium News).  These conspiracy theories are all great fun, but not so much when the really bad guys latch on to them for their vile purposes, which has started to happen.  Of course, the phony conspiracy theories also distract, and are intended to distract, from the real conspiracies.  There is no difference between claiming 'it's just the flu' and telling people to cure themselves by drinking Lysol.

"On The Coronavirus And Smoking, Infection Fatality Rates And More" (Moon):

"For the quite bad flu season of 2017-18 the CDC estimated 45 million infections which in total caused some 61,000 deaths. That gives an IFR of 0.13% for the flu which again proves the point that Covid-19 is not like one. The seasonal flue has an R0 of 1.2. SARS-CoV-2's R0 is 2 to 3. The virus is at least two times more infectious than the flu, only few have immunity against it and even in well developed countries Covid-19 is 4 to 8 times more deadly than the flu. We can thereby expect that the total death rate from Covid-19 will be 10-15 times higher than the number of deaths caused by the seasonal flu during a bad year. 

Our health care systems are sized to keep up with a bad flu plus other the other usual cases. They are not sized to take ten times the flu cases plus the other ones. It is therefore obvious that social distancing will have to continue."

People seem to have forgotten that the reason for flattening the curve was to prevent so many cases presenting simultaneously that the entire health care system breaks down.  Once that happens, hospitals are incapable of dealing properly with anybody, and death rates skyrocket.  At its worst, the health care professionals start to die off in large numbers, and these people can only be replaced after years of training.  This came very close to happening in Italy.

These antibody tests are producing results so different from each other that we can only conclude 1) there are different variants of the virus involved (and perhaps variation in effect due to unknown factors in local conditions), or 2) the antibody tests themselves are flawed and completely unreliable.  "Miami-Dade: 6% Infection Rate, 0.17% Infection Fatality Rate (So Far)" (Sailer).

One thing that's standard with infectious diseases is that the infected create antibodies which prevent re-infection for a period of time.  We're seeing evidence from places like Korea that people who test positive for antibodies are being re-infected.  Does that mean Covid-19 is unique, or is there something flawed in the antibody tests?

"Intelligence Agencies Mobilized in the Fight against Covid-19" (Platov):

"Intelligence agencies in different countries have also been summoned to the front line in the fight against Covid-19, but the way they are operating differs from country to country, which is more of a reflection of the orders coming from the political elites in these countries. After all, an epidemic is not only a good time to gather intelligence to investigate the causes of the outbreak, but it is also the perfect opportunity to spread misinformation and take advantage of the state of panic.

First of all, we should probably mention the fact that monitoring public health and sanitation in different countries and the spread of dangerous infections has always been a key focus for intelligence agencies in countries around the world, as these factors can be detrimental to a country’s national security and the “theater of war” where an armed conflict takes place.

The United States devotes a great amount of energy and resources to this work, constantly investing billions of dollars to set up and run its biolabs, not only on US territory, where they are continuing to develop biological weapons, but also in regions where there could potentially be US military operations in the future. This explains why Washington has been setting up more and more Pentagon biolabs in border countries around Russia and China over the last few years, two countries identified as strategic “adversaries” in the US National Security Strategy.

This is the reason why the United States — responsible for unleashing more armed conflicts than any other country in recent years and for launching foreign military interventions in countries all over the world — has been constantly ramping up its research into biological warfare, mainly through the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was created specifically to develop these kinds of military technologies. DARPA’s main objectives in this field include work with pathogenic microorganisms, collecting the biological materials in countries of interest (all of these samples are sent back to the United States), studying how susceptible local residents are to various diseases and how responsive they are to treatment, and conducting clinical trials for breakthrough medical treatments on ethnically heterogeneous local populations.

It is worth recalling the US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025 report, released back in 2008, which predicted that the “emergence of a novel, highly transmissible, and virulent human respiratory illness for which there are no adequate countermeasures could initiate a global pandemic.” Moreover, American intelligence experts even named the coronavirus as the disease which could cause this pandemic.

The importance of this work in the United States was also stated in a report produced by the Rockefeller Foundation and leading consulting firm Global Business Network in association with American intelligence experts in May 2010, which outlined a scenario of global development in response to a deadly pandemic. It is noteworthy that even back then, the authors of this scenario mentioned that China would be the country capable of mobilizing the best response, highlighting its ability to immediately introduce mandatory quarantines and special measures to protect borders.

In 2015, the British scientific journal Nature Medicine published an article about successful experiments conducted at the Fort Detrick biological warfare laboratory. This United States Army Medical Command installation which specializes in developing biological weapons is considered the American “devil’s kitchen” for a good reason. The article in Nature reports the successful results of experiments carried out to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, so that it could infect human airway cells without first evolving in an intermediate host. In the same year, former German Deputy Defense Secretary Willy Wimmer reported that the US military even patented the new bioweapon.

It is worth noting an article published in the New York Times about an anti-epidemic exercise code-named “Crimson Contagion” that was conducted by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in Washington in 2019 and on the territory of 12 States, which simulated the scenario of a severe influenza pandemic, similar to the coronavirus outbreak in China.

US intelligence reports have repeatedly warned the White House of the severe threat of a coronavirus crisis, and ABC News reported that the US administration received the first of these warnings in November 2019.

On March 31, Reuters cited official sources in the US administration who confirmed the fact that the US Intelligence Community (IC) is trying to paint an accurate picture of how the novel Covid-19 coronavirus could spread around the world. Why are they doing this?"

"US launches campaign to accuse Syria of inability to curtail coronavirus, claims Syrian-Russian Joint Statement"!  "Coronavirus Stimulus Bill Funds State Dept/USAID Operations that Once Helped Trigger Polio Outbreak in Syria" (Blumenthal)!

Tweet (Garland Nixon):

"CIA Chief: the left wing sheep bought the Russia-gate hoax, do you think the right wing sheep will buy a China-gate hoax? I mean c'mon, they couldn't be that stupid? 

Right Wing Sheep: Baaaaa.."

Tweet (Amarnath Amarasingam) (Ford called them a 'bunch of yahoos', brave as these are literally his 'base'):

"I love these protests where people show up with masks, stand two metres  apart, and hold signs that say COVID is not real."

Tweet (Henry Foy):

"I still can’t believe it took 20,000 deaths for the UK to finally deploy a 14 day quarantine policy for arrivals used across the world"

"New Evidence Supporting Credibility of Tara Reade’s Allegation Against Joe Biden Emerges" (Grim).  She's got solid evidence - now being suppressed!!! - of contemporary complaining to others in multiple cases, a common sense reason to believe her, which Kavanaugh's accuser notably did not have.  The Democrats are, at best, hypocrites.  I note, however, that this is pretty obviously a Killary plot to remove Biden and replace him with Herself, just in the same way Killary was behind the original Obama birtherism claims well before Trump took them up.

"Jacobin Magazine Is Funded by Zionist Money; Gyps Authors" (Striker).  It should be no shock at all that the main vehicle of delivering 'socialism' to America is a con, I mean, (((con))).

Ben Norton thread on the current US intelligence enthusiasm for the 'where's [insert name of leader of a country Assholia currently doesn't like]' meme.

"Small Business Rescue Money Flowing to Major Trump Donors, Disclosures Show" (Fang).

Epstein is still vitally important as it was his operation that supplied much of the blackmail material which allowed Khazars to get away with simply the largest theft in world history:  "Epstein Victim Maria Farmer Speaks With Whitney Webb, Full Phone Call – Part 1" (Webb):

"One notable comment that Maria makes is regarding the man whom she calls the “holy grail” of the Epstein case, Epstein and Maxwell’s longtime chef, Andy Stewart. Maria refers to him as “Chef Andy” in the phone call. Andy Stewart died suddenly on April 7 as Maria’s lawyers were seeking to subpoena him for information on the case, and Maria and her lawyers were unaware of his untimely death until after her phone call with Whitney."