Covid-19 Global Lockdown
CJ Hopkins
Let’s try a little thought experiment. Just for fun. To pass the time while we’re indefinitely locked down inside our homes, compulsively checking the Covid-19 “active cases” and “total death” count, washing our hands every twenty minutes, and attempting not to touch our faces.
Before we do, though, I want to make it clear that I believe this Covid-19 thing is real, and is probably the deadliest threat to humanity in the history of deadly threats to humanity.
According to the data I’ve been seeing, it’s only a matter of days, or hours, until nearly everyone on earth is infected and is either dying in agony and alone or suffering mild, common cold-like symptoms, or absolutely no symptoms whatsoever.
I feel that I need to state this clearly, before we do our thought experiment, because I don’t want anyone mistakenly thinking that I’m one of those probably Russian-backed Nazis who are going around saying, “it’s just the flu,” or who are spreading dangerous conspiracy theories about bio-weapons and martial law, or who are otherwise doubting or questioning the wisdom of locking down the entire world (and likely triggering a new Great Depression) on account of the discovery of some glorified bug.
Obviously, this is not just the flu. Thousands of people are dying from it. OK, sure, the flu kills many more than that, hundreds of thousands of people annually, but this Covid-19 virus is totally new, and not like any of the other millions of viruses that are going around all the time, and the experts are saying it will probably kill, or seriously sicken, or briefly inconvenience, millions or even billions of people if we don’t lock down entire countries and terrorize everyone into submission.
Which, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for that … this is not the time to be questioning anything the corporate media and the authorities tell us. This is a time to pull together, turn our minds off, and follow orders. OK, sure, normally, it’s good to be skeptical, but we’re in a goddamn global state of emergency! Idris Elba is infected for Chrissakes!
Sorry … I’m getting a little emotional. I’m a big-time Idris Elba fan. The point is, I’m not a Covid-denialist, or a conspiracy theorist, or one of those devious Chinese or Russian dissension-sowers. I know for a fact that this pandemic is real, and warrants whatever “emergency measures” our governments, global corporations, and intelligence agencies want to impose on us.
No, I’m not an epidemiologist, but I have a close friend who knows a guy who dated a woman who dated a doctor who personally knows another doctor who works in a hospital in Italy somewhere, and she (i.e., my friend, not the doctor in Italy) posted something on Facebook yesterday that was way too long to read completely but was a gut-wrenching account of how Covid-19 is killing Kuwaiti babies in their incubators!
Or maybe it was Italian babies. Like I said, it was too long to read.
Also, did you see the story about the baby that was born infected?! Or the stories about the people in their 30s and 40s who were more or less in perfect health (except for, you know, cancer or whatever) who died from (or with) the Covid plague?! And what about all those charts and graphs?! And those pictures of people in hazmat suits?! And those Italians singing Turandot on their balconies?! Doesn’t that just make you want to break down and cry over the sheer humanity of it all?!
No, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Covid-19 is the deadliest global pandemic humankind has ever faced, and that we have no choice but to cancel everything, confine everyone inside their home, wreck the entire global economy, force working class people even further into debt, pour trillions into the investment banks, cancel elections, censor the Internet, and otherwise implement a global police state.
But what if it wasn’t? Just hypothetically. What if this wasn’t the deadliest global pandemic humankind has ever faced? (I’m just posing the question as a thought experiment, so please don’t report me to the WHO, or the CDC, or FEMA, or whoever.) What if this new coronavirus was just another coronavirus like all the other coronaviruses that people die from (or with) all the time? What if the fact that this one is “new” didn’t really mean all that much, or possibly anything at all, because coronaviruses are always mutating, and every year there are a lot of new variants?
Relax, OK? I know this one is different, and totally unlike anything ever encountered by virologists in the history of virology. Remember, this is just a thought experiment. These are just hypothetical questions.
Here’s another hypothetical question. What if all the scary statistics we’ve been seeing (e.g., the death rates, the explosion of “cases,” etc.) weren’t unquestionable scientific facts, but rather, were, like other statistics, based on things like sample groups, and dependent on a host of factors and variables, which you kind of need to know to make sense of anything?
Say, for example, you tested everyone that died of acute respiratory failure on a given day in your Italian hospital, and you discovered that, let’s say, five of those patients had been infected with Covid-19. So you feed that number to the WHO, and they add it to the “total deaths” count, regardless of whether the folks who died had terminal cancer, or heart disease, or had also been infected with the common flu, or some other type of coronavirus. That would probably skew your “death” count, wouldn’t it?
Or, say you wanted to test for the virus to keep track of all the “active cases” and generate an infection rate, but you can’t test hundreds of millions of people, because no one has that many tests So, you test everyone who turns up sick, or thinks they’re sick and demands to be tested, or who touched someone sick who you already tested (though you’re not even sure that your test is accurate) and you come up with, let’s say, ten positive results. So you feed that number to the WHO, and they add it to the “active cases” count, regardless of the fact that everyone knows the real number is likely twenty times higher.
OK, so now you take your “active cases” number and your “total deaths” number and you do the math (keeping in mind that your “total deaths” include those cancer and heart failure people), and you end up grossly underestimating your “infection rate” and “active cases,” and grossly overestimating your “death rate” and the number of “total deaths.”
Just hypothetically, you understand. I am not suggesting this is actually happening. I certainly don’t want to get censored by Facebook (or accidentally censored by some totally innocuous technical glitch) for posting “Covid misinformation,” or tempt the Wikipedia “editors” to rush back to my Wikipedia page and label me a dangerous “conspiracy theorist” … or, you know, get myself preventatively quarantined.
It probably won’t come to that anyway, i.e., rounding up “infected persons,” “possibly infected persons,” and “disruptive” and “uncooperative persons,” and quarantining us in, like, “camps,” or wherever. All this state of emergency stuff, the suspension of our civil rights, the manipulation of facts and figures, the muzzling of dissent, the illegal surveillance, governments legislating by decree, the soldiers, the quarantines, and all the rest of it … all these measures are temporary, and are being taken for our own good, and purely out of an “abundance of caution.”
I mean, it’s not like the global capitalist empire was right in the middle of a War on Populism (a war that it has been losing up to now) and wanted to take this opportunity to crank up some disaster capitalism, terrorize the global public into a frenzy of selfish and irrational panic, and just flex its muscles to remind everybody what could happen if we all keep screwing around by voting for “populists,” tearing up Paris, leaving the European Union, and otherwise interfering with the forward march of global capitalism.
No, it certainly isn’t like that. It is an actual plague that is probably going to kill you and your entire family if you don’t do exactly what you’re told. So, forget this little thought experiment, and prepare yourself for global lockdown. It probably won’t be so bad … unless they decide they need to run the part of exercise where it goes on too long, and people get squirrelly, and start rebelling, and looting, and otherwise not cooperating, and the military is eventually forced to deploy those Urban Unrest Suppression Vehicles, and those Anti-Domestic-Terror Forces, and …
OK, I’m getting all worked up again. I’d better take my pills and get back to Facebook. Oh, and … I should probably check up on Idris! And see if Berlin has gone to “Level 3,” in which case I’ll need to find whatever online application I need to fill out in order to leave my house.
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After 3 months, I finally found the right corner of the internet. Gives me maybe 0.0001% comfort. The rest comes from practising mindfulness by saying f*** it, a lot. Who would have thought that one day, I would fall into the category of a conspiracy theorist… people will say “but she had such a bright future ahead of her…”
Glad to have you here, Anna. 🙂 Admin2
As a nurse taking care of people who seem to be dying of heart failure and recycling personnel protective gear, WE REALLY don’t want to take care of your sorry ass, so please be careful!
Why even say such a thing? People might have a different opinion than you but if you’re a healthcare worker you took an oath. I hope you don’t get angry with me and refuse to help me.
I love what you did just there, great article.
http://www.thecanadianrevolution.ca
This is a practice run for the up coming global war which will include Nukes gain. They’re testing the Sheeple.
Brilliant. Currently spending time between rationale and fear. I think this is going to be a long haul, and likeminded folk need to stay together(9virtually of course) for support when the media and government go awol.
The best article I have seen ont he coronavirus yet! I would like to add, I am very ver very scared and I ask the government to please pretty please please take my rights! Please. I am so scared!
And is still great
The fascinating thing is that both Trump and Johnson are bailing out the people. Liberals only ever bail out banks and megacorps. It’s blowing up in ‘their’ face.
jesus, are you stupid enough to think there is a difference between a liberal and a republican ?
Politics are owned by globalists. You vote for appointed puppets. Wake up.
“Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.”
Gilens, M., & Page, B. I. (2014). Testing theories of American politics: Elites, interest groups, and average citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581. DOI: 10.1017/S1537592714001595
=====================================
We are seeing a change in ideologies, moving to fascism. Only a halfwit blames puppets for the actions of the rich.
““And what we are seeing is the structural crisis of the system. The structural crisis goes on for a long time. It really started more or less in the 1970s and will go on for another 20, 30, 40 years. It is not a crisis of a year or of a short moment, it is the major structural unfolding of a system. And we are in transition to another system and, in fact, the real political struggle that is going on in the world that most people refuse to recognize is not about capitalism – should we have or should we not have it – but about what should replace it.”
Immanuel Wallerstein
Donald Trump is not a Republican. He isn’t even a politician.
“Until 2008, Trump Was a Big Democratic Donor
He donated more than $10,000 to Hillary Clinton between 2002 and 2007, and Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., is his top beneficiary, raking in $18,350 over the years”.
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/articles/2016-01-14/donald-trump-donated-to-democrats-until-2008
Did you miss the point ? Point is, they are ALL puppets to the rich, to inequality.
Its quite simple, the far right have pushed the common people to breaking point(Macron vs Yellow Vests, BoJo vs the Disabled and unemployed) and are now acting as socialists coming to their rescue against the latest Boogeyman. The majority of sheep will develop Stockholm Syndrome and worship them.
I like Boris Johnson very much having delivered a Keynesian budget and Brexit. If he sorts out Universal Credit I might even support him. He can’t overturn 40 years of Thatcherism in one parliament.
Capitalism is obsolete…It ate itself.
While infinite growth on a finite planet cannot sustain.
“And what we are seeing is the structural crisis of the system. The structural crisis goes on for a long time. It really started more or less in the 1970s and will go on for another 20, 30, 40 years. It is not a crisis of a year or of a short moment, it is the major structural unfolding of a system. And we are in transition to another system and, in fact, the real political struggle that is going on in the world that most people refuse to recognize is not about capitalism – should we have or should we not have it – but about what should replace it.”
Immanuel Wallerstein
It is eating us all.
Anyone seen any good articles discussing industrial pollution levels in reported ‘high incidence’ and ‘high’ death rate areas? Wondering if air pollution/industrial toxic soup have an impact or maybe even the cause of higher respiratory infections as climate is change spikes occurring ( man made or otherwise – not getting into that discussion here ).
Surely all of this disinfectant that’s being blasted across the streets by authorities in various countries will do more damage to a majority of respiratory tracts…?
The end of mass air travel will be interesting. In the USA, after 9/11, the absence of high altitude contrails led to a one degree Celsius increase in temperatures over the USA in a matter of days, with the absence of the reflective, high albedo, clouds. If that’s any guide, we might see a nasty, and unexpected, further disaster unfold.
Temperatures over the US can change by several degrees every day simply due to weather systems so how could this alleged 1deg due to absence of con trails possibly be assessed separately from background noise? Do you have a source?
It’s a fact that the sky became clearer above the US for a few days unconnected with the weather. Massive reduction in condensation and soot trails from aircraft for 3+ days. That allowed more solar radiation to reach the ground, less was absorbed or reflected from the trails. The result was warmer temperatures that would be otherwise.
That’s very well established empirical data and analysis by hardcore scientists, not forward looking theories and guesswork models of the global warming group.
With the UK and Europe currently experiencing a halving of air traffic at the moment there will be similar to those post 911 effects on clear and still days. When it’s cloudy then we won’t experience a difference probably.
The ‘global warming group..’ are ‘hard-core scientists’, peer-reviewed, their theories proven by observations from the field and increasingly useful computer modeling.
Why even when I refresh do I get the Toby McCrossin comment top of the list regardless of which filter I apply?
Excellent review – I love mind games! But seriously: this is either ‘real’, mass hysteria, or manufactured to appear conveniently when the global financial system was about to crash anyway.
I have been following the actions of the Fed for many years and have written a book about it all after the ‘bank robbery’ in Cyprus in March 2013. My book has been serialised weekly at:
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2020/03/14/the-financial-jigsaw-issue-no-95/
There is no doubt that the Fed lost control in September 2019 when the Repo rate exploded to 10% on the 16th. Thereafter it’s been a battle amazing to witness when the Fed panicked increasingly often as the markets melted up at an unreal rate. Most people have no idea how the global financial system works and especially the banking system.
Do you know that ‘your’ money in a bank is not yours anymore? It is owned by the bank and can be stolen on a whim as happened in Cyprus; a test run for the ‘Bail-in’ bank rescue system – maybe we are being prepared for this next when the banks fail?
Then there is Event 201 in October 2019. What I can’t find is another explanation to account for a coordinated global reaction of such proportions – even to risk the total collapse of our economies. There must be more to this than meets the eye and I wish someone would come up with a believable cause because I remain confused but alert.
You are spot on, although you said it far more amusingly than I managed.
https://towardsabettersociety.home.blog/2020/03/19/corona-virus-case-fatality-rate/
What kind of country introduces a curfew on the strength of ridiculous and transparent lies?
We might as well fight them now.
I plan to die fighting. Might as well do something useful with my life.
First cluster of cases in Italy was in Lombardy in northern Italy.
“Late Saturday, civil protection officials said 79 people had contracted the virus, including the two who died and one who was cured. Of the remaining 76, 54 were in Lombardy, 17 in Veneto, two in Emilia Romagna, two in Lazio — a Chinese couple from Wuhan — and one in Piemonte.”
https://www.wsoctv.com/news/world/italy-towns-close/TRXEI7QN67VZJTW6SVW6O4EGU4/
Milan is the capital of Lombardy and has 18,918 Chinese immigrants (highest percentage in Italy).
Chinese people in Italy
Northern Italy is also host to a lot of chinese factories making fashion items.
The Italian fashion capital being led by the Chinese
“Most of Prato’s Chinese come from Wenzhou, a coastal city in Zhejiang province. They started flocking to Prato in the mid-1990s to work in Italian-owned textile factories and quickly mastered the entire production chain.”
Chinese Take Over Italy’s Garment Workshops As Demand Soars For ‘Made In Italy’ Label
“If my suspicions are correct and the spread of the virus does have a Wenzhou connection, I would urge everyone to pay attention to France as the next outbreak. Again, a lot of Wenzhounese are employed in “French” fashion factories and most French-Chinese are from Wenzhou.”
A Hypothesis On How the Coronavirus Spread
“Most of the leather factories were sold to chinese companies who import their workers. With one of china’s biggest holidays occuring at the end of January, a lot of these workers returned home to Wuhan and returned to Italy afterwards.”
anyone wondering why corona virus hit so hard in Italy?
“1.) The strain in Wuhan atttacked ‘Han Chinese’
2.) The strain in Iran attacks Persians
3.) The strain unleashed in the chinese factory’s in North&Central Italy attacks everybody, its a chinese strain designed to jump over to Italian population, and wipe out europe”
China locked in hybrid war with US
Did the Chinese spread the virus in Italy?
Was the Chinese presence in Italy a “plausible deniability” cover (like the bio lab in Wuhan) to infect Italy?
Are the numbers coming out of Italy even to be trusted? (What tests are they using? Are they reliable?)
(PS: sorry for all the links.)
Whoa there cowboy, racist much?
You been taking lessons from Trump?
The hard Right are using CoVid19 as an excuse for yet more deranged Sinophobic hate propaganda. War’s a-comin.
Unthinking knee-jerk reaction. Think for one second please.
According to your logic ALL TRAVEL BANS are racist.
And btw almost everything in that comment is a quote. I’m not the only one thinking about this. We’re just trying to figure out what is going on, that is all.
I am an Italian doctor, I escaped from lombardy 16 days ago, as my specialty is not fundamental for this Emergency.
I think infected people are much more than media says. The vast majority of dead are oldest people, but many younger go to resuscitation department, so this is a serious disease.
On the other hand I think this situation is bringing to the biggest governement experiment of ever. They want control us. It is insane to stay home for months. People will get mad.
Italy
“The mean age of the 827 coronavirus deaths in Italy until March 11 is 81 years and more than two-thirdsof them had diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, orcanceror were former according to a paper published in Lancet Friday.”
https://indianexpress.com/article/coronavirus/coronavirus-deaths-in-italy-lancet-study-europe-cases-epicentre-of-pandemic-who-6313497/
Comment software is seriously borked. Used underline code from comment box and composed in notepad where it looked perfectly normal.
The comment software is fine – you’ve just added a bunch of unordered lists (UL = ‘unordered list’) – I’ll remove them
Oops! I apologize. I thought ul meant underline.
It would be useful to know which markup tags are accepted by this editor, starting with the automated variety above the textbox for cases such as the one to hand, where many readers may not know any markup (along with some idea of how to specify the markup text) and going on to the undocumented rest for those who don’t want to clutter actual conversations with testing testing 1 2 3 4s. Or have a little throwaway (e.g. cleared daily) test BTL where users can try for themselves if Wild Reality is too lazy to meet professional documentation standards.
Bit bitchy there, Robbobbobin. But by all means have a play on this thread, and I’ll remove your tests once you’re up to speed.
Bitchy not, just suggesting. Difficult to write unambiguously in high latency serial mode, unless you mean my comment about Wild River. They’re not alone; there’s hardly a consumer comms device out there that has anything like an adequate manual, even at the OS level for those that allow such access, where there’s really no excuse. The result is painfully obvious when one tries to determine something about a release or distribution one’s unfamiliar with and a Google to get a clue throws up nothing but a bunch of dweebs who are even more confused about it all than one is oneself.
Excluding standard UNIX/Linux man pages and the like, of course.
Ever since the ‘state of emergency’ was declared in France on Tuesday things have been quiet. However, a small number of brave protestors have been out on the streets. This will be coming to a city near you sometime soon…
https://twitter.com/LeMarechal0/status/1240676674095718400
And as I think I’ve mentioned before, I have two family members who work in the NHS (one’s a midwife and one’s a paramedic), and I’m being told that no one in the NHS is being tested for covid 19.
That’s more likely a result of the Tory mismanagement of the NHS for the past decade. They should be held culpable for this, but voters are brainwashed by the right wing press.
According to the Office of National Statistics, in the week ending the 6th of March 10 895 deaths were registered in England and Wales. The average number of deaths registered for the corresponding week over the previous five years was 11 498. So the coronavirus appears to be reducing mortality. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales
Mortality rates are always higher in the winter months.
— that’s why he said “for the corresponding week”.
Maybe the deaths were the same or higher than last year, but those reporting deaths died
😲🤓🤔
First I didn’t believe, then I changed my mind. This because I believed when was said that corona virus was totally new to us. and I thought of those Native Americans, who died in masses because of the diseases they got from the European settlers. Diseases, which for the Europeans were next to harmless “Children diseases”.
But they lied: We have Corona viruses together with Influenza A and Influenza B and a forth kind of viruses every flu season. And Yes corona changes every year a bit – as do Influenza A and B – in order to circumvent our immune defence (with its data from the last season).
To this see Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg – https://youtu.be/yn074EB5NNY
And now they lie again! For this see: “WHO Director Made BASIC MATH ERROR in Causing Global Corona virus Panic” – https://postnewsd2.blogspot.com/2020/03/hello-world-before-economy-totally.html
This WHO director mixes up “Confirmed-CFR” with “IFR”. Here a graph showing the fundamental difference between “Confirmed-CFR” and “IFR”:
When looking at a health problem all cause mortality ought to be considered. I wonder if anyone has data about the number of deaths this year and the number of deaths in the same period in previous years? I suspect such data might well show no excess deaths.
No data, but somehow I kinda suspect so too.
The crisis hit and Qantas sends home 20,000 workers or two thirds of its workforce of 30,000. Go home with no pay. The company management is proud of implementing such measures to save the Australian icon.
Qantas, once a government owned entity, is a civilisational symbol of strength and prestige. But with such behaviour, shouldn’t we ask the question: what are these Strength and Prestige built upon?
China locked in hybrid war with USA
https://thesaker.is/china-locked-in-hybrid-war-with-us/
That’s a good read. Thanks!
Preceding this new virus, a hostile US was acting with determination to HURT China. Not only, hurt China, but hurt those countries developing China-friendly policies as well.
The USA has ALWAYS been insanely aggressive and arrogant, and that will never change until it collapses and is broken up into a group of hopefully more pacific and humane states, having learned some bitter lessons. Of course the problem is how to achieve that end without thermo-nuclear and/or biological warfare.
USA has some impressive credentials as the authority on bio-weapons, from smearing the natives with smallpox since the 1600s, to the war-criminal and insane use of DU in our day.
This is why the late Tom Hayden wrote as his wish for a better world the slow, gradual, and totally non-violent disappearance of Caucasian strains, as they seem to engender the types at the top that run our joint, and they have a deeply embedded tendency to kill everything that moves whenever they get a little scared or cornered.
So any direct strategy tends to make them “go postal.” Or Thermal.
Love alone seems to be the only hope. Maybe that’s why certain faiths make it the centerpiece. Among other reasons.
But it seems intriguingly to be the most practical.
I just got in the mail the not well known book of Jim Douglass, “The Non-Violent Coming of God.”
I ordered it after I was very impressed by his landmark “JFK and the Unspeakable” and the fact he frequented the company of many of my heroes, such as his teacher Fr. Thomas Merton, another martyr, which has been brought out by the recent deeply researched book, “The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton”. Another victim of stealthy elimination, and all the more significant since it followed closely on the heels of the murders of King and RFK, making thus a total of 3 assassinations in 1968. They crucified him in Burma, off site, but the truth is out.
In fact ~now come to think of it!~ it was in reading a sterling review of that book here at this site, and some very astute and scholarly comments in the thread, that I stumbled upon this outlet, OffGuardian.
So kudos all around, my reading has been very enriched.
I was myself publishing a bit at OpEdNews in Philly, til the feds, clearly CIA, caught up with me and shut me down, since they had some way of making my editors observe the correct rules of “social distancing.” (And I wasn’t even 65 then. Just 63.)
And all just for three common household words, can you imagine?
Touchy, those guys. With a father with a number of clients as 33rd° Freemasons, since before I was born, they’ve had me under their scrutiny since my cradle.
But it’s all good. “De Imitatione Christi” wrote “the book” on that with a short chapter, “On the Uses of Adversity.”
They are the absolute best!
My bad, Thomas Merton was murdered in Bangkok, not Burma. I just re-read the truly brilliant review at this site two years ago, by Ed Curtin, “The Assassnation and Martyrdom of Thomas Merton”, April 28, 2018. It was thrilling writing and a great example and my first sample of the quality of writing one might find here.
The high quality of Off-Guardian’s ATL is seldom matched by its far more race-to-the-bottom prone BTL.
The EU immigration policy is facilitating that already. Your / Hayden’s violent Caucasian locals are being steadily replaced by your non-violent non-Caucasians.
Well, Hayden was speaking of “reverse assimilation” I guess you might call it.
Instead of the conquerors (usurpers) “assimilation” of Aboriginal civilizations, the survivors are yet plentful, and through the global diasporas, a long transgenerational process of immigration, the descendants of victims assimilate the belligerent cultures. Simply by living. There is a certain stunning symmetry to that.
The meek shall inherit the earth.
For children of the conquerors, there is hope, though even more obscure:
“Now Moses was the meekest of all men…”
A close reading will show he didn’t start out that way, at all.
So, what?
He lived on along the curve of that same process, individually, lonely, as an immigrant and refugee to Midian.
There he became meek. As all the disenfranchised are forced to do, mostly.
We are at a meek pass, likewise.
Are we not??
I’m not “preaching” so much as just displaying a real process and “mechanism”.
****
Kurt VONNEGUT: “The only proof I need of the existence of God is music.”
I’m minded of the Partiot Act, that made its way into force after 9/11 on the back of some pretty stunning fear porn.
I wonder what marvels of legislation are but weeks away?
I wonder what marvels will be attributed to tackling climate change on the back of this?
I wonder who the winners will be financially speaking in all this?
I wonder, if instead of blaming Brexit for the financial crisis, that they are going to pin the Internationalization Financial Ponzi Scheme failing on a virus?
I wonder if we are witnessing the greatest heist in history?
I wonder if people recognize debt for what it is, the NEW SLAVERY.
Just wondering…..It’s not a crime is it (yet)?
Well, it has given Macron an excuse to call the troops out in Paris to put a dampener on the pesky anti-austerity-bots clogging up the streets.
And the MH-17 trial, where the id of prosection witnesses is a secret, and the defense can only question them by written questions, has had to be moved to a closed court to keep the pesky anti-Russia-did-it-bots away from the trial. A perfect reflection of ‘Western transparency’.
And the news of Assange …. what is an Assange?
And this unofficial experiment with a cashless society will turn out to be a ‘great success’ justifying making it permanent.
and the declaration by Mielekowski and friends that COVID is a ‘terror virus’, lurking in terror tunnels waiting to destroy our precious lungs with balloon bombs of pustilence. PS don’t forget to bomb Iran.
Oh, and we can’t forget the opportunity to bailout Our Corporate Overlords, peace be unto their names.
So it is ‘not all bad (TM)’.
The MH17 Inquisition is an even more ludicrous Dutch Farce than the Lockerbie Lynching.
I noted that critical voices re: the virus seem almost non-existent compared to 9/11 but then it did take months and perhaps years for a sceptical mentality to rise re: 9/11 too. In the mean time, as the world was reeling from 9/11, the PTB did their best to sneak in reforms to transform the world. I think the same will happen with the virus only to a much deeper extent.
Yes – it took a while.
The mighty David McGowan, who sadly died in 2015, was the first 9/11 sceptic as far as I know. He wrote this article on September 12th 2001:
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:The_First_9-11_Sceptic
Snippet:
“I have a friend with whom I frequently disagree on matters of politics. He thinks that I am a crazed conspiracy theorist, and I think that he is a reactionary fascist. There was one thing that we agreed on though.
A few weeks ago, I told him that our fearless leaders seemed to be veering dangerously close to unleashing ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons upon the world. Although he seriously doubted that that was in fact the case, he readily agreed that such an action would be reckless and unconscionable. He stated that he couldn’t envision any scenario under which such a strike would be justified and that we should avoid, at all costs, crossing that threshold. Opening that door, he believed, could only serve to escalate tensions and make this a much more dangerous world in which to live.
He was one of several people who called me yesterday to discuss the alleged terrorist attacks on America. During the course of that call, he stated flatly that when the perpetrators were identified, they and their backers should be nuked. When I reminded him of our conversation of just a few weeks before, he said that things have changed now. I asked him if he had considered whether that wasn’t perhaps precisely the point of the attacks. Unfazed, he reiterated his belief that I am a crazed conspiracy theorist. ”
Posters who have never read McGowan – check him out. His books too.
McGowan was a wonderful writer. I myself didn’t come to 9/11 skepticism till later and I still recall the first time I ever heard the notion that it was an “inside job”. There was an article on the late night BBC news about Thierry Meyssan’s suggestion that there was no plane at the Pentagon and my immediate reaction was a visceral rejection. I thought “Oh those fucking conspiracy nuts! Don’t they ever give up?” I look back at that now and realise how deeply embedded I was in hypnotic Western media propaganda. Sadly most people I know still are – and I can vouch that there is no point in talking to them about it. Gore Vidal summed up the technique in his usual wry way:
Well, if anthropogenic climate destabilisation is not reversed, there will be no human posterity to worry about at all.
Of course it’s a crime, more than Dickens time. It just is treated, here in the U.S. especially, with the appropriate social distancing from the term. But not the consequences.
“Les riches boivent le sang des pauvres.” — Léon Bloy
It may be soon enough, as our late neighbor from Santa Ana, CA, Philip K. Dick showed us that “probable” future with his scintillating “Minority Report”, years ago. That technology is rapidly developing over the past ten or fifteen years. It’s real. Nissan has a new car, KURE, with a headset, like wireless headphones, that scans and transmits your e.e g. and claims it can allow the car to take evasive actions like braking up to a half second faster than the driver. That’s pretty precise. And that was two years ago.
Absent God, we are in a fix. Only along modes of that intervention – interaction?- is there help on the horizon.
So I will direct my thoughts “upward”–and inward- even if “decoded” in transit. LOL.
Who knows, maybe even the thoughts themselves will develop added value!
Talk about working from home!
I’ll try dreaming.
The hysteria creating panic is going to cause far more harm than coronavirus. Those pushing this hysterical over-reaction are guilty of crimes against humanity.
Not only “going to cause”, but “has already caused”.
This is a worldwide financial collapse veiled behind a virus. It’s a panic pandemic causing more anxiety attacks than upper respiratory infections. It’s testing how much freedom you’re willing to sacrifice for safety….
The world population is approximately 8 billion and there’s been less than
7,000 deaths. The 150 who’ve died thus far in the US from COVID-19 had underlying health issues. A panic pandemic has been declared, but when all is said and done the mortality rate within the US might be no higher than the annual flu.
MSNBC and CNN are the greatest purveyors of panic. Mainstream media news increases ratings by terrorizing the population. News commentators earn millions each year f–king with the heads of the entire population. The best treatment for a panic pandemic is to quarantine MSNBC and CNN.
Well said.
The Atlantic has online a bloviating, bogus bit of bilge, an “interview” (read “pulpit of propaganda”) with Francis Collins, perp-in-chief and co~organizer of this scare with Fauci at NIH (but, “a man of great integrity” says the interviewer –hint, hint, hint, and then ring a bell to get all their Orwellized readers to salivate, or maybe sneeze, on cue) where the very headline has the shout out: “We’re on an exponential curve here”…… 150 deaths to Italy’s so-called 3000, and all, as Charlotte noted, with underlying health problems.
An “EXPO[-EFFING-]NENTIAL CURVE”.
Something to shut down the entire Homeland of “The Last Superpower” over. (God, I hope it’s the Last.)
The no doubt Pulitzerized pundit at the storied journal at least spared us the (implicit) exclamation point (!!!). They don’t want the high-toned “Atlantic” to come off as vulgar, or anything. I mean, this is America.
Not that I want to bring down our homeland brand with my antics, but Charlotte brings up the real underlying point of all this, though it has been begging my own mind, for one, to be noted: the fallout from this into rubber rooms worldwide is a pandemic they don’t want to cover.
What are the social costs? The pesky “collateral damage” of such massive Head Jobs? For starters. It will hugely outpace the viral illnesses. And all the other flus combined. (Let’s not get into bankruptcies, the uncountable lost jobs, etc.)
Just as the perps splattered JFKs brains (whether it happened or not is not my point) over a seedy Dallas street (believe me, I worked next door a year or so in 1981, and it was still and always is, world without end, a dump) they do black ops of this stature in the most explicit, graphic, and pervasive way they can conceive. The point of such ubiquitously televised bloody massacre of the Kennedy Bro’s (they could have just slipped them a pellet) was to inflict as much PTSD as possible, sort of the scattershot of which the anti-personnel grenade is the synecdoche (not to mention the Pentagon). Then get the addled survivors all high on LSD at the Kaiser and Ford Foundations a couple years later. Like the thoughtful Nazis they always are.
What else? What else can be construed or deduced from just the merest partial reconstruction of their storylines and timelines, this year?
I know a lot of sensitive souls out and about, at so many blogs, and at least one friend went off the deep end on me, living not far from Katrina, and having come up in a family entrenched within a Reagan-centric inner high cabal of right wing politicos, and before several nervous breakdowns, she had already gone full Abby Rockefeller at a young age (the recently departed centenarian David’s daughter who became an avid Castro-supporter and counterculture feminist firebrand (still is), the (brightly shining) Black Sheep of the dubious dynasty).
A lot of people are going to not be well-defended for all the anxiety of this, and they will be looking for some serious couch time. Look for Prozac stock to shoot high. And Big Pharm in general.
Of course, if you can sustain the lie that this is a legitimate event, or jam it down the world’s throat ( the only one big enough to swallow it ), then you don’t have to pick up the tab or the fallout. If the assassinations were ever proven to be conspiracies, the lawsuits would bankrupt Uncle $cam all back to colonial days. But some are proven: one of the MKULTRA victim’s families sued for years and finally won a small settlement.
Proving some of these other things is the work of the most cold-blooded perps could be quite a drain on the vampires that paid them.
Which is a real economic rationale for waging the war mostly in our minds: easy to do, hard to prove. And meanwhile, the real villains can bust the global piñata and make off with all the goodies inside, leaving us with only the frizzed paper and the hangovers and head cases.
Which is almost the main point of all this nonsense, or maybe it IS the point: weaponized psychiatry.
PSYWAR IS the Medium that IS the Message, to steal a page from Marshall McLuhan. (And he should know, as longtime confidante of that peerless triple agent and purveyor of the LSD Left Coast pandemic, the whimsical CIA veteran, Timothy Leary.)
As the US Army manuals have it: “Psyops”: aka Psychological Operations.
The documentary by Zeitgeist Films (Canada) of ten years ago, the eponymous PSYWAR, is immensely revealing about all these strategies, and their history, and the whereabouts of all the bodies. Free version at YouTube, with the tagline: “The Real Battlefield is the Mind”.
Perhaps this is what the events of the last week, month, season portend: the first salvos of WW III, staged mostly in our minds.
Never hurts to muster their forces, which is why I relish sites such as this. Whatever the purity of the content, here or at others, I can’t always know, but it works it out.
***
So, I wrote a ditty exactly 40 years ago, the last time the sky fell for me, and this time we have more company, so here it is, almost hummable (well I was young, and that alone excuses a lot:
“Better shine your spirit
When Dark begins to fall.
You’re not up against a lot.
You’re up against a wall.
Shine your spirit now,
Don’t be misunderstood,
World War Three is happening
For everybody’s good.”
Anyway, that’s how I hope always to look at it.
“The point of such ubiquitously televised bloody massacre of the Kennedy Bro’s (they could have just slipped them a pellet) was to inflict as much PTSD as possible.”
Traumatizing the world psyche by demonstrating that even the president of the USA is not immune to the brutal violence and power of the national security state. These ghouls leave just enough doubt to make their point, but cover their tracks with an official narrative to prevent outright pandemonium. The same modus operandi is always deployed for every horrendous event. The dirty deed occurs in plain sight, but is backed by a dubious authoritative report relentlessly repeated by the state-run mainstream media news to establish credence for a fable.
Thank you. The human spirit, the soul, the atman, needs to shine forth now.
“A panic pandemic has been declared, but when all is said and done the mortality rate within the US might be no higher than the annual flu.”
Without any of it said or done, the numbers suggest that even without containment measures, the final stats would be much less for the BoogeyMan Bug of 2020, than for the common flu.
But math is not my forte. That said, how could it justify every living soul in the L.A. area, or anywhere else, finding nothing but locked doors at almost all of our regular stops?
As nutty as it gets. And they’ll have a hard time selling historians on their good and altruistic intentions, for real.
Wait, they are almost all owned by CIA now “covertly”.
Just everyday “engineering of consent” as Eddie Bernays called his 1950s book.
The CIA controls all mainstream media news and much of the websites on the internet. If info is not totally controlled it’s carefully monitored. Many websites, and individuals have already been banned. There was a huge sweep at the beginning of the year, but I’m sure its ongoing.
Thanks, it’s good to get a confirmation of the signs I’ve been seeing for some time. As they thrive on murk, and what spooks don’t, they also revel in the public there is some relative “freedom of the press”. There is almost none whatsoever. They don’t seem to mess with some of the Catholic journals I read, to see a progressive publication like National Catholic Reporter write with some freedom is intriguing, but largely that’s because that coverage does not push their envelope.
Journalism that really sees through their charade is going to get messed with.
If you want to say or report something really game changing, some deep analysis, you’ll be hounded and hushed.
It’s probably true, that even the seemingly most progressive Leftist websites and ancillary news services have been co-opted by the CIA.
Wikipedia dutifully reports on “Operation Mockingbird” but says it was mostly a ’50s thing, and was terminated.
Sure it was. They gave it another name, and after all, by then all the “ancillary” methodology they had developed merited “re-branding”.
Problem is, it’s not hard to see the size and shape of those tentacles reaching now far abroad.
I knew a priest here over 10 years ago, recently then from Ireland. After a couple years here, he was being infected slowly by corporate culture. I saw him talking to types we know all too well after services. I passed by him soon after, that Sunday, as we were alone in the old church and clearly startled him by saying, “Don’t let them take the Irish out of you.” It had been building up in me.
He made a U turn and came up to my side, “But…it’s like this everywhere. It’s the same in Ireland.” He seemed to have a real feel for the sense.
I came back with, “I know, that’s why we have to stop it.”
I told him of a pen pal in Venice, Italy (to reference a current telling hot spot) who had recently written the same thing, “All the young men in Italy are losing the old culture and driving around in the fad clothes, and all the rest, copying all these things.”
He took it in, and in coming months he did the appropriate gradual social distancing that is SOP for malcontents like me.
But I noted with satisfaction, after being absent from that parish for a year, that when I asked someone where he’d gone, I was told he had been transferred back to Ireland.
(I was writing this about him 20 minutes ago, when I put my tablet down for a moment to rebelliously scratch my nose, and when I picked it back up the screen had changed and was rifling through other OffG screens randomly, suddenly. I’ve seen that here before, but not recently. Could be normalcy, but stage magicians thrive on the kind of smoke and mirrors that is the DARPA-invented gadget we all know as the internet. Note that if you turn WWW a quarter turn to the left, it spells, top to bottom, 333. It really is nothing if you write it correctly as Vs, but it’s spoken,ZUCK called, as “double U”. Which is a 3. I have used it in my email name, but I’m having second, and 3rd, thoughts. I grew up with a father who would not accept the new number for his law firm (when he moved a few miles away off Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills) from the phone company without “333” in it. He came home gleefully one night in ’69 and crowed that not only did he get that, but succeeded after 2 or 3 years of trying in getting an “ideal” number. And so he did, Tesla would like it: if you call 310-273-6333 you’ll get the law offices of Ervin, Cohen, and Jessup (27 is the cube of 3, and Nikola was found dead in RM. 3327). Back then, the prefix there was 213. In the hugely interesting and educational 7 hour series by Scott Noble and Zeitgeist Films called “CounterIntelligence”, of recent make, there is an innocuous clip running by near the opening half hour of part 1, seemingly as filler, in which some shady characters, presumably spies, are leaving a building with beveled glass above the door, popular in 40s film noir, and you see “333” as the street address, inside what looks like the Christian ICTHOS fish symbol.
But “after further review” it doubles as the Masonic eye.)
God only knows how “ZUCK” got wedged in the penultimate paragraph.
Any relation to Robot ZUCK?
I had typed “but is spoken, called, as…” and somehow “ZUCK” squeezed his ugly head into my text.
NSA and it’s AI nanobots effing with us again LOL?
The smoking gun is that it’s the only place in the text that does not have a space before the comma, lol.
Truth be told, the worldwideweb is giving me the willies, or the WWWillies, more with each passing day. Soo much hocus pocus can be brought to bear.
But it has a strong draw socially, and otherwise.
What to do?
After all, the WorldWideWeb may be intimately patrolled by one single WorldWideSpider.
Now that’s a Tolkien image.
I always thought 666 was the devil’s number.
I blame the millennials …
When Fully implemented, divisive identity politics and neoliberal ideologies could save us from this pandemic . It works like this: when we are fiercely independent and no one gets along with anybody else anymore, we basically live in isolation from each other, which is now required of us now so we can survive!
With such a scenario, in order to create a pandemic they must develop a virus that jumps walls.
Woke up this morning early hours had no internet. Went to 24-hour garage was told all internet was down everywhere. I don’t know why they said this but it was really chilling. It turned out to be a glitch but if and when they do turn it off we will be royally screwed.
Sky News said that Sir Patrick Vallance now believes the virus kills 1-in 1000 and that 20000 people may die. This is a massive downward shift.
I suggest they are not even pretending this is not a hoax anymore.
I hoped that they would have to back down eventually…
Maybe, it never took hold sufficiently; either the fearmongering propaganda or the illness itself?
Thank God.
In a few weeks they will say the isolation & lock-down measures are working so to be on the safe side they need to continue…
Former American Congressman and Medical Doctor Ron Paul writes:
http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/march/16/the-coronavirus-hoax/
If you want to get really sick, and magically so without any viral help at all, read the nauseating blatant, flagrant puff piece at The Atlantic, an interview with Francis Collins, Fauci’s partner in crime at NIH. The Nazi-esque propaganda seams are not so much showing as splitting up every other line or so.
Man, thanks to our gaudy media here, that is an absolute smoking gun about this black op, almost as good as Condoleeeezza turning up her palms on a pandemic newscast, saying lo these 19 years, “Who would ever have expected people to hijack our airliners and fly them into our skyscrapers?!”
Not mentioning that NORAD was conducting anti-terrorist training drills since 1995, as well as that morning, doing just that.
Well, that’s old news, but a vaccination against this Fauci/Collins Psyop felony.
You look at the photo of Collins, and his fraudulent mug favors faces like Robert Mueller, FBI, or John Kerry, W’s Skull & Bones classmate.
Ah, but he was a strident anti-war protester in those days. So there’s that.
Like Rubin & Hoffman, same era, not much later became stockbrokers.
Well, they lost the bandanas at that point. Both died unnaturally and young, too.
Like my old man, found in a brand new locked Lincoln in ’82 with a gun in his hand and a hole in his head. And I find out in 2000 LAPD has it as an open case.
But I had connected the dots by a serendipity: Rubin was run over a few years later by a hit and run, and my father had been found, in full business attire like Jerry, just blocks away, off Wilshire at UCLA.
Hard to miss the connection, whatever it is…..
Is this a great country, or what??
As an aside, and a issues I think this Blog should concern itself with, I’m getting mightily annoyed at the anti-Chinese hysteria being propagated in the Washington Post and by the likes of Nigel Farage in the UK over the past 24hrs.
The notion that China actually caused this Coronavirus outbreak is ludicrous to say the least, its a bloody natural occurring virus that’s jumped species, which is not at all uncommon.
Further, whilst critiques of officials in Wuhan City and Hubei Province are justified – the authorities initially trying to keep a lid on details of this outbreak, whilst medical practitioners on the front line were warning peers globally, the fact remains once Beijng got involved the response was swift and draconian, with the measures actively taken now leading to no new local infections for 48hrs, although China has now imported a number of new infections from travellers.
The fact remains that the WHO and all global governments were aware of this outbreak by early January, and that the first infections outside of China were appearing by 19 January, and what did the leaders now slagging China off actually do? The fact is, essentially nothing, epitomised by the fact that international travel to China remained unimpeded, with the exception of flights to Wuhan – this, despite the fact that anyone who knows China was aware that the largest migration of humans was about to take place in China as a result of the Chinese New Year annual shutdown/vacation, which was an excellent means of spreading this virus far and wide within China – said holidays were hit on the head by Beijing, but this did not stop international travel to and from China.
Given that China essentially put itself into lockdown, it strikes me as odd that the internationally community was unwilling to stop all flights to China and impose stringent checks on all land-based boarder crossings.
In Hong Kong, it was a safe bet that the virus would emerge given the close economic ties we have with Wuhan, and the fact that many Hong Konger’s visit China for the Chinese New Year – quite normal given family ties, the same applies to Singapore and other nations hosting a large Chinese community, particularly those in Asia Pac.
As most have observed, this Poster is of the opinion that the pathogen is dangerous and is a serious health hazard, which is why I’ve offered no critique of China, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea’s handling of the virus, we can throw Japan into this pot too.
On the other hand, I have plenty to say about the Western powers, and of course accept the fact that many of the financial class who rule us are quite keen to make a fast buck out of any crisis and push their nefarious agenda’s in order to gain more power over our lives, or, essentially starve us.
Rant over!
Too many Chinese Men dining out with old bats?
Ridiculous of course it is.
Great post, sums up how I feel about the gross inaction of our governments.
Interesting – given that businesses are closing all over the country, thousands of people out of work and without income, the world economy tanking, and the government has enacted a state of emergency to be effective for 2 years, including the right to arrest, detain and ‘treat’ any law-abiding person they consider ‘may’ be infected, what would you consider an adequate response to a virus that may have killed a tiny percentage of those who die from flu, 99% of whom were very aged and sick with at least one co-morbidity?
You agree response ought to be proportionate, yes?
The world’s economy tanking doesn’t stop the richest making money on the futures’ stock market. The very rich stockpiling their money while using the crisis to allow the crash and hide the fraud that has been going on since 2008. No doubt allowing large companies to buy out smaller companies to shut down the competition – wait, that’s what happened last time. I didn’t understand the rest of your post cos I’m old.
The global economy tanking is a great opportunity for the rich to further their control and drive onwards to neo-feudalism.
Admin1,
I’ve responded once, God knows what has happened to my answer to you?
I’ll start again, most of the measures now being taken in the UK, and by extension other Nation States would not have been necessary had flights to China been suspended at an early stage, namely, as soon as the pathogen had crossed international borders courtesy of commercial flights, which, was happening as far back as 23 January – see HKSAR, Singapore. USA, France & Canada.
I trust you’ll agree that in Wuhan by late January it was evident something was amiss and that Wuhan City medical authorities were having issues containing and identifying a pathogen that was causing respiratory issues in many individuals, which, was not Influenza.
Indeed, events in Wuhan had a prompt response in the HKSAR, whereby all educational institutions were closed and travel restrictions & checks put in place on all points of entry with Mainland China, these being, air, sea, road and railways – note, the HKSAR did not quarantine China, as such, individuals were still able to travel between Hong Kong & China ( a mistake in my opinion).
With regards draconian measures now being taken globally. Again, had all commercial traffic between states boarding China, and by extension all air travel to China been suspended, the international spread of the pathogen would have been reduced greatly, particularly given by late January all heavy lifting and draconian measures were being taken by the Chinese authorities, which, I’ll remind you have proved successful as far as reducing infection rates in China is concerned. I’ll further remind you it was China taking the economic hit.
Now, focusing on the economic impacts, all airlines operating flights to China could have managed a suspension of all air traffic to China for a 28 day timeline, during said timeline nations outside of China could have implemented checks for passengers entering national territories, specifically at airports – the UK does not do this, but HKSAR and Singapore do, such measures are hardly noticed and are not expensive.
With regards the supply chain, a large amount of commercial freight is moved via aircraft operating in and out of China, however, nowhere near as much as what’s moved by road, rail and sea, as such, the real economic impact of ending commercial airline freight would not be great, and, sufficient global stocks exist for brief supply chain interruptions – a 28 day suspension would not have crashed the global economy.
Hindsight is great thing, however, let us not forget that most nation states with air, sea, rail and road communications with China had experience of the SARS outbreak and its potential to cross borders and cause international havoc. I’ll also remind you that risk management professionals working in a variety of industries and within the medical sector itself have been fully aware of the impact of a new pathogen emerging that threatened health and life.
In a nutshell, maybe next time governments and international supranational bodies will listen to risk managers and act promptly on advice, rather than take a ‘wait and see’ approach, which on this occasion has facilitated not only the spread of a pathogen, but resulted in civil liberty curtailments in order to stop said pathogens spread in communities globally.
So, no, the present actions were not necessary, alas, it seems economics and ease of travel seem to trump actions that would have forestalled this pathogen at an early stage in the outbreak.
check out @afneil tweet (22hrs ago) of WHO statement made in Jan 14th….very enlightening.
The anti-Chinese hate propaganda was ubiquitous before the epidemic, and is merely being ramped up even more, now, during its global spread. Nothing new there, but exacerbated by China’s spectacular success in controlling the outbreak, and, now, its generous support of nations like Serbia, Italy and France still coping with it. As for ‘delays’ and ‘suppression’-straight Sinophobic lies, as usual. Read ‘How to Yellow-cake a Tragedy’ by K.J.Noh in the Unz Review for the facts.
Germany is an interesting case.
Firstly, the government has dragged its feet for nearly 2 months now with all the draconian measures – always introduced reluctantly. Even now things are much freer than in all neighbouring countries.
Until several days ago Chinese and Iranians were entering with ease. Borders are controlled very reluctantly.
Germany has dutifully anounced 13083 ‘cases’, but only a miserly 31 deaths ‘due to covid-19’.
It is like they are playing along with a smile on their faces at the absurdity of it all.
Are the Germans taking the piss out of this fake epidemic?
To quote Pope Benedict in the film “The Two Popes” : “It’s a German joke. It doesn’t have to be funny”.
Germany has MORE ICU’s and ventilators than any other country in the EU. Today, an Iran Air plane landed at Heathrow, there are three flights per week and they are nearly always full with around 300 passengers a time.
I think that is an unacceptable risk.
They have an economy to run.
Germany is a country that actually makes things. France and Italy too of course, but if they want to kill their economy by quarantine to prevent spreading of micky mouse virus, that is ‘their’ choice.
The only positive thing I can see about this COVID-19 deal is that at some point in the next few days hundreds of millions of Americans will be savaging each other in the steets and gnawing each other’s entrails…
Why on earth would you want such a thing?
It makes him feel tough.
Surely what really matters about this crises is the number of game-changing issues it raises. Western governments inadequate response (especially in the UK and US), what this says about our societies and their ability to respond to national crises; the impact on capitalism, what might emerge out of this, are we looking at disaster capitalism or disaster socialism (i.e. a crises that is so severe that it’s only outcome can be socialism); that many of the middle classes who considered themselves safe a week ago will now face the same insecurities as the precariate; the sudden collapse of our “system” and empty supermarket mayhem within a week, or, indeed, the opportunity the current crises presents for the left. By tying itself to relentlessly beating one drum alone – that the virus is over hyped and it’s all about social control – Off Guardian is failing to explore any of these rich and important seams embedded in the current crises.
I think many of the issues you raise are very relevant Martin.
I think it’s unfair though to criticize OffG for negelcting these. It’s just that the themes of hype and social control are simply the most important issues at the present time.
So, why don’t you expand on the points you raise in further comments?
Looking forward to that.
It’s inevitable that the fallout from the government’s lockdown will soon come under the Off-G microscope.
One thing bound to be explored is the central role played by the MSM in its reporting the crises.
Even though I have linked to Ioannidis (below) there is a further excerpt in his article worth repeating since we are discussing this point, i.e. reality management by platforms that exploit certain narratives for their own ends, especially when events are shrouded in a high degree of uncertainity (see Skripal, chemical weapons in Syria,etc).
Anyway, Ioannidis says, “If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my ‘Diamond Princess’ analysis (i.e. those trapped on the cruise ship) — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.”
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
This is an important factor: “media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams’.
Now compare that to hourly BEEB updates addressing COVID-19 imponderables such as ‘when will it be safe to let granny out of the cellar’- 2 months, 3 months, 6 months? – over to a leading granny expert in our London studio.
Capitalism ends, inevitably, in one of two ways. Either it fulfills its neoplastic destiny and destroys most Life on Earth including humanity, or it is killed itself, and Life flourishes under some new human system.
as usual, the “simulation” occurs almost simultaneously with the actual event.
And the MSM presstitutes NEVER dare to notice.
Great piece, CJ, thank you !
World leaders with their hands on OUR purse strings, have just agreed (almost over night) to bail out the financial system to the tune of $ trillions – again. Yet every year MILLIONS of people die as a direct result of poverty because those same leaders tell us there isn’t enough money to save them. Remember that REALITY whilst we’re being distracted by ‘is the virus real / are the numbers real’ conversations. If you knew nothing else, just observing such decisions by those in power would tell you everything you need to know about who’s interests they’re ultimately here to serve and how information is framed to do just that.
100 thumbs up
Under neo-liberal capitalism, EVERYTHING, the 99% of surplus humans, the entire natural world and all the accumulated wealth of millennia only exist to feed the insatiable avarice of the tiny elite of parasites who now control nearly all humanity’s wealth, all ‘democratic’ polities and the entire gargantuan brainwashing system of the MSM, PR, advertising, ‘think-tanks’ etc. Once the ‘useless eaters’ grow restless, they will be eliminated as merely a threat. Bio-warfare must be the preferred means, and this looks awfully like a trial run.
Brendon O Connell’s latest offering. Ummm…..speechless. This has totally floored me
45. CORONA VIRUS – ISRAEL & BIOLOGICAL WARFARE WITH APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
We’re all Palestinians now.
@Orage will probably consider me ‘flippant’ but is it any wonder when rubbish such as this is being reported and contributing to the meltdown in society. All I can say is FFS!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-8128385/Linda-Lusardi-61-reveals-COVID-19-symptoms.html
Any regular OffG readers have an opinion on Dr Vernon Coleman?
I’ve read some of his articles on vaccines in the past and think he makes a lot of sense – in line with my thinking but he’s written a series of short articles on the current farce, including “Coronavirus – Why and How the Government and the Media Are Wrong” which is short but interesting reading where he expresses his thoughts that this is not what it says on the tin.
https://www.vernoncoleman.com/coronavirus3.htm
“So far all the people who have died of the coronavirus in the UK had underlying health issues. The youngest was 59 – rather proving my argument that it is nonsensical to lock up the over 70s.”
The youngest, the last time I heard was 45. He suffered from motor neurone disease, which is invariably fatal.
I’m not sure I can call myself a “regular”. Last year I posted here under an alias. Dr Coleman’s view seems very sane and rational.
I do love his sarcasm: “The World Health Organization says that the number of deaths globally from the normal communal garden variety ….. that’s the one that doesn’t have the PR people” !!!
youtube video posted yesterday ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbEHEzEEHJ8 )
Vernon Coleman’s stuff is very good – he’s been saying lots of things for decades that are now generally recognised as true.
(I am a recent discoverer of this site).
Hmm, whilst reading this highly entertaining blog about a thought experiment a bit like Schroeders cat, I was watching a video on social media from a city in Lombardy. A man was holding up the local newspaper showing the deaths columns from a few weeks ago before the virus took a grip which amounted to approximately 1.5 pages. Next he showed the same local paper dated from the 14th March showing the latest death columns. It amounted to 10 pages. So the question is why has the amount of deaths, mostly old people judging by their ages, so dramatically risen in such a short space of time?
Yah. I don’t think anyone is doubting that there is a viral epidemic.
The difference is that usually these things barely raise an eyebrow in the media.
And your “ten pages” assertion also sounds very dubious.
Well, having seen it with my own eyes, with the names, ages, dates of deaths plus in many cases photos of the deceased as happens on occasions in my local newspaper, unless you have evidence which can show that these reported deaths in a local newspaper are fabricated then your assertion of “ dubious “ must be taken with all the weight that it does not deserve.
Yes, people die. This is reality. And some people die in epidemics. That means more reports in newspapers. Even 1.5 pages sounds a lot to me. The amount of space devoted to deaths depends on how big your town is and how many relatives a person has.
I’m trying to maintain some balance and perspective on this. Your comment I view as sly fearmongering. However, you are entitled to your views.
You might want to check the CDC flu estimates (they don’t bother to count them individually) for flu every year:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm
I note you use the word “ estimate “ which is not the same as actual facts. I also note you did not notice that I said city not town. In my home city a deaths column can range from 1- 2 pages so the notion of this 1.5 pages sounding a lot does not stand up to scrutiny. Now, your “ view as sly fearmongering” belays the fact that previously there were 1.5 pages and now there is 10 pages. If you have evidence that the pandemic in Lombardy is a fabrication or hyperbole, let’s see it.
With good reason, John. I was discussing this with a relative who had read that the local Italian newspaper had actually decided to publish obituary notices every, say, couple of weeks for people specifically recorded as dying from Covid-19. So the 10 pages worth had been compiled over a, give or take, fortnightly period. Not only that, each notice included a photograph of the deceased so there weren’t as many entries on each page as you might see in one page of a UK newspaper. I imagine this is still the case. The 10 fold increase would appear to be a misinterpretation of the less dramatic reality of the situation. Unfortunately I cannot provide any links.
John Deehan asked a good question so I wouldn’t down vote him for that. Judy’s response if true would also make complete sense.
Anyone have any way of confirming it? – other people have mentioned the extra pages as proof of impending virus disaster & we’re all going to die (well apart from those with mild or no symptoms) so would be good to be able to point out that misinterpretation.
Well, the first video still showed the deceased with pictures so the notion that suddenly the other 10 pages of the deceased are deliberately filled with pictures of them to exaggerate the number of actual victims does not explain the customary practice in that North Italian City. Moreover, you are trying to compare apples with oranges, for example, although people may not include photos, they do frequently include motifs or symbols such as Harps, Shamrocks, Guitars, Cars or other types etc, if they had an affinity to them.
John,
I have tried to post this once already and seemed to hit a brick wall so apologies if this is duplicated!
I realise it is convention in Italy to include various images to accompany obituaries. My point there is that when people in the UK hear about ten pages of obituaries that alone may conjure up in their minds the tiny inserts in UK newspapers, thereby giving the impression that there are far more notices in ten pages than there actually are, albeit not denying that ten pages is not insignificant in anyone’s book.
But that was a relatively minor point. The main point I was making is that I was told that the newspaper had on 13 March consolidated all the pending obituaries over a prolonged period of time into a single special edition commemorating specifically those who had died with Covid-19.
All the articles I can find on this matter compare the ten pages issued on Friday 13 March with one page issued in the same daily newspaper on Sunday 9 February. The key to knowing the significance of the apparent disparity is establishing with what frequency the paper published obituaries prior to 9 February. If they had been published every day prior to that date then that would present any comparison in a different light.
Equally, were any obituaries (Covid-19, or other) published between 9 February and 13 March? If so, what were the numbers of those?
Without such historical data, a meaningful, empirical comparison of information from two distinct dates, with no context, is all but impossible.
Well, if it is a weekly paper, then it would publish the obituaries columns every week, and , if it is a daily paper then it would be daily, as my home city which publishes the obituary column every day except Sunday. Now, unless the newspaper decided to switch from a weekly to daily or vice a versa without the public noticing, which seems highly unlikely, it has to be one or the other. Moreover, the correlation between the outbreak of the Coronavirus and the dramatic increase in deaths reported in obituaries column cannot be ruled out.
As I said above this is a daily newspaper. So, as you confirm, the standard practice would most likely have been to publish obituaries on a daily basis.
So, hypothetically and to give my point context, if the newspaper normally published a page of obituaries every day but decided instead to publish a single edition for the ten days prior to 9 February that would result in a ten page obituary column which would look dramatic compared to the one page obituary column which would have been published on 30 January.
Likewise, if (again, hypothetically) on 21 February they took the decision to publish attributed Covid-19 deaths in a ‘special’ single consolidated edition of 10 pages on 13 March those obituaries might otherwise have been spread over 20 days. That’s equivalent to half a page in each edition if published on a daily basis – not striking in the normal scheme of things.
How many non-Covid19 obituaries have been published since 9 February? Now that would be a revealing figure. If you are so convinced that the Covid19 deaths were additional to normal expectations then presumably the paper was continuing to publish 1-2 pages of ‘non-Covid19’ obituaries every day between 9 February and 13 March. If no non-Covid19 obituaries were accounted for at all for a period prior to 13 March we would have to ask why. But we haven’t been given this information so we cannot say whether the 10 pages being highlighted did in fact indicate ‘a dramatic increase in deaths’ or not.
As I said, it is necessary to know much more about the context of these obituaries to read anything into what little we do know.
Evidently, you didn’t read my reply since I didn’t confirm it on a Daily basis because I said it was one of 2 possibilities but not both. Now, if the obituaries column prior to the pandemic had the deaths notification at the usual date of application and then decided to withhold them to create a false impression of the actual number of deaths in a given time period. The relatives would be in an uproar because they frequently contain times, dates plus places of Church services, if they are religious and many of the older generation in Italy will be, burials/cremations and wakes they would be out of date to the actual event. Moreover, if you had my reply properly, you would have been aware that I said” the correlation….cannot be ruled out”. Which I see you are giving an entirely different spin to what I actually wrote.
Hmm, Ebola crisis didn’t raise an eyebrow in the media?
Go and ask the average person on the street if they know what ebola is.
The public has, on average, so many things happening in their lives that they won’t dwell on previous epidemics. For example, how many people, on average, will recall the foot and mouth disease which caused havoc amongst the farmers and many European countries wouldn’t accept U.K. beef for a number of years.
Perhaps the real question is why the REPORTING of deaths has risen in such a short time?
I live in Italy but not in the north .Dottssa Bulgan in an interview on byoblu.com implied there is an emergency situation in the air quality specifically Brescia / Lombardy with a huge open garbage site. Already in Nov 2019 there were 1000 death from pneumonia.
Henriette
funny!
and i needed that. scared shitless/depressed over impending totalitarianism.
as an older german person well versed in history i hoped to never experience a practical example of fascism.
ireland now.
just following orders
everybody is!
those who go out shuffle in lines 2 meters apart while concentration camp guard wannabes bark at them if they go slightly over the line, ready to spray them in the face with sanitiser.
the revolution has been cancelled, no rounding up, militarised police, or camps needed.
not even children playing in people’s back garden 🙁
Thanks CJ Hopkins – I needed that!
Here an announcement of the Salt Lake City Police Department:
“DUE TO THE CONFIRMED CASE OF #COVIDー19 FROM COMMUNITY SPREAD, SLCPD IS ASKING ALL CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES/NEFARIOUS BEHAVIOR TO CEASE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. WE APPRECIATE YOUR ANTICIPATED COOPERATION IN HALTING CRIME & THANK CRIMINALS IN ADVANCE.”
https://twitter.com/slcpd/status/1238848450340352000
…what does this “UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE” mean? I mean: Can an honest good criminal really rely on this?
I live in France where you aren’t allowed to leave your house without a certificate signed and dated each day to indicate that you are going to buy food. Or taking a solitary walk. Since I am a law-abiding citizen I do what the government says. I’m not in a position to give an opinion about the dangers of this coronavirus, with its new, catchy name of Covid-19. However, it seems that what the French government is worried about is not the population being wiped out – they say that most people will have mild symptoms or none at all – but that intensive care units will be overwhelmed. Hence, if more money had been spent a little earlier on health services to make sure that hospitals had plenty of beds and plenty of breathing equipment, we could all have got on with our lives as usual. Now the government is producing billions out of thin air to deal with a situation that boils down to a lack of hospital beds and equipment rather than a killer virus.
Another point : what is happening to the poor immigrants in camps in Calais? Are they confined to their tents? And the drug dealers outside the high-rise flats in the suburbs of Paris? Can they show a certificate to prove to police that they are going about essential business? All the people they bring on to the radio to talk of their experiences seem very middle-class.
“Now the government is producing billions out of thin air to deal with a situation that boils down to a lack of hospital beds and equipment rather than a killer virus.”
Yes, I think the general idea is to slow it down rather than stop it, but as the previous commenter said, they’ve been there before. In 2017-18 the Italians ran out of ICU beds for the sick.
I think the difference this time is that governments have all been caught with their underpants down in public. The people will have to pay for that terrible humiliation.
So what better a solution than to to scare the world shitless over something which is not really a very big deal.
Sorry mate, you dreaming this is a planned global financial collapse. People downunder are losing jobs hand over fist already. Next wave will be knockon effect. F&ckall to do with a virus. That’s the scapegoat. Not our fault the virus did it. Get ready. You going to hear that for a long long time if we have that long.
Chill.
Look, I agree with you. I should have been clearer. The virus in my very humble opinion is no big deal. The government overreaction to it might be a big deal. But I think it’s still too early to say.
It might be a heresy to say this, but if you lose your job, you can always get another. Or do like me and become self employed. I had an enquiry this morning from someone in Australia.
The fat lady has not sung yet.
The virus is a transparent hoax. I think that is the point of it. In hindsight I think it was the point of 911 as well.
The fear of ICUs being overwhelmed is just a way of circumventing the undeniably low death rates and infection rates and still keep the panic at desired levels.
It is pure nonsense and you don’t need a degree in virology to figure this one out.
If annual flu – with infection rates many times those claimed for this ‘novel’ CoV – does not completely overwhelm ICUs, how could this low grade additional pathogen possibly do so?
Winter always puts huge strain on healthcare systems. ICUs are often under great pressure, and yes, sometimes choices have to be made. This is no different right now. The stories out of Italy are nonsense without any statistical base.
hear hear encore (clapping) All I know is people are losing jobs all over the place. Thats what they really worried about and should be
People are also losing all support services. Special care for elderly, sick and disabled etc. Expect a lot of “temporary” emergency situations to become the permanent “new normal”.
“Expect a lot of “temporary” emergency situations to become the permanent “new normal””
Advanced Austerity measures under a different name!
Yep, this isn’t going away.
It will be as “temporary” as negative interest rates in 2008.
Or as “temporary” as going off the gold standard in 1971.
The reaction of governments around the world still doesn’t make any sense. They all saying it’s like very mild flu in most cases. Destroy the economy huh what? ICUs are being over run because of panic not the virus.
“The reaction of governments around the world still doesn’t make any sense. ”
They are embarrassed. The media has whipped it all up and governments have to be seen to be doing something.
Come off it
Swiss Propaganda Research is a great resource for COVID-updates (all solid sources in original article):
The latest summary:
The Italian National Health Institute ISS has published a new report on test-positive deaths:
The median age is 80.5 years (79.5 for men, 83.7 for women).
10% of the deceased was over 90 years old; 90% of the deceased was over 70 years old.
0.8% of the deceased had no pre-existing chronic illnesses.
Approximately 75% of the deceased had two or more pre-existing conditions, 50% had three more pre-existing conditions, particularly heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
Five of the deceased were between 31 and 39 years old, all of them with serious pre-existing health conditions (e.g. cancer or heart disease).
The National Health Institute hasn’t yet determined what the patients examined ultimately died of and refers to them as Covid19-positive deaths in general.
A report in the Italian newspaper Correrie della Sera shows that Italian intensive care units already collapsed under the marked flu wave in 2017/2018. They had to postpone operations, call nurses back from holiday and ran out of blood donations.
German virologist Hendrik Streeck suspects that in 2020 there could be no more deaths in Germany as a whole than in other years. Normally, about 2500 people die every day in Germany. Streeck mentions the case of a 78-year-old man with preconditions who died of heart failure and subsequently tested positive for Covid19 and was included in the statistics of Covid19 deaths.
According to Stanford Professor John P.A. Ioannidis, there is no sufficient medical data basis for the measures currently decided upon. The new coronavirus is no more dangerous than some of the normal coronaviruses, even in older people, he says.
Italian immunology professor Sergio Romagnani from the University of Florence comes to the conclusion in a study on 3000 people that 50 to 75% of the test-positive people of all ages remain completely symptom-free – significantly more than previously assumed.
A hospital doctor in the Spanish city of Malaga writes on Twitter that people are currently more likely to die from panic and systemic collapse than from the virus. The hospital is being overrun by people with colds, flu and possibly Covid19 and doctors have lost control.
Thanks for this.
“The new coronavirus is no more dangerous than some of the normal coronaviruses, even in older people, he says.”
Yes, I read somewhere last week (when the world was still functioning relatively normally) that coronaviruses account for about 30% of cases of the common cold.
Our Govt actually tells us this and then announces travel bans. For a mild flu epidemic wtf!!!
Excellent btw thank you
Excellent.
Even the ‘ 0.8% of the deceased had no pre-existing chronic illnesses’ since it is such a tiny fraction, I would not be surprised if that is misclasdificstion, ie reported as no chronic illness but actually had chronic illness.
“A report in the Italian newspaper Correrie della Sera shows that Italian intensive care units already collapsed under the marked flu wave in 2017/2018. They had to postpone operations, call nurses back from holiday and ran out of blood donations.”
Could you maybe point to a reference online for this info?
Thx!
Ah, no worries, found it…
— why don’t you provide the reference, then?
Excellent resource Terje – thanks for sharing it.
Somebody mentioned that the obituary pages in the Bergamo newspapers increased from one page to five or ten pages once the Coronavirus business started. Maybe someone who reads Italian could check the obituary pages in the Bergamo newspapers for previous winters.
I have a colleague who lives there. This is happening for real, and its exceptional compared to previous years.
I love it C.J – thanks!
You knocked it out of the park.
Lets look at some pretty graphs.
Fun – when science cuts through bullshit – isn’t it.
Kind of. As someone with a science degree, however, I have been taught to always be skeptical about what I am told. Especially when it comes to crystal ball gazing about the future.
Unless you are (lol) a weather “person” forecasting is subject to a great deal of potential error.
Where is Michael Fish when you need him?
To add: it is clear already from the Chinese data that this is a disease which only kills the elderly and or the very sick in any number.
In fact I think it is likely that it is not age which has been a factor so much as health. The over 70s are quite likely to be suffering from some sort of chronic illness already.
How many this will kill is very hard to say with any certainty, but it helps to compare to flu stats which estimate deaths in tens of thousands in the US from that condition since 1st October 2019.
Old people die. We all will someday.
It’s clear only if we accept the data as genuine. Why would we?
Excellent again CJ. More food for the brain in these very surreal times.
Speaking of the muzzling of dissent, how many here heard of the ‘Earn It Bill’ just introduced to the United States Senate the other day, sponsored by that odious vile blob Lindsey Graham, along with Richard Blumenthal (D).
Essentially, it will be a full throttled attack on all independent media sites if they don’t engage in ‘best practices’ ie, get on their knees and toe the line. Including this one, and others like The Saker, The Grayzone, The Greanville Post, etc.
Or if they don’t ‘toe the line’ be vanished into the big black hole of cyberspace.
Even more disturbing, this proposed Bill will apparently allow scanning software to be used to read all online messages.
I wonder where that software will originate from? Peru? Botswana?
Today, I received text messages from my housing company saying “in these troubling times, we are in solidarity with you” and another one requesting a phone interview about the Coronavirus. Hmmm.
Eretz Botswana, perhaps.
Botswana sort of popped into my head for some reason, but, yeah, the place I was thinking of is exactly 6380.64 miles north of Gaborone. I checked distance calculator thingy.
John Michael Greer has an interesting post on the astrological prospect for the coming year.
Yes, yes, those who KNOW THE TRUTHS WHICH MAY NEVER BE QUESTIONED ‘know’ that astrology is all bollocks, so you needn’t concern yourselves with this note, dears. Just write it off as (wholly unexamined) superstitious nonsense and go back to wanking your certainties! You listening, Toby…?
For those relatively rare people, like Michel Gauquelin, who are actually swayed off previously-unexamined certainties by seeing impressive real evidence, I would just point out that John has proven himself over many years to be an outstandingly perspicacious commentator, on matters political (predicted Trump-POTUS, when all around him were shilling Killary), social, and magical (in which latter discipline he’s an impressive, time-served, **very-highly-self-disciplined** veteran with a very good track record of actual success, of the “My god! This is real!” variety which every aspiring serious shaman knows; ex-Grand Arch-Druid of AODA, and so on). And – key intellectually-honest discipline – he always subjects himself to a rigorous look-back over the past year, to check how his previous astrological predictions panned out; pretty well usually, in the event.
So here’s John’s take on the upcoming year. Not too doom-laden, you’ll notice. ‘Wait and see’ remains the prudent rule (oh, and stock up on mega-doses of any kind of VitaminC you can lay hands on – except calcium ascorbate; PROPERLY-MADE liposomal-encapsulated C particularly recommended; but that’s me speaking; don’t know what John thinks about C-therapy):
https://www.ecosophia.net/an-astrological-interlude-aries-ingress-2020/
PS: Note to Admin: I get your preference for not using shriek-caps in posts. I quite agree. But may I plead that my usage here is a) for comic effect; and b) for underlining a really serious short-coming of home-made liposomal C. Not dangerous, actually fairly useful, but nothing like as effective as the properly-made article. Apart from calcium ascorbate, which can lead to calcium overdose, there are no known, **genuinely-established** major drawbacks to C. Plenty of lying and slagging by ignorant mediawhores serving the interests of Big Pharma, but nothing genuine. Safer even than water, as Dr. Tom Levy (qv!) likes to point out (and in clinical-reality, it actually helps to dissolve, not cause, kidney stones).
You’re just adding to the ridiculous marketing campaign by promoting quack remedies/prevention aids.
There is no evidence that taking large doses of vitamin c does anything at all. In fact they have measured almost the same amount as taken orally is then present in the subject’s urine.
Ah that famous thought-stopper shriek: “Quack remedies!!!” Virtually always a sure sign that the slagger hasn’t actually confronted the huge, multi-decade mass of hard clinical evidence. You haven’t, have you L?
For information to the genuinely open-minded, let me recommend this – as just one route onto the VitC evidence mountain; published last month by a veteran sharp-end clinical VitC specialist MD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQWSqHZZu1Y
This matches my own experience: nearing 80 and no – zero, nada, zilch – noticeable colds or flu for over 2o years of regular multi-gram daily dosing with C. (Used to get them previously; never taken the vaccinations.)
The actual truth, as Tom points out, seems to be that C kills literally all the viruses against which it’s been tested in vitro. A promising hint for anyone confronted with the need to self-medicate – or better yet self-prophylactise – at home, when the ICUs are full.
You’d be better off listening to this guy.
https://youtu.be/FK25upIADkY
Brilliant presentation Rhisiart, thank you.
I swear by Vitamins and C is top of my list.
I have a compromised immunity because I had cancer, but made a miraculous recovery, according to my physician.
I told her that I was craving oranges, and caviar???? (only ever eaten caviar once before) Wealthy relative brought me a jar every day for three weeks?? GP told me caviar contained zinc, selenium and iron, three of the important repair vitamins, along with the vit C in the oranges, so I had effectively aided my healing by 100%.
I have continued with a vitamin regime ever since and am mindful of everything I eat and drink. Having said this, in October 2019 my Grandson and I became seriously ill with a chest infection for eight weeks! I actually felt I would die, and a GP appointment was not available for TWO weeks, so I took to my bed with paracetamol and a posset of Whiskey/Ginger/Honey… and squeezed Lemons, which I drank constantly and awaited the inevitable. Slowly over the next week I began to recover, but was still on my knees. A week later I was feeling so much better, and by the third week I was back to normal. As I said it took eight weeks in total.
Doctors cannot cure a cold or flu so why fill up GP’s waiting rooms, when you can self medicate and actually do some good. Unless of course they are intent on sharing it???
That’s good to hear, Maggie.
There is plenty of evidence for vitamin C. I trust the published scientific evidence and experience of people like Linus Pauling and Andrew Saul over the throwaway second-hand biased comments of an anonymous internet commenter.
http://www.doctoryourself.com
(I’m afraid I don’t believe in astrology though Rhisiart)
It’s not a belief system. More a dataset based on observations over a couple of thousand years.
Many serious astrologers will state they don’t know how or why it works. Just that it does.
Just what John says, JohnB.
Cobblers.
Overall, the evidence to date suggests that regular intakes of vitamin C at doses of at least 200 mg/day do not reduce the incidence of the common cold in the general population, but such intakes might be helpful in people exposed to extreme physical exercise or cold environments and those with marginal vitamin C status, such as the elderly and chronic smokers [83-85]. The use of vitamin C supplements might shorten the duration of the common cold and ameliorate symptom severity in the general population [82,85], possibly due to the anti-histamine effect of high-dose vitamin C [86]. However, taking vitamin C after the onset of cold symptoms does not appear to be beneficial [83]
Overall, the evidence to date suggests that regular intakes of vitamin C at doses of at least 200 mg/day do not reduce the incidence of the common cold in the general population, but such intakes might be helpful in people exposed to extreme physical exercise or cold environments and those with marginal vitamin C status, such as the elderly and chronic smokers [83-85]. The use of vitamin C supplements might shorten the duration of the common cold and ameliorate symptom severity in the general population [82,85], possibly due to the anti-histamine effect of high-dose vitamin C [86]. However, taking vitamin C after the onset of cold symptoms does not appear to be beneficial [83].
— quoting your disinfo twice doesn’t make it any less disinformational.
Phone glitch. But yea, maybe my source ods.od.nih is disinformation as it’s linked to the American government, but so are the “experts” vitamin c fans are quoting as having proved it will cure anything when the truth is it’s good for curing survey and an important vitamin within normal diets.
I’ve just looked up what Pauling has to say: Taking vitamin c shortens the duration of the common cold. It won’t stop you getting one and it won’t have any effect if you already have one. Hardly “plenty of evidence” and before I commented I checked here: https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminC-HealthProfessional/
” throwaway second-hand biased comments of an anonymous internet commenter.”
Snidey tosser.
Pharmacokinetic modeling predicts that even doses as high as 3 g ascorbic acid taken every 4 hours would produce peak plasma concentrations of only 220 micromol/L.
— which is to say that they couldn’t be bothered to actually try the experiment. I wonder why that might be.
Errr, ’cause they’re not idiots trying to squeeze blood out of a stone, they know a blind alley when they see one and they already know that large doses of vitamin C are excreted in the urine, not absorbed in the body.
However, I’m bored with this, if you and your other two vitamin C apostles want to queue up every morning to empty your local supermarket of vitamin C, be my guest, but for fuck’s sake stop nitpicking.
Neither did Michel, Mike – until he actually began checking the evidence. Very Vulcan sort of thing to do, I know; not Earthling’s style at all: believe whatever effing tosh we find most pleasing, is our rule. Anyway, Gauquelin found himself in a bad state of cognitive dissonance, but soldiered on through it, faced the non-dodgeable implications of the data he was compiling, and published – to a slag-storm of epic proportions. His insights have never been discounted – honestly – though.
Similarly, you don’t need to ‘believe’ in astrology. Just – for a typical example – look through JMG’s track record, as he lays it out himself, all the misses as well as all the hits, and see whether your belief begins to waver a smidge. 🙂
‘Astrology is empty superstitious bollocks’ is one of the myth-memes with which our scientism-enslaved modern Westerm society gavages us as we are getting socialised in our first few years. Since propaganda sticks like shit to a blanket, as all who lurk here understand vividly, it isn’t surprising that lots of us buy into these nostra-from-authority without ever examining them seriously. Michel did, and see what happened.
Vitamin C powder mixed with soda crystals and instant coffee. will develop a black and white film. Fairly badly in my experience but it does work.
General advice: ignore Lundiel’s fanatical denialism, listen to Dr. Levy – who actually knows deeply what he’s talking about, both through widespread researching in the peer-reviewed literature-mountain, and from veteran clinical practice of his own – and get in your own self-doctoring supplies – preferably including some liposomal-encapsulated, though it’s more expensive. And leave the know-eff-all, keyboard-jockey naysayers to be hoist with their own fanatic-petards. LOL!
If this epidemic really takes off – and I have no hard opinion about that just yet – big stocks of C, in any form but calcium ascorbate, will likely be a life-saver for you and yours.
PS: Just got my next kilo – sic! – of ascorbic acid today. Lipo coming shortly. Money where – soundly evidence-based – convictions are. 🙂 🙂 🙂
Right! Off into the woods again now, to cut some more standing-dead firewood. (Regular moderate exercise always helps immune-system health too. 🙂 )
The only thing I’m “fanatical” about is hoarders and panic-buyers which you seem determined to encourage. If you believe vitamin C helps you take it, but don’t attack me for pointing out the fact that nothing has been conclusively proven apart from vitamin C’s ability to shorten the life of a cold.
“The Hungarian physiologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi discovered vitamin C only ~200 years later and received the Nobel Prize for it in 1937. Since then, research has been buoyant, and vitamin C has been advocated for almost every condition one can think of. Looking at some of the claims made for it, I get the impression that more charlatans have jumped on the vitamin C band-waggon than the old vehicle can support. In alternative medicine, high-dose IV vitamin C is a popular variation of Lind’s concept, not least for the treatment of cancer.”
There are many cases of vitamin C being peddled as a cure for just about every disease. Hungarian physiologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi discovered vitamin C only ~200 years later and received the Nobel Prize for it in 1937. Since then, research has been buoyant, and vitamin C has been advocated for almost every condition one can think of. Looking at some of the claims made for it, I get the impression that more charlatans have jumped on the vitamin C band-waggon than the old vehicle can support. In alternative medicine, high-dose IV vitamin C is a popular variation of Lind’s concept, not least for the treatment of cancer.se in existence.
You are so angry and defensive you have to resort to attacking me rather than addressing the issues, just saying there’s loads of peer-reviewed evidence doesn’t mean anything. For instance, you mentioned the work of Pauling and when I looked it up and understood there had been no breakthrough, you continued with Levy alone. The same Levy who’s been mentioned in QuackWatch as a co-author of a book by someone who’s been struck off. However, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Oh, hang-on…..”It is interesting to note that Thomas E Levy, who trained as a medical doctor in the 70’s and then qualified as a lawyer in the mid 90’s, states on his CV, which is available to download on his website, that he is currently an Associate Professor at Capital University of Integrative Medicine (CUIM). Turns out that CUIM was founded by a convicted fraudster and closed its operations over five years ago. Furthermore, it was what is known in the industry as a ‘diploma mill’, offering degrees that were not recognised by official educational accrediting bodies. Despite ‘15 years of research’ Dr Levy has not published a single peer-reviewed article on the link between vitamin C and disease.”
Look, carry on taking as much vitamin C as you can, but don’t a) attack people who don’t believe what you’re saying and b) don’t try and convince others to act as you do.
America is full of people who trained as doctors and then looked for ways to accrue as much money as possible by selling something people want.
Have a good day and try and control your anger.
Genuinely open-minded readers might wish, as well as perusing the mountain of peer-reviewed evidence to which Dr. Levy links, to look at Andrew Saul’s website, also peer reviewed hard evidence, about as reliable as you can hope for in real life. Do a search on Andrew’s site for items on VitC:
http://doctoryourself.com/
And now, cue Lundiel to try a hatchet job on Andrew, as with Tom Levy: When you can’t negate the message, attack the messenger! 🙂 🙂 🙂
And get those VitC stores in, for your nearest and dearest as well as yourself; particularly liposomal, which seems to be even more potent than large-dose IVC, because the liposome carries the C, protected and undiminished by digestive processes, to the end-user: the organelles and the general environment inside the containing membrane of individual cells; a sort of medical closely-guided munition, delivering massive anti-oxidant supplies exactly to the dead-centre of the problem.
In case you wondered, I have no pecuniary connection to any business selling C or C-related products. (My only pecuniary interest these days is my state pension; no other money sources whatever.)
And – anecdotal though it is – the fact remains that as I near 80, I’ve had literally zero respiratory illnesses – cold, flu, bronchitis, etc. – for 20+ years, and this state of affairs began only after I started regular supplementation with daily C intake as standard; at least two grams – sic! – a day in divided doses, taken as a maintenance regime, and shoved up to ***at least*** 10 grams a day – sic! – any time I get any of the usual early-warning signs of an impending cold/flu/etc – to which my family are somewhat susceptible, but which depart overnight from me every single time that I use my tried and trusted C-flooding.
Make as much or as little of that as you will, but its a fact.
PS: Any trace whatever of – genuine – evidence of bad side-effects for large-dose C is welcome. I haven’t found anything yet that’s seriously convincing; nor have I ever seen a convincing LD-50 account. There appears to be no known toxic dose. Tom Levy likes to say that it’s actually less lethal than a determined overdose of plain, clean water – which can kill you. He may be right. At all events, in all the time I’ve been using it as an essential dietary supplement – in a species which has lost the ability to manufacture it’s own C internally, due to a genetic glitch – I’ve never, ever felt the slightest problem. I’m not one of those unlucky people who get a slightly upset stomach above a certain dose limit. And even for them, liposomal H-bombs seem not to have any of the tum-rumble, diarrhoea-ish responses that they get from taking the other forms, by mouth. IV doesn’t seem to cause tetchy stomachs either.
Bugger the obsessive nay-sayers! If faced with self-isolation, and no help available from an over-pressed medical system, how are you going to self-medicate? With a vaccine that’s been rushed out without any serious testing at all (with us taking the place of the mice and the guinea pigs), or with a tried and repeatedly-proven remedy with no known serious bad side-effects, that has been ***demonstrated*** to reverse lethal illnesses in patients very near to death?
In my experience (a.k.a. “anecdotal evidence”) Vitamin C megadosing doesn’t so much cure anything as act as a symptom suppressant for–at least–common cold related rhinoviruses and, possibly, if taken early enough, to prevent the development of a cold beyond its initial stages. I have no information, anecdotal or otherwise, of its effect on other rhinovirus induced infections (or not) except the theories of Pauling and his adherents. As for the effect on cold symptoms, they are–for me–definitely real. The cold doesn’t go away, it carries on as it would without any treatment, but with the most unpleasant and debilitating symptoms significantly reduced in intensity, making it much easier to get through unavoidable work, or whatever, between onset and recovery. Stop megadosing the Vitamin C (because the external reasons to take it disappear and the adverse side effects–for me, mild insomnia and slightly upset stomach–thus assume a greater importance) and within a day or so the cold returns with all the expected intensity it would have had at the stage it would have reached had no Vitamin C been taken at all. Not a quack remedy, but a useful quick fix to help with an unavoidable workload, etc.
I have no experience yet of the value of Vitamin C megadosage or otherwise in preventing the escalation of early COVID-19 symptoms or suppressing its terminal pneumonia stage, so I’ll keep my cardboard coffin, emergency supplies of toilet rolls and constipating iron supplements, along with my geriatric’s hospital bed reservation guarantee voucher at the ready for the duration of the pandemic, just in case.
For what? a non-existent mild flu bug?
The problem, and it is a big problem must be addressed in a sensible and adult fashion. I am afraid there are a lot of commentators here who take a rather flippant and childish approach to this very serious subject. From my point of view, I think that if someone has something to say they could propose a sensible argument. We may disagree but at least we enrich each other. To me there are many different strands to this.
1. Is Covid-19 the dreaded pandemic that it is made out to be. To confirm this we have to look at how quickly, over a few weeks ago, a disease never heard of before with a novel agent with a few cases in Wuhan suddenly spread to the whole of China and then elsewhere very quickly with large numbers in Iran, South Korea, Italy and now spreading to other parts of the world. Although it has a relatively low mortality rate estimated at between 1% and 8% and affecting the elderly and vulnerable more than the young. However, there is a rather high rate of case to case transmission and 20% of cases require hospital admissions with 5% need critical care. These figures mean that health care resources are overstretched in a very short period. I hope we can all agree on this, it is facts and not a hoax.
2. Despite the robust presence of solid data we know that social distancing and lockdown works as seen in Wuhan in China and in South Korea and other smaller examples. We know that slow response once the transmission occurs leads to exponential growth of cases and this is well illustrated by Italy and now most of Europe.
3. We know that social distancing in modern society, and what has become known as ‘lockdown’ is an extreme measure and we know that it has huge social and economic costs. We do not know how long it could last to remain effective. We also must agree that it cannot last for very long before the lights come out, so this phase has to be a temporary stop gap. Unfortunately, our incompetent government in UK appear hapless and rather than strongly pro-active are very reactive. They give the impression that they have no clue how to deal with this. A strong proactive programme should include widespread testing, case contact tracing, isolation of contacts and vigorous treatment of early case, or at least more information on those as to how to stop progression, rather than losing all this data by asking people to self-isolate if they have symptoms. We are willfully creating a situation that says: ‘what we do not know does not hurt us’. This phase should also be accompanied by serious support for clini9cap trials of anything that can be tried in situations with a similar clinical picture.
4. Governments and people should stop politicizing this issue and blame China Iran or anybody, this I am afraid also includes those who want to believe that this is a bioweapon. Such careless statements are harmful.
So please can OffGuardian start being serious about Covid-19. I have made serious challenges to admin before but no responses. Your website is valuable, don’t please loose this value by being one sided.
So, keep calm and do what the nice chief science officer tells you to do: without question. Based on the totally verifiable model the nice Imperial College interns made. If in doubt, ask your friendly military policeman. Say goodbye to Granny on Skype.
Your advice seems rational, but just happens to be exactly the same advice coming from Imperial College. Based on the efficacy of testing, and the probability of a suitable vaccine becoming available. With which they will have to vaccinate us all. Then we can return to the rest of our lives …in two years or so. To the ”new normal”. Whatever that will be.
By their own Infection Fatality Ratio – based on the Wuhan outbreak – of 0.9% …ergo: 99.1% will recover even if infected. Their own suppression tactics merely delay the peak infection spike to December. So, any policy implemented is effectively implemented until a vaccine becomes available. Are you prepared to put your life on hold on an uncorroborated model? On the say so of Bojo, Sunak, Whitty, and Vallance? Have you got kids or elederly relatives?
You do not even suppose that this time it is different? By their own admission: it is not that deadly. The claim that it has comparable lethality to the 1918 H1N1 flu is a totally irresponsible lie. That is deliberate fear mongering. Does that not bring into question the rest of the advice: to lockdown the country indefinitely …for at least 18 months? Could they be lying? Could it be the virus is not the main event here?
Well, I’m with the conspiracists and cranks. I think they are without doubt installing fear and uncertainty to protect their inhumane social order. I do not think they even are sparing a thought for the population. They want to hang on to their entitlement and power status: and will go to any length to secure the hierarchy. They are lying to protect themselves: not us.
It is not coincidental that a relatively mild, in historic terms, seasonal coronavirus just happens to align – by design – with market failure. If you want to know why this particular coronavirus is extraordinary – look to the markets and the carnage of value destruction that is ensuing. This virus is a bad case of economic determinism.
I’ve got no advice. I do not know what we can do. But sit around and watch them cover their own fat priviliged arses while we act socially and responsibly cynically seems to be the best advice …that the few can give to preserve the privatised hierarchy of the few.
Yes maybe and maybe it is because they take a rational scientific approach.
I sort of agree with what you are saying, there are too many unknowns but we have to work on what little we know. We know that contagious diseases need containment and that can only be achieved through testing and isolation of cases and contacts. I think the government approach is wrong in just applying social distances without any testing. At least you engaged with a considered reply, thank you. Others have been more flippant. We can disagree but at least we do so sensibly.
That rational scientific approach is as much determined economically as anything else. The government has already put £2bn toward a vaccine (see footnote 3 in Imperial report). And a monster payout awaits the bio-gen firm that can produce the vaccines and testing capabilities. With North America, Western Europe, the UK etc as a captive market …with no natural immunity.
And we can at least begin to imagine what economically determined scientifically rational solutions will be required to maintain the social order. Essentially our lives are captive and on hold (for at least 4-5 months): awaiting the social engineering that the market mechanisms will determine for us in the future. If, and only if, some sort of market stabilisation and equilibrium is (temporally) restored – then we can resume our lives. When they are ready and when they say. Based on estimates of ICU capabilities they determine.
Given the current amount of uncertainty: some might want to ponder whether unequal distribution through market mechanisms is the best way to determine what sort of future we may have?
I’m sure you can easily discern my feelings on the matter? That market state societies make poor decisions on vital social issues – because economic rational choice is pre-determined by ”self-interest utility maximisation” …formally known as greed!
Blanche, it’s the ‘vaccine’ that has me worried. Attempts to produce a SARS vaccine were not ‘crowned’ with success, and a number of primates met a wretched end as exposure to the SARS virus produced a cytokine storm probably caused by the Antibody-Dependent Enhancement phenomenon. I see the tests on vaccines this time have started on human ‘volunteers’ who are cheaper than monkeys. Methinks they probably got shots of sterile water.
On top of all the ones pushing for lockdown to “save lifes” do not care a bit if iranians and venezuelans dye becuse of lack of medical supplies die to the crippling sanctions.
Before the coronaviris thing, we were callinng these people psychopaths and sociopaths…and now what?….did they all of a suddend developed empathy for mankind???…..really???
The neo-liberal capitalist Moloch is moribund, terminally weakened by inequality, unpayable debt, elite avarice and sheer incompetence in a system where one is promoted for Righthink, not intelligence . Its defenders and beneficiaries, and its political stooges, must defend it at all costs, so witness the hysteria of hatred and lying that destroyed Corbyn (along with his cowardice). CoVid19, which is dangerous and nasty, is being used as a casus belli for a social and ideological putsch to do away with even the diaphanous pretense of ‘democracy’.
Are you my MP?
As I said
I quaff a gallon of cow’s urine every morning. I never had a day off work.
There is no social distancing. People are queuing in their cars every morning to panic buy everything in their local supermarket. If there is a contagious virus, they couldn’t do more to try and get it. Meanwhile, in the afternoon, the shops are empty.
I know someone living on a caravan park in Southern Spain. The premises are ‘on lockdown’ but the residents are allowed to leave temporarily to go to the local village for three reasons only: to get groceries and other essential commodities; to go to the bank;…and to go to the hairdressers. I kid you not. That is the last place I would go if social distancing was truly to be taken seriously …and this has the full endorsement of the local authorities.
If they truly wanted to prevent the virus from spreading in old people particularly, they should cancel their bus passes for the foreseeable future. I say this as a bus pass holder who has been sneezed and coughed over many times before.
Nothing they’re doing makes sense.
— it makes a lot more sense once you begin to consider the alleged pandemic as the pretext, rather than the actual problem to be solved.
“I have made serious challenges to admin before but no responses.”
On what ground? This is a discussion board. You have no right to censor people or to call for others to be censored just because you disagree with them.
John
I have never said anywhere that I wanted to censor anyone, that is a strawman. I merely wanted Admin to acknowledge that there are other opinions. As I said
Oh right, you only want to censor people who you consider to be flippant and childish.
specialise in strawmen?
Yes those “other opinions” are dominating the MSM 24/7. You object that OffG dares to voice an alternative view?
I live and work(ed) in Vegas. The crossroads of the world. Since this Covid-19 broke out millions of people from all over the world most of them from China came through. The OFFICIAL count of infected people in Vegas a few days ago was 8!!!!! The curated media here LIES. So you SHOULDNT take them seriously. None of it. ZERO.
Just stick to the science for facts and watch the media and politicians like a hawk to see what fresh hell they visit upon the many to keep the few in their ivory towers.
The socio-economics and geo-politics is more important than whichever event we face. As humans we have faced a few catclysms in our brief half a million years of evolution.
Like natural events such as Katrina, Tsunami, volcanoes, Fukushima or manmade events such as Brexit, GFC1 the current GFC2, rigged polls and mixed natural/manmade events such as air pollution, plastics, chemical poisons, GM – which are always EXPLOITED by the bankers by emotional button pushing scams to grab even more wealth by the tool of Money – with larks such as ER and its nordic goddess figurehead – just follow the money and all msm and social and controlled alt media shills stand out like the naked emperors they are the lackeys of.
Until the Big One – A planet changer – meteorite or supervolcano or major solarflare direct hit don’t let the bastards get away with it!
I think we must distinguish between happenings not planned but exploited from actions planned and exploited. For example I do not think the bankers planned the crash out of 2007-8 but they certainly did exploit it. They were helped by the politicians who bailed them out (possibly sensibly) but failed to then control their folly. Similarly I think this is a real event out of the control of those who run the world and what we must do now is stop them from exploiting it. It is very clear to me that for example neither Trump nor Johnson has a clue how to deal with this sensibly. They act by a series of reactions but without any sort of proper planning for the intermediate and longer term. They have no vision and they are outside their comfort zone. But let us not be blinded by ignoring that this is a real big event.
neither Trump nor Johnson has a clue how to deal with this sensibly.
— Macron, the Rothschild agent, on the other hand…
why bother deporting yellow-jacketed subversives to concentration camps, when you can just lock them up indefinitely in their own homes, and make them pay for the privilege?
Your comment is way too sensible. Look at all the thumbs down. I share your frustration with Off-G. It has now become an unashamed platform for anti-science conspiracy theorists. Very sad.
I take the thumbs down as a badge of honour here.
Serious question, Orage: Do you truly feel that way because you rate this site and its contributors so poorly that you genuinely consider it affirming to receive a negative response to your opinions on this subject (which just happen to conform entirely with the united MSM agenda, and just happen to read like a cut ‘n’ paste from a government information leaflet)? Or are you a troll?
Because your statement would certainly fit both scenarios, if indeed it’s 100% possible to separate these two scenarios, if you truly are posting here in such bad faith.
Thanks for engaging. I only meant the thumbs down on this topic. I have commented on other topics and never got this hostility, some of it extremely childish. If you read my posts carefully you will see that this is not cut and paste from government websites, a false accusation which I hope you either prove or apologise for. I have been critical of the government’s slow reaction and lack of testing for example.
I rate OffGuardian very highly and your cover for many issues, including the war on Syria, Corbyn, and many others very highly indeed that is why I come here. But I think on this occasion the topic has been highjacked by some crackpots.
As I stated above, we must distinguish between the veracity of an event and the reactions by governments that ensues. This is often exploitative but it does not negate that the original occurrence is genuine and genuinely serious.
For example I believe that short term lockdown is a necessity but there were some silly ideas to give the police powers to detain people suspected and forcibly treat them and there are examples from Denmark that appear very authoritarian. But if we indulge in trivialising the disease and the epidemic then the authorities will find ways of neutralising us and making us irrelevant.
No I am not a troll, a very serious accusation by the way and I appreciate that you may not have made it lightly but it is false.
So is it your contention that the MSM is like the door in the riddle that can only tell lies? Preposterous.
Well, I’ve not seen them saying anything factual, in regard to any vital problem or events, for some time.
Same.
Orage,
So let me get this right. You’re suggesting that all these people were in hospital only because they were suffering from, or suspected of suffering from, Covid-19 and for no other reason?
Was it possible that many of the ‘hospital admissions’ were actually people like this one?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8125353/Single-mum-46-battling-coronavirus-describes-horror-symptoms.html
And is it possible that many were people who required hospital admission because of pre-existing conditions not related to Covid-19, but were tested positive for Covid-19 after admission?
And is it possible that most, if not all, of the ‘5% needing critical care’ were there because of their pre-existing condition but happened to test positive for Covid-19?
The point I am making is that cold figures and loose semantics can be misleading and unnecessarily fear-mongering, simply by omission of crucial context to get a true picture.
Good question. I referred to the NEJM paper earlier which has these figures. The diagnosis of an illness is made by looking at the clinical picture and is confirmed by the test for the virus, so that if you looked at a patient in critical care during this outbreak who was there because they had renal failure or because they had a serious operation and they tested positive without showing the other features they would not be classified as being in critical care because they have Covid-19 disease although the would probably soon get into that category because of their other complications.
Bottom line is you would only classify someone if the had the combination of symptoms and are positive for the virus. Thius would all be stated in the paper.
Using exactly the same methodology, if somebody dies of pneumonia or heart failure, and the subsequent autopsy discloses an ingrown toenail, the cause of death can be classed as toenail-related.
It will be objected that there is no evidence that ingrown toenails are a common cause of pneumonia or heart failure. Of course, the same could be said for the alleged virus.
Your attempt at reduction ad absurdum does not work.