by John Ward
Our main news stories at the minute offer thinking people a chance to decide for themselves whether the Buddhists were right, in that everything is connected. The Slog analyses investment meltdown, COVID19 and the Unelected State’s role in media hysteria.
There are signs from New York and elsewhere that the longest and most corrupt Help Yourselves Bulls**t run in history is about to have its final Wily Coyote moment. Trump appointee Jerome Powell at The US Federal Reserve was quietly telling the Dimons and Cohns of this world mid last week that this time, Wall Street has been found out by enough opinion leaders to make the free money Repo Loans scam’s continuation impossible.
In the light of this, HSBC three days ago announced a cut of 35,000 jobs over the next three years. Until that one, Deutsche’s plan to cut 18,000 the year before had been by far the biggest. A legal eagle insider told me Wednesday afternoon EDST to “expect more of the same….and fast”. The Fed duly announced cuts in the bailouts for several months to come.
The banking lobby didn’t waste any time trying to change the prevailing mood, persuading Paul Krugman to write a long piece in the Alt State’s Inhouse Journal, The New York Times, exonerating Wall Street banks of any responsibility for Crash1 twelve years ago. How Krugman ever won a Nobel Prize for economic ‘science’ contributions has always baffled me (I decided during my Second Year at Uni that there is nothing remotely scientific about it) but I suppose it is and always was the metier of economists to explain why something happened, without ever showing any awareness of the likelihood before it happens.
This isn’t true of those at the investment sharp end. Respected guru Crispin Odey two days ago came balls out and said, “We’re tasting the last intoxicating draughts of this longest ever bull market….the world economy weakens into monetary easing whilst stock markets catch up with bond markets in their rating…..no one should be in any doubt that this will ultimately end badly.”
One of the reasons I listen to Odey is his insistence that debt being out of control is (as ever) central to the problem. “There just isn’t any way it can be paid back,” he observes, “one day you wake up, and the Titanic’s only listing slightly. But there aren’t enough lifeboats, period”.
The entire Repo Loan farrago is a symptom. Bourses out of sync with commercial activity are another, lack of liquidity in the eurozone another, Beijing chucking cash at its markets another still. Now other ‘fundamentals’ are reestablishing themselves. Gold began the year on $1528, and is as I write on $1633….the most sustained run since I reinvested in it almost exactly a year ago at $1328. The price is still being suppressed artificially, but – as with the New York Fed’s grudging decision to trim Repo Aid – the élite heart doesn’t seem to be entirely in it any more.
Given this context, those who look for a scapegoat to prove that everything “was alright really” have been given a heaven-sent gift in the shape of Covid19.
Truth be told, lower demand was hugely apparent across Europe, Latin America, the US, and across the Asia-Pacific rim during Q4 2019, when the sole awareness of something called Corona was among Brits alive in the 1950s who remember it as a soft drink brand directly home-delivered from lorries. So placing all the blame on Covid19 is what I would call opportunistic back-writing. Or stabbing, if one looks more closely at the geopolitics of it all.
We have an apoplectic President in the White House at the minute. His own man Jerome Powell is now in reverse as far as the “print unto eternity” strategy for getting The Donald reelected is concerned. Those close to such events attest to a dark cloud of ire following Trump around.
The Unelected US State doesn’t like Donald Trump. They’d prefer Biden, and if not, then Bloomberg. But Biden is getting whupped by Sanders, and Warren gave Bloomberg an almighty clobbering on TV the other night.
It is at this point that we get into conjecture, speculation and “what if?” rather than news. But as I always say, if logic, motivation, opportunity and odd behaviour point that way, then it is at least worth investigation as an avenue of enquiry.
Let’s start with odd behaviour. When SARS and MERS emerged some years back, that entire class of virus was unknown. Both outbreaks fizzled out without great harm to humanity.
Although it transmits far more easily and is harder to spot than either predecessor, Covid19 is – in terms of ‘deadliness’ – roughly halfway between the two. As such therefore, it is in no way the Domesday Bug; in fact, at that level it isn’t even a cull. Rather, it is most likely to kill economically inactive old gits like me of very little concern to the QE/Zirp perpetrators.
And yet, two things are apparent:
- Despite our greater knowledge and previous experience, both the MSM and internet blogosphere/social media are drowning in a fearfest far greater than anything we experienced with SARS an MERS….even taking account of the explosion in digital since then. Sites like Zero Hedge and the Washington Post seem determined to name Covid19 as a 21st century Black Death.
- The Unelected State in the US has tried, from Day one online, to establish this event as a germ warfare lab escape. In early to mid January, virologists from Boston to Britain via France and Singapore categorically asserted that Covid19 is a twice-mutated 65 year old virus that did not originate in Wuhan….although they admitted that some elements of easy transmission were odd, in that the RNA bears resemblances in parts to the AIDS virus.
However, the clear possibility that the virus was not a Chinese cock-up but a deliberate plant by A. N. Other power or powers seems to have passed everyone by.
What would be the motive behind doing such a thing? That depends on who one suspects (a) had something massive to gain and (b) needed a major victory over a weakened opponent. As Claude Rains remarked in Casablanca, “It’s time to round up the usual suspects”.
The White House wants better trade terms with China. The Pentagon and NATO would like to see China castigated and weakened. Globalist energy interests and the White House would like to see Chinese output fall, thus reducing oil demand, weakening Beijing’s trade bargaining hand, and making oil cheaper in the factory and at the pumps. And leading the way with two motives (at least) is Wall Street and its sugar Daddy the Fed, who (1) would like to see Chinese gold demand fall and keep the bourses high for that bit longer and (2) desperately seek something to blame for the inevitable Crash2 that is hurtling towards us.
Covid19 could’ve been tailor made for all those needs and desires. Except, in some of it, the President….who wants the false “boom” to keep going. As the bad guys would like to dump Trump anyway, it seems doubtful that they told him anything such involvement as they may have had in it: for them, the election of Bloomberg would be win-win (albeit increasingly doubtful).
That only leaves capability. Parts of Covid19’s RNA resemble the AIDS virus. No nation on Earth has done more research into the AIDS virus than the US.
I want to go on and make a final primary point about the events and speculation described above. But before doing that, sadly I must return to the bizarre magnification of Covid19’s “deadly” nature. This is a subject so foggy with myths and wrapped in blogger hysteria (before being handed out to Sun readers) as to make any final attempt at accuracy virtually impossible.
Take for example the latest scare in South Korea, insisting that the “tally of deaths has doubled because of one super-spreader who went unnoticed”. This is crapola: the total of cases doubled to 204 because some marathon Church event in a tightly enclosed space allowed one 61 year old woman from Daegu to spread the illness during rituals. She is not a super-spreader, and it remains doubtful if such people really exist: of the two “found” so far, both involved 36-48 hour stays in a small space — one a ski lodge, the other a church. Not only is the source of her infection unknown, we don’t even know her name: she is, for the time being, ‘Patient 31’.
South Korea, by the way, has an absolutely appalling health control track-record. Singapore, on the other hand, comes No 1 worldwide out of 191 in virus control: as I predicted last week, the island’s rate of infection spread is (albeit on relatively small samples) a fraction of that in China.
More exactly, Covid19 is itself a super-spreader. We now have a long enough data series overall to at last establish the exact multiple involved: it is between fifteen and twenty times more effective at reaching and establishing itself in a new host body than either SARS or MERS.
Its ease of spread is highlighted by the events on board the British cruise liner Diamond Princess. Bizarrely, the medical officer took the decision to make – yes, another highly populated enclosed space – a sort of DIY quarantine. In fact, it became an entirely predictable incubator, with 10 infections roaring ahead to 600 in just two weeks.
OK, so we know that as a viral killer it is average in almost every way, but as an infector, it’s very clearly turbo-injected…..and is difficult to spot because of the long incubation and (at first) lack of symptoms.
The long-term prognosis on these bases remains the same: minor cull, not many dead, mainly grumpy old misogynists, who cares etc etc.
But we still don’t have a reliable kill to cure rate; and the latest obsession of the Armageddon Army – “reinfection” – is the new OMG sweeping through the anti-social media. Let’s examine it.
The News18 site carries this bowel-wobbler of a headline this morning:
People in China are Getting Reinfected
Well, first up let’s establish one thing clearly: the article is about 1 (that’s one) person, not ‘people’.
To be fair, there are 4 (that’s four, boys and girls) ‘other cases’, although not in this article. But the term ‘reinfection’ is for now completely inappropriate, because none of the five (let’s count them together, should we?) people involved (all in mainland China) shows any evidence of reinfection. All of them are patients discharged from hospital who no longer displayed coughing/sneezing symptoms and were not testing positive for Covid19.
The most likely explanation is that they were misdiagnosed; or had the virus alongside a flu, recovered from the flu but then presented later with the Covid19 symptoms and tested positive. None of them have died, and all are showing signs of recovery. The best extrapolations from these cases are (i) they confirm that in some patients an incubation period of up to 26 days may be possible, but (ii) as 5 out of 77,800 cases, they are of homoaeopathic (if any) importance.
Finally, an anxious sea-captain of my acquaintance announced the day before yesterday that “only numpties think Covid19 will fade during the summer months”. This is the broadest definition of the term I have yet come across, as it encompasses the Lancet, Science, Virology today, the National Geographic, Johns Hopkins hospital, L’Institut de virologie de France and – oddest of all – me.
Salty Dog has yet to furnish me with the evidence supporting the charge of snowflakery; meanwhile, I have failed to find any myself beyond one piece of pure conjecture from a medic at the Boston Children’s Hospital, whose sole conclusion is ‘not known’ as clearly recorded in this page capture:
And yet, the MSM > 24/7News > blogosphere > offpiste news online > blizzard of overstatement continues unabated. At every stage, the language used is ‘deadly killer’, ‘surge’, ‘doubles’, ‘serious danger to human life on Earth’ and even ‘chances of containing bug narrowing’.
It’s all bollocks and that’s official. IABATO rules OK.
You have to wonder why…and the more it continues, the more one comes to think that maybe – just maybe – the most far-fetched explanation might be the nearest thing we’re ever going to get to the Truth.
My over-arching point today is, however, pretty clear…..even if the 3% would rather it wasn’t. It is this: the various élite suspects are not always as one about the wisdom or otherwise of cooking something up. There is no one ‘united’ élite, nor one global Alternative State: when their interests diverge, they fight like stoats in a sock.
Some for example – like the Pentagon – see the State as an inestimable source of free money; for others, it is simply in the way. For Wall Street, the State in all its forms is a nuisance, and yet for bureacrats it offers access to all sources of power. But whereas the Pentagon can always find an enemy, the oil and automative businesses only want war that protects the supply of Black Gold: war that disrupts petrol supply is very bad news. For the CIA, the sureté, MI5, the NSA and GCHQ, everything the People get up to is paramount; the banks would rather they just didn’t exist. For politicians in “liberal democratic” societies, no people to vote for them and pay taxes would present an existential crisis.
And so, and so on, ad nauseam.
Viruses created in the lab are for military use….hence the term – germ warfare. So the organisation of a virus to cripple an enemy puts the military at the top of the list of suspects. Nevertheless, it still has to have a rationale for such psychopathy: on the one hand, gold price destruction and someone to blame would suit the markets….but wouldn’t suit globalist manufacturers and silicone valley for whom the “enemy” is a vital source of parts and raw materials.
These unelected élites have never been as powerful as they are today, except perhaps in single significant examples from the past – the Church in Mediaeval Europe, the military under Kaiser Wilhelm, the SS in Nazi Germany and so forth. More to the point, there are far more of them, and they go rogue without a moment’s hesitation if it suits them.
The future leader who can play them off against each other could turn out to be either the most useful (or dangerous) human being ever born.
It’s a sobering thought. And a damned sight more of a threat to humanity than Covid19.