Han Elite Rule Epitomizes The Full Neoliberal And Surveillance Capitalist Agenda

strategic-culture |  For decades, we were led to believe that the world-system put in place after WWII provided the U.S. with unrivalled structural power. Now, all that’s left is structural fragility, grotesque inequalities, unpayable Himalayas of debt, and a rolling crisis.

No one is fooled anymore by the Fed’s magic quantitative easing powers, or the acronym salad – TALF, ESF, SPV – built into the Fed/U.S. Treasury exclusive obsession with big banks, corporations and the Goddess of the Market, to the detriment of the average American.

It was only a few months ago that a serious discussion evolved around the $2.5 quadrillion derivatives market imploding and collapsing the global economy, based on the price of oil skyrocketing, in case the Strait of Hormuz – for whatever reason – was shut down.

Now it’s about Great Depression 2.0: the whole system crashing as a result of the shutdown of the global economy. The questions are absolutely legitimate: is the political and social cataclysm of the global economic crisis arguably a larger catastrophe than Covid-19 itself?  And will it provide an opportunity to end neoliberalism and usher in a more equitable system, or something even worse?

 

Wall Street, of course, lives in an alternative universe. In a nutshell, Wall Street turned the Fed into a hedge fund. The Fed is going to own at least two thirds of all U.S. Treasury bills in the market before the end of 2020.

The U.S. Treasury will be buying every security and loan in sight while the Fed will be the banker – financing the whole scheme.

So essentially this is a Fed/Treasury merger. A behemoth dispensing loads of helicopter money.

And the winner is BlackRock—the biggest money manager on the planet, with tentacles everywhere, managing the assets of over 170 pension funds, banks, foundations, insurance companies, in fact a great deal of the money in private equity and hedge funds. BlackRock — promising to be fully  “transparent” — will buy these securities and manage those dodgy SPVs on behalf of the Treasury.

BlackRock, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink, may not be as big as Vanguard, but it’s the top investor in Goldman Sachs, along with Vanguard and State Street, and with $6.5 trillion in assets, bigger than Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank combined.

Now, BlackRock is the new operating system (OS) of the Fed and the Treasury. The world’s biggest shadow bank – and no, it’s not Chinese.

Compared to this high-stakes game, mini-scandals such as the one around Georgia Senator Kelly Loffler are peanuts. Loffler allegedly profited from inside information on Covid-19 by the CDC to make a stock market killing. Loffler is married to Jeffrey Sprecher – who happens to be the chairman of the NYSE, installed by Goldman Sachs.

While corporate media followed this story like headless chickens, post-Covid-19 plans, in Pentagon parlance, “move forward” by stealth.

The price? A meager $1,200 check per person for a month. Anyone knows that, based on median salary income, a typical American family would need $12,000 to survive for two months. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in an act of supreme effrontry, allows them a mere 10 percent of that. So American taxpayers will be left with a tsunami of debt while selected Wall Street players grab the whole loot, part of an unparalleled transfer of wealth upwards, complete with bankruptcies en masse of small and medium businesses.

Fink’s letter to his shareholders almost gives the game away: “I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.”

And right on cue, he forecasted that, “in the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant reallocation of capital.”

White Negroes And The Global Negroe Replacement Program 2.0

economist |  Perhaps, though, China is less interested in running the world than in ensuring that other powers cannot or dare not attempt to thwart it. It aims to chip away at the dollar’s status as a reserve currency (see article). And it is working hard to place its diplomats in influential jobs in multilateral bodies, so that they will be in a position to shape the global rules, over human rights, say, or internet governance. One reason Mr Trump’s broadside against the WHO is bad for America is that it makes China appear more worthy of such positions.

China’s rulers combine vast ambitions with a caution born from the huge task they have in governing a country of 1.4bn people. They do not need to create a new rules-based international order from scratch. They might prefer to keep pushing on the wobbly pillars of the order built by America after the second world war, so that a rising China is not constrained.

That is not a comforting prospect. The best way to deal with the pandemic and its economic consequences is globally. So, too, problems like organised crime and climate change. The 1920s showed what happens when great powers turn selfish and rush to take advantage of the troubles of others. The covid-19 outbreak has so far sparked as much jostling for advantage as far-sighted magnanimity. Mr Trump bears a lot of blame for that. For China to reinforce such bleak visions of superpower behaviour would be not a triumph but a tragedy. 

Han Elites Influence American Elites Far More Than The Well Being Of American Citizens

npr |  Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government. The company successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.

"They assumed that because I was the wife of their employee, I was the wife," the author and journalist Leta Hong Fincher tells NPR. "I was just an appendage of their employee. I was not a human being."

Fincher is married to the journalist Mike Forsythe, a former Beijing correspondent for Bloomberg News who now works at The New York Times. In 2012, Forsythe was part of a Bloomberg team behind an award-winning investigation into the accumulation of wealth by China's ruling classes.

The Chinese ambassador warned Bloomberg executives against publishing the investigation. But Bloomberg News published the story anyway. Afterward, Forsythe received what he and Fincher considered death threats relayed through other journalists. He and Fincher moved their family to Hong Kong, believing it to be safer.

Even so, the reporting team pursued the next chapter, focusing on Chinese leaders' ties to the country's richest man, Wang Jianlin. Among those in the reporters' sights: the family of new Chinese President Xi Jinping. The story gained steam throughout 2013.

In emails sent back to Bloomberg's journalists in China seen by Fincher, senior news editors in New York City expressed excitement.

And then: radio silence from headquarters. That story never ran.

"Mike and some of the other reporters and editors who had been working on this story just were asking for answers about ... why was this story killed?" Fincher says.

Wealthy Powerful Americans Catastrophically Wrong About China

NationalReview |  For the last thirty years, the vast majority of powerful institutions in the United States placed a gargantuan bet on the idea that the government in Beijing could be a reliable partner in prosperity and would be a responsible actor on the world stage. Many leading politicians in both parties chose to believe this, many foreign-policy wonks chose to believe this, many academics and university administrators chose to believe this, and obviously, corporate America loved the idea of both using Chinese labor for imported goods and receiving access to the Chinese market. This includes Comcast, Disney, Viacom, AT&T, and Fox Corporation — the parent companies of NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and Fox News, among other large multinationals that own major U.S. news organizations.

The controversy over the NBA last year was a vivid demonstration that most of these entities were not going to let little things like the Chinese government forcing over one million ethnic minorities into concentration camps or a brutal crackdown in Hong Kong disrupt these extremely profitable relationships. These American companies had gone way too far down the road of partnership with China to turn back now and could do elaborate mental gymnastics to justify why Chinese oppression and brutality was qualitatively different from oppression and brutality anywhere else. This mentality took root at institutions like the World Health Organization, too.

The problem was, the Chinese government was never the stabilizing, reasonable force for order that these Americans wanted to believe it was. We saw the regime’s true nature over three decades of brutal human-rights abuses and censorship and shameless lies to cover that brutality.

When the Chinese government initially declared this new virus could not be spread from person to person, and that the situation in Wuhan was under control, very few people wanted to stand up and say they couldn’t be trusted. We had just seen the Chinese government try to blow up the business plans of the National Basketball Association over a single general manager’s tweet. If you cross the Chinese government, you take your livelihood in your hands, if not your life. On March 4, the state-run Xinhua News Agency declared, “If China retaliates against the United States at this time, in addition to announcing a travel ban on the United States, it also announces the strategic control of medical products and the ban on export to the United States, then the United States will be caught in the sea of new coronavirus.” Every day, the leaders of China tell us and show us exactly who they are and how they see the world. They are perfectly content to watch us die painful deaths if this means greater leverage and power for themselves.

WaPo Throwing Shade On Shi Zhengli And The Wuhan Virological Institute

WaPo |  Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.

In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.

What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to comment on this and other details of the story.)

The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.

As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.

Washington Talm'Some Ole Bullshit - Fired Resigned Dept. Sec. Navy Mobly Talm'bout WW-III

SCMP |  Even if Congress is able to return to regular business in the coming months, attention from legislative matters will quickly be pulled away again – this time by election season. In the run-up to November 3, not only will President Trump be seeking re-election, but most members of the House and around a third of the Senate will also be absorbed in fights to stay in office.

“In an election year, really anything after July is not likely to happen,” said Chris Lu, a former House oversight committee lawyer who later served as Barack Obama’s White House cabinet secretary.

“This will be an incredibly short legislating year with the exception of, obviously, continuing to provide relief and possible stimulus [relating to the coronavirus outbreak],” said Lu, who also served as a commissioner on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, an influential advisory panel on human rights issues in the country.

Neither House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – one of Beijing’s most vocal critics – or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell responded to requests for comment on whether they anticipated scheduling floor time for any of the China-related bills that still await votes. One House aide on the Democratic side, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the chance of any non-coronavirus legislation moving ahead was “pretty, pretty limited”.

Yet despite the narrowing window for China-related legislation to reach Trump by January, many lawmakers are pressing ahead, both with intensifying rhetoric and several pieces of legislation about Beijing’s handling of the outbreak.

“Not much of what gets proposed or introduced in the upcoming days [regarding China] will become policy, but everyone wants to message that they’re on it,” said a senior congressional staffer, who requested anonymity to discuss lawmakers’ internal deliberations.

In March alone, lawmakers introduced at least 20 China-related bills, ranging from demands that China pay for the US pandemic costs to calls for an international investigation of Beijing’s coronavirus response.

With criticism intensifying about the US government’s own response, Republicans’ complaints have become ever louder. On Friday, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina proclaimed on Twitter that the Chinese government was “responsible for 16,000 American deaths and 17 million Americans being unemployed”.

Quiet As It's Kept The Kochtopus Is A Reservoir Of Managerial Intellect And Unified Cultural Vision

state.gov |  Last year, I announced that I would give a series of speeches on China, and this is part of that. It’s the context in which state and local government officials ought to think about the way they lead with respect to our relationship. It’s important. China matters.

It’s been part of my mission at the State Department to mobilize all parts of the United States Government. I was out in Silicon Valley a couple weeks ago to talk to America’s leading tech companies about this very set of issues.

And I need your help, too.

What China does in Topeka and Sacramento reverberates in Washington, in Beijing, and far beyond. Competition with China is happening. It’s happening in your state.

In fact, I would be surprised if most of you in the audience have not been lobbied by the Chinese Communist Party directly.

Chinese Communist Party friendship organizations like the one that I referenced earlier are in Richmond; Minneapolis; Portland; Jupiter, Florida; and many other cities around the country.

But sometimes China’s activities aren’t quite that public, and I want to talk about some of that today. 

Let me read you an excerpt of a letter from a Chinese diplomat. It was China’s Consul General in New York sent a letter last month to the speaker of one of your state legislatures.

Here’s what the letter said in part. It said, quote, “As we all know, Taiwan is part of China… avoid engaging in any official contact with Taiwan, including sending congratulatory messages to the electeds, introducing bills and proclamations for the election, sending officials and representatives to attend the inauguration ceremony, and inviting officials in Taiwan to visit the United States.” End of quote from the letter.

Think about that. You had a diplomat from China assigned here to the United States, a representative of the Chinese Communist Party in New York City, sending an official letter urging that an American elected official shouldn’t exercise his right to freedom of speech.

Let that sink in for just a minute.

And this isn’t a one-off event. It’s happening all across the country.

Chinese consulates in New York, in Illinois, in Texas, and two in California, bound by the diplomatic responsibilities and rights of the Vienna Convention, are very politically active at the state level, as is the embassy right here in Washington, D.C.

Maybe some of you have heard about the time when the Chinese consulate paid the UC-San Diego students to protest the Dalai Lama.

Or last August, when former governor Phil Bryant of Mississippi received a letter from a diplomat in the consul’s office in Houston, threatening to cancel a Chinese investment if the governor chose to travel to Taiwan. Phil went anyway.

Little Man: Is Your Governor Being Urged Or Compelled To Tyranny?

mises |  As of April 6, forty-one states have statewide "stay-at-home" decrees in place. These orders vary widely from place to place. In some states, there are long lists of exempted industries including marijuana dispensaries, liquor stores, hardware stores, and of course, grocery stores. In some states with these edicts, public lands, state parks, and beaches remain open. In some states, city parks are more crowded than ever as local residents, with little else to do, attempt to recreate. In other places—such as California—one can be arrested for paddleboarding all alone in the ocean.

Yet in all of these places, the current regime of rule by decree will have—and already has had—a devastating effect on many small and medium-sized businesses and their employees. As governments have created new arbitrary definitions of what constitutes an "essential" business, some businesses find themselves forced to close. Employees have lost these jobs. The owners of these enterprises will likely lose far more as debts mount and business investments are destroyed. As unemployment and poverty increase, the usual pathologies will arise as well: suicides, child abuse, and stress-induced death.

Yet the politicians—mostly state governors, mayors, and unelected bureaucrats—remain popular. In New York State, where the lockdown orders are among the most draconian in the nation, it is now claimed that 87 percent of those polled approve of Governor Andrew Cuomo's handling of the situation. As Donald Trump's administration has recommended ever harsher government limits on the freedom of Americans, his poll numbers have only improved. 

Meanwhile, among critics there appears to be a misconception of these lockdowns (which are very often only partially imposed or enforced) as being imposed over the howls of the local population, which is being silenced and cowed by jackbooted local police.

If only that were true. In most places, it appears clear that a great many residents approve of the lockdowns. We see this support in the form of all the local scolds who complain on Nextdoor.com about neighborhood children who don't properly engage in "social distancing." We see it in the people who call the police to report violators of stay-at-home orders. We see it in those who report local businesses for allowing too many people inside.

Viewed in this way, it may be more likely that state governors and other politicians are afraid of being seen as doing too little, rather than as overstepping their authority to impose public safety measures.

Controlaspecies: Gain Of Function Research And The Blame Game

harvardtothebighouse |  we have Peter Daszak.  His company, EcoHealth Alliance, which is a non-profit that depends largely on multi-million dollar government grants to function, has been partnering with Chinese researcher for years in an attempt to secure funding for more and more research into coronaviruses. At least they’re not really even pretending to be philanthropic.

And in one of the more transparent attempts at blatant PR-spin, Daszak was featured alongside one of the researchers who learned how to create hyper-virulent bat coronaviruses at UNC back in 2015, Zhengli Shi. Their article insists we should take Zhengli at her word when she claims to have not found a match after she checked COVID-19’s genome against everything in her lab. As if someone responsible for releasing the most virulent pathogen to hit humanity in modern history, one that’s already killed thousands and is projected to kill millions and millions more all across the globe, would simply fess-up to it, torpedoing her career and the years of research performed by her and her colleagues? And possibly opening all of them up to legal and other repercussions?

If you still aren’t sure whether the scientists involved with kind of research are being forthright, there’s Dr. Ralph Baric. It was in his lab at UNC that a hyper-virulent bat Franken-virus was created by splicing a new protein-spike on an existing coronavirus, creating a monster so vicious that a virologist with the Louis Pasteur Institute of Paris warned: “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory.” It should also be noted that several years prior to tinkering directly with bat coronavirus spike-proteins, Baric orchestrated research that involved isolating a coronavirus from civets and then passing it through mammalian ACE2 receptor cells that were grown in the lab from kidney and brain samples – serial passage through host cell lines instead of entire hosts, which imparted a strong affinity for ACE2, and presumably created an airborne strain of coronavirus. And if cells derived from kidneys and brains were used for the serial passage development of COVID-19, that might help explain its affinity for attacking the kidneys and brains of its human hosts.

So if he was being honest, you might expect him to warn the public about the lethal potential coronaviruses pose during our current outbreak. However, when he was asked if the public should be worried about COVID-19 he said that people should be more worried about the seasonal flu. Pretty bizarre statement from a scientist who knew full well how dangerous coronaviruses could be, especially given the fact that not only was Zhengli Shi working in his lab on that project in 2015, but Xing-Yi Ge was too. Both of whom returned to Wuhan where they’ve continued their work for years.

Xing-Yi Ge is especially notable since in 2013 he became the very first scientist to isolate a bat coronavirus from nature that uses the ACE2 receptor, which is found in human, tree shrew, and ferret lungs and allows coronaviruses to become airborne. And as you might have learned by now, that’s the exact receptor used by COVID-19 to enter human cells – if anyone would know how to finagle that part of the coronavirus genome, it’d be him. So both Xing-Yi Ge and Zhengli Shi were part of the research team that created this hybridized hyper-virulent bat coronavirus under Baric, who’s actively downplayed the risk posed by COVID-19, and then returned to work in Wuhan, where funding provided in part by Daszak’s company allowed them to continue their work on coronaviruses with plenty of research to cut-and-paste into their work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Disease Engineering Technical Research Center.

And as Dr. Ian Malcolm puts it in Jurassic Park, it is never a good idea to futz around with science and research when you don’t fully understand it, nor its possible implications.

However it wasn’t just Daszak funding their work, Zhengli also secured millions of dollars in grant money from various American institutions including our Department of Defense as well as the U.S. Biological Defense Research Directorate, and millions more from other foreign governments.

So although the Chinese Communist Party deserves its share of the blame for attempting to cover the outbreak up, arresting the heroic scientists trying to warn us and issuing gag-orders and the destruction of evidence, this research likely wouldn’t have occurred at all if the NIH hadn’t lifted the ban on gain-of-function research in the first place. And it was funded directly by American tax dollars, by government officials willing to let others play god at their behest.

But now that the virus is out of the lab, are the private entities responsible for its creation going to bear any of the blame at all? Or will America and China continue to point fingers at each other until the worst happens?

“Mars will accuse Earth of using a bio-weapon. Earth will claim it was Mars. The Belt will blame the other two. It’s a good way to start a war and cover it up.”

One last spoiler warning… okay, so in The Expanse the central plot device pushing things forward is the discovery of a mysterious substance dubbed the protomolecule, which seems to have a mind of its own and seek out radiation as sustenance before then beginning “the Work,” a mysterious intergalactic goal that isn’t revealed until later seasons.

And its not individual nations who first attempt to harness the protomolecule, but their Peter Daszak, the aforementioned scientist and CEO named Jules-Pierre Mao, who attempts to weave it into the genomes of immuno-compromised children to create hybridized super-soldiers. Not for his own private army, but as a game-changing bio-weapon he’ll sell to whichever government is willing to pay the most for it. So in The Expanse, it takes amoral scientists as well as the collusion of officials affiliated with both governments for this research to happen and be hidden, and when these Hybrids are eventually dropped between both armies the carnage is immense.

Luckily, we haven’t gotten that far on earth yet, but the rhetoric between America and China has been heading in that direction – it’s been growing increasingly hostile as each blames the other for starting the pandemic and covering it up, with China even going so far as to threaten to cut off our supply of antibiotics and other life-saving medical goods.  Meanwhile Daszak, Baric, Zhengli, and others sit back counting their lucky stars and their money, since both governments and the public at large seem to have bought their story that there’s no way this virus leaked out of one of their labs, and every government on earth now wants to harness their research to help create vaccines and treatments.

And these researchers have been assisted by scientifically spurious and journalistically vacuous articles which mindlessly regurgitate claims from the Chinese government, and its scientific propaganda arm, the WHO, about how bad the outbreak was in the past and how contained it is now. As the Chinese government arrested whistle-blowers and sent agents out into the street in bio-hazard gear while carrying automatic weapons to detain anyone suspected of breaking quarantine, while literally welding apartments buildings shut, the American media fawned over China’s “decisive and heroic” actions.

Please take a moment to consider the fact that almost everyone reading the news to you on television was selected due to their connections or how photogenic they are, not because of any actual journalistic chops or ability to think critically.

So as two superpowers are pushed closer and closer to conflict, the research that’s almost certainly the source of COVID-19 not only continues unabated, but if anything talk of more funding to stop this sort of supposedly natural pandemic from happening again is pouring into the pockets of the people who, if they weren’t directly responsible, should certainly have been at the forefront of warning the world about the risks posed by lab-altered coronaviruses, and been disclosing the existence of this sort of research in the first place.

Oddly, each and everyone one of them is pretending that viral dual-use gain-of-function research has never occurred at all. Or not so oddly, when you stop and think about how much they have to lose if their role in this pandemic is revealed.

“The hardest part of this game is figuring out who the enemy really is.”

Other than the fact it doesn’t bear the direct marks of genetic tampering, just like the engineered hyper-virulent H5N1 Bird Flu, there’s literally nothing natural about COVID-19’s behavior or clinical presentation. And hauntingly, peer-reviewed research has noted that a crucial region of its genome “may provide a gain-of-function… for efficient spreading in the human population.”

Not only is it so distant from any other coronavirus that it forms its own clade, but there isn’t even a natural path for it to have emerged through – assertions about pangolins have always been dubious at best, but were even further debunked when analysis of COVID-19’s genome at the regions that most accurately show heritage made it “very unlikely” that pangolins had ever been involved at all.

Beyond that is the fact that its affinity for the ACE2 receptor is somewhere between 10 and 20 times higher than SARS, and it also creates viral loads thousands of times higher than SARS. These two characteristics point towards COVID-19 using antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE, to enter human cells. This is when the virus is able to hijack white blood cells to more easily enter into the rest of our body’s cells, allowing it to seep deep into its hosts’ nervous systems, creating permanent neurological damage in the hosts it doesn’t kill outright. ADE could also explain why between 5% and 10% of once “recovered” patients in Wuhan have been showing up with fresh infections, since that phenomenon allows a virus to hijack the antibodies created by a previous infection to re-attack an old host. And curiously Zhengli Shi, of UNC and Wuhan fame, co-authored a 2019 paper which used inert viral shells to figure out exactly how SARS, with its affinity to the ACE2 receptor just like COVID-19, was able to harness ADE to hijack white blood cells for enhanced cell entry. A gain-of-function extension of this research would be exactly the kind of experiment that could’ve given birth to COVID-19, especially considering that 2019 paper managed to fine-tune the exact concentration of antibodies that would best facilitate ADE.

Both HIV and Dengue Fever use antibody-dependent enhancement to boost their virulence, however its generally a phenomenon that takes a long time to occur when it happens in nature. However COVID-19 looks like it may have had its ADE jacked into hyper-drive as it was passed between a series of animal hosts, since it has the aforementioned much stronger ability to bind to host cells and creates viral loads orders of magnitude higher, and also appears to immediately to be able to enter its hosts nervous systems, killing many of its victims by attacking the region of the brain that controls breathing, drastically lowering white blood cell counts early on in infections, and apparently re-infecting individuals who had already appeared to clear their infection.

Further increasing the possibility that COVID-19’s unique clinical presentation may be due to its ADE being juiced by laboratory engineering are the observations from an ER doctor who’s stated that I have seen things that I have never seen before… I have witnessed medical phenomenon that just don’t make sense in the context of treating a disease that is supposed to be viral pneumonia. In an interview with Medscape, Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell went on to say that the closest thing to the symptoms he was witnessing in his emergency room.

Controlavirus: The Chinese Communist Party CCP Virus And The Great Blame Game

SCMP |  In October, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence noted in the first line of its report on Russia’s use of social media to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election, that “information warfare [is] designed to spread disinformation and societal division”. Zhao’s tweets accom­plished both. The disinformation was obvious. Critical thinking in abeyance, plenty of people will believe a claim that the US Army planted Covid-19 in Wuhan; even more will want it to be true.

When US President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others began fighting back by loudly and repeatedly calling Covid-19 “the Chinese virus”, social division in the US grew, if that is possible. The media accused Trump of being racist and xenophobic, and inciting more of the same towards Chinese-Americans. This only caused Trump to say it louder and more often.

One wonders how much longer Washington will conti­nue fighting the information war against Beijing with one arm tied behind its back. Chinese media enjoy free run of the US, including on Twitter. The US has no such freedom in China.

Not a few pundits in these past few weeks have predicted Covid-19 will end globalisation, or even “life as we know it”. That seems unlikely, given the short-term nature of people’s memories and how profitable “life as we know it” has been for so many. But given the mischief Zhao’s tweets caused, Beijing’s days on Twitter might be numbered.

Father Of Neoliberalism Says U.S. Needs To Unclinch Buttcheeks With China And Just Let It Happen...,

project-syndicate |  Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy focused on great power competition with China. Many Americans of both major political parties agree that Trump was correct to punish China for cybertheft of intellectual property, coerced intellectual property transfer, and unfair trade practices such as subsidized credit to state-owned enterprises.

Reciprocity does need to be enforced. If China can ban Google and Facebook from its market for security reasons, the US can take similar steps against Huawei or ZTE. 

Anger and mistrust festers in both countries’ capitals.But what the COVID-19 crisis teaches us is that this competitive approach to national security is inadequate. And COVID-19 is not the only example. The information revolution and globalization are changing world politics dramatically.

While trade wars have set back economic globalization, environmental globalization, reflected in pandemics and climate change, obeys the laws of biology and physics, not politics. In a world where borders are becoming more porous to everything from drugs and illicit financial flows to infectious diseases and cyber terrorism, countries must use their soft power of attraction to develop networks and institutions that address the new threats.

As technology expert Richard Danzig points out, “Pathogens, AI systems, computer viruses, and radiation that others may accidentally release could become as much our problem as theirs. Agreed reporting systems, shared controls, common contingency plans, norms, and treaties must be pursued as means of moderating our numerous mutual risks.” Tariffs and border walls cannot solve these problems.

On transnational issues like COVID-19 and climate change, power becomes a positive-sum game. It is not enough to think of power over others; one must also consider power with others. On many transnational issues, empowering others helps a country accomplish its own goals. For example, all can benefit if others improve their energy efficiency, or improve their public health systems.

All leaders have a responsibility to put their country’s interests first, but the important moral question is how broadly or narrowly they choose to define those interests. Both China and the US are responding to COVID-19 with an inclination toward short-term, zero-sum, competitive approaches, and too little attention to international institutions and cooperation.

Great Britain Seeking £351Billion In Reparations From China

thesun |  CHINA owes Britain £351billion in coronavirus compensation and the government should pursue it through the international courts, a study has concluded.

An investigation into the crisis has claimed the horrific impacts of coronavirus could have been mitigated if China had just been more honest about the outbreak.

The report, to be published tomorrow by the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a British foreign policy think-tank, claims China directly breached international healthcare treaty responsibilities.

It also argues there are ten legal avenues major nations - such as Britain - could take to pursue damages from Beijing.

Experts calculated the G7, the world’s leading economies, face a bill of £3.2trillion.

And they said this could have been avoided if the Communist Party was more open about coronavirus, reports The Mail on Sunday.

Britain’s slice of the compensation would be used to cover the full costs of the treasury’s economic bailout plan and the hike in NHS spending to manage the crisis.

World governments have been forced to inject huge sums of cash into their economies to keep them going, helping to prop up businesses and support laid off or furloughed workers.

HJS experts concluded the Communist Party “sought to conceal bad news at the top” and to “conceal bad news from the outside world”.

It comes as British ministers are now reportedly not discounting the theory that coronavirus actually came from a leak from a Chinese lab in Wuhan.

And meanwhile, the report has spurred a group of 15 top Tories to call on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to “rethink and reset” the United Kingdom’s relationship with China.

In a joint letter, the four former Cabinet ministers and 11 MPs said they are worried about the “damage to the rules-based system caused by China’s non-compliance with international treaties”.

Downing Street Says China Faces A Reckoning

dailymail |  Boris Johnson’s allies turned on China over the coronavirus crisis yesterday, as Britain’s death toll from the epidemic reached four figures.

Ministers and senior Downing Street officials said the Communist state now faces a ‘reckoning’ over its handling of the outbreak and risks becoming a ‘pariah state’.

They are furious over China’s campaign of misinformation, attempts to exploit the pandemic for economic gain and atrocious animal rights record.

In another dramatic day:

• The UK death toll soared to 1,019 – up 260 in 24 hours, including the first surgeon to die from Covid-19;
• NHS medical chief Stephen Powis said ‘every one of us has a part to play’ if deaths were to be kept below 20,000;
• As No 10 released pictures of Mr Johnson at work, a poll found Chancellor Rishi Sunak is the voters’ favourite to be interim Prime Minister if Mr Johnson cannot perform his duties;
• Tracking by this newspaper suggested the virus sweeping Whitehall may have originated with the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier;
• The first images emerged from inside London’s ExCel Centre as it is being transformed into a 4,000-bed makeshift hospital;
• Deaths across Europe exceeded 20,000, with Italy suffering 10,023 fatalities and Spain seeing its biggest daily rise of 889 to reach 5,690;
• Global infections hit 600,000;
• Ministers were considering using the RAF to airlift Britons stranded abroad after Opposition pressure;
• A front line NHS doctor gave a harrowing account to this newspaper about how medics are having to ‘play God’ due to equipment shortages;
• Amid fear of more domestic abuse cases, Home Secretary Priti Patel warned culprits they would be ‘brought to justice’;
• Police risked fresh claims of snooping by tracking motorists’ cars to check how far they have travelled;
• Panic buyers provoked anger by throwing away excess food – some of it unopened;
• US President Donald Trump suggested he may try to put New York in quarantine;
• Wuhan, the Chinese epicentre of the crisis, partially reopened after more than two months in isolation;

The latest British victims of the epidemic to be named include the first surgeon to die from the virus. 

Transplant consultant Dr Adil El Tayar, 63, who died on Wednesday, is thought to have become infected while was working at a hospital in the Midlands.

His cousin, the BBC presenter Zeinab Badawi, said: ‘Adil was a stoic and an optimist and thought he would soon recover. This virus is unforgiving, indiscriminate and it can be brutal.’

Shi Zhengli's Student Huang Yan Ling Mysteriously Disappeared

WaPo | The story of how the novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China, has produced a nasty propaganda battle between the United States and China. The two sides have traded some of the sharpest charges made between two nations since the Soviet Union in 1985 falsely accused the CIA of manufacturing AIDS.

U.S. intelligence officials don’t think the pandemic was caused by deliberate wrongdoing. The outbreak that has now swept the world instead began with a simpler story, albeit one with tragic consequences: The prime suspect is “natural” transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.

“Good science, bad safety” is how Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) put this theory in a Feb. 16 tweet. He ranked such a breach (or natural transmission) as more likely than two extreme possibilities: an accidental leak of an “engineered bioweapon” or a “deliberate release.” Cotton’s earlier loose talk about bioweapons set off a furor, back when he first raised it in late January and called the outbreak “worse than Chernobyl.”

President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added to the bile last month by describing the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and the “Wuhan virus,” respectively.

China dished wild, irresponsible allegations of its own. On March 12, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao charged in a tweet: “It might be [the] US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.” He retweeted an article that claimed, without evidence, that U.S. troops might have spread the virus when they attended the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.

China retreated on March 22, when Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai told “Axios on HBO” that such rumors were “crazy” on both sides. A State Department spokesman said Cui’s comment was “welcome,” and Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged in a March 27 phone call to “focus on cooperative behavior,” a senior administration official told me.

Elite Establishment Joins MSM Villifying China For Controlavirus

foreignpolicy |  While the novel coronavirus is changing the world, China is trying to do the same. Already a serious strategic rival of the United States with considerable international clout, it’s now moving into a new field—health.

After initial denials and cover-ups, China successfully contained the COVID-19 outbreak—but not before it had exported many cases to the rest of the world. Today, despite the falsehoods it initially passed on, which played a critical role in delaying global response, it’s trying to leverage its reputed success story into a stronger position on international health bodies.

Most critically, Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the World Health Organization (WHO), which both receives funding from China and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels. Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do so.

After the Beijing visit, though, WHO said in a statement that it appreciated “especially the commitment from top leadership, and the transparency they have demonstrated.” Only after the meeting did it declared, on Jan. 30, a public health emergency of international concern. And after China reported only a few new cases each day, WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic March 11—even though it had spread globally weeks before.

WHO was keen to broadcast Beijing’s message. “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” WHO experts said in their February report on the mission to China. The country had gained “invaluable time for the response” in an “all-of-government and all-of society approach” that has averted or delayed hundreds of thousands of cases, protecting the global community and “creating a stronger first line of defense against international spread.”

China’s “uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures” provides vital lessons for the global response, the WHO report said. Beijing’s strategy “demonstrated that containment can be adapted and successfully operationalized in a wide range of settings.” However, while recommending China’s epidemic control policy to the world, WHO neglected the negative externalities—from economic damage to the failure to treat many non-coronavirus patients, psychological woes, and human rights costs.

It’s not surprising that China’s containment strategy was effective, said Richard Neher, virologist at the University of Basel. “The big lockdown, centralized quarantine, and contact tracing for sure accelerated the decline,” Neher said. Lawrence O. Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, points to “major human rights” concerns with the lockdown techniques pioneered in China and now—to a different degree—adopted in many nations. Gostin recommends standard public health measures like testing, treatment, contact tracing, and isolation or quarantine “as scientifically justified.”

While the rising number of cases elsewhere shows that China isn’t alone in failing in the initial stages of an outbreak, the full story of the Chinese loss will probably never be known—and certainly not recognized by WHO or other bodies.

One reason is that official data from China is often highly dubious—which can lead to ill-advised health policies in other countries, since studies based on information from China are the first used to understand COVID-19. Countless cases of people dying at home in Wuhan—some being described in social media posts—will probably never go into the statistics. And while a report by Caixin on the Chinese province of Heilongjiang said that a considerable percentage of asymptomatic cases has not been reported—which amounts to about 50 percent more known infections in China, according to a South China Morning Post report on classified government data—WHO takes numbers reported by Beijing at face value.

Senator Rick Scott Calls For China-WHO Coronavirus Cover-Up Investigation

americanmilitairynews |  Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott on Tuesday called on Congress to investigate the World Health Organization (WHO) for its early handling of the coronavirus outbreak that began in China, and allegations the WHO helped China conceal the severity of the virus.

Scott described his concerns about the WHO’s handling of the virus in a statement shared on his Senate website.

“The mission of the WHO is to get public health information to the world so every country can make the best decisions to keep their citizens safe. When it comes to Coronavirus, the WHO failed. They need to be held accountable for their role in promoting misinformation and helping Communist China cover up a global pandemic,” Scott said.”We know Communist China is lying about how many cases and deaths they have, what they knew and when they knew it – and the WHO never bothered to investigate further. Their inaction cost lives.”

Scott called on Congress to open an investigation of the WHO, once it comes back in session, “To review whether American taxpayers should continue to spend millions of dollars every year to fund an organization that willfully parroted propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party.”

The Chinese government reportedly took several efforts in late December and early January to conceal knowledge about the novel strain of coronavirus, now commonly referred to as COVID-19. Chinese medical professionals who encountered the disease early on were reportedly detained and reprimanded for “spreading rumors” and in some reports were told to destroy data establishing the existence of the novel coronavirus strain.

Han Elites Poised To Unleash Full Controlavirus On Hong Kong

reuters |  Officers from China’s top internal security force - the People’s Armed Police – joined Hong Kong police on the frontlines to observe anti-government protests that peaked last year, according to a senior foreign diplomat and an opposition politician. 

Hong Kong police took PAP officers to monitor the protesters and their tactics as part of a wider effort by the paramilitary force to deepen its understanding of the Hong Kong situation, they said.

“I’m aware that Hong Kong police officers have taken Chinese security forces to the front during protests, apparently in an observation role,” veteran democratic legislator James To told Reuters.

To said he had reason to believe the Chinese forces included members of locally-based PAP units.

The foreign diplomat, who requested anonymity and declined to be quoted due to sensitivity over commenting on security matters, also said PAP officers accompanied police to the frontlines. 

Responding to questions from Reuters, the Chinese Defence Ministry said the PAP was not stationed in Hong Kong, while a Hong Kong police spokesman said they “stress that there is no such visit or observation by any members of the mainland law enforcement agencies”. 

The State Council Information Office and the Central Government’s Hong Kong Liaison Office did not respond to Reuters’ questions. 

The diplomat and three other foreign envoys, however, estimated that China’s government had ramped up the paramilitary People’s Armed Police (PAP) presence in Hong Kong to as many as 4,000 personnel - far more than previously known estimates. 

Their assessments were based on intense scrutiny of the security forces’ response to the pro-democracy protests, which began last June, but have ebbed this year amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis. 

Reuters had reported in September that an unknown number of PAP were among a surge in Chinese security forces moved quietly into bases across the city last year as Hong Kong’s government struggled to contain the mounting political unrest. 

The rapidly-modernized PAP is the mainland’s core paramilitary and anti-riot force and operates separately from China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).  

Under 2018 reforms, both the PAP and PLA are under the ultimate command of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who sits at the apex of the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission.

Han Elite SARS-CoV2 Narrative Blowback

Some #influenza deaths were actually infected with #COVID-19, Robert Redfield from US #CDC admitted at the House of Representatives. US reported 34 million cases of influenza and 20,000 deaths. Please tell us how many are related to COVID-19? @CDCDirector pic.twitter.com/vYNZRFPWo3

— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) March 12, 2020

 

winterwatch |  There is something very sketchy about the official cases of coronavirus versus the string of important people who have it.

The U.K.’s health minister caught the virus. Really? What are the odds?

Either the cases are already many, many multiples higher than the 1,200 in the U.S. acknowledged, or there is a big-time psychological operation in play. It’s probably both, as the game is generating panic at this point.

And what better way to trigger a full-blown panic than for Trojan Horse Trumpenstein to call the affliction “just like the regular flu” on Monday, and then Wednesday evening turn around and implement a draconian 30-day ban on all travel from Europe. Talk about suddenly yelling fire in a crowded theater.

Also throwing a match on the kindling was National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Fauci’s warning that “millions” of Americans could contract the virus if Americans are “complacent.”

Axios reports, citing two sources briefing on the meeting, that Congress’ in-house doctor told Capitol Hill staffers at a close-door meeting this week that he expects 75 million to 150 million people in the U.S. — roughly one-third of the country — will contract the coronavirus.

My Feb. 29, 2020, post on COVID-19 was spot on and in nu'merous respects. This should be reread, or read it now if for the first time before you continue.

One of my remarks was this: “Look for a big celebrity who’s active on Twitter to ‘come down’ sick to help trigger a panic among the plebs.”

And now, lo and behold Tom Hanks and his wife have announced they have the coronavirus. Has to be Oprah next?

Then Utah Jazz basketball player Rudy Gobert has also tested positive for coronavirus. Moments after the Gobert announcement, the NBA declared it would suspend the season until further notice. A short time later, it was announced that games would be played in empty arenas. No fans would be allowed to attend. Yes, now they have Joe Sixpack’s full attention.

KU and UMKC Got ZERO Coronavirus Phuggs For Its Students/Communities

bizjournal |  The University of Missouri-Columbia will suspend in-person classes and move to online instruction starting 5 p.m. Wednesday until March 30 in an effort to stem the growing coronavirus outbreak, the university announced.

In-person classes will resume March 30, after spring break, which is set for March 21-29.

An official with the University of Missouri-Kansas City said in an email Wednesday that classes would continue as scheduled and are not being moved online.

"Under the circumstances, however, making preparations to do so if necessary is the prudent course," John Martellaro, UMKC's director of media relations, said in the email. "We are providing instruction and resources to our faculty on how to change in-person courses to online courses if that becomes necessary at some point."

Effective immediately, all MU-related domestic and international travel is suspended until April 12, including previously approved travel, according to a university statement. That travel is canceled regardless of how it was to be funded.

All nonessential university events will be canceled until March 29. Small meetings and athletic events still will be held, and the school will be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected, the statement said.

There are no confirmed cases of coronavirus at MU. Last weekend, several MU students and faculty attended a journalism conference in New Orleans where another attendee tested positive for the virus. 

The positive case was not part of the MU group, the university announced Wednesday. MU students and faculty who attended the conference are staying home, and none have shown symptoms, the university said in a Wednesday statement. The risk of those people developing the virus is low, the statement said.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the University of Kansas had not announced any changes to in-person instruction.

The state of Missouri has one confirmed case of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. A St. Louis woman tested positive after returning from a study abroad trip in Italy.

Washington University and Webster University, both in St. Louis, also announced they would move to online classes starting this month, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The United States Owes China An Apology, and The World Owes China a Gratitude

xinhua |  Not only that, the U.S. government also announced that restricting the entry of Chinese and foreigners who have visited China into the U.S. is actually an indirect declaration of a travel ban on China, which isolates other countries in the world from China, and has a great economic impact on China. of.

　　These practices in the United States are very unkind. They can be described as falling into the ground and killing people while they are ill. Now China's new crown pneumonia epidemic has been controlled. Except for Wuhan, new confirmed cases have been added in single digits. But it's getting worse.

　　If China retaliates against the United States at this time, in addition to announcing a travel ban on the United States, it will also announce strategic control over medical products and ban exports to the United States. Then the United States will be caught in the ocean of new crown viruses.

　　According to the US CDC officials, most masks in the United States are made in China and imported from China. If China bans the export of masks to the United States, the United States will fall into the mask shortage, and the most basic measures to prevent the new crown virus are Can't do it.

　　Also according to the US CDC officials, most of the drugs in the United States are imported, and some drugs are imported from Europe. However, Europe also places the production base of these drugs in China, so more than 90% of the US imported drugs are Related to China. The implication is that at this time, as long as China announces that its drugs are as domestic as possible and banned exports, the United States will fall into the hell of the new crown pneumonia epidemic.

　　However, there is a great love in the world. The Chinese people and the Chinese government have never done so. They have not insulted the United States, nor have they banned the export of masks and medicines to the United States. As China ’s new crown pneumonia epidemic is gradually controlled, China ’s ability to export masks and medicines Will be greatly enhanced, and the United States is one of the demand side. US government officials, such as Secretary of Commerce Rose, US Secretary of State Pompeo, and US White House Economic Adviser Navarro, have publicly gloated over China's new crown pneumonia epidemic, saying that the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic in China is good for the United States and will help companies return to the United States. It also called on companies around the world to consider the risks of China's supply chain. Even the infamous "Wall Street Journal" published an infamous article "China is a real patient in Asia", and the "New York Times" in the United States also published a document condemning the closure of Wuhan in China as a violation of human rights. The American culture of falling rocks is really shameless. Today, Feng Shui is taking turns, and the United States has become a victim of the new crown pneumonia epidemic. At this time, China has not fallen into rocks and has not condemned the United States. At this time, the United States should be more mistakes for the past. Apologize to China for your actions.

　　During this time, a voice deliberately speculated that China owes the world an apology, which is very ridiculous. In order to fight the new crown pneumonia epidemic, China has made huge sacrifices, paid huge economic costs, and cut off the new crown virus. The route of transmission. No country has made such a great sacrifice and effort in this new crown pneumonia epidemic.

　　Moreover, according to the research of Academician Zhong Nanshan, although the new crown pneumonia epidemic broke out in China, the source may not necessarily be in China. Many studies have also pointed out that the origin of the new crown virus may come from other countries. Many confirmed cases of new crown pneumonia in the United States, Italy, Iran and other countries without a history of Asian contact have demonstrated this, so China has no reason to apologize.

　　Now we should rightfully say that the United States owes China an apology, and the world owes China a gratitude. Without China ’s huge sacrifice and dedication, it would not be possible to win a precious time window for the world to fight against the new crown pneumonia epidemic. The hard-to-find new crown pneumonia epidemic has been blocked for a long time, it is really shocking, crying ghosts!