Nobody knows how many people died as a result of the UK/US Coalition of Death led destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and, by proxy, Syria and Yemen. Nobody even knows how many people western forces themselves killed directly. That is a huge number, but still under 10% of the total. To add to that you have to add those who died in subsequent conflict engendered by the forced dismantling of the state the West disapproved of. Some were killed by western proxies, some by anti-western forces, and some just by those reverting to ancient tribal hostility and battle for resources into which the country had been regressed by bombing.
You then have to add all those who died directly as a result of the destruction of national infrastructure. Iraq lost in the destruction 60% of its potable drinking water, 75% of its medical facilities and 80% of its electricity. This caused millions of deaths, as did displacement. We are only of course talking about deaths, not maiming. This very sober analysis from Salon makes a stab at 2.4 million for Iraqi deaths caused by the war.
The number of Iraqi casualties is not just a historical dispute, because the killing is still going on today. Since several major cities in Iraq and Syria fell to Islamic State in 2014, the U.S. has led the heaviest bombing campaign since the American War in Vietnam, dropping 105,000 bombs and missiles and reducing most of Mosul and other contested Iraqi and Syrian cities to rubble.
An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that at least 40,000 civilians were killed in the bombardment of Mosul alone, with many more bodies still buried in the rubble. A recent project to remove rubble and recover bodies in just one neighborhood found 3,353 more bodies, of whom only 20% were identified as ISIS fighters and 80% as civilians. Another 11,000 people in Mosul are still reported missing by their families.
For a vivid illustration, here is a photo of Sirte, Libya, after it was kindly “liberated” by NATO aerial bombardment. NATO carried out 14,000 bombing sorties on Libya.
Sirte, Libya, after NATO bombing
The neo-con drive to dominate the Middle East, in alliance with Saudi Arabia and Israel, has caused an apocalyptic level of death and destruction. It really is very difficult indeed to quantify the number of people killed as a direct result of the policy of “liberal intervention” in these countries. Bombing people into freedom has collateral damage. There are also the vast unintended consequences. The destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria launched a wave of refugee migration which led to politicial instability throughout Europe and contributed to, among many other consequences, Brexit.
For the purposes of argument, I am going to put an extremely conservative figure of 5 million on the number of people who died as a result of Western military intervention, direct or proxy, in the Middle East.
Now compare that to the worldwide death toll from coronavirus: 220,000. Let me say that again.
Western aggressive wars to coronavirus: 5,000,000 : 220,000.
Or put it another way. The total number of deaths from coronavirus in the UK so far is about half the number of civilians killed directly by the US military in the single city of Mosul.
Makes you think, doesn’t it? There are four horsemen of the apocalypse, and while of course I do not blame people for focusing on the one which is riding at them personally, do not forget the others. Coronavirus has not finished killing. But then nor have western wars.
The sight which I cannot stand is the mainstream media which cheered on the horseman of war as they argued for the invasion Iraq on the basis of lies – and still defend it as a “liberation” – who now pretend massive concern for human life. The hypocrites are disgusting.
I was wrong when I initially wrote about the coronavirus.
Before I detail where I was wrong, let me say where I believe I was right. Large general population sampling antibody studies are now just beginning to emerge, and I feel reasonably confident that I was in fact correct that the mortality rate of coronavirus is under 1%, and probably not too different from the 0.5% generally quoted for Hong Kong flu. The term “infection fatality rate” is now being used to describe this true mortality rate. The “infection fatality rate” is the percentage of those who get the disease who die.
These are very early days for whole population sampling antibody studies, and the true picture should become more plain over the next month or two. I must say I have found it alarmingly difficult to explain to people the rather simple concept that you cannot infer a mortality rate among everybody who catches the disease, from the results you get when by definition you have only been offering tests to the most acute cases presenting as needing serious treatment. Of course a fair proportion of the worst cases don’t make it through the disease. But there is a population of millions in the UK (and nobody has a serious idea how many) who have had the disease with no or mild symptoms, and who do not figure in the statistics.
The very large majority of people in the UK who have had coronavirus have never been tested. That is simply true. How many, nobody knows. That is also true.
I do not endorse the extrapolation from New York to the UK, in this Daily Mail piece, to try to calculate how many people may have had coronavirus in the UK. But buried in there is the best collection I can find anywhere of what sampling antibody studies are indicating for the “infection fatality rate” across various US and European locations, and there is a strong clustering under 1%. Now these are preliminary studies, though almost all from reputable institutions. Proper, large scale, antibody testing programmes to produce peer reviewed and authoritatively published studies are on the way, but not here yet. I repeat, though, that I think the infection mortality rate is somewhere below 1%.
Where I was wrong, was in not realising that what is different about this disease from a flu is that it is really very, very contagious. So a far higher percentage of the population get it, all at once. Over two seasons, only about 30% of the UK population got the Hong Kong flu. Unchecked, it seems this coronavirus can spread very much quicker than that. I do not know why, but it appears that it can. So the lockdown policies to prevent health services being overwhelmed are needed and do have my support.
I do not however support the level of alarmism and panic. Of course the disease is really appalling for those who get it badly. It is a painful, protracted and terrifying experience. But a similar level of scrutiny of extreme illnesses of other kinds would bring similar stories. I have had three brushes with death in my own life.
In 2003 I had multiple pulmonary emboli (bloodclots in both lungs), which left me in a coma for days, was incredibly painful and I understand very similar in terms of experience to the end phase of this coronavirus. In 1986 I was actually declared dead in a hospital in Kaduna, Northern Nigeria (salmonella paratyphoid B), and was woken up on a morgue trolley by a cockroach eating my nostril. In 1974 I had emergency surgery for peritonitis, and was in hospital for 5 weeks and then a convalescent home. Retailing the experience or images of any of these illnesses would be as capable or more of generating the terror being created by the detailed coverage of extreme cases of coronavirus.
Yes the coronavirus is horrible if you get it badly. Almost all severe disease is horrible and death very seldom consists of peacefully stopping breathing, despite Hollywood. I wonder if having lived so much in Africa has changed my attitude to death. We do not see death much in the UK. Did you know the British have a 350% higher propensity than the Italians to put their elderly into care homes? That is why the deaths in Italy were so much more visible, even though the truth is that the UK government is doing not significantly better, and quite probably worse, than the Italian government, at containing the virus. It is only now making a start at adding English care home deaths to the official statistics (Scotland has for weeks).
I do support lockdown, I do support every sensible precaution being taken because the virus is so contagious. I utterly deplore the vast quantities being spent on war, the $220 billion being squandered on Trident missiles while the most basic precautions stockpiling against the much more real threat of a pandemic were not undertaken, because Tories begrudged spending a few millions on the NHS. I get all of that and I repeat it. But we must not be panicked into believing that the threat is greater than it is. You have approximately a 99% chance, (still nobody knows for certain) of surviving this disease if you catch it. If you are under 60, your chance of death is almost certainly at worst 1 in 500 if you catch it. If you are older or like me have heart and lung issues, it looks a bit bleak. But we are not immortal, nor would I wish to be.
But remember this. Your odds of survival are massively better than were those of a civilian in a country that your country chose to invade in recent years. Did you, personally, do enough to try to stop that?
Remember, there are other horsemen.
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I’m not going to post a long, reasoned reply here. All I would say is that after Iraq and the Brexit debacle, anyone who trusts the British government or the media on the coroavirus or anything at all is a fool. And that especially goes for a government led by Boris Johnson – particularly a Boris Johnson visibly shaken by his slightly Reagan-esque ‘brush with death’.
In six months time, when the powerbrokers and disaster capitalists have their loot. the same Tories and media stooges now hyping up the coronavirus will probably be bemoaning the ‘ineffficient’ NHS and making fun of the ‘snowflakes’ clapping for the NHS.
It’s worse Tom74. Johnson has private healthcare insurance. What the devil was he doing in an NHS unit? I think they took him out of the way because he believes in herd immunity whereas everyone else seems to subscribe to herd mentality. And it’s worked a treat.
Who’s “they” ?
Whoever sidelined him.
It was Sunday night, no time to arrange with private insurance dealing with an emergence.
His keepers at No.10 arranged getting him to St. Thomas/s
– “What the devil was he doing in an NHS unit?”
Because the private sector does hardly any real medicine. They just offer queue-jumping for easy, non-risky stuff to avoid massive insurance bills. As soon as anything serious happens to any of their paying patients, they just ship them off to the NHS where all the best facilities and specialists are, and insurance is underwritten by the state.
Read This is Going to Hurt, the several-years diary of a ‘junior’ doctor.
Trust. Belief in something as true. That hope is, of course, a pipe-dream as reality penetrates some minds. The powerbrokers and disaster capitalists love coronavirus as the great controller and that control we can equate to loot.
In the early ’70s, CCDU was researching the ‘common cold’ and I volunteered to be a test
victimsubject. The scientist wanted to find out how the ‘common cold’ or the small percentage of coronavirus or influenza virus that cause cold-like symptoms mutated, effectively evading our body’s immune surveillance. This is why a yearly review and update of the flu virus is required to keep up with this evolution.Dr. Francis Boyle explained in detail in 2002 how Amnesty International was instrumental in publicizing the “Iraqi soldiers dumping children from incubators in Kuwait” hoax. Recently in another interview Francis discusses the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China and the Biosafety Level 4 laboratory (BSL-4) from which he believes the infectious disease escaped. He believes the virus is potentially lethal and an offensive biological warfare weapon or dual-use biowarfare weapons agent genetically modified with a gain of function properties, which is why the Chinese government originally tried to cover it up and is now taking drastic measures to contain it. The Wuhan BSL-4 lab is also a specially designated World Health Organization (WHO) research lab and Dr. Boyle contends that the WHO knows full well what is occurring.
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/geopolitics-empire/e/66974269
My sincere thanks to Dr Francis Boyle for his support of The Children of Iraq Association, my own charity.
Thanks for that comment Mark. I too have a lot of respect for Francis Boyle. His book “Destroying Libya and World Order” ought to have received a much wider readership. I would particularly recommend Chapter 4 for Trowbridge and others “Resolving the Lockerbie Dispute by Means of International Law”.
I’ll take a listen to the podcast.
Very interesting Mark, especially about what he has to say about WHO and Big Pharma. As a lawyer he is careful not to make any damning convictions about things he cannot be certain about, The patent for a vaccine for Covid-19 already being in existence was enlightening. No wonder he and the interviewer, both academics, have been silenced by the CIA.
Some people equate Covid-19 with the flu. Others (most often those in favor on continued lockdown) see no correlation with the flu and warn that this is a novel virus and as such is not comparable in any way to the flu. Many of these same people who see no comparison to the flu warn of the dangers of a second peak should lockdown be lifted too early.
Step forward Professor Hugh Pennington who some describe as a “renowned Scottish microbiologist” Professor Pennington sees no reason to expect a 2nd peak and believes that those who do are relying on data harvested from the past flu epidemics.
…and so Covid-19 is nothing like the flu except that it can be expected to behave in exactly the same way as the flu in terms of causing waves of infection. People know this because they have studied the flu even though they believe the flu to offer no useful guidance as to the nature an behavior of the Covid-19.
Surely it cannot be that people are cherry picking data so as to ensure they develop a view of Covid-19 that accords with their own pre-existing ideology.
Classic projection by the most selective cherry picker of them all.
No projection, merely highlighting an inconsistency of approach.
An example of projection would be my interpreting your response as indicative that you are a cheer leader for the ongoing transfer of wealth being carried out under cover of the Covid-19 confusion. Confusion that you seek to add to so as to enable your billionaire masters to loot ever larger amounts.
As I do not engage in projection I would make no such point and obviously there must be another reason that explains your comment.
The confusion seems to have enveloped you, Loony. It was your man Trump who has used this as cover for a multi-trilion-dollar giveaway to giant corporations, following on from his giant tax cut for billionaires. You’re forgetting you’re meant to be the main cheerleader for such theft not condemning it.
You are correct in that there does appear to be enveloping confusion. For my part I am not confused as to the separate personages of Jay Powell and Donald Trump. I am not confused regarding my understanding that Jay Powell as Head of the Federal Reserve enjoys considerable autonomy from the Executive branch of Government as headed by Donald Trump.
Neither am I confused regarding my own position on the subject of theft, something I do not support and have never supported.
You, on the other hand….
He says it’s very unlikely and isn’t ruling it out completely. It would be as well to be prepared don’t you think? Just in case.
Yes, it would be as well to be prepared. The question is what form this preparedness takes. Is it just a continuation of the closure of the economy or is there something else in mind.
It would also be advisable to be prepared for food shortages – something that will become inevitable should the economy remain closed. Concerns of this nature are a long way from hyperbole with food shortages being recognized as a developing danger by a number of sovereign states who have already acted to ban food exports. Most notable in this regard being Russia – the worlds largest grain exporter.
I am unaware of any widespread media or government attention to this developing danger.
“Step forward Professor Hugh Pennington who some describe as a “renowned Scottish microbiologist” ”
Renowned unionist more like, that STV and the BBC go to whenever they want a biased point of view. Half of Scotland just ignores the obnoxious wee gatekeeper.
So Mini Morris, SUV, Truck are all motor wheicleis and they have same impact on a bridge they are crossing.
After all they all got tyres so nothing to worry.
In other words nuclear bomb is nuclear bomb. Irelevant of strength.
This is not the first time that I notice from aside that the lack of unity in society and distrust of the government impede you. You have a lot of doubts about the need for measures, the relevance of measures, you are afraid that the strict measures once introduced will stay with you forever and take away your freedom.
Perhaps this is the reason China has done better than the United Kingdom.
You may agree that in order to repel an external threat, it is critical to have an already well-functioning system within society. It can be compared with the army, and if you do not like militarism, then with a religious community, and if you do not like religion, it is comparable with a company or a family. Trusted leader, approved system, known roles.
Some people deny the need for quarantine in your country, and in mine, and in many others. I know that usually people obey when their own knowledge and logical arguments coincide with the decisions of the leader. But in the case of the “deniers,” I can’t get rid of the feeling that knowledge and logic are useless. It feels like an infantile refusal of a teenager to clean up his room. Are you familiar with this situation? He protests because he wants to decide himself, he does not like coercion, he does not like to be dependant, and he believes he was asked not politely enough 🙂
And I understand him perfectly, no one likes that all, but the room should be clean after all. Once he will understand that some things just need to be done despite the emotions, then I recognize him as an adult.
Well it was always going to be that the totalitarian states that have populations that are used to being told what to do and doing what they’re told were going to fare batter. We’ve lost the deference we once had for our political leaders, whilst overall I think that’s a good thing maybe not so good in a crisis.
Who was the last leader in your country, supported by a majority of the population? winning the election with at least 60%?
None of the above. FPTP guarantees minority rule.
Тhere is only one consistent leftwing position on the “contact tracing app” that the British government and its brown-tongued “experts” are boasting about planning to impose on as much of the population as possible: namely, refuse to participate in it. Shun all participants. This is real fascism and anybody who participates is on a par with those who willingly took part crowds that adulated Adolf Hitler.
It remains to be seen what kind of resources the rulers will try to deprive resisters of access to.
What’s on the list?
Smartphone internet access?
Being allowed to be out of doors?
Employment?
Food?
Will the cops be told to arrest anybody who’s not carrying a smartphone?
Will supermarkets be told not to sell food to us?
“Deputy chief medical officer
Dr[1] Jenny Harries said “We need the whole population to work with us on this, it’s quite an exciting adventure.” (Emphasis added.)Note
1) She is wrongly called a “doctor”. As far as I am aware she has no doctorate.
Couldn’t agree more N_ but I see we have a hard task on our hands. Some will be first in the queue to get the App.
Were there a choice between an App and a human tracer, I would be the first in the queue, just to put checkmark “app installed” and thus I’m free to never take my phone with me 🙂 Untracable, unlike surveilled by a human tracer.
And guess where the British rulers will “trial” Adolf the Contact Tracing App? Answer: the Isle of Wight.
The “app” “will be paired with an army of 18,000 human contact tracers to follow up on those who need further attention, or those who don’t download the app.”
If any “army” wants to “follow up” on me because I don’t use this app, they may find the situation soon becomes rather more complicated than they foresaw. (My lawyers helped me draft those words 🙂 )
Anybody who participates in this is not “helping the NHS”. They are helping the cull and they should be shunned, ridiculed and treated with utmost contempt as the antisocial boss-helping fascist dimwits that they are.
Gove was bigging it up today in the questions section of the virus announcements programme. He even named the Tory MP, Bob Seeley. Good chap doncha know. One or two of the Tory types round here have second homes on the IoW.. Dead from the neck up types. Enough said.
He’s another Captain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Seely
“Contact tracers” will be the same Stasi as the Census operatives. Remember them? – they used to lie in wait for you.! Never did fill the form in 😀 Successfully evaded 😀
” She is wrongly called a “doctor”.
The GMC seem to disagree:-
https://www.gmc-uk.org/doctors/3015995
No one’s going to force or coerce you into downloading the app or buying a smartphone.
No one’s going to force or coerce you into downloading the app or buying a smartphone.
Probably not but they can and will impose restrictions on you if you don’t.
It is just that you need to show the security guard a ‘green tick’ on your phone to enter the shop. You need a ‘vaccine certificate’ to remain in employment, claim benefits, remain in your tenancy, get a mortgage, get a loan, keep your bank accounts open, travel, etc. Nor like you are being ‘forced’ 😀
They’re just trying to keep us all safe from the big bad bogeyman out there, somewhere.
Currently, this deadly virus, with China waiting in the wings.
There have been many bogeymen before of course.
Since beginning 19C alone, we’ve had Spanish, Anarchists, Russians, Germans, Communists and Fascists, Germans again, Soviet Russia and/or Communist China, Climate terrorism, Nationalist terrorism, global Islamic terrorism, financial terrorism, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and now the deadly virus.
Let’s all pray that China proves a reliable and long-term bogeyman, like Soviet Russia, giving us all many years of peace and tranquility.
Jenny Harries is a medical doctor
https://www.gmc-uk.org/doctors/3015995
What would be interesting to learn would be,
was the virus that seems to be causing covid-19 being handled in a lab in Wuhan prior to covid-19 in the human population?
It has been said that in January it was determined in China that there were three strains of virus.
If there are three strains of virus are there three strains of covid-19?
not sure it was exactly this virus (sars-cov-2), nontheless:
“In 2015, researchers from three US universities, from Wuhan and an Italian researcher from Varese, published the results of a joint experimental work … they created synthetic coronaviruses in the laboratory and infected cell cultures and mice with them.”
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/backing-the-wrong-horseman/comment-page-5/#comment-939323
Tatyana
That paper showed scientists making recombinant coronaviruses with novel patterns of cell infection. The virus they created was not SARS-CoV2, however.
It showed all the technological requirements to make coronavirus ‘bioweapons’ but that virus is not the one sweeping the world right now.
Michael norton
The Wuhan lab had collected a virus from horseshoe bats in another area of China and the lady professor at the lab confirmed immediately that the covid 19 virus from the market was 96% the same as the one they had collected. They ‘d collected it because it was well known that it could migrate to humans. When it did, through human contact with bats in the market, they realized that the calamity they had known about for 30 years had finally happened. The US, UK and other countries were all involved in that scientific work , all along, so nobody in the world was unaware of what was going on.
The mindset of the US that they were going to save Iraq and install their own better civilisation there, is exactly the same as alt right Tories like I D- S and Tugendhat and US Republicans, that we are right and they are automatically wrong, because we’re White supremacist criminal murderers who don’t like it up ’em.
And they have slitty eyes and communism .
In reality the neocons are steak staring mad and jealous as hell of Chinese billionaire business men.
Here are some deadly viruses, some even more deadly than COVID-19, but we did not shut down the world because of them.
https://www.livescience.com/56598-deadliest-viruses-on-earth.html
That’s a good roundup of the 12 most deadly viruses. They include “Influenza”.
Influenza
During a typical flu season, up to 500,000 people worldwide will die from the illness, according to WHO. But occasionally, when a new flu strain emerges, a pandemic results with a faster spread of disease and, often, higher mortality rates.
The most deadly flu pandemic, sometimes called the Spanish flu, began in 1918 and sickened up to 40% of the world’s population, killing an estimated 50 million people.
“I think that it is possible that something like the 1918 flu outbreak could occur again,” Muhlberger said. “If a new influenza strain found its way in the human population, and could be transmitted easily between humans, and caused severe illness, we would have a big problem.”
I see there are entries for “SARS-Cov” and “SARS-Cov-2” too.
It seems like a good site. Maybe people should read up on the page about transmission: https://www.livescience.com/how-covid-19-spreads-transmission-routes.html
The interesting one for me Justin is MERS-CoV which badly hit South Korea and Saudi Arabia 2012. It looks like it created some immunity in these countries against SARS-Cov-2 because todays figures (John Hopkins) show of the 27,011 diagnosed with SARS-Cov-2 in Saudi Arabia (2012) only 184 have died and of the 10,7011 diagnosed in South Korea (2014) only 250 have died and South Korea appears to have plateaued whereas Saudi Arabia has not. I realise a lot of other factors are at play but the MSM has done a dirty propaganda job. I see it in so many intelligent people who have bought into the overhype.
The other explanation that I have heard is that S Korea was well prepared with the necessary testing etc infrastructure for covid – 19 because of its experience with Mers. It was able to “flatted its curve” quickly because of this.
Why I tend to go for the built-up immunity theory is because that is what historically has happened with all viral epidemics and pandemics. Herd immunity is how all species that survive manage to survive. Mosquitoes become immune to pesticides. I’m not equating the two but resistance and immunity is the body’s built-in mechanism is its way of tackling alien intruders.
The 1918-1919 flu killed more people than WWI
– In May 1996 Madeleine Albright, who was then the U.S. ambassador to the UN, was asked by 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, in reference to years of U.S.-led economic sanctions against Iraq,
– “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
– To which Ambassador Albright responded,
– “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
John
One does wonder if there is any legal mechanism for bringing the MSM to book for their role in this situation: they have shamelessly distorted reality at every step and set up a rolling propaganda service whose only parallel in my lifetime was the blanket coverage of 9/11.
In my opinion there is huge culpability of the media for what has happened, even if they are only the concentration camp orderlies ‘doing what they were told’ by Goebbels et al.
What you say Rhys is so true. I doubt there is any legal mechanism for bringing them to task. The judiciary is governed by the same cabal that governs MSM and they are all interlinked. You only have to look at the despicable treatment of Julian Assange at the hands of Ms. Baraitser to know where the “law” stands on this.
Well, yes. Baraitser takes dictation from the US State Dept as far as I can see, whereas 12 jury members acquitted alex Salmond of all crimes in an equally trumped up case in Scotland.
You can see why the Establishment want to get rid of Trial by Jury: there might actually be some true and fair verdicts that way.
I like the quote from your livescience link about the 2 metre distance ‘rule’:-
“Yet hospital infection control experts continue to believe this rule. It’s like the flat Earth theory — anyone who tries to discuss the actual evidence is shouted down by a chorus of believers.”
I see the Guardian has a piece with a similar quote:-
“These include projects to analyse how virus-laden aerosols behave in the air in a bid to understand how the disease is passed between humans.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/03/uk-lockdown-must-not-be-lifted-until-covid-19-transmission-is-understood-say-scientists
John, the reason cases are low in Saudi is that the government took swift, sharp action. My dates may be a little off, but the sequence of events is right. Korea took extreme but decisive action. I feel that the Saudi government has carried out a greater number of tests and we are seeing a figure for deaths that is closer to the true % for the number of infected.
They closed the border to Bahrain at the beginning of March when it became clear there were many cases in that country.. A few days later they locked down 500,000+ people in Safwa , Saihat and Qatif – essentially the Shia heartlands of the Eastern Province due to a cluster of cases in and around pilgrims returning form Iran. A couple of days later they closed all schools, colleges and training institutes.
12 March they closed All land borders to the surrounding countries except to returning citizens as well as banning flights from countries with high infection rates in the EU and china. 17th March all flights were locked down No internal flights, no international flights, no trains, taxis or buses allowed to operate. Nothing. The holy mosque in Mecca was closed down (the holiest of holy sites in the arab world) due to a cluster of cases in Mecca. All mosques were closed down, and
have been ever since. Any Saudi national who has returned since has been placed on 14 day isolation in hotels (some 14,000 of them)
Mecca, Medina and Riyadh were locked down under 24 hr curfew except for medicinal or food shopping. The rest of the country was put under curfew from 3pm – 7am (later changed to 5pm – 9am for Ramadan). Just 3 days ago Dammam was locked down due to a cluster of cases (1 million people) and all businesses told to cut production to 1/3rd capacity and maintain precautions to safeguard workers.
If I go to the supermarket – temperature taken and face mask and gloves. Baskets and trolleys are sanitized. When I enter the compound I live on -temperature taken. Most doctor consultations are done by video unless face to face is required.
Despite all of these precautions the current figures are still around 28,000 cases with 484 deaths. The curve is flattening, but the virus seems to have gotten a foothold in the poor migrant worker communities which is not surprising given the conditions these poor workers live in.
The country is not without its faults but compare their government COV information page to the UK’s mismatch of hidden and obsfucated information. Region by region, exact figures for each major area.
https://covid19.moh.gov.sa/en/
Meanwhile an Island nation that could have easily closed its borders early and minimized the infection is on the way to becoming the Covid capital of the world due to a catastrophic sequence of events and failures, mostly aimed at not crashing the economy. They delayed the crash by 1-2 weeks at the cost of many, many more deaths than were necessary.
Thanks John
Because in most there are simpler ways than shutting the world to stop them. SARS-Cov 2 appears the most contagious and has spread around the world in about two months with exponential rise in cases.
If, as it looks, most countries have now plateaued, next year COVID-19 will join the others as a virus to which the world has certain immunity. But those who want the world to never be the same again will no doubt shake the populace with the latest virus or some other means of control. Don’t buy into it. You are free. Stay that way.
What needs to be exposed ruthlessly are the business interests at play. Gates is absolutely at the front, centre and rear of all of it. Tattoos, vaccinations, satellite services, you name it he wants to make billions from the new surveillance world.
I want him in prison for sterilising Africans using vaccines.
When modellers pipe up next: they need ruthlessly putting down with a historical documentation of their uselessness, on a par with Met office seasonal forceasts.
When vaccine companies and Wall Street speculators pipe up again about vaccines, highlight that all the profits go to the vaccine companies and all the socialisation of losses concerning adverse reactions. That system has to be abolished and pharma must bear the full brunt of downside risk. If Emma Walmsley makes any threats whatever, she needs a mob taking her out in no uncertain terms .We must stop playing by the overpaid lawyers’ rules: Walmsley is just a huge parasite expecting all the profits but none of the losses. That is a non-negotiably unacceptable position.
The three things I want to see most before 2020 is out:
1. Bill Gates in prison under worse conditions than Julian Assange.
2. All freedom from vaccine liability removed in the UK and US.
3. A law banning all future bailouts to any companies >1000 employees in size. Specifically excluding investment banks, big pharma and the MSM.
– “We must stop playing by the overpaid lawyers’ rules”
And yet this:
– “All freedom from vaccine liability removed in the UK and US”
..is just a lawyer’s wet dream. Of course the state should carry liability for state-sponsored vaccine programmes, and the manufacturers carry liability to the state. Open it back up to case-by-case, should we? Decisions about science and medicine decided by lawyers and judges? That hasn’t always worked very well in the past. Sure you haven’t read too much at Natural News?
What really needs breaking is the commercial secrecy enjoyed by commercial entities. Let’s get all the data out in the open, all of it, and let’s get the scientific literature out from behind the paywalls too.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
– “If, as it looks, most countries have now plateaued, next year COVID-19 will join the others as a virus to which the world has certain immunity”
Countries’ current cases have plateaued because of social restrictions. Only a small proportion of the population have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2.
It isn’t yet known whether having covid-19 imparts immunity – always? Sometimes? Never? It just isn’t known yet.
Thanks for this, John. I didn’t know MERS has mortality rate between 30% and 40%. We are lucky it is not that contagenous as this new one.
By the way, I thought it can explain why South Korea did well with Covid – they just finished MERS epidemy, must be well alerted population.
Our comments, similar, have crossed Tatyana.
“Almost all severe disease is horrible and death very seldom consists of peacefully stopping breathing, despite Hollywood”
Yes of course, but Leonardo da Vinci- the great anatomist was very struck by a friend’s peaceful death dying in bed peacefully n his sleep. This was a rare occurence, as what you say is generally true, especially in Leonardo’s time. Anyway,Leonardo decided to find out how his friend had died so, asonme does, he dissected his friend and being Leonardo recorded his findings. What he drew was a literally, text book example of a heart attack and athersclerosis.The anatomical drawings were still used as the ‘text book’ for medical students until the 1920’s.
He pretty much monopolised the software market, how unreasonable is to think that he has his sights on bigger things now.
How Bill Gates Monopolized Global Health
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=wQSYdAX_9JY&feature=emb_logo
Bill Gates is a sick sociopath, and he has been thus from the very early days in his ‘garage’.
People call him a genius — which is totally laughable; we don’t call the don running a borough a genius.
Hi all from France where restrictions are soon to be lifted. Our region has been, luckily, one of those with very few cases. The lockdown is very restrictive with us having to document where we are going and why we are out of our houses.
Our region is financially dependent upon tourism and vines for cognac. Our worry is that lifting restrictions will allow those from other more infected areas to visit. There are a large percentage of second homes here, mostly used for `gites`, holiday rentals.
I looked at USA history regarding the `Spanish Flu` epedemic and came across the `Anti-Mask` league in Sanfrancisco. Interesting, but stoopid!! History says that those cities that entered lockdown early and stayed with it had less fatalities than those that didn`t.
Thank you Craig for your continuance in times of great hardship for yourself, my subscription will continue until the bastards shoot me. And thank you Clark for your stamina and calmness in the face of fools
Thank you extremebuilder. I hope the lifting of restrictions goes OK.
– “those cities that entered lockdown early and stayed with it had less fatalities than those that didn`t”
Thanks for that too.
First we had SARS originating in China now Covid-19 has arisen from China as well. If we put the Wuhan lab theory aside for a moment, and focus on the Wet Markets, where some have said it originated. Just exactly what can be done to persuade China, a secretive and authoritarian state to regulate these markets, and if China refuses to do so, what international actions can be taken to ensure that China does adhere to international concerns?
As for the Wuhan lab theory, did the virus accidently escape into the general population there, was a second outbreak of SARS exactly due to this kind of accident.
“In 2004 there was another smaller SARS outbreak linked to a medical laboratory in China. It was thought to have been the result of someone coming into direct contact with a sample of the SARS virus, rather than being caused by animal-to-human or human-to-human transmission.”
Could it then be said that it’s a real possibility that Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab? However I haven’t read or heard anyone in the scientific community refer to Covid-19 as being manufactured, yet.
The overall economic damage that will be attributed to this pandemic is immense, even more staggering is the knock on loss of life from starvation, other diseases deaths through fighting for resources etc, as funds have been and will still be redirected to fight the pandemic, in countries that have limited
resources.
Should we hold China accountable for this? Or is the trail of thought one that its a pandemic and its not really any one nations fault?
Finally what of future outbreaks, if say another one arises in China, what then, especially if Wet Markets are mentioned, and could the next one be far more deadly.
ROS
The virus is not man made and there are reasons why the scientific community does not think it is a laboratory escape. I have provided links in other discussion forums.?
The second interview by Paul Vogt in russian
https://swisshealthmagazine.ch/ru/kovid-19-prodolzhenie/
” 27 leading virologists from 9 countries (USA, Europe, Australia) wrote an article in the famous British medical journal Lancet…
Together, we strongly condemn conspiracy theories that suggest that COVID-19 has no natural origin.
Scientists from many countries published and analyzed the genomes of … (SARS-CoV-2) and overwhelmingly concluded that this coronavirus originated in the wild, like many other emerging pathogens. “
—
he also says:
“COVID-19 is very contagious …number of infected people increases by about 40% daily without taking countermeasures, which corresponds to a doubling of the number of infected people every 2 days or a 100fold increase per week.”
“The right way would be to divide the number of deaths today by the number of actually infected people (including unregistered cases) 16 days ago … This method is called Kaplan Meier Estimator and is used by all life insurance companies.”
“Research on coronaviruses and other viruses has long been international … The idea of crossing “normal” influenza viruses with Ebola viruses is not new, but such experiments since 2008 can only be carried out in high-security North European laboratories.”
“Switzerland is a prosperous country with a high standard of living … The day after the introduction of isolation, on March 16, the economy already “moaned”; political decisions were taken too late or not at all; the army was mobilized, but did not know what to do; the legal system only claimed restrictions on human rights, but did not become a compass to establish the necessary balance between individual freedom of the individual and collective social duty in the context of a pandemic.”
“…masks, disinfectants and distance. No contact – no infection! A broader population test only makes sense if all citizens can be tested within two days”
“The fact that the coronavirus may contain the HIV / Ebola genome (for example, by cross-pollination during infection of the HIV / Ebola-positive patient with COVID-19 and subsequent spread) should be taken seriously enough. We must be prepared for the fact that one day a supervirus will appear that combines the genome of the fast-spreading coronavirus with the Ebola genome with its mortality rate of 90%”
—
Now a note from me.
Dear all, the last excerpt reminds us, that if infected then we serve as a laboratory for the virus, because it may combine with other viruses in the cells of our bodies, releasing modified version outside.
“The scientific community” will “think” whatever it’s damned well told to think. More than that, it will like it.
It’s not a collection of independent public-spirited investigators who always love the truth before everything, who never allow prestige or funding to affect how they think or what they think about, and who never take on board what a person says just because he controls funding or has prestige. (Anyway, is there a difference between funding and prestige?_
“There are reasons why the journalistic community does not believe any part of the US state had prior knowledge of 911, or that any part of the Russian state had prior knowledge of the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings”… Wait…that’s not actually true! For all the contempt I have for “journalists”, many of them are not so eyes-to-the-front and think-what-you’re-told as “scientists”.
must be why republican james hansen repeatedly risked his job to publish the truth about global warming in the bush administration, and why so many have resisted trump’s calls to remove public information about research into global warming.
oh wait, that doesn’t fit your narrative.
SA.
I didn’t say the virus was man made, I merely put it out there as an option.
Hi RoS. You never did get back to me with your evidence of China’s abuse of the Rohingya Muslims…
If we… focus on the Wet Markets… Just exactly what can be done to persuade China, a secretive and authoritarian state to regulate these markets, and if China refuses to do so, what international actions can be taken to ensure that China does adhere to international concerns?
If you spent a bit more time finding out what is happening in China, and a bit less time listening to what Western loonies are screeching about China, you would be aware that you don’t actually need to do anything.
China already passed a new nationwide law back in February, permanently banning all wildlife trade in its markets. (They also banned the sale of dog, although I suspect that will be temporary). As for banning wet markets altogether, I’m not so sure it’s an environmentally positive measure to have hundreds of millions of Chinese suddenly start buying all their meat and fish in clingfilm-wrapped polystyrene supermarket trays.
From a broader perspective, are you really sure you want to be marching in lockstep with this tuppeny fascist?
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/04/20/farage-trump-has-stood-up-to-china-but-western-consumers-must-follow/
Or this deranged psychopath?
Fox News – Judge Jeanine: China Must Be Held Accountable (FaceBook)
The idea of “holding China accountable” for the damage caused by the pandemeic is ludicrous. From a practical perspective, the economic damage in countries like the US and the UK is being caused almost entirely by their own incompetence, and their stupidity in inflicting a completely unnecessary and counterproductive across-the-board lockdown. And from a moral perspective, go back and read Craig’s article. Read his words. Look at the picture of Sirte. And tell me on what conceivable ground countries responsible for inflicting this carnage on the world could go round demanding “compensation” from others.
Unless, of course, like the tuppeny fascist and the deranged psychopath, you simply subscribe to the charming doctrine of American exceptionalism: We have the right to take what we want from whoever we want, because we have the might to destroy anyone who argues…”
Or you can now join Pompeo and Trump in pursuing the same line
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/us/politics/coronavirus-pompeo-wuhan-china-lab.html
Stonky: “…the economic damage in countries like the US and the UK is being caused almost entirely by their own incompetence, and their stupidity in inflicting a completely unnecessary and counterproductive across-the-board lockdown”
I wish you’d said their incompetence and stupidity in not acting early enough, getting control of it with contact tracing and quarantine. The UK lockdown is a blunt instrument, badly thought out and applied, but you know full well that China locked down much harder – again, because the authorities acted too late, preferring to censor the doctors who raised the alarm.
I’m not keen on apologists for the state. Any state. Western states indeed had warning, and the predicaments of their populations are indeed those governments’ fault. But the Chinese authorities acted brutally and stupidly nonetheless.
To me, Stonky, you seem to be propagandising for China. Are you employed or have any incentive in such role?
“China already passed a new nationwide law back in February, permanently banning all wildlife trade in its markets. (They also banned the sale of dog, although I suspect that will be temporary). ”
Yes you’re probably right it will be temporary, as China’s wild animal farming industries are worth billions to its economy and employ probably millions of people, well if you believe the Chinese Acadmy of Engineering that is, which I do.
Of course the Huanan Market, one of the biggest in central China will of course for now be strictly regulated, the authoritarian one party state will make it so.
As for marching in step with Trump and Co, youve obviously not read my comments on the Great Satan (consecutive US adminstrations) on previous pages of this thread.
“Hi RoS. You never did get back to me with your evidence of China’s abuse of the Rohingya Muslims”
And you haven’t provided evidence to the contrary, nor have provided evidence that China didn’t abuse and murder Tibetans.
Just because the West is corrupt, and aggressive, doesn’t mean the likes of China isnt.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/02/20/more-evidence-chinas-horrific-abuses-xinjiang
Yes we know HRW is a Western NGO, and there for bias by design, but it doesn’t mean China isn’t abusing Muslims in the country.
If wet markets are bad shouldn’t we be banning fishmongers and butchers?
Republicofscotland, first, I stress that SARS-CoV-2 does not look like a bioweapon or anything to do with one. It looks like a bat virus, and it is far too indiscriminate to be a bioweapon.
However, I regard it as entirely possible that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally escaped from one of the two biolabs in Wuhan.
But this does not make other countries’ epidemics China’s responsibility, since a pandemic could come from anywhere at any time, and it is up to each country and region to be prepared, and to take action upon being warned. Most governments failed miserably in this. In the UK and the US it was beyond incompetence; it was and continues to be wilful.
The Chinese authorities should be held accountable by the people of China, for censoring and suppressing the doctors who tried to raise the alarm.
Biolab security is hopelessly inadequate all over the world. This is another reason not to point the finger at China; biolabs are just as insecure everywhere else. They are in city centres and staff work nine to five. They should be in remote places with staff confined on-site for maybe three month duty periods – two months work then one month quarantine before being permitted to leave.
History of lab escapes:
https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-laboratory-escapes-self-fulfilling-prophecies/
Wuhan lab escape theory:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/coronavirus-spreads-leads-theories-origin-200407073509327.html
Summary: There was still mainstream scientific support for the lab escape theory as of April 8. There are two biolabs in Wuhan; a Centre for Disease Control public health lab right across the road from the wet market said to be the origin, and a “highest security” BSL4 lab some miles away. Both labs work with bat viruses, and the BSL4 lab has the largest collection in the world of viruses found in bats. Scientists from China’s top polytechnics published a pre-print paper (ie. not peer reviewed) saying that SARS-CoV-2 may have leaked from the public health lab, which has also had biosecurity breaches involving contamination of staff. SARS and other coronaviruses are handled with a lower level of security not requiring full decontamination of staff, and the original SARS has leaked from labs four times. There is no worldwide body overseeing biolabs.
It’s just not good enough! Biolabs require much better regulation and biosecurity.
“But this does not make other countries’ epidemics China’s responsibility,”
Thank you Clark for your informative opinion, as for the above that’s why I put it out there in my comment to see whether folk felt China should be held responsible or not.
Looks like commentors think not, however I wonder how those who’ve lost loved ones to the virus unaware of the shambolic handling of the pandemic by the UK government, or any other government around the world think about it?
Just a thought.
Governments will seed propaganda into the media to shirk their own responsibilities. It is up to us to spread more intelligent perspectives.
Craig, have I misunderstood your post, I read it as at critique of the hypocrisy of neo conservatives expressing concern over the Covid-9 deaths when compared with the enthusiasm they had for the decimation of parts of the middle east. I can’t see this matter raised in the comments, is there no enthusiasm to discuss this?
It was the main point, and it has, sadly, got lost.
It has I agree, and it is not a question of either or. In addition, another horseman, man-made climate change has also been put on the back burner, although it seems that the pestilence may improve things on this score.
Mary May 3rd 2020 at 1341.
“Fortunately, though, I’m not locked up like Julian. I wonder how he is and whether he has had any visitors. Trust Ms Baraitser and co are all OK in their salubrious dwellings.”
—————————————————————————
Well said Mary, my thoughts are with Julian also.
Thankfully we’re not stuck in solitary confinement in a cell at Belmarsh.
I hope Julian’s physical and mental health is robust enough to come through this politically motivated and illegal confinement.
Unfortunately we now have an ultra-Blairite Labour leader who seems hostile towards Julian Assange and pro- USA.
As for Vanessa Baraitser, I hope she has an acute attack of diarrhoea every time she leaves home.
“Unfortunately we now have an ultra-Blairite Labour leader”
I disagree that Starmer is an ultra-Blairite. I think he is more genuine than that but possibly with his own brand of ‘triangulation;. He is not saying that he is comfortable with some getting filthy rich.
Gawd bless yer Sir Keir. ‘ees so radical.
In 2013 the CPS pressured Swedish prosecutors into maintaining a fraudulent investigation into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange,
Uncovered emails show Starmer’s department writing to their Swedish counterparts, “Don’t you dare get cold feet!”
In 2015, Sir Keir abstained from the vote on the Tory Welfare Bill, which left 13 million of the most vulnerable people in society an average of £260 a year poorer. The same year, Starmer joined the likes of Hilary Benn in resigning from the front bench to begin a coup of Labour MPs (the Backstabers’ Club) against the newly elected leader of the party, Jeremy Corbyn.
See https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/07/star-a07.html
Johny : All my working life I had voted in general elections for a Labour government because I believed it would serve the working population better than what we have now. I remained persuaded for two years after the ’97 election that the nation was about to see real change that would benefit the poorest in society and then I began to recognise there were the ‘left behinds’ in the ‘red wall’ constituencies and the upper echelons of the Labour Party contained those who could accept the filthy rich as part of society when invited to luxury yacht parties in the south of France. We expect this sort of behaviour from Tories, but not from those who purport to be champions of the ordinary working people. I’ve no doubt that under Mr Corbyn the Labour Party would have been more likely to stem the migration to the right, but in truth he had little chance of that with the array of opposition, more of which from within than without, headed by Hodge, Mandelson, Blair and Starmer, included. I speculate the new Starmer-led Labour Party will do nothing to promote the plight of Mr Assange, he didn’t even have the courtesy to acknowledge my letter to him when I referenced his interview with the Huffington Post after he had declared Judge Baraitser to be a fair and competent magistrate who should be left to get on with her job in the absence of a jury. You are correct in all you have written about Sir Keir and it needs to be broadcast at every opportunity.
I joined the Labour Party to support Corbyn. Labour made massive gains in the 2017 General Election; I thought we might do it in 2019.
I don’t and never did support New Labour so I may well cancel my membership soon.
There’s so much to learn from this grand experiment.
This Lockdown.
All the controls are there.
The varying approaches to Lockdown across the world, from the strictest to the most lax.
Perhaps the greatest sociological experiment of all time.
Unfortunate perhaps, the extent to which it seems a Behaviorist approach.
But still, there’ll be loads and loads of interesting data from this, and, no doubt, much discussion of it.
The Climate lobby look to be an early beneficiary, for example. That’s already being emerging.
One of the more interesting aspects is the conspiracy theorists believe (and I mean Believe, with a capital B) that it’s all a hoax.
Yet these massively divergent governments are – gasp! – all in on it. Communist, capitalist, religious nutters – all of them. First time in history they’ve agreed on anything at all.
Conspiracy theorists haven’t really decided on the One True Conspiracy yet, and it shifts around and they are generally mutually exclusive – yet still are complementary, somehow.
But the one factor is clear – it’s a conspiracy, and scientists and medics are all in on it too. Only the denialists are the smart ones, everyone else are sheeple/ dupes or worse still, agents for the PTB ©.
What an ideal combination to rule the world, not far off what we have now. You forgot also Bill Gates, Soros seems to have been demoted for now, and of course his plaything, the WHO through which he will have us forcefully vaccinated whilst slipping in a mind bending drug, made by big Pharma. And behind it all shape shifting reptilians and illuminati.
Glenn you are exaggerating. There are hardly any conspiracy theorists who believe “it’s all a hoax”. I think you would struggle to point to any, now that David Icke has been silenced. What a very large number of people do believe is that governments of all hues have seized on this heaven-sent opportunity to implement draconian levels of unnecessary social control, and that even more is on its way. And one of the main reasons they have been able to do that is a moronic mainstream media exaggerating the actual danger out of all proportion.
I disagree that this is the case. In fact what the media has done is to politicise the issue in such a way as to give this inept government and that of the US a leeway. The lockdown should have been done earlier and sharper and accompanied with testing and quarantining of mild cases and contact tracing. The government was allowed to procrastinate and then focus on chasing stupid meaningless targets. There was meanwhile and still is no exaggeration of the risk, and we have not seen the end of this epidemic yet which will spin out of control for a second wave in the countries that did not act fast enough.
Incidentally what you say is not far off what Johnson and Trump have said at the outset.
I disagree with you SA. Our media have been groomed to be utterly superficial in their analysis, to trivialise complex matters, and to respond with hysteria to any problem, however minor. And their response to the pandemic has been superficial and hysterical.
But the outcome of that is that no Western politician now dares stand up in public and say anything sensible about COVID – that we should keep things in perspective. Any one who did would immeddiately be denounced and pilloried by the opposition and the media for “destroying innocent lives and insulting our heroic NHS…”
So instead we get an idiotic race to the bottom, with all our “leaders” trying to outdo each other in draconian measures, pointless gestures, empty posturing, and dramatic pronouncements of doom.
And of course that inevitably leads to the next consequence we’ve talked about above – the demonization of China. Because as we destroy our economies and make your lives hell, we need someone to point the finger at. It’s not our fault that we’re carrying on in this stupid, superficial and hysterical manner. No sirree bob, don’t blame us! It’s all China’s fault. We’ve been forced into it! Because of big bad China! That’s right! Blame all your woes on China! And make ’em pay…
You may be interested of China’s opinion on USA blaming them.
“Once upon a virus…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5BZ09iNdvo&t=
Thanks Tatyana. That is literally the first decent response from China to the West I have ever seen. I suspect it was Xinhua’s foreign experts who produced it 😉
Enjoy the comments as well, Stonky.
“As an American, I’ve never been so offended by something I 100% agree with.”
Seems like not everything is lost with americans, does it?
oh, just look, they continue commenting there and it’s brilliant!
“As an American, I’ve never been so offended by something I 100% agree with.”
david abe:
– “So yer saying you agree with communist Chinese propaganda?”
phayke:
– “@david abe mate. We all know this is propoganda, but it’s fucking true.”
– Once Upon a Virus
Brilliant!
(but why does it remind me of so many commenters on here?)
Did you notice “Bell and Howell” logo in the first secconds? I know chinese people as very clever people, perhaps they message us something?
Very witty Tatyana. However the WHO connections with China cannot be dismissed as witnessed by the Francis Boyle interview posted yesterday by Mark Golding.
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/geopolitics-empire/e/66974269
Francis Boyle is another academic whose voice has been silenced. He joins a long list. Academic establishments used to be places where open debate was allowed, even encouraged. Today they are places which have to produce reports to concur with the opinions of those who fund them, people like Big Pharma and the Bill Gates Foundation.
Glenn
I’m a conspiracy theorist but I don’t believe the virus is a hoax. But I am aware that the social control measures being introduced have been predicted for years by conspiracy theorists. And now lo! Facial recognition, biometric ‘immunity passports’ to allow us to go to work are only months away.
This article is one of the most dystopian I’ve seen for a long time.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/03/coronavirus-health-passports-for-uk-possible-in-months?CMP=share_btn_tw
Are you OK with this? Needing a facial recognition biometric ID in order to earn a living?
Can’t you see what’s happening?
So many can’t see what’s happening yet its happening before their very eyes. And they are the ones trotting out modern-day clichés like “the new norm”, “stay at home” and “keep your distance”, all designed to alienate and drive us apart. The virus is not a hoax. It is the way governments have used it to try and control us that is false. Thankfully they have not found any reason to prevent us going for a bike ride and getting away from the claustrophobic shutdown of people’s brains. I’m off.
I don’t want to advocate such decisions; I have not yet made up my mind whether this is good or bad. I just remind you that today, to visit some countries, you must definitely get a vaccine against local diseases. To visit the kindergarten and school, you must provide a vaccination card for the child. The civil passport has a blood type mark. People with special conditions have bracelets or tokens on them. I just remind you that a huge amount of information about personal health is already in the public (non-personal) space.
If the immune status is considered a reason for not allowing a citizen to some public places, then this will be an undoubted violation of his freedoms. But at the same time, the admission of contageous citizens to public places violates the freedoms and rights of others.
A balanced and good reasoned decision would be needed here. But I believe that we must wait for the end of the epidemic, maybe the virus will be cured by a simple inexpensive pill, who knows.
Those who don’t carry phones 24/7 with the “extremely helpy anti-germs tracing app” are likely to be denied “privileges” such as being allowed
* to buy food
* to connect to the internet
* to receive medical attention
* to work
* to use bank machines
* possibly, to access their bank accounts at all.
Can we think of a way that it can be verified that people stay close to their smartphones 24/7? Because I can: chip implants.
Google and Apple are having a f***ing field day, as are companies further down the pecking order such as Microsoft.
“Months”? This is more likely to happen within weeks.
Within months there will be famine. Sometimes one has to spell it out:
* 50% of Britain’s food is imported
* there will be major problems bringing in the domestic harvest too
* there is talk of using the unemployed, army reservists, students, “furloughed” workers, etc.
Everyone is an “expert” now on labs in Wuhan even if they have never even bothered thinking for 5 minutes about what biological warfare is all about.
Expect further shocks.
The situation is likely to move rapidly from
* everybody stand together to stop the nasty virus and “protect the NHS”
to
* death to the saboteurs who are not accepting the tracing app, who seem to be rather over-represented among
a) the unemployed
b) single mothers
c) black people
d) immigrants
e) those who have just come out of prison, have tattoos, etc, which is how Tories tend to view the majority of the working class
f) the homeless
g) anyone who is a bit lippy, stroppy, or bolshie.
You could say the situation will have moved from
* war against terror (an emotion)
to
* war against drugs (a collection of inanimate objects)
to
* war against the virus (a collection of pseudo-living microscopic entities)
to
* war against saboteurs and germ-spreaders (a collection of human beings)
“companies further down the pecking order such as Microsoft.”
“Further down the pecking order”. Microsoft? Are you kidding?
Who are the ‘conspiracy theorists’, Glenn?
There are large numbers of people who acknowledge that CoVid19/SARS-CoV2 exists, that it is a naturally occurring virus that has spread globally.
What they do not accept is that it is a uniquely virulent virus, that it causes dangerously more deaths than flu and that the whole economy should be shut down because of it.
The economic vandalism is what this is actually all about. And yes: Governments are taking orders from people like Bill Gates, who wants to sell his vaccines, sell his wireless-based tattoos, wants to sell low-level-satellite-surveillance serivces and a lot more. The banks have been bailed out yet again, whereas all the really needy SME owners have been totally hung out to dry. All the NHS, the BBC, the police, the Civil Service are on full pay, and MPs awarded themselves a £10k a year pay rise. None of those people have any incentive to return to normal, because they are all ‘I’m all right, Jack!’
Those of us under 60 who are fit and healthy should not be under lockdown. If we need to get old folk self-isolating, fine. But you do not shut down an entire economy to save the over 80s. It is economic suicide and there is no basis for even discussing that.
Lefties like you need to say how you are going to pay for this economic carnage because, believe you me, the world will not bounce back like it did after the 2008 crash.
All you folks saying ‘Isn’t lockdown wonderful’ are active participants in creating a horrible new world where the rich travel the world with impunity whilst locking the vast majority down under a myriad of travel restrictions.
It is disgusting, it is puke-inducing and it is absolutely everything that lefties purport to abhor.
It is going back to the 1400s, when titled landowners were the only people having a life of pleasure, enjoyment and prosperity.
Is that your aim??
– “Who are the ‘conspiracy theorists’?”
Er, can’t you see them? They’re all over this thread. Maybe you just can’t smell your own farts.
This is so sad. We have John Goss actually encouraging people to spread covid-19, and a whole crowd claiming it’s a hoax. If people would show more responsibility and treat covid-19 with the respect it should demand we wouldn’t need an enforced lockdown.
– “But you do not shut down an entire economy to save the over 80s. It is economic suicide and there is no basis for even discussing that.”
The basis for discussing it is effectively waterboarding half a million people for between a week and a month each, many of them to death. Your lot only ever mention the deaths, never the suffering. I think you watch too much telly, where the death is all sanitised.
And here you are slagging off the emergency workers along with the politicians and media! Shame on you. The emergency workers are at greatly increased risk.
– “…to save the over 80s”
This really makes so furious. By far the majority of these old people have contributed entire productive lifetimes.
So their final weeks, days and hours can be spent in a futile, doomed and agonising struggle for breath can they? Because we’ve overwhelmed the hospitals where they could have pain relief, breathing / oxygen assistance or induced coma?
How would you like to spend your last few days Rhys?
You know all those sheeple clapping the NHS workers that commenters on here have been berating? They have more humanity in their little fingernail than I see among the conspiracy theorists.
Rhys’s writings have turned into bitter raving tirades where he would like to imprison, hang and kill various people and accuse health workers risking their lives for wanting to prolong this crisis. He has no shame and cannot see beyond the bile he spews.
– “And yes: Governments are taking orders from people like Bill Gates, who wants to sell his vaccines, sell his wireless-based tattoos, wants to sell low-level-satellite-surveillance serivces and a lot more. The banks have been bailed out yet again, whereas all the really needy SME owners have been totally hung out to dry”
Now this, I entirely agree with, but it is the politico-economic context in which this pandemic has occurred, and it has taken decades to be established. But you slag off as “controlled opposition” the very groups who put their liberty on the line in an attempt to reverse it.
“Who are the ‘conspiracy theorists’, Glenn?”
Practically everyone commenting on this thread, including all those sounding off about “conspiracy theorists”. All you need to be a conspiracy theorist is a theory about a conspiracy. There is hardly a commenter here that doesn’t see a conspiracy somewhere, even if it only be the Alphabet Sisters. A conspiracy doesn’t have to be imagined to be a conspiracy and as for theories, why, the Scientific Method tells us that the entire body of science is simply theories, theories that fit the known facts most closely.
Bayard: “All you need to be a conspiracy theorist is a theory about a conspiracy”
No, a conspiracy theory resorts to action by the purported conspiracy (“they” or “them”) at every turn. eg; CT = conspiracy theorist, RT = rational theorist:
CT: “They” are propagandising that a relatively harmless virus is deadly.
RT: Here are the figures of the deaths caused by the new virus; they are rising very fast, so the virus must be deadly.
CT: No, “they” have manufactured fake tests,
or : No, “they” are using uncertainty in testing and diagnosis to wrongly attribute other deaths to the virus.
RT: Here are the figures for all deaths together; they are rising fast too, so there must be some new cause of death, which is the new virus.
CT : No, “they” control the media; those deaths aren’t real.
RT: Here are the official death figures.
CT: No, “they” control the authorities too; “they’ve” inflated the overall figures.
RT: Here are death figures from other countries; they too are rising very fast.
CT: No, “they” control the media; those deaths aren’t real either.
RT: Here are the official figures from those countries.
CT: No, “they” control other countries’ authorities too.
RT: Oh come on, there must be some limit to this conspiracy.
CT: But you would say that because (either 1) you are working for “them” (or 2) you have been brainwashed by “their” media.
And so on, ad infinitum…. A proper conspiracy theory is an untestable proposition, because the purported conspiracy can always be expanded without any limit upon either its reach or its power.
Well said Rhys.
Well said Rhys.
I have received a personal false accusation from friend Clark as encouraging people to spread Covid-19 I will briefly address it.
All I have advised is for people to give one another a hug. This would be a show of solidarity that we are not going to be dictated to by Bill’s shills. I never encouraged people to go into hospitals and hug Covid-19 patients (a silly suggestion by glenn-uk). I believe that the virus, like all other viruses, will run its course whatever we do. So we should not in my opinion bring down society because of it. It is nowhere near as virulent as the post World War I flu which killed millions. There is a difference from the 1919-20 pandemic. Today our diets are better, we are not suffering from the aftermath and privation of war, or the harsh unemployment of the first two decades of the 20th century. However we soon will be. All the promises about bailing out businesses cannot possibly be fulfilled. Many people already have no jobs to go back to. That unemployment will lead to a depression which will create an ideal environment for the release of another man-made virus which will go through a population with empty stomachs like the plague. Got it?
I know Clark must be very bitter after continually spreading lies about there being thrice the number of deaths due to the new virus and me revealing how inaccurate this “scientific” statement was, it is understandable that he must feel piqued. So perhaps he can be forgiven for attacking the man and not his comments.
John – your suggestion that people go around hugging is foolhardy in the extreme. It would almost certainly count as an assault unless you first found someone willing to take such a stupid and irresponsible risk themselves, preferably someone who likes to see pandemics spread because they hate society.
Why don’t you ring NHS direct, and tell them what you’re advising people to do, and see how they react? Perhaps you should visit your local hospital, so they can tell you directly what they think of your suggestion. Seriously – do it – before your advice kills someone.
I didn’t claim to be quoting you when I spoke about C-19 patients in hospital, you must have misinterpreted. What I did suggest was that you should go in there if you don’t believe that this virus can be transmitted.
John, I have a good friend in the Birmingham area who could call round to give you a hug. He’s been finding life pretty stressful for the last few weeks and I’m sure he could do with it.
Far from being furloughed, he’s been asked to do overtime in public spaces. Unfortunately he doesn’t have much choice, because he’s a police officer and they’re really overstretched just now. Please post your address and I’ll see if I can arrange for him to pop round. If you haven’t spoken to anyone new for a while, I’m sure it would do you good too.
Just because the world is becoming urbanised does not mean that everyone lives in cities, yet the entire thrust of the reaction to this disease assumes that everyone does. It may be news to the city dwellers on here, but there are huge areas of the world, even in densely populated countries like the UK, where COVID-19 hasn’t reached yet. The only point of any of the quarantine restrictions, apart from those preventing people bringing the disease in from outside, is to get people used to them for if and when the disease does arrive. Meanwhile, it’s perfectly safe to give a friend or a family member a hug.
In 1665, Britain was faced with a much worse disease, bubonic plague. It was contained in London, and a few other places, simply by restricting travel. Elsewhere in the country people were able to go about their business unaffected.
As a conspiracy theorist, I will just say that it is your usual crap IMHO, Glenn-uk.
I don’t believe in one grand plot, but some time one is connected to several others, like the ones to get rid of the USSR, the assassinations of JFK, Sweden’s PM Olof Palme, and the Russian defector Sasha LItvinenko.
Kennedy’s killing was planned to blame on Moscow but failed because one of the assassins Richard Cain failed to test fire the rifle to make sure that it shot straight but he didn’t do it, hitting Governor Connally instead, and forcing LBJ to appoint the Warren Commission so the Soviets still didn’t Renaldoget blamed.
Palme’s killing didn’t get blamed on the Soviets because the set-up assassin Stig Bergling wouldn’t defect back there after the shooting.
Sasha was killed because he was blackmailing KGB spies like Renaldo Prodi, and the Brits had to make out that he still worked for the Russians. There’s nearly always something to mess up a plot, a mistake, surprise or accident
pete – obviously they’ve no more care or concern for their own herds of cattle than other elite leaders have for theirs, it’d be foolish to think they do, especially for the old with pensions, some too with extra public-sector pensions (sppa and the equivalent in R-UK), the sick, long-term unemployed, and other ‘useless-eaters’, it frees up public-sector housing too, turfing old-folk into care-homes where they can be quietly dispatched. They can buy and sell pick from the immigrant camps/slave-markets more-compliant and biddable cheaper replacement workers as their forebears did with chattel-slaves, colliers etc. Touching that anyone thinks they give a monkeys, any more they did for the millions they blew to smithereens under their international responsibility to protect, or legislated domestic equivalents.
More hall-monitors, prefects and teacher’s pets than is healthy here, all parroting msm ‘obey’ tropes. The double-act briefly became a trio as another popped up just as the first two’s apoplexy became all too evident and sorely needed to repair to the powder-room. Have they left the gate unkept?
Yes, very worrying about obedience to MSM tropes myself, partly because it is suckering in intelligent people. The gatekeepers, like the poor, are always with us, sadly.
On another subject how are you? Are you still in hospital? Hope things are getting better for you.
I know you two are talking about me.
I don’t use the corporate media. How many more times?
I don’t use the corporate media.
I don’t use the corporate media.
I don’t use the corporate media.
I DON’T USE THE CORPORATE MEDIA
Heard me yet?
https://www.medialens.org/2020/for-unknown-reasons-they-waited-and-watched-lancet-editor-exposes-devastating-government-failure-on-coronavirus/
@Tony – Are they planning to use inmates from immigrant camps as forced labour in agriculture? I can easily imagine that happening.
(Those among the customers at my local Tesco’s who are such moronic racist scumbags that they won’t go to a checkout counter where a black person is working probably won’t worry though – they will just think that the forced labourers have it easy and all get given free television sets.)
Thanks for the reply. It is sad that the debate on Craig’s post has been usurped by the understanable concerns raised by the Covid-19 pandemic. I am surprised that so many people can give an opinion about the spread of the new virus based on so little trustworthy scientific information.
So what would you say to Blair and Campbell?
I’d be more than happy to say this:
“You will be taken from here to the place from whence you came and there be kept in close confinement until next Friday, and upon that day that you be taken to the place of execution and there hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have… Oops. No, sorry. Got that bit wrong. I meant may you writhe in agony in hell for all eternity, as you so richly deserve…”
Tony M
If politics now is the art of lying, presumably Russophobia means the West and Russia are allies against a common enemy, and Chinaphobia the same. Cv19 is just the shaving foam.
Russia and China are together building a significant geographical alliance, covering much of Asia and parts of Europe and Africa, explicitly rejecting the US’ mantras about how the world should be run.
No-one suggests that Russia and China are saints, but at least they are trying to build constructively and do not use bombing and infrastructural destruction as their everyday tool of foreign policy.
Rhys Jaggar
How can we be sure that all of the main economic “rivals” are not united against 1/ our overpopulation and 2/ our divergence from their materialistic beliefs. I personally think its conceivable that the global rivals forgot to tuck in their collars when some of them failed to ban “bush” meat when they knew the dangers of virus transmission and others employed advisors that think black people are inferior to themselves and believe in Eugenics.
I always said that the place for them would in a cell on a cold island with a loop playing of Iraqi children screaming as their dressings were being changed.
They wouldn’t care about the Iraqi children bit. They’re subhuman sociopaths. Something happens to people when they exercise a certain level of power. They stop seeing people as human beings, and just consider them as if they were no more than ants. Blair and Campbell sent their own British forces off to Iraq on a pack of lies, knowing that some would die, and not caring if it was dozens, or hundreds, or thousands. I doubt if the millions of Iraqi dead ever troubled them for a second, before or since.
For what it’s worth I don’t think they actually killed David Kelly – just hounded him mercilessly until he killed himself. But if he had proved to be of sterner stuff, I don’t think they would have had ths slightest compunction in giving the order.
Doctors disagree about Dr David Kelly’s ‘death’. It was not suicide. Ask why did Grieve (Attorney General)
refuse to grant a rightful inquest (Falconer subsumed the original inquest, closed as soon as it was opened, and set up the Hutton Inquiry whitewash) and fight the request for a judicial review in the High Court?
See Miles Goslett’s –
An Inconvenient Death: How the Establishment Covered Up the David Kelly Affair
https://books.google.com/books/about/An_Inconvenient_Death.html?id=R9tADwAAQBAJ
It was not suicide. Certainly not a conspiracy theorists fascination Mary and thankyou.
Norman Baker, LibDem MP, wrote an excellent, meticulously researched work “The Strange Death of David Kelly”. It took him a lot longer than he had expected, and he was able, through being a MP (perhaps then was easier than now), to get a lot more detail than had been previously made available. His book was published in 2007. He is a honest man and as Peter Oborne wrote at the time: “he asks difficult and problematic questions that seem not to have occurred to Lord Hutton”.
Baker’s conclusion is that it was murder but not necessarily by the British State, possibly by Iraqi pro-invasion actors frustrated by Dr. Kelly’s stubborn integrity. Of course, with what we have learned since of the fluid interaction between jihadi and other non-state terrorists and the established security services, who can know?
Dr Kelly’s death looks like murder followed by cover-up to me.
But that’s not to say the British state did it. But whoever did, the British state covered up for them. There are plenty with motive, and they’re all on the pro-war side.
Ultimately, power is war and war is power. Let the power fall. But for that, we need to learn personal responsibility, and that includes not spreading killer viruses.
And it includes taking personal risk and making personal sacrifice to take back power from wherever it accumulates. Because power accumulates power, and it always will.
– People gonna rise like the water,
– Gonna turn this system round…
BLiar was on a plane when told about Dr. Kelly. He went ashen. Probably hearing that his plans had been realized.
Dr Kelly’s daughter, Rachel, was due to get married at the time. A father does not commit suicide at that time in his own and his daughter’s lives. The knife that was found on him was a pruning knife incapable of cutting through flesh and a blood vessel. In any case, an artery heals over very quickly when cut as any A&E doctor/trauma surgeon say. There was no residue of tablets in his stomach contents. The pathologist used who called the death a suicide was a state operative. The papers from the Hutton ‘inquiry’ were locked away for 70 years. That makes you think doesn’t it.
PS Then his body was disinterred and his remains were cremated. I won’t go on.
I think Norman Baker did a great job in his book on Kelly, but I think he was duped at the end with the idea that the perps were ‘Iraqi pro-invasion actors’. I can no longer remember the details but I seem to remember he was given this hot top ‘off the record’.
Stonky, you say “subhuman sociopath… when they exercise a certain level of power”. I agree, and also I think that the power structure itself is tailored in such a way that it implies a place for sociopathic characters.
I explain why I think so.
We discussed Biden and Tara yesterday, and today’s Russian news brought a piece on this topic.
“US lawmakers have a special, absolutely official budgetary fund – from taxpayer money – to pay for claims from injured employees…
this fund paid approximately $ 17 million to victims… All hearings … are held in a closed format … especially determined … is the consent to refuse any other claims and never publicly tell who and what has been done to them.”
https://www.ocwr.gov/sites/default/files/Annual-Report-FY17.pdf
“… In 2017, reporters learned that … the victim (*of a Republican senator) received $ 84 thousand of state compensation, and the fined person was forced to leave his post.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/01/blake-farenthold-taxpayer-funds-sexual-harassment-274458
source in russian
https://ria.ru/20200504/1570930901.html
—
Can you imagine, that “the beacon of democracy and chief fighter for women’s rights” have a special fund for their senators? To pay victims!
I still can’t believe it, it just can’t be! Or is it true? Can someone advise me if this is true? OH! MY! GOD!
I thought that people who go to high posts are offered, I don’t know, a high salary, security, a luxurious home and a car, the possibility of an excellent education for children – what a person dreams of when he thinks of really good work.
But, NO, look what’s happening – they literally tell him – come on, friend, jump into our boat, you can do anything anonymously and with impunity, and taxpayers will pay for it!
This system sucks. Politics make me sick. USA government is one big grotesque LIE.
It’s a bit a giveaway too that the Coronavirus Act in Britain (sections 11-13) has allowed the indemnifcation of medics and nurses who “accidentally” kill people in relation to Covid-19 – possibly the biggest change in “health” law the country has ever seen, and which has gone practically uncommented in the media.
I wonder-
I am personally very averse to hierarchies. They always descend, eventually, into brutality and abuse, sometimes serious, sometimes ‘trivial’ eg bullying.Where power is unevenly distributed( the essence of hierarchy) there will be misuse of power
But I wonder, does the hierarchy shape the members to become sociopathic, of do the people attracted to power/hierarchy /(sociopaths/narcissists) shape the hierarchy?
I noticed that even in the relatively benign organisations where I worked (education) the people who were at the top of the hierarchy were often ruthless and lacked personal integrity ie they had worked the system and had become adjusted to the comforts of rewards from their acceptance of the primacy of the organisation. My feeling is that certain organisations and hierarchies provide a ‘cover’ for incipient moral weakness. The ‘organisation’ becomes the dominating influence that must survive above the individual members and any scruples.
The organisation’s survival or expansion justifies the loss of humanity that accompanies the individual actions. This was ,of course, the theme of the Nazi war trials, where the individuals had became monsters under the influence of the organisation. However I guess that the corporatist cult that dominate Western (Primarily US ) thinking is a way of reproducing the efficiencies of Nazism while creating an apparently morally neutral profit making structure. The pursuit of profit seems to excuse the participants. I think this is the point Tatyana is making about the monetisation of harm caused by the organisation. as long as we have this form of ‘social ecology’ based on exploitation, we are doomed to forever repeat the failures of the past.
Eichmann was a very limited corporate organiser who turned his mind to the logistical problems of efficiently managing slaughter. He abandoned all morality to the propagation of his hierarchy. Without the organisation and accompanying ideology, he would probably have remained some kind of middle management production organiser and scheduler dealing with (say) assembly of a big widgets from many small widgets. Hannah Arendt noted the banal nature of evil.
Addressed to ‘N’ comment above. surely you don’t think that doctors and nurses will intentionally kill people. I think your “inverted commas” on accidentally are misplaced.
Deepgreenpuddock
My point is so primitive that I didn’t expect such an analytical development as the monetization of harm. My view on the normal natural structure of society and power is probably naive:
I suppose that ordinary people can’t do large projects alone, so historically there is a tradition of allocating a small amount of personal income to the public treasury, for example, to build a bridge or a mill. Later, this system proved to be effective and now we know it as taxes and budget.
Public projects of our time are much larger, we recognized the need to sponsor national projects (health, education, infrastructure, etc.).
People choose persons (officials) to manage these projects, and entrust them with the disposal of this money. Also, people choose the officials who compose the rules (issue laws), according to these rules, social projects operate, people interact, etc.
Even in a terrible nightmare, I wouldn’t imagine that trusted elected managers would reserve a certain amount from the public money to cover up their own violations! This is just perverse logic. I can’t imagine HOW this is even possible.
This violates all ideas about equality, trust in power, democracy, moral norms. What’s happening? I can’t imagine this happen in Russia. Can you imagine that Putin would do something similar with a woman, like Biden did to Tara, and, instead of being condemned, the case made public, instead of bringing the offender to the court – instead of all that the woman would be covertly sent to the cashier to get payment for silence? What a f*cking horrendous humiliation.
Due to my interest in maths and computing, I must defend hierarchy. Computer filing systems are hierarchical; folders within folders within folders etc. The classifications of living organisms is hierarchical, etc. Hierarchy is one of the most powerful organisational tools ever invented.
The real issues are control and communication, and we could define a subset of hierarchies (hierarchically, of course!) as power hierarchies. In these, control is unidirectional, from top to bottom, and communication is also unidirectional, but from bottom to top. Control and secrecy; they are intimately connected.
Clark, it is disingenuous to conflate human hierarchies with an analogous or metaphorical structural hierarchy as used in computing.
Human hierarchies are way of organising a particular distribution of power and authority, and rewards. Human hierarchies are not based on any logical arrangement.The power embodied in an individual as part of a hierarchy is rarely arrived at in some ‘reasoned’ manner.In a human hierarchy, the organisation becomes defensive if threatened in any way.It propagates power and control regardless of moral qualities or effectiveness and the hierarchy becomes the very essence of itself. Examples abound. Trump-the putative head of a hierarchy which self-evidently only exists to propagate itself or more precisely to divert the collective power of the electorate into a dead end (where it can be mugged).The sameis true of British democracy. Putin the head of a worthless,venal amoral kleptocracy. The EU is similarly corrupt even if the tone of the corruption is distinctive.
Actually, it is not totally due to status or power levels, it is a state of mind. I have three family members who see other family members as subhuman if they do not submit to them, just the same as the way Americans see anyone who does not become their vassal.
Tony Blair was just a shameless wannabe multimillionaire. He understood that if he did the Yanks’ bidding, he would be handsomely rewarded.
The UK taxpayer was not handsomely rewarded, but what did he care?
Are you doing something to stop it, Rhys?
I just can’t calm down, it’s so monstrous – a fund to cover violations. How did american lawmakers justify such a need? Under what sauce did they manage to feed this shit to the public? How did the public swallow it? Did Tara know about this fund? Did she sign informed consent to work on such terms? What do american citizens think about the idea of a fund from the state budget – to pay pedophile victims for silence? Where is the end? Is there something that cannot be sold?
So many questions… At least, now I understand how my remarks were percieved. I wondered what’s wrong with women, why can’t they just tell their bosses to f*ck off or, to bring the bastard to the court.
The people gotta take back the power Tatyana.
Power corrupts; this is undeniable. And power attracts corruption. But the people at the top are corrupted by the system just as much as the much larger number of people that they oppress.
We all permit this every time we comply rather than challenge. The system only exists through the aversion of the majority to making trouble, and taking on responsibility. We all have the responsibility to push back, and to demand information, and to break secrecy. This is why Julian Assange is locked up.
We need to learn Rebellion!
The guilty have no conscience.
I hope we are not required to listen to the BBC or its news to get our guidance to this protracted and negligible action saga that is playing out now. I am switching off and their directions and policies to lift this lockdown are not received here. I shall take my cue from the general public and their responses, common sense guidance.
The useless time wasting gibber jabber that daily swamps our minds with fear and anxiety raising matters has to be stemmed somehow.
So when there is a vaccine approaching’ please don’t tell me, I have no interest in it.
I’ve stopped listening to the radio – it’s the same fascist message in every programme.
Napoleon said there was one rhetorical device that is more important than all the others: REPETITION.
Napoleon said there was one rhetorical device that is more important than all the others: REPETITION.
Napoleon said there was one rhetorical device that is more important than all the others: REPETITION.
The vaccines will only last a year or two: Coronavirus mutates sufficiently rapidly that I would be very surprised if any vaccine was useful for more than 3 years.
Where did you get the information that the virus mutates? Even if it does, flu viruses mutate and there is good basic immunity still but it has to be boosted by newly adapted vaccines every year. Also as a scientist you must know that vaccines are often produced to stimulate infections against structural proteins or crucial parts of proteins associated with certain vital functions and for which a mutation may lead to lost of function.
As for Blair and Cambell, still earning money from smearing their opinions into newspaper articles, regularly, it shows that the MSM will not change, that this system needs this MSM to exist, and that these newspapers will have to disappear with these war criminals and liars, before we can report on a more normal course of life as it exists.
Ecolution now! How I wish a tsunami would sweep it all away so we can grow a more sustainable society thereafter.
Media hypocrisy on the value of human life is indeed nauseating. So too is the BBC’s current veneration of the NHS. Just go back to the election campaign to recall the BBC’s real commitment to free healthcare. When documents were leaked proving the government was in talks to sell off the NHS to US corporations, the BBC’s reaction was to twist the revelation into a ‘Corbyn is Putin’s puppet’ scandal. Its shielding of government venality and incompetence has become even more shameless during this pandemic. We are being played over and over and over by this so called public service broadcaster.
Not even the NHS or the communist media claim that the UK has free health care. Their claim is for healthcare that is free at the point of use.
Maybe the real virus is the virus of money printing with the infected contributing to societal delusion.
“healthcare that is free at the point of use”.
Much of it isn’t even free at the point of use: dental treatment; eye tests and glasses; prescription payments.
Be honest, @Loony, you’d whoop for joy if ex-council estates, areas with high unemployment, and immigrant “holding centres” all got sarin gased, wouldn’t you?
His short term hope is that ‘the residuum’ be forced back to work at the height of a pandemic. Long term, to strip them of free healthcare.
It is a well known tactic of Communists to seek to deconstruct everything including the use of language.
The real question is whether you are seeking to advance the agenda via your own attempts at deconstruction or whether you are a victim of deconstruction. There is no rational basis at all to conclude from my comment that I wish to see people gassed.
Or maybe you are simply engaging in transference. After all Communists are so fond of killing people that it is hard to accurately count the aggregate number of victims. Around 110 million would appear a conservative estimate.
No, when the Bolsheviks had to choose between Bolshevism and the state, they chose the state. Nothing that happened in the USSR after 1921 can be called communist. That said, communists are right-wing deviationist milquetoasts compared to us anarchists.
If there is anything that makes my blood boil it’s the disingenuous use of ‘free at the point of delivery’ to describe the NHS. It’s not free it never has been free, it’s paid for by public taxes and national Insurance contributions. I always say to anyone who wants to argue otherwise, go set up an insurance company into which people pay monthly, then advertise the service as ‘free at the point of delivery’. Set the clock for how long it takes to land you before a court.
Forgot to include that the RCP, and then the subcutaneous chip, will of course incorporate the citizens financial credit rating, the only way of buying food or anything else.
Here’s what’s going to happen:
There will be a relaxation of lockdown but we will be instructed to wear masks and maintain some degree of social distancing.
A certain amount of complaint at the continuing control measures will be carried in the MSM and there will be calls for actual protest meetings.
Some actual protest meetings will go ahead and TV crews will film people mingling and agitators voicing extreme conspiracy theories about the virus.
We will be told that a 2nd wave of the virus has come round.
Lockdown will be re-imposed and the protesters will be blamed for the 2nd wave.
The Deliver Us from Pandemics and Epidemics Society (DUPES) will blame the government for relaxing the 1st lockdown too soon and demand stricter controls and censorship of “dangerous opinions.”
The government will respond with more surveillance, biometric ID, more powers to deal with dissent.
Another cycle of relaxation and lockdown, this time cash transactions will be blamed.
Cash will be removed from circulation, electronic commerce only, all transactions monitored.
Everyone must carry an RCP (Responsible Citizen Passport) which proves they’ve had their vaccines, not been to unauthorised meetings, displays any black marks they’ve earned for dissent or rule infringements, and incorporates their financial credit rating, the only way of buying food or anything else.
Access to the internet will require biometric ID linked to RCP.
The WHO will announce Epidemic 2 has been detected, and this time it is definitely a Chinese bioweapon.
DUPES will demand that our clumsy RCPs are replaced with convenient subcutaneous chips.
Node cuts out his chip and runs off to join the resistance living in the sewers.
Node …couldn’t agree more. Meetings will already have been held marvelling beyond all expectations at how utterly malleable the public have been, it’s a prize they couldn’t have dreamt possible. They now know the toilet roll hoarders and pan clangers will accept absolutely anything if it keeps them ‘safe’.
I think that the 18-30s should organise a snog-a-thon for 48 hrs: Friday night to Sunday evening.
After all, they have been told to stop shagging by one and all, so a defiant 1 million or so engaging in some healthy snogging and kissing for 48 hrs is a perfect ‘cock a snook’ answer as virtually none of them will be susceptible to Coronavirus.
A 30 year old friend of mine has had covid-19. He was reportedly on the mend after a very bad illness, but I’m yet to hear from him. Another friend of a friend was “left as weak as a kitten”. Either or both may have suffered long term or permanent damage; we know covid-19 can do that, especially lasting lung damage, but also organ and neurological damage. We don’t yet know how prevalent that is.
To clarify my prediction:
When I said “The WHO will announce Epidemic 2 has been detected, and this time it is definitely a Chinese bioweapon, I mean that the WHO will claim Pandemic 2 is a Chinese bioweapon,
And I missed a step. After The DUPES demand censorship of dangerous opinions I should have included the line “Websites like this will be closed for allowing posts like this.”
Node, there’s no point in hiding in the sewers, it’s just as dangerous as being up top. They’ve got it covered anyway with surveillance.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/coronavirus-found-paris-sewage-points-early-warning-system
Damn. OK, Plan B : I’ll infiltrate the government, work my way up to becoming prime minister, be a useful idiot for a few years till one of the Elite’s headhunters invites me into the upper echelons, spend a few more years proving I’m psychopathic enough for them to trust me, then a quick palace coup and I’m Emperor of the World. By then, you lot will be used to constant fear, 24 hour surveillance, and absolute obedience. As an Emperor, these are useful traits for the masses. I may decide to keep the measures in place for your own good, easier for me to protect you that way. Hmmmm, this website is going to have to go …
Хех, ты русский штоле? 🙂
About “штоле” I tried dictionaries, including a slang dictionary and then tried online. It appears to be some kind of pirogi. Is that right Tatyana?
John Goss,
it is a distorted “что ли”, an almost exact transcription. The whole expression “ты русский штоле?” refers to the popular meme “Ты наркоман штоле?”
https://www.meme-arsenal.com/memes/e3078f6813eadedd16690d71a5f5a57e.jpg
Node’s humor is very russian
Thanks for the explanation Tatyana.
…and Node thanks Clark for pointing out that subcutaneous chips are vulnerable to cocaine and scalpel?
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/backing-the-wrong-horseman/comment-page-5/#comment-939302
OK, I’ve got a scalpel ….
Well the other isn’t entirely necessary, but it helps.
It is beginning to look like the first coronavirus case in France dates back to at the latest 27. 12. 2019.
(French) https://www.lefigaro.fr/sciences/un-patient-atteint-du-coronavirus-fin-decembre-a-bondy-20200503
(English) https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1277449/France-news-coronavirus-December-first-case-COVID-19-Emmanuel-Macron-latest
It looks like Mr. Donald Trump may have to find a way of sending that bill he was preparing for China to the rider of Revelation’s pale horse instead. Maybe he can delegate the task to Mike Pompeo or Mike Pence who boast closer connections to God than the President himself.
That would mean there have been more deaths from covid-19 in Europe than we have been told about.The hotspot for Europe was said to have been
The Alps.
People coming in, for skiing.
China person ZERO
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coronavirus-chinas-first-confirmed-covid-19-case-traced-back
November 17
Clark,you are absolutely correct. The sad truth, however, is that these people, whether or not they realise it, are arguing on behalf of the eugenicist inspired neo-fascists who are defending neo-liberalism from the final indignity of being curbed in order to save lives.
The nonsense that they are defending individual freedom-for everyone else- by engaging in anti-social acts is so obvious that it is difficult to believe that, for example, Goss cannot see it.
If it would not be in the interests of freedom to encourage an infected man to spit into a cradle how can it be reasonable to encourage potentially asymptomatic carriers of the virus to go around hugging, shaking hands and infecting others, without their consent?
Perhaps these lovers of freedom could herd themselves together in the interest of developing immunity. They could wear T-shirts to identify their desire to be infected and willingness to infect others.
Bevin, thank you. It has been a long hard slog for me on this thread.
We should have risen up decades ago against the neoliberal insanity. These are absolutely the worst circumstances under which to have to cope with a pandemic. With Free Software and blockchain we could have had computing, contact tracing and electronic currency that we could trust.
We have to get through this without suffocating the old folk, and then we must Rise!
@bevin – Why do you limit your argument to Covid-19?
The WHO estimates that 4.6 million people per year die from causes directly attributable to air pollution. Why should anyone have the right to engage in any activity at all that causes air pollution without the consent of everyone else who is not engaging in that activity? So, for example people that do not fly should have the right to stop everyone else from flying. People that do not drive cars would have the right to prevent anyone else from driving cars. People that do not take public transport should have the power to close down public transport systems and so on.
Exactly how do you imagine any society could avoid complete collapse should it operate under the kind of modus operandi that you favor.
“Why should anyone have the right to engage in any activity at all that causes air pollution without the consent of everyone else who is not engaging in that activity?”
They should not and they do not. Air pollution, from industry and transportation is monitored and licensed by governments. People die from air pollution because government does not choose to control pollutants sufficiently. Generally speaking this is because voters and their representatives do not insist on their doing so.
If you read what you have written you will notice that your argument is that people should be allowed to behave as they choose, without regard to the consequences to others. You suggest that it is outlandish to prevent the population from preventing others from polluting the air at will. I would argue that to suggest that people can, if they fancy, pollute the air that others must breathe is about as sensible as arguing that murderers be allowed to indulge in their private taste and kill others.
How do you imagine any society could avoid complete collapse should it operate under the kind of modus operandi that you favour?
Poor poor Julian. His hearing is delayed until September by Baraitser to another court, name unknown. It’s slow torture.
Thanks to Margo in SA for this update and for the Australian link. I don’t suppose there’s anything in the British press.
https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/1588598188.html
Just the two – The Australian and this in Newsweek.
https://www.newsweek.com/julian-assange-extradition-delayed-september-wikileaks-1501780
There’s a relevant article Mary, in honour of yesterday being World Press Freedom Day (Unesco 1993)
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/05/04/watch-outpouring-for-assange-on-world-press-freedom-day/
Both Pompeo & Trump calling for Julian’s Freedom, apparently on the above link
meanwhile UK’s media has recently slipped down the international press freedom charts; Norway is top, UK in 2020 is below even Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Switzerland, New Zealand, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Ireland, Estonia, Iceland, Canada, Luxembourg, Austria, Uruguay, Suriname, Samoa, Latvia, Namibia, Liechtenstein, Cabo Verde, Australia, Cyprus, Lithuania, Spain in the international press freedom ranking. reporters without Borders tell all :- https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table
I wonder if that is in anyway connected with Julian’s torture (according to UN) or the gap-propaganda silence in UK gov & media
Thank you so much for that. Good people there, esp Ray and Cynthia. My brother was on a Free Gaza boat, the MV Dignity, in 2008 with her and 11 others plus several tons of medical and other aid. In the middle of the night, in international waters, Israeli gunships suddenly appeared and flooded the boat with searchlights, ordered it to turn back and then rammed it three times. The sea was rough and many of the passengers had been seasick. Cynthia had asked my brother for help and support. ‘Are we going to die?’ she asked. The boat which was clinker built and not made of synthetic materials resisted the attack and managed to limp to Tyre in Lebanon with only the superstructure damaged.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7805075.stm
PS What hypocrisy from Pompeo and Trump ref your link.
My brother said what a lovely person Cynthia was. I think they have stayed in touch.
Ray McGovern is a friend of Craig’s btw.
Craig refers to the assault on Ray McGovern here –
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/half-a-million-pounds-of-taxpayers-money-bails-out-criminals-jack-straw-and-sir-mark-allen/
There is a shocking photo of him being manhandled by the goons.
Is Covid-19 equatable to the flu or is it something entirely different?
Many people seem keen to point out that the 2 viruses are entirely different and are in no way comparable. After all if you are going to shut down vast swathes of the global economy because of Covid-19, but never undertake the same actions for the flu then you simply cannot believe the 2 to be comparable.
It seems that some people think that those who see “flu equivalence” are either uninformed idiots or to be operating with malicious intent. The constant refrain is to listen to experts and to be led by science.
How unfortunate then that the CDC (“The Nations Health Protection Agency”) is publishing information that compares Covid-19 to the flu.
https://flagandcross.com/cdc-now-equating-covid-19-to-seasonal-flu-for-the-elderly-less-hospitalizations-than-flu-for-kids/?
The major practical differences are because SARS-CoV-2 is totally new, so:
(1) Entire populations have no immunity, so everyone an infected person interacts with is vulnerable to infection. Rt is the number of people an infected person infects during the course of their infection. In Britain this was just over 4, until social restrictions were introduced. By contrast, seasonal flu has already been doing the rounds, so most of the people that an infected person interacts with have immunity. Seasonal flu has less chance of finding new hosts, so can’t multiply so fast, so it doesn’t produce orders of magnitude more cases than hospitals can cope with all at once.
(2) We only have five months of experience with covid-19, so we know little about medium-term effects, and nothing about long-term effects. We don’t know about reinfection and immunity, so it is wise to be careful until we know more. That will take time; there is no substitute.
What if we went for herd immunity by everyone going through covid-19, and then found it was actually worse the second time you caught it?
– “How unfortunate then that the CDC…
Interesting that you linked to “Flag and Cross Conservative News” rather than the CDC then…
Unlike you I am neither an expert nor an ideologue in these matters. I assume the link to be an accurate reflection of the CDC. If it is not I would be happy to be corrected.
Separately I note that you claim that “only a small proportion of the population have been exposed…” How do you know this? How can anyone know this absent widespread testing?
Saudi Arabia claims that 70% of the citizens of Mecca have been infected with Covid-19. That would equate to something over 1.4 million people. Saudi Arabia has reported a total of 157 deaths. In February Saudi Arabia took the historically unprecedented decision to suspend the holy pilgrimage to Mecca.
Equally I have no idea how Saudi Arabia has derived its figures, but surely you can see that there is a range of conflicting information coming from a range of “official sources”
Why is someone living in either Europe or North America 84 times more likely to die from Covid-19 than someone living in Asia. 84 times more likely is a very big number and the only plausible explanation I can see is that someone somewhere is engaged in some very loose practices when it comes to ascribing a cause of death.
There are more holes in the official narrative than the Beatles were able to identify in Blackburn Lancashire – and on the back of this people want to destroy the entire fabric of the economy and of society,
Why is someone living in either Europe or North America 84 times more likely to die from Covid-19 than someone living in Asia.
Here’s a possible explanation. Referring to a survey in California which found that infection rates in Califoirnia were 50 – 85 times higher than previously reported, Prof John Ioannidis said :
“immediately we see that the probability of dying if you are infected diminishes by 50 – 85 fold because the denominator in the calculation becomes 50-85 fold bigger.”
Loony – one difference is that there is a vaccine for flu but not Covid 19. As regards the flu, it’s advised that people who might be put at particular risk if catching the flu should get a vaccine. Of course the vast majority of people don’t get a vaccine for the flu – perhaps the same will happen if we get a vaccine for Covid19.
It’s surreal to see so many commenters actually campaigning to maximise death and suffering, many of them the same people who campaign against war. Sometimes my mind simply boggles.
Clark, there are some absolutely brilliant people’s comments under “Once Upon a Virus…” I suggest you use this one as an argument for future debate:
Quarantine, no human right
No quarantine, no human left
(c) GreaterChill
Tatyana I see the Russian Prime Minster has contracted Covid-19, I wonder if he’s passed it on to Putin unwittingly.
Several nations leaders have contracted it, off the top of my head I can think of Trudeau of Canada, Johnson, Barnier of the EU (though not a country as such).
Of course there’s been much speculation over North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un, on whether hes had it, and recovered or if he caught it and died, thus being replaced by a doppelganger.
well, RoS, if we are making assumptions… (good grammar exercise on subjunctive mood!)
If there was only one free ventilator left for all in Britain, and, if there would be a choice between you and the Queen, then, do you believe that the London doctors remembered that “you were all in the same boat” and the Queen deserved her honest fatal 5 out of 10, because of her age?
Tatyana.
I have no love for the self serving, mass state, sponging royals. They’re a drain on society, and an embarrassment with their salacious and Machiavellian activities to further appropriate more wealth.
Thankfully many folk in Scotland see her as just an English queen. Russia wisely ended its support for such folly.
Whilst we’re pondering on the subjunctive mood, do you think Putin will achieve his goal and emulate China’s Xi Jingpin and remain Russian President for life, or to be more precise, another two-six year terms after this one ends in 2024?
Bearing in mind that the lower House in the Duma has already passed the idea, but the Russian Constitutional Court still needs to legislate for it, though its been said very little dubiety surround the decision that it will pass with flying colours in the courts.
Ah, subjunctive mood, my pain throughout students days. You know, you have so much grammar tenses, using 4-5 in daily life and the rest goes for describing something imaginatory 🙂 Very complicated.
Back to Putin. Well, I said I’m ambivalent about that paragraph in the new constitution
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/03/13-events-no-witnesses-the-prosecution-concludes-the-case-against-alex-salmond/comment-page-1/#comment-929172
As you see, that comment I made long before we had lovely conversation with you last time, remember, that one, you called me putinista 🙂
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/03/assange-bail-application-today/comment-page-3/#comment-932312
and never came back to explain 🙂
I have nothing to add to my position, so far.
“Back to Putin. Well, I said I’m ambivalent about that paragraph in the new constitution”
Ambivalent Tatyana, I’d be furious if Sturgeon attempted to try and become Scotland’s FM for life. Indeed I’m furious at her now, for her, and her cliques Machiavellian pursuit of Alex Salmonds demise, the only silver lining is that the Scottish court acquitted Salmond, but on the downside Craig has been unjustly accused of CoC, which he did not do.
If Sturgeon tried to become a russian president, well, I’d be furious too. Even for 1 single term, not even speaking of ‘for life’.
Tatyana
You know about pots calling kettles black? Our Greek teacher also taught us some basic Russian, so we got a taste of Russian tenses, but I am in a state of having forgotten their names.
This will boggle it more as US POTUS Trump has given back handed praise to heavily armed protesters in several US who want the their states fully opened up again. Trump did have method in his madness though, his support for armed protesters extended to states led by Democratic governors.
Some of the militia (that’s what they’re calling themselves) are funded by the likes of the Koch brothers and Adolph Coors the beer tycoon.
One wonders how long it will be (especially with tens of millions of Americans unemployed) before armed protesters go a step further, Trump appears to be unleashimg a force he might not be able to reel in anytime soon.
RoS
You think maybe his fishing hook has caught his own pants trying to cast his flies?
I wont be the first time.
You cannot solve an equation by looking at only one side of it.
The destruction of the economy will also lead to death – how much death it is today impossible to calculate – just like it is impossible to calculate the aggregate death from Covid-19.
A report compiled by the China Institutes of Contemporary Internal Relations urges that China prepare for war with the US in part as a consequence to western rhetoric as to the ultimate cause of the economic collapse induced by Covid-19.
Even those that believe Covid-19 to be the most dangerous plague ever known to man would have a hard time constructing a scenario whereby Covid-19 kills more people than a US-China war.
Talking about the idiocy of this “western rhetoric”… who’s that lunatic again, who likes to provoke China all the time and blames them for C-19? Oh yes – your hero Trump.
Actually the people blaming China for Covid-19 are the intelligence services operating under the 5 Eyes umbrella.
From a US perspective these would be the same intelligence services that have worked tirelessly to smear President Trump. First he was a Russian agent, then he was paying prostitutes to urinate on beds, then he was a Ukrainian agent, and today he is claimed to be an agent of China.
In any event I note that you concern yourself with Trump Derangement Syndrome and offer no view as to whether you consider Covid-19 more or less deadly than a US Chinese war.
What a ludicrous, confected false dichotomy. Almost as ridiculous demand that you must answer the absurd contention. No-one said Trump is a Chinese agent, just that he is monumentally stupid, narcissistic and venal, an immature fraud who will switchback every other week in order to blame everybody but himself for his own utter incompetent shambles of a presidency. Yet you buy into it. Ha ha. Got your disinfectant ready?
Five Eyes going to war with China is a real possibility and Five Eyes would go in fast and hard.
Five Eyes would go in for a substantive win.
Actually the people blaming China for Covid-19 are Pompeo. Wiki says his position is the 70th United States Secretary of State.
Don’t you find the ‘states secretary of state’ sounds like “the best of the best of the best” from Men in Black? never too much states, never too much bests 🙂
Though, I agree he is the intelligence service operative, I’d even suggest “the best state intelligence the best service chief state operative. ex.”
When Trump leaves the White House, I’ll call Pompeo’s position ‘отставной козы барабанщик’
Yes Iam you are absolutely right – who needs information when you have rhetoric. Here is Politico:
https://www.politico.eu/article/trump-owes-tens-of-millions-to-the-bank-of-china-and-the-loan-is-due-soon/
Oh dear it seems Politico made a mistake and had to retract the entire thing
https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/28/politico-effectively-retracts-entire-trump-china-article/
Not to worry Joe Biden probably forgot about it – because here he is accusing Trump of being soft on China
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9BFr4R8eM4
False dichotomy? God forbid politicians ever have to deal with a real dichotomy, like not having enough masks to give to hospitals and care homes.
If I want to drill a hole and I haven’t got a mask, I wrap a piece of cloth over my nose. It’s taken several months for our politicians to solve that practical problem. How do they think us inferior tradesfolk manage to change a light bulb? Probably take them a year to think that one through.
You cannot solve an equation by looking at only one side of it.
1+1=?¹
Were you thinking of simultaneous equations, perhaps… or just trying a bit too hard with the clever-dick tomfoolery?
A jewel of a comment in a sea of balony.
¹ you can work that one out for yourself, Loony.
For lockdown fun, try calculating (no cheating, please) the definite integral between the limits of zero and 2 of the following equation: (2x-x^2) ^(3/2). [Hint: let x=1+sinθ]
(That one I remember from my CCE. It was part of the reason why I was offered a place to read Nat Sci at Jesus, Cambridge 35 years ago. I changed for Part 2s to MML, having bored of the chemistry and relentless lectures, and now occasionally comment on blogsites.)
I think the CCE examiners were a little fresher than me. The original (more correctly than my faulty recollection) read
Show: Integral limit 2,1(2x-x^2)^(3/2)=3π/8
Now that actually was an equation.
Apologies for my bad memory, inability to typographically render the “integral” symbol, and poor grammar!
But there’s no function to this comment, either!
It’s surreal to see so many commenters actually campaigning to maximise death and suffering
Oh, go on then, I’ll bite. Show us an example of a commenter actually campaigning to maximise death and suffering.
How about the guy advising people to go out and hug each other? That counts.
How about the guy advising people to go out and hug each other?
Please quote the words he used which you say are “actually campaigning to maximise death and suffering.”
A->B-C :
A: Encourage people to go out and hug one another
B: More transmission of C-19
C: Death and suffering is maximised
Why are we confined to quoting particular words, when we’re free to demonstrate rather obvious cause and effect?
You don’t know glenn-uk that your ABC is correct. You don’t know what would have happened had there been no lockdown and social distancing. You don’t know how many people have been infected already with the virus. You don’t know the actual death figures from coronavirus ID-19.
You should know that they built a massive 4,000 bed Nightingale hospital which is currently treating 20 patients and over the past 3 weeks has treated 51 and today it was announced it would go onto standby and will not be accepting any more. You know that COVID-19 affects mainly the elderly and hardly any children. Most healthy adults will not suffer major symptoms. People over 70 are vulnerable.
It would be welcome to have some actual facts from you rather than your ABC fancy which you can’t prove. Or if you can I should like to see the proof.
John, it should not be incumbent on me to brief you with very well known and verifiable facts.
Otherwise healthy people can easily overwhelm the health services, with otherwise easily treatable conditions, if they present themselves in sufficient numbers.
That’s all I need to say. If you claim you cannot understand that, erm… ok.
How about the people agitating for extended economic shutdown and completely oblivious to the fact that the UN warns of consequential widespread famine affecting up to 300 million people.
Or how about the people that ignore the risk of war. It is not like newly impoverished countries never resort to war. A lot of people on here probably think Adolf Hitler was advised by Donald Trump.
who is talking about economic collapse? Have they not organized the safe mode of work for the necessary enterprises in your country? After all, there’s the Fund for Stability, you should have in your budget, make sure it is not us dollar fund, and that’s all you need to survive a couple of months till virus stops spreading. Of couse, if you were wise enough to close country early, then it will be only 2 months.
I suppose I might have included the word ‘risk’.
But really, anyone so clueless about science that they have to make a guess between every major health institution and Off-Guardian’s quotes carefully selected from the corporate and PR media should realise that they’re out of their depth. Unfortunately, Dunning and Kruger were right.
“Off-Guardian’s quotes carefully selected from the corporate and PR media”
That would be the same corporate and PR media that overwhelmingly back the lockdown and tell us this virus truly is horrendous?
“mainstream media which cheered on the horseman of war as they argued for the invasion Iraq on the basis of lies – and still defend it as a “liberation”
Still showering the criminals with massive honour too, on both sides of the Atlantic … blessed are the warmakers!
I don’t normally waste people’s time with youtube links, but this is a great summary of the relationship with China and the US over C-19, and does not even take two minutes.
A lot of people here will probably recognise their own attitudes reflected in the statements by the character on the right,
“Once upon a virus (China’s view)” (YouTube)
glenn_uk, it’s funny and witty video, we discussed it earlier today
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/backing-the-wrong-horseman/comment-page-7/#comment-939826
Thanks Tatyana – I have not read every comment here, particularly recently (I know, shame on me!)
Too much time on my hands – here is my tuppence worth:
The basic purpose of all constitutions is to keep the executive in check. Traditionally through the separation of powers i.e. 1) independent legislature and 2) independent judiciary. It also usually requires an uncensored and independent press to keep everyone on their toes. The legislature in the UK/US model involves conflict and opposition and that should in principle also keep everyone on their toes.
Traditionally that was about it: 1- Exec, 2- Legislature , 3- parliament, 4- judiciary and 5- free press and 2-5 looked after the thing we really care about i.e. money and stopped the 1st spending all the money in ways we don’t like. The Executive comes to the legislature with its budget and tax plans and once approved it can tax us and spend. If its unreasonable the press report. If it’s illegal the Court can step in. If we don’t like it we vote the Executive out, or we at least complain to our opposition MPs to hold them to account.
But QE has changed that. If the executive is deriving a substantive part of its income not from taxation but form the Central Bank (from borrowing which the Central Bank then buys back) then the Central Bank becomes a political institution. 2008 was crazy and I have been expecting some sort of big event to occur to get us off our addiction to QE, but what is now happening is the exact opposite: a massive event has occurred which is enormously increasing this source of untaxed income. I am not an economist and do not say if it is inherently good or bad to conjure money out of the ether, but I do say that it should be subject to political scrutiny by the legislature, by the press and by the voter and maybe by the courts, but yet there is nothing. There are no checks. Even the opposition in Parliament says nothing. In fact there is no parliament, just zoom parliament.
Why are we ignoring this fundamental change to how government derives its income? Is it too confusing? Not really. It’s more occult than direct taxation but it’s not really any more confusing that indirect taxation. It’s basically as if all us UK Citizens are shareholders and then the directors (the executive government) dilute our shares to further their own spending. In a company maybe its OK and maybe its not but as shareholders we would want a look in at the AGM. Somehow we have all been taught to think the the Bank of England is independent of politics but it’s not. Its a tool of the Executive. Many on the Left like this idea of generating executive government i.e. MMT. It seems plain weird to me. I can see how to could be used to try and rebalance wealth but it basically cuts man adrift from his usual inherent sense of fiscal responsibility.
Anyway, we have a situation where the Labour opposition appears too timid to query the Government line for fear of appearing disloyal or acting contrary to national interests (and maybe they also like the idea of the Executive being all powerful with a magic money tree in case they can get in). We have a press that talks of one topic only and contrarian voices are either drowned out or censored. Courts are more or less closed. We are not allowed to congregate or assemble and so any protest is unthinkable. We have the military handling civic duties (they do an excellent job as they are usually more efficient and understand planning better than much of the executive but its a bit worrying getting used to the military carrying out civic duties). We have a country either getting into debt and or getting used to unprecedented levels of state hand outs whilst we stay at home. We have a collapse of economic activity and everything being paid for by the Bank of England i.e. QE. We are getting used to an executive telling us that everything is being decided by the scientists – yes we don’t want politicians deciding on whether bleach is suitable remedy for Corona – but if the only check on the executives are the scientists they have chosen, then we have a technocracy. This is the government which brought us Brexit, which defended Parliament as above all else not Government but Parliament.
Isn’t this just statism pure and simple. There is a worrying view about fascism as essentially just statism. Apparently and although we have forgotten fascism was in vogue in Europe and America before WW2, and the Nazis made the concept wholly repugnant and the word taboo. The fact that the word is taboo shouldn’t stop us thinking about what it is so that we don’t miss it when it’s in front of us. It’s not essentially about being necessarily evil or racist but it’s basically about giving the executive all the power without the checks on the basis that they and their technocratic planners know best. Maybe they do in the short term but in the long term, power corrupts. It has had different strains so that in Italy it was nationalistic, in Germany racist, in Russia founded on class and in the US with Roosevelt’s New Deal it was much softer and less easy and not usually identified as such, but the common factor is where the executive obtains unchecked power. The worst way to do that is with the barrel of a gun and the ideal way to do it is so that no one notices.
I don’t know whats going on. I have always liked aspects of libertarianism. It feels like fresh air BUT its premise that the little lambs should be free to compete with the wolf is always going to need checking and adjustments or else the big bad wolf eats the sheep and gets richer and fatter, and of course we do need some sort of NHS and some sort of welfare. The opposite extreme to libertarianism is statism with the executive controlling everything – government through order and command and fear not through law. I wonder what Jacob Rees-Mogg thinks about recent developments?
The political pole used to be left and right, but now at one end of the pole we have the idea of libertarianism – small government and freedom to do what we like so long as it is lawful (which requires courts and a lawful check on government expenditure) and on the other end statism / fascism.
In the middle we have what we have known, but which I suspect we may now risk losing.
We should focus on:
1) what % of expenditure is derived from the Bank of England (borrowing to be sterilised) as opposed to taxation
2) what do we think of 1) and why don’t we talk about it. Politics is after all largely about money.
3) where is the press and what the feck are they doing
4) where is the opposition and what the feck are they doing.
We can’t leave it all to Peter Hitchens.
@fwl – Your analysis is one of the most sensible things I have ever read on this blog.
The rich love QE – they are closest to the creation of the money and so they get hold of it first. The media has been completely corrupted and is extremely dangerous. On the one hand you have people like Jeff Bezos and Carlos Slim who control the Washington Post and New York Times respectively. On the other you have a bunch of “geeks” in Silicon Valley who are often very young, or obtained great wealth at a very young age and who understand nothing much about anything other than coding.
So they are all for QE. Politicians are in favor for the reasons that you describe. Left wing types are all in favor as they envisage some kind of earthly paradise all brought about by free money morphing into MMT. MMT is beloved by the intellectual class who find it fascinating as some kind of financial perpetual motion machine.
QE does a number of things, the most significant being the exacerbation of wealth inequality. Societies suffering extreme wealth inequality tend toward a revolutionary outcome. It is possible that some of the more extreme leftists understand this and support it for this very reason.
For MMT to have any credence it is necessary to believe that money derives solely from the government. Consequently statists love the idea. However all kinds of things are used as money – tobacco is often used in prisons as are things like sea shells in “primitive” societies. So MMT requires an assumption that the state has powers that it may in fact not have.
Gideon Gono seemed full of surprise as to the hyper inflationary consequences of his policies in Zimbabwe. He did not seem to realize that he printed money for the population and the west printed money for the rich – thus ensuring that western money velocity stayed very low. Presumably MMT and UBI will involve giving money to the people and thus leveraging the velocity of money. I do not understand how a different outcome to Zimbabwe can be expected.
“Lastly, and most importantly, the assflationists fail many out of sample tests. For instance, the Bank of Japan has been doing QE on and off for 20 years. Japanese stocks have gone nowhere. Europe has been doing QE since 2009 and the Euro Stoxx 600 is flat since 2013. The only market that has outperformed is US stocks, in large part because of the tremendous outperformance in a handful of technology names that have gained monopolistic like footholds in certain places.
Bottom line – don’t let the assflationists fool you into thinking that this was all caused by QE. There are perfectly rational reasons for the rise in capital goods values. And there could also be perfectly rational reasons why those values need to come down in the coming years.”
https://www.pragcap.com/lets-talk-qe-asset-price-inflation/
This is how QE is supposed to work?
“The intention of the Bank of England’s programme of quantitative easing is to increase the quantity of money by direct transactions between it and non-banks. . . .
The objection is sometimes raised that the major holders of gilts are pension funds and insurance companies, and they will not “spend” the extra money in the shops. But the big long-term savings institutions are reluctant to hold large amounts of money in their portfolios, because in the long run it is an asset with negligible returns. At the end of 2008 UK savings institutions had total bank deposits of about £130 billion. They will be reluctant to let the number double, but — if the £150 billion were allowed to pile up uselessly — that would be the result.
What is the likely sequence of events? First, pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds and so on try to get rid of their excess money by purchasing more securities. Let us, for the sake of argument, say that they want to acquire more equities. To a large extent they are buying from other pension funds, insurance companies and so on, and the efforts of all market participants taken together to disembarrass themselves of the excess money seem self-cancelling and unavailing. To the extent that buyers and sellers are in a closed circuit, they cannot get rid of it by transactions between themselves. However, there is a way out. They all have an excess supply of money and an excess demand for equities, which will put upward pressure on equity prices. If equity prices rise sharply, the ratio of their money holdings to total assets will drop back to the desired level. Indeed, on the face of it a doubling of the stock market would mean (more or less) that the £150 billion of extra cash could be added to portfolios and yet leave UK financial institutions’ money-to-total-assets ratio unchanged.
Secondly, once the stock market starts to rise because of the process just described, companies find it easier to raise money by issuing new shares and bonds. At first, only strong companies have the credibility to embark on large-scale fund raising, but they can use their extra money to pay bills to weaker companies threatened with bankruptcy (and also perhaps to purchase land and subsidiaries from them).
In short, although the cash injected into the economy by the Bank of England’s quantitative easing may in the first instance be held by pension funds, insurance companies and other financial institutions, it soon passes to profitable companies with strong balance sheets and then to marginal businesses with weak balance sheets, and so on. The cash strains throughout the economy are eliminated, asset prices recover, and demand, output and employment all revive.”
June 2009
https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/june-2009/the-unnecessary-recession-features-june-09-tim-congdon-gordon-brown-alistair-darling/
For consideration?
“Guarantees would have been the easiest form of intervention to present politically because they would have emphasised the true purpose of government assistance to the banking system: to prevent the savings of depositors – especially wholesale depositors such as corporations, foundations, savings institutions, and local governments. These depositors would have seen trillions of dollars in payrolls, pensions, and working capital evaporate if the banks were allowed to fail. Guarantees would have underlined the fact that the main beneficiaries of all bank rescues were not greedy bankers or shareholders but wholesale depositors whose money is not covered by retail guarantees.”
A. Kaletsky: Capitalism 4.0. P150.
James – thanks I have to mull this over. I worry over companies mirroring the government and running up debt. How does Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway hold its $130B cash?
Cheers. I am always confused as to why QE has not produced wider inflation (beyond property and stocks) although I suppose it has produced hidden inflation in that some goods stay the same price but shrink and so your point about Zimbabwe is interesting as I had not thought about it like that before.
I see that Sky is reporting that US government borrowing for the latest 1/4 has truly surpassed all previous records. Previous highest 1/4 was $569B in 2008 and previous highest annual was $1.87T in 2008. However last 1/4 was $2.99T.
Who remembers that bizarre Donald Rumsfeld press conference in 2001 when he reported that they couldn’t account for $2T in respect of defence expenditure.
‘Cullen actually looked at 10 modern (post 1900) hyperinflations and found several common themes. First, most of the ten occurred during a civil war, with a regime change. A majority also occurred with large debt denominated in foreign currency (this included Austria, Hungary, Weimar Germany, Argentina, and Zimbabwe). I am not going to reproduce these excellent analyses, but let me just very quickly summarize key points about the Weimar and Zimbabwe hyperinflations to assure readers these were not simple cases of too much “money printing” to finance government that was “running amuck”.’ http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2011/08/31/not-worth-a-continental-how-modern-money-theory-replies-to-hyperinflation-hyperventilators-part-2/#idc-cover
Contrary to popular opinion, excessively high deficit spending and exorbitant government debt
levels are not the primary cause of a hyperinflation. In most cases they have been the result of
other exogenous events such as ceding of monetary sovereignty, war, rampant corruption or
regime change. It is these exogenous events that result in the public’s rejection of the currency, a
collapse in the tax system and the government response of printing more money to fill in the
confidence void. Ultimately the confidence void cannot be filled and the currency is fully rejected
by the public in the form of hyperinflation. In my treatise on the monetary system I discuss the
importance of this unspoken agreement between the private sector and public sector
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1799102
“Traditionally that was about it: 1- Exec, 2- Legislature , 3- parliament, 4- judiciary and 5- free press”
Just a minor quibble; A parliament is the Legislature. The press are referred to as the fourth estate, with the executive, legislature and judiciary being the first three.
Quite right Deb – apologies for double counting leg and parliament.
I really like your analysis, Fwl – but I would say the Labour opposition is not “too timid to query”, but rather is already bought and paid for, and dutifully following paymasters’ instructions.
The thieves who are (mainly through media narrative, because we are collectively stupid) running the world can no longer target the modest assets of workers in the “developed” countries, who have already been squeezed dry and pushed into never ending debt. Third world people were never a direct target, as they do not generate financial assets, but despite not being the target, they have been killed and damaged in millions as a systematic byproduct of the thieves’ greed.
This time round, the thieves’ entreprenurial target will be the assets of the Western World’s “comfortable” people: bank accounts and pension funds will be stolen.
Who do the thieves think will feed them, after the final economic crash, in their nuclear proof bunkers in the mountains of New Zealand or wherever? I hope they will be cannabalised by their starving personal bodyguards.
One doesn’t need to actually seize assets just as one doesn’t need to resort to violence for the executive to become independent of usual checks and balances. Money Tree is sufficient as it creates wealth out of thin air. All that one needs is (1) a Money Tree (2) absence of check on money tree operations. Seizing assets like pointing a gun is visible. Why be visible.
On a more charitable analysis if one runs up debts that can’t be paid off then provided all the borrowing is in a currency which one can legally print then the Magic Money Tree of Modern Monetary Theory allows you to inflate your way out. Having done that a few years later revert to convertibility – maybe a future digital currency which is also convertible.
Yes – we’ve been here before – many times.
There is no touching of ‘ Their ‘ money only the touching of ‘ Our’ money.
In essence there is no such thing as money.
There is future surplus labor – there is future profit from which future capital is used to exploit the future exploited worker to make more profit/capital etc and on and on it goes.
Or it did.
Easy money ( not for us ) for the capitalists have meant that they can borrow cheap and sell by loaning out to the underpaid and over exploited at interest rates much higher than the borrowing cost.
That process didn’t start after the Financial Crash but mainly caused the Financial Crash.
What we have now is that the differential between borrowing money and then lending it out is much bigger than before the Crash.
That really was easy money for them.
Covid – 19 has halted that particularly lucrative game.
In the UK the government is talking about ” getting back to work ”
What the ” work ” people are getting back to is not known.
Big companies will be OK but smaller ones will not be.
They don’t have any reserves.
The Self Employed have just as little and Freeleancers and Uberists have even less.
Looking at the Opinium Poll on reopening, everything the government is doing is going against everything the public say shouldn’t be done.
After the praise from the politicians.
So the much vaunted ‘ V’ economic recovery will not happen.
The buyers/shoppers are nervous not just of the virus but their incomes.
They are not going to Spend Spend Spend.
Meanwhile the BoE will continue to print our money ( not the capitalists money – that resides with Mossack Fonseca et al) and keep lending rates for the big fish down to near zero levels of interest.
Meanwhile Brexit continues like nothing has happned and the 80 majority Tory MPs need to consider as to whether the UK does not want an extension by the end of June.
For some of the voters that could be Tin hat time.
The trouble is for Starmer and his mates the last thing he and his chums want is for the government to fall as they ( the new style Labour Party ) will have to come up with policies of their own.
For Centrists that is more frightening than the virus and to some extent Jeremy Corbyn.
Anyone for certainty?
That’s what we were all promised.
Trouble is the promise came from a liar.
And here we are.
Ken Kenn
Trouble is the promise came from a liar.
You’re creating a vision in my mind of a painting by Hieronimus Bosch where it is unclear whether the special place in Hell is .existential or in the subjective mind. We are fast approaching the reality of that ancient and grotesque Bavarian imagination as we progress , wide eyed with terror , through May , into June…. somebody saying ‘ I told you so ‘ in gravelly tones in the background of our dreams. Hahahahaaaaaaa.
@John Goss, thanks John – in plaster, long-time if ever before I’m 100%, alive just, rather not say what happened beyond rowv, smidsy, science, physics, kinetics, an accident, perils of motorcycling.
@Clark, fits you lovely that cap, could pull it down a little at one side for a more jaunty look.
A question for the budding historians: Was Attlee in the late-thirties or later likely receiving money from the same ‘Focus’ group that kept Churchill from bankruptcy and destitution, from selling Chartwell, having to let the sixty-odd servants go?
Boris fancies himself as Churchill, the man is deranged, as was his idol, who wrecked Britain for the sake of his ego. We should probably count ourselves lucky he hasn’t started and got us into a world war yet, and make sure he doesn’t get either the time or the chance to do so, get rid of him by any means possible. SNP benches look the safest bet for next UK PM and government, with Cabinet positions for Corbyn and the non-trojan Labourites. Impossible? Anything’s possible right now, the present arrangement cannot, must not continue. Right-wing quisling MPs could well be inordinately prone to the next mutation of The Virus…
How does lockdown differ from a very effective National Strike, especially if a premature return to normal workhouse conditions when it’s still unsafe is ordered. Lockdown isn’t oppressive if the people choose to continue something like it on our own terms for our own safety after it’s officially over.
No More Champagne is an exceptional history book and incredible that David Lough was able to gain access to such records. Im not sure if there is another like it. If only every leader’s financial records could be reviewed in the same way.
Tony M
I hope you get better soon. Some bit of you must be working, one finger maybe? Or are you dictating to Google? As the doctor said to the man swallowed twice by a hippopotamus, you are the sum total of all the decisions you have ever made in your life. And obviously very brave.