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The Coronavirus Is Not the Plague: The Plague Is US

Edward Curtin

“Two categories of propaganda must be distinguished. The first strives to create a permanent disposition in its objects and constantly needs to be reinforced. Its goal is to make the masses ‘available,’ by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination. The second category involves the creation of a sort of temporary impulsiveness in its objects. It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movement are sometimes necessary).”
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus’ great 1947 novel, The Plague, is a warning to us today, but a warning in disguise. When he died sixty years ago at the young age of forty-six, he had already written The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague, and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The outward story of The Plague revolves around a malignant disease that breaks out in a town that is quarantined when the authorities issue a state of emergency. After first denying that they have a problem, the people gradually panic and feel painfully isolated.

Death fear runs rampant, much like today with the coronavirus. The authorities declare martial law as they warn that the situation is dire, people must be careful of associating, especially in groups, and they better obey orders or very many will die. So the town is cordoned off.

Before this happens and the first signs that something is amiss emerge, the citizens of the town of Oran, Algeria remain oblivious, for they “work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich.” Bored by their habits, heavily drugging themselves with drink, and watching many movies to distract themselves, they failed to grasp the significance of “the squelchy roundness of a still-warm body” of the plague-bearing rats that emerge from their underworld to die in their streets.

“It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of their secret humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails.” To them the plague is “unthinkable,” an abstraction, until all their denials are swept aside as the truth emerges from the sewers and their neighbors and families die from the disease.

“Stupidity has a way of getting its way;” the narrator, Dr. Rieux tells us, “as we should see if we were not always so wrapped up in ourselves …. plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

The American people are wrapped up in themselves. Nor do they recognize the true rats. They are easily surprised; fooled would be a better word.

Camus uses a physical plague to disguise his real subject, which is the way people react when they are physically trapped by human rats who demand they obey orders and stay physically and mentally compliant as their freedom is taken from them.

The Plague is an allegorical depiction of the German occupation of France during World War II. Camus had lived through that experience as a member of the French Resistance. He was a writer and editor of the underground Resistance newspaper Combat, and with his artist’s touch he later made The Plague a revelatory read for today, especially for citizens of the United States, the greatest purveyor of the plague of violence in the world.

We are all infected with the soul-destroying evil that our leaders have loosed upon the world, a plague of killing that is now hidden behind the coronavirus fear that is being used to institute tight government controls that many will come to rue in the months ahead, just as happened after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Coronavirus is a perfect cover-story for the occupation of the public’s mind by a propaganda apparatus that has grown even more devious over the past 19 years.

Ask yourself: Where is the news about U.S. military operations in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, etc.? There is none in the corporate mainstream media, and little in the alternative media as well. Have those operations ceased? Of course not. It’s just that the news about them, little that it was, has disappeared.

Now it is all about us and the coronavirus panic. It is about how many of us might die. It is about stocking toilet paper. For the rich, it is about getting to their second or third houses where they can isolate themselves in splendor.

As I write, 150 or so Americans are said to have died of Covid-19, and by the time you will read this the number will have climbed, but the number will be minuscule compared to the number of people in the U.S.A. and those numbers will be full of contradictions that few comprehend unless, rather than reacting in fear, they did some comprehensive research.

But arguments are quite useless in a time of panic when people are consumed with fear and just react.

For we live in plague time, and the plague lives in us. But to most Americans, Covid-19 is the plague, because the government and media have said it is.

Like the inhabitants of Oran, the United States is “peopled with sleep walkers,” pseudo-innocents, who are “chiefly aware of what ruffled the normal tenor of their lives or affected their interests.” That their own government, no matter what political party is in power (both working for “deep-state,” elite interests led by the organized criminals of the CIA), is the disseminator of a world-wide plague of virulent violence, must be denied and divorced from consensus reality.

That these same forces would use the fear of disease to cow the population should be no surprise for those who have come to realize the truth of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the anthrax attacks that followed, both of which were used to justify the endless “wars on terror” that have killed so many around the world.

It is a shock for so many people who can’t countenance the thought that their own government could possibly be implicated in the death of thousands of U.S. citizens and the release of the deadly anthrax, which we know came from a U.S. lab and was carried out by a group of inside government perpetrators.

When it comes to the plague-stricken deaths visited on millions around the world for decades by the American government, this must be denied by diverting attention to partisan presidential politics, and now the coronavirus that engenders fear, loathing, and a child-like tendency to believe Big Brother.

The true plague, the bedrock of a nation continually waging wars through various means – i.e. bombs and economic and medical sanctions, etc. – against the world, disappears from consciousness. As U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albrecht said to 60 Minutes Lesley Stahl in 1996 when Stahl asked her if the U.S. sanctions on Iraq that had resulted in the death of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it: “We think the price is worth it.”

For “decent folks must be allowed to sleep at night,” says the character Tarrou sarcastically; he is a man who has lost his ability to “sleep well” since he witnessed a man’s execution where the “bullets make a hole into which you could thrust your fist.”

He awakens to the realization that he “had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people.” He loses any peace he had and vows to resist the plague in every way he can. “For many years I’ve been ashamed,” he says, “mortally ashamed, of having been, even with the best intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn.”

The rats are dying in the streets. They are our rats, diseased by us. They have emerged from the underworld of a nation plagued by its denial. Unconscious evil bubbles up. We are an infected people. Worry and irritation – “these are not feelings with which to confront plague.”

But we don’t seem ashamed of our complicity in our government’s crimes around the world. For decades we have elected leaders who have killed millions, while business went on as usual. The killing didn’t touch us. As Camus said, “We fornicated and read the papers.”

He knew better. He warned us:

It’s a wearying business being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness.

Yet the fight against the plague must go on. Tarrou puts it thus:

All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, as far possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can’t judge if it’s simple, but I know it’s true.

You see, I’d heard such quantities of arguments, which very nearly turned my head, and turned other people’s heads enough to make them approve of murder; and I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language. So I resolved always to speak – and to act – quite clearly, as this was the only way of setting myself on the right track.

These days, I keep thinking of an incident that occurred when I was a young investigator of sexually transmitted diseases, working for the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare through the Public Health Service as an epidemiologist. My job was to track down sexually transmitted diseases by finding links of sexual contacts.

One day I went to interview and take a blood sample from a poor woman who had been named as a sexual contact. I knocked on her door on the third or fourth floor of a walkup apartment building.

She looked through the peep hole and asked who it was and I told her my name and what government agency I represented. I could tell she was very wary, but she opened the door. She stood there naked, a very heavy woman of perhaps 300 pounds. She nonchalantly welcomed me in and I followed her as she padded down the hall where she took a housecoat off a hook and put it on.

There is, as you know, an old tale by Hans Christian Anderson called “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Although the emperor parades around naked, the adults make believe he is clothed. Only a child sees the obvious. I was a 23-years-old naïve young man at the time of this unforgettable incident, but it echoes in my mind as a reminder to myself that perhaps that woman was unconsciously teaching me a lesson in disguise.

The year was 1967, and when I went out to get into my government car with federal license plates, a white man in a white shirt in a white car in a poor black neighborhood, a hail of bricks rained down toward me and the car from the roof opposite. I quickly jumped in and fled as the ghettos were exploding. Soon the National Guard would be called out to occupy them.

Intuition tells me that although the emperor has no clothes and a vast PSYOPS occupation is now underway, too many are too grown-up to see it.

It’s an old story continually updated. Like The Plague.

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mcdonagh4
mcdonagh4
Mar 29, 2020 2:45 PM

This article accepts that Coronavirus is a plague. When it clearly is just an viral pneumonia epidemic now subsiding . Mortality rates are in act very low . The lessons of Camus are inappropriate here . The lessons of the 9/11 and WMD apply better .

paul
paul
Mar 24, 2020 6:16 PM

Russia, China and sanctioned little Cuba are spearheading the efforts to deal with global CV outbreaks.
What are other countries doing?
Poland banned Russian relief flights taking medical teams and medical supplies to Italy.
The Czechs seized Chinese relief supplies to Italy that were in transit through their country.
F*** the Poles. F*** the Czechs. F*** the EU.
Does anyone still doubt we are lucky to be out of this loathsome organisation? Seriously??

What has been the reaction of the Orange POS in the White House?
More sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China, Cuba.
Burning through $11 trillion in a futile attempt to prop up the stock market.
Letting all the political elite bail out of the stock market in a neat bit of insider trading.

JudyJ
JudyJ
Mar 24, 2020 11:47 PM
Reply to  paul
paul
paul
Mar 25, 2020 12:18 AM
Reply to  JudyJ

Yep, if those German satraps hand over the vaccine to US big pharma, it’s bonanza bonuses all round again.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Mar 25, 2020 6:31 AM
Reply to  paul

The idea of merging those two Jewish redoubts, the Federal Reserve and the ‘US’ Treasury, is sheer genius.

mcdonagh4
mcdonagh4
Mar 29, 2020 2:49 PM
Reply to  paul

“Never let a good crisis go to waste” . A rule applied rigorously by all governments/elites when they feel the need to concentrate their power over the masses .

Doctortrinate
Doctortrinate
Mar 23, 2020 10:51 PM

Intuition tells me that although the emperor has no clothes and a vast PSYOPS occupation is now underway, too many are too grown-up to see it.

Thanks.

and Heads Up…everyone at home…using lots of Water ? – is it Tap Water..not meaning the (good) medicinal Plague type..more what could be, a contaminated other, perhaps.

How the British Government subjected thousands of people to chemical and biological warfare trials during Cold War

During the Cold War, the British Government used the general public as unwitting biological and chemical warfare guinea pigs on a much greater scale than previously thought, according to new historical research.
In more than 750 secret operations, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Britons were subjected to ‘mock’ biological and chemical warfare attacks launched from aircraft, ships and road vehicles.

Doctortrinate
Doctortrinate
Mar 23, 2020 10:53 PM
Reply to  Doctortrinate

link to the above:

Dave Lawton
Dave Lawton
Mar 23, 2020 11:15 PM
Reply to  Doctortrinate

Yes in the 1950`s I was serving in RN.They Porton Down offered us two weeks free leave if we volunteered to test a treatment for the common cold,Something told me not to volunteer.

Doctortrinate
Doctortrinate
Mar 23, 2020 11:57 PM
Reply to  Dave Lawton

Porton Down – most likely engineering a new strain – Dave…and can imagine they had little problem finding test subjects (two weeks leave)…though I’d prefer to be wrong.

JohnB
JohnB
Mar 24, 2020 11:05 AM
Reply to  Dave Lawton

Yep, remember my dad talking about this. I think, but may be wrong, that the offer was open to civilians too.

Doctortrinate
Doctortrinate
Mar 23, 2020 8:26 PM

Flies are drawn to faeces….they cant help themselves, the scent is too attractive to ignore, they breed on it, feed on it..are reliant on it – Humans do the same thing, theres no good reason for it, were just “told” it was best for them – better than anything they alone could make….and so they came to crave it , live for it, corrupt piles of it, and when the quality was weakened, they’d swarm together in bellyache, for a new supplier was needed….But, how long could that go on, what happened when their consumption wasn’t necessary, had reached unprofitable highs – and became infectious to the next level of germination…the new sh:t “Machine” wouldn’t need them….So, what did they do ?

BigB
BigB
Mar 23, 2020 7:39 PM

Might be a good time to remind ourselves of this:

”How can you establish if someone has developed automatic deference to authority? By checking to see if they’ll follow stupid orders. Function one achieved.” John Tayor Gatto

The six purposes of schooling:

1. adjustive function – establish fixed habits of reaction to authority.
2. integrating (conformity) function – develop like-mindedness, unity in thoughts and habits.
3. directive function – label children to mark them in the class structure.
4. differentiating function – divide and conquer strategy to immobilize the social structure.
5. selective function – preservation of the ‘favored’ races – tag the unfit.
6. Propaedeutic function – grooming of those in higher classes to manage the lower classes.

Principles of Secondary Education Inglis, Alexander James, 1879-1924

Awaiting the big announcement from our glorious leader at 20:30 …to see how Function One is to be achieved. 🙁

MASTER OF UNIVE
MASTER OF UNIVE
Mar 24, 2020 12:42 AM
Reply to  BigB

FICO scores? Maoist social engineering points system based upon reinforcement whether negative or positive? Fixed & variable reinforcement?

Ken Lay & Jeffrey Skilling like the fixed/variable ratio behavioural control, frankly. What we do know is that whatever mode of reinforcement the man chooses will be based upon Operant Behavioural Conditioning much like old B.F. Skinner utilized to model behaviour in pigeons. A Skinner Box of an Internet of Things based upon 5-g tech & Experimental Psychological control.

China is way ahead on the infrastructure.

MOU

Tim Jenkins
Tim Jenkins
Mar 25, 2020 10:51 PM
Reply to  BigB

“… establish fixed habits of reaction to authority.”

RLF >>> run like fuk, to wild terrain, living with bees, bears, vultures & wolves,
your safest & best option 🙂 (instincts, especially valuable when instilled young),
no question there … head for the hills or mountains.
And hold fort, by whatever means, without provoking unnecessarily.
Leave well alone any authority figures … 🙂
& just survive with the nature, that provides everything.

And having made decades of planning in this direction, with mountain gravity fed water supply and a small pump for extra pressure (as hobby, OTGrid), I find myself feeling obligated to help my wife’s brother, in a sticky situation in a city, with personnel problems & credits (against which I naturally warned him): at present within full police & military Lockdown, I can escape if need be: but heyho, at least he has a small cool warehouse with too few competent transport & warehousing personnel, so we ain’t gonna’ starve, immediately and the products from our garden in the mountains will certainly become vital, by next Christmas.

BigB: We both know this is not gonna’ turnout pretty, now the ‘Reset’ button has been irrevocably pushed. Far worse is surely now guaranteed, immediately, this year . . . when people comprehend that this time around there should be no “Socialism for the Rich” (Stiglitz) or expansion of the M.I.C. that rules still, with further austerity & central bank govern-mental lending with quantitative easing, thus, I’m just wondering about Tim Geithner’s new bout of “Palpable Fear” over this virus thingy. 😉

Looking on the bright side, I never reckoned with a pension anyway &
always thought like The WHO ? Hope I die before I get old … coz’ I can see for miles & miles ahead & I won’t get fooled again by punch-drunk-blind pinball wizards of derivative investment upstream/downstream bollocks 😉 and Keith Moon-shine antics, like parking a Rolls in the swimming pool of scientific entropy & any humanity …
whilst innocents are suffering & murdered for the Mic.
What people lost … ?
Is their soul ! The worst is yet to come, as
logic dictates. And those in control are not thinking logically, ever,
due to corrupted Data. Like, VW programmers & their CEOs.
As VW has ceased production of all vehicles globally,
Vultures & Wolves roam wild, freely in Virgin Wilderness, crossing borders wilfully
(trade marked territory), lol, back in 2010, when Branson’s IP Lawyer, Mark James, was threatening me with the UK High Courts. ‘Fortunately’, fully expecting such antics, the name was registered in Bg. first, (the day before I registered the name in the UK), so, European courts take the ‘biscuit’, in terms of precedence, should the Virgin Group ever wish to discuss, legally & publicly … I do hope Branson suffers, ‘bigly’, for not listening to my ideas.
🙂 Sod’em & go more, ahhhh 🙂 >>> Scream with me >>> “Kids, wake up …”
***Just Get Wild*** 😉 Listen Llareggub dub
According to Odhams Dictionary (1946) a ‘Bugger’ is primarily first & foremost,
1) ‘A Bulgarian Heretic’
(Well bugger me, do you need any further clarifications ? ) 🙂
What do you want, weather wise ? Snow, Ice, Hail or the holy grail, as Eric & Ernie would sing >>> “Bring me sunshine …” no problem, BigB, let me know when & where you want it to rein/reign/rain finally, what with corporate TNC backed regime change & market forces, with weather derivatives… what could possibly go wrong, further than any virus ? 😉
like… no water ?
That’s control. !!
Must dash 4now, could say more on electronic matters,
but what with Quantum Random Encryption waiting in the wings of a Photon Internet,
my brain is becoming legally taxed …
must sleep some, no surprises really,
in the absence of law & any accountable jurisdiction 🙂
Anarchy rules, logically 😉

Hope all is well your end.
Best wishes,
Tim

A. Scott Buch
A. Scott Buch
Mar 23, 2020 7:15 PM

The fight must go on. It crosses generational boundaries. Sometimes it even seems to cross the boundaries of time. So many have died in the course of fighting this most essential of battles. So many it becomes clear, that the people of this earth will never stop fighting, even if that means to die trying in countless iterations throughout the multiverse of eternity.

MASTER OF UNIVE
MASTER OF UNIVE
Mar 24, 2020 12:54 AM
Reply to  A. Scott Buch

Billionaires & their creditors only understand asset inflation. Let the Second Law of Thermodynamics do all the fighting against the billionaires & their over-inflated corporations. Give them the rope/Entropy to hang themselves in the public square for spectacle.

Wealth extraction via vulture capitalist corporate parasites is priceless until it ain’t.

Welcome to the New World Disorder where there is no more wealth to extract until BIG Pharmacology finds a vaccine to renew irrational exuberance lost as Atlas got mugged.

MOU

Yana Porter
Yana Porter
Mar 23, 2020 6:50 PM

Thank you for this piece. I think it one of the most lucid and grounded I have read. It is as if you pulled the words from my own heart…

George Mc
George Mc
Mar 23, 2020 6:42 PM

Odd announcement on the news:

“Life should not seem normal for anyone right now and if it does, there’s something wrong”.

Now there’s a real bit of mind fuckery!

JudyJ
JudyJ
Mar 23, 2020 8:01 PM
Reply to  George Mc

Goerge

Must be something wrong with me then! I live on my own; am retired (only just 😀 !); find enough activities to do at home, happy with my own company …and that of my dog of course; have no immediate family to worry about and to worry about me; go to the supermarket or local shop at most twice a week; am not in any ‘at risk’ bracket and am fit and well (fingers crossed). I am extremely lucky and very much in the minority I know. I am aware and empathetic enough though to understand the impact all this is having on other people’s lives and I feel obliged at every opportunity to fight against it for their sakes.

So presumably the Govt are dreaming up ways they can disrupt my life as well just so there enforced suffering is leaving no stone unturned. Apart from the threat of grocery shortages (and it’s worrying how many food shops are deciding to close up for the time being) the only step they can take of significance to affect me is to prohibit me from going out walking on my own or with my dog. I suspect the time will come sooner rather than later. Beyond that, will they say at some point that dogs can be carriers and need to be culled? Nothing would surprise me and they must have considered and sought scientific advice on that possibility. But I think that would definitely lead to riots on the streets.

Gezzah Potts
Gezzah Potts
Mar 24, 2020 7:54 AM
Reply to  George Mc

Jesus wept… Are we all in A Clockwork Orange?

Tim Jenkins
Tim Jenkins
Mar 26, 2020 12:17 AM
Reply to  Gezzah Potts

Owned by Terry’s ?

Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
Mar 23, 2020 6:19 PM

Apparently, Boris Johnson is considering telling all shops not selling food or other ‘essentials’ to shut up shop.

That being the case, he must also ban all supermarkets from selling anything that the forcibly closed shops sell, because otherwise he is taking from the small and giving to the big. If he refuses to do that, then the supermarkets must pay solidarity payments to every small shop Johnson forces to close and, if they refuse to do so, all the management of those supermarkets go to prison for 20 years without trial, nor right of appeal. There cannot be a single discussion of allowing the supermarkets to take control of all retailing. Not even a discussion about it.

Boris Johnson needs to be in no doubt that if he is seen to be giving the big supermarkets a free ride and ensuring their increase in market share due to Coronavirus, he must be thrown under a bus. Not figuratively, literally. Supermarkets are NOT our saviours, they are cartels of rentiers extracting super-profits. Always have been, always will be. They must be treated exactly the same as small businesses.

Their food is exorbitantly expensive and I have proved, all over the country, over 20 years and more, that you can feed yourself for a month buying from local markets, butchers and fishmongers just using the money you have to spend in one week in the major supermarkets. They are profiteering rentiers who squeeze all their suppliers to the bone. This is an opportunity to reorganise in the other direction……..and with large sections of society suffering huge losses in income, I do not see supermarkets being the retail outlet of choice for increasing numbers of people……

Mike Ellwood
Mike Ellwood
Mar 23, 2020 9:46 PM
Reply to  Rhys Jaggar

hmm…if your town (or village) is lucky enough to have a butcher or fishmonger. Mine doesn’t, so supermarkets are the only option for meat or fish. There is a market once a week with a limited range of fruit, veg and some other foodstuffs, that is effectively sold out by the middle of the day, and a farmer’s market once month which is definitely not cheap (although I will grant that you get a better choice of meat than at the supermarkets.

michaelk
michaelk
Mar 23, 2020 4:51 PM

There is, thankfully, a far less emotional and… ‘ideological’ way of examining what’s really happening in relation to this ghastly virus and the dire situation civilisation finds itself in. Things are… bad enough without grasping at the poisoned nettles of rampant conspiracy theories. There’s enough real horror to go round already. This article shows something of what we’re up against and how difficult, unless we act promptly, with sense and resolution, things could be.

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

Alan Tench
Alan Tench
Mar 23, 2020 5:02 PM
Reply to  michaelk

I glanced through the article and came across this: “If we do nothing: Everybody gets infected, the healthcare system gets overwhelmed, the mortality explodes, and ~10 million people die” Utter bollocks! I stopped reading it at that point.

Ben
Ben
Mar 23, 2020 8:34 PM
Reply to  Alan Tench

You know what. Even that number doesn’t warrant what they doing.

John Pretty
John Pretty
Mar 23, 2020 6:37 PM
Reply to  michaelk

Well, I prefer facts to fear porn. This is more standard fearmongering. I’m not impressed.

And my writing here is neither an endorsement of any article, or a signal of agreement with what anyone else here says, but I believe in free speech.

The facts about coronavirus (from the nhs) are that it generally causes mild symptoms characterised by a raised temperature and a dry cough. There are other possible, but not guaranteed symptoms, but you are advised not to contact your doctor.

Much has been made of the likelihood that nobody has immunity to this virus. SO WHAT. You don’t have immunity to any virus that makes you feel ill. If you did they wouldn’t make you feel unwell. This includes the coronaviruses and rhinoviruses that cause the common cold. Your body’s immune response will give you immunity once it has fought off the infection. Which, in all probability – if you even get it – your body will.

This is not a particularly dangerous virus. The rabies virus is 100% fatal if a person bitten by a rabid animal is not treated right away. Ebola kills around 50% of people that get it. What is the death rate of this? Estimated from 0.3% in Germany to 8% in Italy. Looks as though it must like Germans!

This may sound controversial, but I am not even sure that coronavirus has killed anyone.

It may have helped to dispatch some elderly people who were already very sick (as elderly people often are) and very poorly individuals who were younger. But nobody on it’s own. And to my knowledge no children.

I could go on and on, but people are not listening to sense over this at the moment.

Watt
Watt
Mar 23, 2020 10:42 PM
Reply to  John Pretty

This bug is nothing more than regular winter flu(albeit different from the last, which is in itself normal), with ice and a slice. What is different is that a global pandemic of fear and panic has spread like wildfire, rendering 90% or so of people either unwilling or unable(due to social lockdown) to righteously protest against these draconian measures. It is only online at such blogs as this here that voices of sanity are to be heard.

Watt

John Ervin
John Ervin
Mar 24, 2020 9:39 PM
Reply to  John Pretty

No children. Few below 70.

Seem to be clues.

clickkid
clickkid
Mar 23, 2020 3:41 PM

Thanks to Edward Curtin for another great article. I love Camus’ work

Yes – the biggest financial bubble of all time needs the biggest psyop of all time to try and effect a controlled demolition of the debt towers, and to build the structures of oppression to control the outrage of the scammed populations.

It won’t work – the real world is too complicated and too full of unintended consequences.

Just today the guy from the Robert Koch Institute in Germany reiterated that anybody who dies and is subsequently ‘tested positive’ for covid-19 is automatically counted as having died from covid-19. Angelo Borralli, the head of the Italian civil Protection organization, said the same on Saturday.

All the world’s a stage.

John Ervin
John Ervin
Mar 23, 2020 5:50 PM
Reply to  clickkid

I guess that rationale is presented to total mind-controlled patsies. They count them as victims. This “science” is what we’re up against.

Francis Lee
Francis Lee
Mar 23, 2020 3:29 PM

”The American people are wrapped up in themselves.”

They surely are, but the really disturbing thing is the brute learned ignorance of what ought to be a leadership class and an abject denial of reason which is all pervasive; this particular stratum inhabit a winner takes all political, social and cultural universe but the have sold the pass and betrayed the trust of the people they are supposed to represent. Trahison Des Clercs is about right. Ayn Rand is perhaps the doyenne of this reactionary nihilism which must eventuate in a cultural collapse. This is not new however, since,

” … the lack of judgement in matters of domestic and foreign policy is more shocking in the case of educated people and of people who are successfully active in non-political forms of life than it is with more uneducated people in more humble stations… information is plentiful and available. But this does not seem to make any difference … without the initiative which comes from immediate responsibility ignorance will persist in the face of masses of information however complete and correct.

” … Thus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He analyses and argues in a way which he would readily recognise as infantile within the sphere of his own interests. He becomes a primitive again. His thinking becomes associative and affective.” (J.A.Schumpeter – Two Concepts of Democracy.)

Unquestionably we are far along the axis of terminal decline, but this is nothing new.

The six stages of the decline of empires are adumbrated by Sir John Bagot Glubb (British soldier and historian. better known as Glubb Pasha, who wrote about the collapsed empires of the past. In his late 19th century book The Fate of Empires and the Search for Survival, he described a common pattern fitting the history of some fallen empires. They went through a cycle of stages as they started, expanded, matured, declined and collapsed.

These stages were as follows:

1. The age of outburst (or pioneers).
2. The age of conquests.
3. The age of commerce.
4. The age of affluence.
5. The age of intellect.
6. The age of decadence.
7. The age of decline and collapse.

This makes uncomfortable reading and I would offer the view that we are somewhere between stage 6 and stage 7.

John Ervin
John Ervin
Mar 23, 2020 5:56 PM
Reply to  Francis Lee

Such empires seem to have expiration dates that grow shorter and shorter. This one went from 1 to 6+ in blazing record time, maybe because it leap-frogged #5.

MASTER OF UNIVE
MASTER OF UNIVE
Mar 24, 2020 1:00 AM
Reply to  Francis Lee

The Greeks nailed it with Acropolis, Metropolis, Necropolis.

Creative Destruction has been around for millennia.

MOU

paul
paul
Mar 24, 2020 6:27 PM
Reply to  Francis Lee

There are several characteristics of an empire on the verge of collapse.

– A vast bloated, out of control military establishment, that is at the same time very inefficient and no longer effective.
– Blatantly inadequate and dysfunctional leadership at the highest levels.
– The debasement of the currency.
– A huge gulf between rich and poor, with blatant flaunting of wealth.
– Excess and spectacle of all kinds.
– Complete and open degeneracy in personal and sexual behaviour.
– Decline of standards in every respect.

Alan Tench
Alan Tench
Mar 23, 2020 3:02 PM

Sorry, this IS the plague. Tim Stanley in The Telegraph (paywall) says it is, so who ware we to argue:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/23/wrong-isnt-war-plague/

Alan Tench
Alan Tench
Mar 23, 2020 3:05 PM
Reply to  Alan Tench

BTW, read the article if you can – because he’s right ….

Seamus Padraig
Seamus Padraig
Mar 23, 2020 2:56 PM

COVID-19 is just another flu; the real plague is the banksters. It looks like the Fed is getting ready for the mother of all corporate bailouts: https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/welcome-to-sweatshop-amerika-the-next-bailout-will-be-our-last/

#CoronaHoax

Sgt Oddball
Sgt Oddball
Mar 23, 2020 5:25 PM
Reply to  Seamus Padraig
Steve Hayes
Steve Hayes
Mar 23, 2020 2:54 PM

Presenting Albert Camus as a hero, an fighter against oppression and the lies of the powerful, is ironic to say the least. Camus was a sexist, racist, imperialist, as can be seen from a reading of “The Stranger”.

clickkid
clickkid
Mar 23, 2020 3:29 PM
Reply to  Steve Hayes

I am sure he was an anti-vaxxer and a climate-change denier too.

There weren’t many recipes for vegan meals in L’Etranger either.

Sgt Oddball
Sgt Oddball
Mar 23, 2020 5:26 PM
Reply to  Steve Hayes

…was he a putin-bot-neo-nazi too?…

– enquring minds, an’ all that.

😉

Charlotte Russe
Charlotte Russe
Mar 23, 2020 2:47 PM

A plague causing delirium has been infesting Americans for numerous decades. Most are so used to its presence they don’t even notice its effects. They do on occasion sense a heaviness and sluggishness lingering in the air, and if it overwhelms them with sadness an anodyne is merely just a few steps away. The glumness and periodic surliness is a dietary issue resulting from the overconsumption of announcements, but NO real news. Warnings, alarms, uncertainties– the phobias are endless the results are stupefying. Oh yes, did I mention that’s the other side effect of this plague–mass stupidity. It should be noted, this particular disease is manufactured by a group of demented sadists deriving schadenfreude whenever they infest the air with a bit more misery. You can almost visualize the coterie of mad scientists housed in an undercover lab laughing deliriously at the brand-new scheme guaranteed to stupefy and terrorize the unprepared and the naive.

One of the original mad scientists was, Edward Bernays, who turned public relations into weaponized propaganda. If you can sell the public overpriced breakfast cereal comprised of non-nutritious sugar-flakes, why can’t you sell them a world war or a panic pandemic….

“Modern means of communication—the power afforded by print, telephone, wireless and so forth, of rapidly putting through directive strategic or technical conceptions to a great number of cooperating centers, of getting quick replies and effective discussion—have opened up a new world of political processes. Ideas and phrases can now be given an effectiveness greater than the effectiveness of any personality and stronger than any sectional interest. The common design can be documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal. It can be elaborated and developed steadily and widely without personal, local and sectional misunderstanding.” HG Wells

By the way, the “only” panacea for this specific malady is “knowledge,” but it must be obtained from independent research and not from mind-boggling announcements…….

Propaganda by Edward Bernays (1928)

John Ervin
John Ervin
Mar 23, 2020 6:36 PM

I just read the other day the bio of HG Wells, and that he requested his epitaph to be cut in lasting stone: “I told you so, you damned fools.”

Chesterton, his debating nemesis in the beginning days of BBC “wireless”, said of Wells that he was “a good man gone bad”.

I don’t know enough of the whole history, or their backstory, to quite grasp what GKC meant, and whose appraisal I greatly value on many other things.

I read recently that Wells attended GKC’s funeral in ’36 and was heard to say something like “perhaps my one best hope of getting into Heaven is the prayers he’s now saying for me.”

It sounded touching, but you would have to know just how he delivered that line!

I do know that I saw Wells just recently on a list of 33rd° Freemasons, and I wouldn’t trust any of that club farther than I can hurl my piano.

By the way, the key banking figures in charge of the Vatican banks, and who nearly collapsed Banco Vaticano and Banco Ambrosiano about 40 years ago were both high-ranking Masons of the P2 Lodge in Italy, since “disbanded” as merely “pseudo-masonic” rather conveniently, the damage was done (Berlusconi was a member): Roberto Calvi and his apparent handler Licio Gelli. Calvin was murdered in ’82 as a “staged suicide” (as was my own father, by the way, also in ’82, come to think of it, and a highly connected Freemason) found hanging from Blackfriars (Dominicans, O.P.) Bridge in London. It took Italian courts over 30 years to call it a homicide.

Gelli, long prosecuted in said courts, was asked in an Italian radio interview what he then really wanted to be, and he answered coolly, “Puppet master.”

At the end of the day Wells was so gifted, and with so much to say. What you cite is intense. With all the caveats about him, I need to learn a lot more about the Invisible Man (sorry, I can’t help but picture an invisible Claude Raines cackling now, in bandages).

Intrigued and fascinated, because GKC quoted him, “It’s not much worth thinking about a thing unless you’re willing to think it all the way through.”

Splendid verity.

Are you listening, USAmerica, virologists, and Western leaders?!

We wonder.

Charlotte Ruse
Charlotte Ruse
Mar 23, 2020 7:46 PM
Reply to  John Ervin

At the end of the day, it matters little if Well’s was a Free Mason or not. What counts are his insightful observations about the insidious ruling class.

MASTER OF UNIVE
MASTER OF UNIVE
Mar 24, 2020 1:10 AM
Reply to  John Ervin

“A good man gone bad.” signifies defiance to norms held sacred. When one talks of the soul of a man it is judgemental at best. To assert that a man has gone bad is to assert that that man has lost morality or ethics.

MOU

michaelk
michaelk
Mar 23, 2020 2:08 PM

I’m not keen on the article at all. I think it makes great flights of ‘fancy’ based on nothing very much. This is easy to do as this virus is so new and we really know so little about what’s happening and the statistics are not solid at this stage, that wild rumours and hysterical conspiracy theories flourish in this atmosphere.

It’s somewhat ‘ironic’ or ‘grotesque’ that many of the same people who criticise the infamous ‘they’ and ‘them’ the media and shadowy forces of the the Deep State, are themselves guilty of reacting in a similiar fashion, only in the opposite direction!

Ken Garoo
Ken Garoo
Mar 23, 2020 1:57 PM

An informative video on COVID-19 from Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a German pulmonologist who ran a regional medical department.

How Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg sees the current Corona pandemic…

Watt
Watt
Mar 23, 2020 10:49 PM
Reply to  Ken Garoo

Informative, yes. I found it compelling. A few of his words were omitted from the subtitles, but he has a mischievous, deadpan sense of humour.

amused
amused
Mar 23, 2020 1:35 PM

How to fight COVID-19?

“US steps up maritime provocations .. Since late January, US warships have travelled within 12 nautical miles of the South China Sea islands in Chinese territory five separate times. Three instances happened close to one another on March 10, 13, and 15.”

Reported only in Chinese press: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1183384.shtml

Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
Mar 23, 2020 1:15 PM

How many people have even heard of the Swine Flu epidemic in China and Vietnam in 2019?

How many people think it was a bioweapon release that triggered it?

if that is US trade war tactics, then people need to get real about the USA.

Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
Mar 23, 2020 12:58 PM

It is clear that Bill Gates is angling for forcible vaccination of every world citizen with him being paid billions to vaccinate them with absolutely no come back if his vaccines kill anyone.

If that is to happen, the first people to injected with any of his experimental vaccines must be his children and grandchildren.

No ifs, no buts: every single vaccine he wants to market has to go through his children first. As patient numbers 1 – however many issue he has in the very first clinical trial of every vaccine. No other guinea pigs before his issue, please.

We will soon see how safe his vaccines are, because if they are not safe, he will not inject his children, will he??

Watt
Watt
Mar 23, 2020 11:03 PM
Reply to  Rhys Jaggar

Well, yes and no. I agree totally with your sentiments, yet…

Perhaps a more circumspect approach might be a pre-emtive legal strike on the basis of, why should we be forced to accept into our very lifeblood, some chemical agent which the ‘perp’ has sought, and been granted, ‘immunity’ against legal action being taken in the event of all and any deletrious effects of said vaccine. Somewhat suspicious, if not alarming, I say.

cheers!

Watt

BigB
BigB
Mar 23, 2020 12:55 PM

On the basis that there is nothing left to lose: ”the plague” is the language. The way we structure and determine knowledge; is the way we structure and determine experience; is the way we structure and determine reality. Which is culturally determined – over time – externalised, objectivised, and internalised as an institutionalised ”objective realism”. Only, how can a reality that places humanity outside of itself make the truth-claim of being ‘real’?

No one gets the significance: because our thinking is heuristic – relying on unchallenged, unexamined rules-of-thumb – that are culturally accepted as ‘true’ and ‘real’ – to the point they are taken for granted and given sacrosanct and law-like status. As the formalised structural determinism of the language.

Which is the unconscious, collective, structural determinism of a consensus discursive reality: which is pre-determined to be authoritarian; technocratic (scientific, objective realism); hierarchical (biological taxonomical determination of ‘classes’); deontological (rule-bound, law-like structural determinism of cause and effect); moralistic (”strict-father” Oedipal paternalism); truth essentialist (singular ”God’s Eye” overview); and ahistorically eternal.

So how is the view from inside an assumed eternal and infinite dualism looking today?

It takes a long time to uncover the hidden totalitatianism in the formalised logical and structural determinism of social reality. Which is why no one bothers. If no one bothers…

…If you want to see the true nature of the plague-carrying ”patient zero” of the Western Ontological Realism Discourse (WORD): we are on 24 hours notice of it being brought into full effect.

Which makes it very frustrating to anyone that sent out the warning. No, not me. We have been on a 2,500 year notice of the impending lockdown of sanity …with the buddhic discourse. Of which the Marxian discourse, in many ways, is a later iteration.

As soon as you ‘split’ experience into two antisymmetric domains (with different spatio-temporal qualites; properties; and attributes): and substantiate (reify with essentialist metaphysics) them into two individuated ontological ‘realities’ (subject/object; self/other) …it was always going to degenerate into this shitshow of absolutised, eternalised dumbfuckerry. Always, always, always.

So long as we uphold the naive Folk Realism of a separate, external, outside ‘real’ world of ”Covidiocy” …there will always be semantic dictators ordering that ‘reality’ from the outside. Because they have a bigger truth-claim over that realism. Even when their metaphysical truth-claims are patently bollocks …we will still be on lockdown tonight. And for a very long time to come.

If anyone else wants to join me in trying to change the way we describe and organise our systemic ‘realism’ …I can only point you in the direction of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. The ”Biology of Love” and ”The Embodied Mind” are good introductions. For a thorough challenge to the Western Ontological Realist Discourse (WORD) – exposing just why it is essentially unknowable and disembodied, from the POV of cognitive linguistics – there is still ”Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson. It looks like we will have a lot of time for reading.

As an insight: this ongoing semantic dictatorship is absolutely predicated on the fact that words correspond to reality ”out there”. That one-to-one correspondence is the sole source of meaning and humanity. Words are ontologically ‘real’. Only, how does that work if they have only metaphoric status? What becomes of ‘objective’ reality then? Can we reclaim a new form of realism that is not located ”out there” with only metaphors, figurative conceptions, and conceptual blending? What would the poem of a processual realism sound like?

There are not two realms. There are not two cultures. Humanity is essentially and metaphysically schizophrenic. There is only a continuum of unity of ongoing active experiencing. The cognitive openness of which is closed; categorised; ordered into classes; organised into hierarchies; institutionalised; reified as ‘objectively real’; and effectively eternalised as an absolutist, scientific, objective, singularity of Truth …which only occurs – and can only occur – in strict, formalised, structurally deterministic language.

Perfect for semantic dictators; with privileged, initiated access; privileged law-like linguistic practices; and final vocabularies that tell us how it really is. And how it is going to be from now on. For the next two years.

Well: this is the nadir of that lexicalised order. So, how is the obedience determinism of the WORD looking today? Like a shitshow of eternalised dumbfuckerry? If we ever get the chance: we have to re-order the language from the inside. I’ve given as many pointers as I can. But no one can order anothers realism for them. But that’s the nature of the plague of determinism that is on us. With its rotting metaphysical concepts and decaying dead metaphoric structures taking over the streets. That institutional hierarchy comes only from self and external object organisational orderings.

There will be plenty of time to reconsider or sociological structural determinism of reality. Whether there will be a chance to implement a new humanist order – where people matter as a primary consideration …we’ll have to wait and see.

Metta and shanti to you all.

Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
Mar 23, 2020 12:50 PM

The Pirbright Institute in Woking, UK has been issued with a number of patents pertaining to a variety of disease virusees, including coronavirus, Foot and Mouth Disease Virus and African Swine Flu Virus.

https://patents.justia.com/assignee/the-pirbright-institute

These are mostly around making certain strains less virulent for the purposes of generating vaccines, but they also cover ‘increasing the tissue tropism of Infectious Bronchitis Virus’. which is basically saying that you make a virus capable of infecting more types of cells rather than less, thereby increasing the chances of virulence in some way or other.

Reading through the descriptions of these patents, it is absolutely clear that all the necessary technology pertaining to weaponisation-, vaccine production etc etc of these families of viruses have been in hand for several years.

So my personal view is that if you wanted to interview relevant experts on Coronavirus in the UK, try the Pirbright Institute, not the Chief Medical Officer.

Harry Stotle
Harry Stotle
Mar 23, 2020 12:10 PM

Lovely post, Ed – thanks.

As Camus might have said to Off-G readers – “But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.” ― Albert Camus, The Plague

John Ervin
John Ervin
Mar 24, 2020 9:50 PM
Reply to  Harry Stotle

My favorite Camus, comme l’humaniste, quote: “Do not walk behind me, I may not lead you. Do not walk before me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me, and be my friend.”

MICHELE K. FIRTH
MICHELE K. FIRTH
Mar 23, 2020 12:06 PM

We have shown how scarily easy it is to manipulate us and how easily we turn against each other, made rabidly angry by MSM stories about people not maintaining a 2m distance or not locking themselves up indoors.
Once the coronavirus crisis is over, when we finally notice that the overwhelmed hospitals we are seeing on TV were already overwhelmed before it started, the merry-go-round will not start up again. We might think it has but we have now shown how easily manipulated we are, and how easily controlled.
(My blog: https://ocultoaplenavista.blogspot.com/2020/03/whatever-happened-to-reducing-plastics.html?m=1)

lundiel
lundiel
Mar 23, 2020 1:07 PM

Talking to my friend, I learnt that Piers Morgan is dispatching a daily diet of scaring the living daylights out of people who watch ‘This Morning’ while railing against the “irresponsible behaviour” of many and calling for the army to patrol the streets. My friend didn’t understand why I thought she shouldn’t be watching This Morning, Morgan’s trying to whip people up and the army on the streets is a very bad idea.

Sgt Oddball
Sgt Oddball
Mar 23, 2020 5:35 PM
Reply to  lundiel

piers moron…

– fify

Willem
Willem
Mar 23, 2020 11:35 AM

Thanks for that essay, I needed that.

Now I will continue with counting, just as Joseph Grand did.

So far the numbers are not impressive (euphemism)

Edward Curtin
Edward Curtin
Mar 23, 2020 12:11 PM
Reply to  Willem

Willem – It’s nice to know you are tuned in to Camus – Ed

George Mc
George Mc
Mar 23, 2020 11:25 AM

Could there be anything crueler than this directive to maintains a distance from each other while boosting panic levels so that everyone becomes increasingly desperate for comfort and contact?

Sgt Oddball
Sgt Oddball
Mar 23, 2020 5:38 PM
Reply to  George Mc

– it’s a *feature*, not a *bug*…

John Ervin
John Ervin
Mar 24, 2020 9:54 PM
Reply to  Sgt Oddball

Always has been,in non-tribal modern societies, and their leaders implement strategies and legislation to atomize them, because unity brings positive democracy, and an end to such “leadership”.

Gezzah Potts
Gezzah Potts
Mar 23, 2020 10:38 AM

It’s not just the United States that is populated by sleep walkers. It’s everywhere. Right across the West.
And yes Edward, I, too, feel weary and disturbed and aghast that so many are fully accepting the lockdowns and states of emergency and martial law.
Even friends who just cannot see what is happening, even after I’ve carefully explained it to them. Others I know are even treating this like its a camping adventure out in the forest somewhere, and we ‘just have to rough it for a short time’.
Of course, all for our protection. For the welfare of the public. To save us. From death.
All this is not temporary. It won’t all be over in 6 months. Or a year. Or two years.
I’m going from… struggling to comprehend the ramifications of what is happening to… its starting to sink in… to anger and frustration.
Have just been on John Steppling and Cory Morningstar FB pages, and was about to follow up some more links.
I appreciate your words, and what you say.

Grafter
Grafter
Mar 23, 2020 4:57 PM
Reply to  Gezzah Potts

“Even friends who just cannot see what is happening, even after I’ve carefully explained it to them.”…………9/11 all over again.

Gezzah Potts
Gezzah Potts
Mar 23, 2020 10:11 PM
Reply to  Grafter

Agreed. Cognitive dissonance G. You could also add things like the White Helmets as well. A lot of people falling for the official narrative. Sadly.

George Mc
George Mc
Mar 23, 2020 10:10 AM

Good article but it applies to the UK as much as to the states.

Everyone in my workplace has bought into the Day of the Triffids scenario so far. We are maintaining a distance of 2 metre from each other etc. Although one staff member voiced a vague murmer of …doubt! I fear a repremand may be in order.

Willem
Willem
Mar 23, 2020 11:38 AM
Reply to  George Mc

At my working place (epidemiology) we are highly in doubt.

It is a biased sample though since only 10% dares to show up at work and do some clean counting of the sick and the dead in the hospital.

Might change. Who knows?

MrChops
MrChops
Mar 23, 2020 9:25 AM

“There are too many coincidences for all of them to be coincidence.”

If you were wondering which one is the cart and which one is the horse then watch this…..

Sgt Oddball
Sgt Oddball
Mar 23, 2020 4:47 PM
Reply to  MrChops

ladees an’ genulmen! – i give you, “REPOCALYPSE!!!” (the horse – kickoff for the main event):

from zerohedge, *09/17/2019*:

“While it is being ignored by most (because the S&P didn’t crash), the chaos in the Fed-controlled short-term liquidity markets should panic everyone as for the first time in a decade, NYFRB was forced to inject liquidity for o/n repo…”

“As one veteran short-term rates trader explained…

Bottom line: here’s what the market thinks of the Fed’s temporary solution…

It’s a joke.

MORE COWBELL?

More cowbell indeed.”

“Today was a bit of a watershed event, though we’ve been seeing this brewing. When they set funds rate target at 2 to 2.25, ideally you would like to funding to be around 2.15. For weeks it’s been above that.
“Today was more dramatic. Funding opened at 4.5, quickly moved to a high of 10, then dropped back to 2.50, nothing close to 2.15. So you’ve lost control of where you want financing.

“Overnight financing is the key to driving the economy, leverage. If you don’t have control over it, what’s the point of setting a funds rate? If they ease tomorrow and funding is at 4%, does it matter if they eased?

“If the plumbing doesn’t work, then it’s going to dramatically affect secondary trading of Treasuries. Which is the last thing they need when there’s massive issuance going on.

“This is without a doubt one of the worst things that can happen. In many respects it overshadows the Fed moving tomorrow, because if the plumbing doesn’t work everything starts to break down. Everything is predicated upon your getting a reasonable funding rate. Otherwise why would you buy this paper to begin with. If you’re funding your overnight position at 6 why would you buy a 10-year at 2?

– this is *when* and *where* the plumbing *finally* broke… no nCoV doing the rounds last september as far as i recall… 😉

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/repo-calypse-ruins-bank-run-oil-mageddon-ripples-through-markets

ron
ron
Mar 23, 2020 9:14 AM

this is getting really boring now – all we can offer this situation at present is analysis, contradiction to the narrative and humour – hardly the tools to dismantle the powerful

sabelmouse
sabelmouse
Mar 23, 2020 11:55 AM
Reply to  ron

i never find impending fascism boring 🙁

John Ervin
John Ervin
Mar 24, 2020 10:00 PM
Reply to  ron

I don’t know, humour is a force, and enough applied at the right moment, at the right place, in just the right way, has toppled many.

Sam
Sam
Mar 23, 2020 9:14 AM

Off-topic:
Today’s postings (23 March) about Covid-19 by Swiss Propaganda Research are fascinating:
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

Another must-read article: Lockdown lunacy
A former chief of health in Israel speaks about the climate of hysteria and dishonesty surrounding Covid-19 and tells the truth about lockdowns.

sabelmouse
sabelmouse
Mar 23, 2020 12:06 PM
Reply to  Sam

would that more than a handful paid attention. few know history, or want to, and even those who seemed to and be aware of what goes on in the world have completely submitted to this 🙁

JudyJ
JudyJ
Mar 23, 2020 12:44 PM
Reply to  Sam

One would like to think that reading the views of even more, seemingly eminent, medical professionals would be enough to make our politicians take a step back and attempt to halt the irreversible damage they have no doubt already done to many people’s lives, and may continue to do. But unfortunately I suspect they will either continue in genuine ignorance, or will even arrogantly refuse to acknowledge the possibility that these views have validity; the latter approach being all too familiar to us.

Sam
Sam
Mar 23, 2020 8:00 PM
Reply to  JudyJ

Indeed. If this all turns out to be a monstrous overreaction, which is increasingly likely, how are any of these “leaders” going to be able to acknowledge the terrible mistakes that were made?

JudyJ
JudyJ
Mar 23, 2020 10:54 PM
Reply to  Sam

They’re probably already beavering away on spinning it in some way.

Refraktor
Refraktor
Mar 23, 2020 7:06 AM

The World Health Organisation is now saying curfew is insufficient. There must wholesale testing and tracing of social interaction. At the very least they will get everyone’s DNA on record.

Even if we get through this it is hard to see that any semblance of democracy can be restored.

God knows what the world will be like in twelve months’ time.

Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
Mar 23, 2020 7:48 AM
Reply to  Refraktor

The WHO has no democratic authority. Demanding everyone’s DNA is not within their remit.

I propose chipping every WHO employee and putting every single piece of data on them all over the net for everyone to enjoy.

They can SET AN EXAMPLE.

Being utterly without privacy for liffe.

binra
binra
Mar 23, 2020 11:34 AM
Reply to  Rhys Jaggar

WHO is effectively a front for what can be called the ‘Rockefeller’ agenda.
It operates broad spectrum dominance in coordination with a network of influence that is effectively a global control of which the US military is but one proxy or controlled asset.

So while I agree they have no democratic authority, they have effectively captured the agencies of such authority by making offers that you cant refuse, installing their own puppets, and generating narratives through which to incentives uptake and compliance to always increasing consolidation of control over everything that lives and moves – at least in terms of removing any possibility of actual opposition of block to the achievement of control as the means to gratify a fantasy of power over life. A fantasy given power by sacrifice to its compulsions, or demands.

I note that the giving of privacy is minding my own business and honouring your right to your own, But the weaponising and defence of secrecy is the setting up of a private agenda over and against transparency to democratic account.

Privacy as a right is not the same as secrecy by which to rob or deny others under masked agenda.

I also wondered what the Net would be if everything was open.
So every search, reading or connection was open to everyone else.
Then you have to be able to give account for WHY you look into anything if asked, and why you ask. When we are All naked – everything is transparent – relative to our need to know. Except the need to know is inner directed and only outer contained where it has no current business. But in my idea here, the act of enquiry is a relational touch and not an anonymous or secret surveillance.

This thought experiment doesn’t allow for the educational responsibilities and abilities that would HOLD such a communication – and like the idea of sharing all the wealth would immediately pattern itself in terms of abnegated and phished responsibilities.

I hold that there already is an Open Communication in Movement and as “Life – but not as we know it, Jim”. The creative capacity to self-isolate in secrecy as a private authoritative block to communication is a fig-leaved world by which the narrative frames, filters and distorts the officially allowed ‘reality’.

I may not share or support your or anyone’s narrative assertions and defended identity – but I MUST support your creative right to make choices for it is also my own.
If I identify against your narrative identity, I use my version of you to bolster or reinforce my own. This is why there MUST be an ‘enemy’ and the underlying dependency-compulsion to perpetual war – however socially masked or unmasked.

Identifying exclusively in story, is a private reality in search of reinforcement – and a driven and compulsive existence under the identification of a reactive impulse that – if brought into the democratic field of a true and open response, would be released, purified or transformed – even if the response was the same behaviour it would come from knowing our purpose rather than some default of acquired or conditioned habit – that embodies no response-ability – regardless any virtue signalling strategies for a ‘personal salvation’ set against a democratic right.

If the control agenda runs to its own revealing – and how can the truth NOT ‘out’? – then the fear that was thought to be escaped and weaponised will reveal itself the hell of an inescapable self-hatred. However, an inescapable dilemma can also be seen as the answer.
If the attempt to escape sets up an impossible situation, then the increasing dedication and sacrifice of will to do so, is a devotion to a god of utter futility.

‘Bottoming out’ may be the tipping point of the release of a false self-derivation and resultant entanglement in fear of pain of loss – cast out as a mind made legion that then terrorises all who approach in the intent of taking away its ‘control’.

Parables can hold many layered insight according to the need to know.
But mythological or narrative creations always cast an evil in our backstory that stamps itself upon the face of the presence that unfolds Meaning of Itself.

Light of a beautiful Spring day, the birdsong embodies it, a rejoicing that connects directly to a stillness of being. Though everything is in flux and change.

bob
bob
Mar 23, 2020 7:58 AM
Reply to  Refraktor

the world health organisation is not occupied by people with medical expertise it is stuffed with politicos as a branch of the united nations. it is following orders.

Sgt Oddball
Sgt Oddball
Mar 23, 2020 4:58 PM
Reply to  bob

robert mugabe for *goodwill* ambassador, anyone?…

– just ask tedros… 😉

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tedros_Adhanom#Mugabe_Goodwill_Ambassador_controversy

Gall
Gall
Mar 23, 2020 4:04 AM

I thought the ghouls Albrecht and Clinton were despicable but uber ghoulish Pompous seems to have excelled in despicableness by proposing to bomb Iran while they are trying to recover what looks more and more like bioweapon unleashed by the Anglo/American/ Zionist conspiracy:

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/03/22/trump-thinks-iran-is-on-its-knees/

DunGroanin
DunGroanin
Mar 23, 2020 6:17 AM
Reply to  Gall

There is still the current head ghoul mouthpiece Bolton (does he have an ilder name?)

Every word that he spouts is pure poison. I won’t quote any.

Their humiliation and overeach in the ME 20 year plague influcting death , suffering and pillage is OVER.

The parting gift the covid – some mutant daily leading back to its creators – the US may have yet to answer a greater charge.

The media everywhere including here on Off-G is ignoring the suffering that the medical sanctions has caused in Iran.

The malevolent strategy has led to Italy finding support in the arms of China and Russia and now that ancient island attached to Gitmo base – Cuba.

Dozens of Cuban doctors have arrived in Italy to help them where the US occupants and bases since WW2 haven’t (may have even caused it)

Fuck the pestilent US and its child killing cackling Madeleines and its Bolt on dicks spaffing their absurd exceptional supremacist pustulence across the globe.

Fuck their handmaiden Euro hand maidens and all their works

Get the fuck out of the ME and central Asia and Africa and South America as they were forced out of indochina.

The crimes will not be forgotten and the criminals must be punished to stop them returning for anothet bite in a century.

Martin Read
Martin Read
Mar 23, 2020 11:42 AM
Reply to  Gall

Incidentally, I find I can’t post that VT article web address on my Facebook page. Apparently contravenes their ‘community – bullshit – standards’. Why am I not surprised.

Eric McCoo
Eric McCoo
Mar 23, 2020 3:45 AM

The Italian figures simply don’t make sense. Very good article below.

“Why have so many coronavirus patients died in Italy (Telegraph) ?

The country’s high death toll is due to an ageing population, overstretched health system and the way fatalities are reported.

..
‘Other experts have also expressed scepticism about the available data. Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says that countries do not yet have a good indication of how many mild infections they have.

If further testing finds more asymptomatic cases spreading undetected, the mortality rate will drop. “It’s too early to make a comparison across Europe,” he says. “We do not have detailed sero-surveillance of the population and we do not know how many asymptomatic people are spreading it.”

Prof McKee adds that testing is not currently consistent across the continent, or world.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/have-many-coronavirus-patients-died-italy/

Summary: we have no idea how to assess what is really going on.

DunGroanin
DunGroanin
Mar 23, 2020 9:53 AM
Reply to  Eric McCoo

Here are some pretty graphs to explained Italy anx what is expected here and some other countries

comment image

alabaster
alabaster
Mar 23, 2020 11:22 AM
Reply to  DunGroanin

In recent years, Italy has been registering peaks in death rates, particularly among the elderly during the winter season. A mortality rate of 10.7 per 1,000 inhabitants was observed
in the winter season 2014/2015 (more than 375,000 deaths in absolute terms), corresponding to an estimated 54,000 excess deaths (+9.1%) as compared to 2014 (Signorelli and Odone, 2016), representing the highest reported mortality rate since the Second World War in Italy (UN, 2019). Although the above-described excess mortality created concern among researchers, health authorities and public health experts, it has been challenging to identify its determinants (Signorelli and Odone, 2016).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971219303285

Sgt Oddball
Sgt Oddball
Mar 23, 2020 5:03 PM
Reply to  Eric McCoo

…and in a country with a population something like *4%* that of china’s…

– hmmmm (*strokes chin*)…

MASTER OF UNIVE
MASTER OF UNIVE
Mar 23, 2020 3:02 AM

Great article. Jacques Ellul is my favorite for Propaganda.

COVID-19 is a gain of function bioweapon utilized as cover for mean reversion & deflation of the US economy pre-electoral gambit of Orange Oaf.

I was on the Harvard Working Group 2014-16 gain of function BSL-4 Lab sanctioning that Marc Lipsitch headed up to rid the USA of BSL-4 Labs and lackadaisical safety record for housekeeping of deadly pathogens like the COVID-19.

very best to you, Ed.

MOU

John Ervin
John Ervin
Mar 23, 2020 5:01 AM

The Italian body count eclipsed the Chinese some days should, and will continue to be it behind. Italy has a mere fraction of the Chinese population, what, 2% ?

I read yesterday that the count in Russia was 1 fatality.

The problem here gives all kinds of signs, evidence, of being economic, not epidemiological.

The Ponzi Scheme of the West reminds you a lot of the Enron Crisis and the revealing documentary, “The Smartest Guys in the Room.” Smart, perhaps, hoodlums for sure: they gave their vast work force in their iconic “E” signed HQ in Houston a half hour to clean out their desks and leave the day their scam collapsed.

A federal prosecutor in Houston courts some years later sent Ken Lay to prison for a long sentence, except Lay died, 68, a few months later, or changed his fingerprints, or whatever. Other darlings of Uncle Scam have done as well.

I lived around the corner from an elderly lady who signed an environmental petition I was circulating right about the time of those convictions, Skilling and Lay’s, and as she walked away from my table I noted the name on my board, “Hueston”she had penned. As a spelling freak, I noted the irregular spelling and freaked out, “Wait! Are you any relation of John C. Hueston?!” She glanced around and nodded shyly, “Why do you ask?”

I exploded with glee: “You ARE. Wait a minute, you’re his MOTHER, aren’t you?!!” She blushed. “Let me kiss your hand! Your son is my rock solid hero.”

She told me that family and friends had just had a homecoming party for him the night before, he’d been gone for years.

“The L.A. Times said he got the jury to convict Lay on all 21 counts! Incredible.”

I told her how Field Marshal Montgomery explained his crushing victories in North Africa over Rommel and the Nazi’s most superior mechanized divisions in world history, when asked how he did that with such apparent ease, and he replied, “It’s really very simple, I never fought a battle I hadn’t won in advance.”

She had paused with her shopping cart about twenty feet away and looked off for a few moments. “That’s very interesting. Strategy, in other words?”

I nodded and she rolled toward her car, but paused to look back and add one thing more, “You know, he’s never lost a case.”

I basked in that, “Wow. Even Perry Mason lost 1.”

I went home that night and read in LAT a long piece about him on the front page, above the fold, huge pic of him in front of the federal court house with his team.

With delight I saw that she had understated the cause: he had never even lost a single count, in all his prosecutions.

Strategy indeed. Bad actors beware.

The body counts are being reported by Western media as though they are in lock step, counting deaths as though they knew it was flu-caused, when 90% were over 70, compromised seriously in health already, and the COVID19 is being named as though the sole perp. You see now that bias everywhere in major media. CNN feed yesterday: “How could my friend die at 34 when otherwise healthy?!”

The article had just stated he’d been “cured” of prostate cancer two years before?!

“And so it goes”, to steal the tagline from Vonnegut’s Schlacthof Funf.

“At end of the day” (and it sure as hell looks to be a long one, criss-crossing International Date lines often) we are going to expose the biggest Ponzi Scheme in history hiding behind a wannabe killer virus.

I wonder if John C. Hueston has any openings in his calendar.

John Ervin
John Ervin
Mar 23, 2020 5:04 AM
Reply to  John Ervin

Apologies for the typos in first paragraph above, the sense is clear enough. Thought I’d caught it. Cursed word predictive, garble, garble: sdfgeetyyrreettxz!

Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
Mar 23, 2020 7:50 AM
Reply to  John Ervin

John

Almost all Chinese cases were in Hubei province, which has a population of 57 million.

For practical purposes, given the way China isolated Hubei, you should use 57 million as the ‘total population’ when using 81000 cases and 3500 deaths as the benchmark.

Then Italy is not so horrendous. It is worse, but not so horrendous.

Seamus Padraig
Seamus Padraig
Mar 23, 2020 2:53 PM
Reply to  Rhys Jaggar

But–correct me if I’m wrong–don’t they now have the entire country of Italy on lock-down? In China, they just locked down Hubei province, as I recall.

Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
Mar 23, 2020 4:11 PM
Reply to  Seamus Padraig

Hubei province is about half the size of Italy, according to geographical stats on Wikipedia (I just about trust them for things like that).

So sort of equivalent of lock down of Italy from a line driven across the country immediately to the south of Rome.

John Ervin
John Ervin
Mar 23, 2020 5:35 PM
Reply to  Seamus Padraig

Awesome point. Exhibit A, in our case, for us Conspiracy Realists. Who needs Exhibit B? So it seems.

Sgt Oddball
Sgt Oddball
Mar 23, 2020 5:16 PM
Reply to  John Ervin

john hueston… – and william black, he who exposed the keating five (r.i.p. john mccain 🙂 ) and congressional malfeasence during savings and loan, back in the ’80s (y’know, back when there was *at least* some *semblance* of rule of law applied to banksters)…

…where are they now, i wonder?

John Ervin
John Ervin
Mar 23, 2020 5:45 PM
Reply to  Sgt Oddball

Bill Black is The Man. Hueston, Son O’TheMan.

I think they’re both still around, last time I checked. Yes, we need them both around now, in harness for this charade, or clearly collosal international Ponzi. One gets the idea they’d have their hands full.

Bill Black sent over a 1,000 upper-level executive banksters to the slammer for what was less than this as crime

Since? All told from all of DOJ: O.

Well, Wall Street seems to have fixed that problem of theirs. Or by the looks of it, Bubba did with his late 90s “reforms”/sellouts.

It only gets worse and worse.

As the late great “leftneck” Joe Bageant ( joebageant.com) wrote: “you can’t reform a Mafia, only pay it more extortion money.”

See: 2008 “bailout”.

milosevic
milosevic
Mar 23, 2020 5:14 AM

I was on the Harvard Working Group 2014-16 gain of function BSL-4 Lab

didn’t you previously say that you were a poverty-stricken welfare recipient with no teeth?

and before that, didn’t you say that you were some kind of finance industry super-villain, who was going to take down the global economy?

I’m trying to reconcile these apparently contradictory backstories, but the only way I can do that is to conclude that you are a government disinfo shill, sent to disrupt and derail the few fora still available to dissident thought criminals.

bzzzz. go and tell your CIA masters that you have failed. but thanks for playing.

crank
crank
Mar 23, 2020 9:48 AM
Reply to  milosevic

Thanks for paying attention Milo.

MASTER OF UNIVE
MASTER OF UNIVE
Mar 23, 2020 2:25 PM
Reply to  milosevic

Yes, I am a poverty-stricken welfare recipient with missing lower front teeth and now missing upper teeth too. It’s so bad that I have to keep my mouth closed when I go out in public. Moreover, I was indeed a member of Dr. Lipsitch’s Cambridge Working Group from 2014 when he started it to 2016 when the US Government agreed with Dr. Lipsitch’s thesis. In brief, I was a signatory of the Cambridge Working Group and if you will give me your email address I will send you the proof.

Still to this day I am unemployed and living in absolute abject poverty where I can’t get replacement teeth.

I have no incentive to lie about my reality, Milosevic.

Give me your email address so I can give you verification of everything I write about to avoid the erroneous accusations.

And I mentioned my involvement in the Cambridge Working Group because Ed Curtin started out as an Epidemiologist working for the man.

Cheers, Milosivic.

MOU

MASTER OF UNIVE
MASTER OF UNIVE
Mar 23, 2020 3:01 PM
Reply to  milosevic

I did not say I was a ‘super-villain’. And the global economy was eviscerated March 10th 08 around 11:00am Bear Stearns time. Any idiot knows when the Ponzi was toppled.

MOU

Watt
Watt
Mar 24, 2020 2:31 AM
Reply to  milosevic

Hey Milo…seems he/she would like your email address, now. Gonna give it? Go on, I dare you! Heh Heh.

Wobbledagger
Wobbledagger
Mar 23, 2020 2:31 AM

As usual. Excellent article! Thank you and thank you for being out there.

Grafter
Grafter
Mar 23, 2020 2:26 AM

Good analogy with Camus. Here in the UK the fear porn continues to flow unabated from the establishment’s “news” outlets with Sky and BBC being particularly prominent in spreading the panic virus.

Fair dinkum
Fair dinkum
Mar 23, 2020 2:24 AM

It’s time to get our priorities in order:
1.Love.
2.Health.
3.Natural foods.
4. Shelter.
The 1% can go to hell.