Many have reacted to this towering edifice of nothing, by talking about Corona in the future tense.
The Lauterbachs of the world cast their gaze to the fall in grim hopes of new, killer variants that will revive the panic that brought them to prominence.
And it is highly uncertain, whether it will ever do much of anything ever again.
This chart is from GrippeWeb, a project of the Robert Koch Institut to track rates of acute respiratory infections in Germany. They base their numbers on volunteer surveys, to provide data that are totally independent of the medical diagnostic apparatus. Right now, they estimate that 5.3 % of everyone in Germany has some kind of respiratory infection.
That sounds like a lot, but it’s in line with pre-pandemic infection rates. More than that, you can see here what a complete nothingburger the entire Omicron wave has been. Despite all the screeching headlines, Germans spent the latest SARS-2 wave on balance healthier than in the pre-pandemic era. If it weren’t for all the pointless quarantining, nobody would’ve noticed that anything was amiss.
Participating clinics take respiratory samples from sick patients, and these samples are then tested for influenza, RSV, rhinovirus, human metapneumovirus, parainfluenza, SARS-2 and the other human coronaviruses. For most of the weeks since January, Corona (orange) has been the single most common virus in the Reference Centre samples. Despite adding this totally new pathogen to our small repertoire of pervasive respiratory viruses, however, the overall rates of respiratory illness remained in line with that from prior years. We have an extra virus, but we don’t have more sick people1.
What then is the strategy that government in Kiev and its overlords in Washington DC are following? Why has the Ukraine not given up? Why didn’t it continue to negotiate with the Russian side?
Is their hope that their daily over the top ‘Russia is losing’ propaganda will create enough political momentum for a large scale NATO intervention?
Russian and Donbas forces have cleared the city of Mariupol except for the giant metallurgic complex of Azovstal which is held by some estimated 4,000 men, including many from the fascist Azov battalion.
On Sunday Russia opened corridors across the front line and asked for those forces to surrender. However the Zelensky government ordered them to stay and to continue to bind Russian forces which otherwise could be used elsewhere:
Russia had given the Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol until Sunday morning to lay down their weapons or be “eliminated.” On Sunday, the forces at the plant ignored the deadline, and Ukrainian officials vowed that they would not surrender. In response, the Russian assault intensified, with missiles and bombs hitting the city and new attacks occurring near the plant, according to the Ukrainian military. … Ukrainian officials said on Sunday that the struggle was not over for Mariupol, which for two months has tied up Russian troops and resources that are badly needed elsewhere.
The Azovstal complex is a 2 by 2 miles industrial area. It can be surrounded and controlled by a relatively small force. Those within the area no longer have heavy artillery ammunition and presumably little other supplies. The Russian forces can see and bomb anything that moves on the open ground and can otherwise sit back and wait their enemies out.
I do not believe that holding on to Azovstal will significantly delay the upcoming second phase of the Russian operation which will surround and destroy the Ukrainian army on the Donbas front.
The Russian military has two huge advantage over the Ukrainian forces in the east. One is of course its air superiority. The other is the unimpeded supply line which allows it to get as much heavy artillery ammunition, fuel and food to its forces as it needs.
Without fuel the Ukrainian army can not move and without constant supply, especially of large amounts of artillery munitions, it can not counter Russian artillery which will be in heavy use against it.
This pictures of a former Ukrainian position show the devastating result of such a situation. bigger
Nearly all of the Ukrainian ammunition and fuel supplies have been bombed and destroyed. What is trickling in through its western borders has difficulties to reach the eastern front and is anyway not enough to supply an actively fighting and maneuvering army.
On April 16 Russia shot down a Ukrainian military transport plane that was bringing ‘western’ weapons to Odessa. Today it destroyed another ammunition depot near Lviv were ‘western’ weapons are crossing the border into Ukraine. Some bits of fuel allegedly still reach the Ukraine through trains from Moldova. But that is far from enough.
Since the beginning of the war, the number of gas stations in Ukraine has decreased three times, and private fuel consumption has decreased by about the same amount, said Sergey Kuyun, director of the A-95 consulting group.
“According to our estimates, a third of the total number of gas stations is operating, this is about 2.5 thousand stations, before the war there were 7.5 thousand. Of course, the main reason is the lack of fuel. Consumption has also decreased three times compared to the pre-war level,” he said at a closed briefing at the Media Center in Lviv on Monday.
At the same time, Kuyun noted that traders or network owners are forced to provide their most strategic and powerful facilities, located mainly in regional centers or on main routes, while peripheral stations are forced to stand idle, although there are also a lot of consumers there.
According to him, the shortage of fuel became especially aggravated after the shutdown of the Kremenchug Oil Refinery as a result of a missile attack by Russian invaders. … On April 2, the Russian invaders destroyed the infrastructure of the Kremenchug oil refinery with their shelling, and it stopped working.
The damage done daily to the Ukrainian military and military industry is huge. One can get a sense of it when one reads through the briefings of the Russian defense ministry. From today’s morning brief (here in full as some have difficulties accessing the site):
There is a strong case to be made that Washington goaded Putin into launching this current war. Likewise, the Soviets’ invasion at the end of 1979 was arguably provoked by President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the boys at Langley. At least they like to think so. Operation Cyclone, as it was called, killed some 15,000 Soviet soldiers and at least one million Afghans.
President Joe Biden’s administration and other hawks do not want the war in Ukraine to end. They are not alone, some NATO member states prefer to see the war drag on indefinitely as well. As Libertarian Institute news editors Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter wrote last week,
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on and the two sides continue negotiations, the Washington Post reports that some NATO states prefer Ukrainians continue “fighting and dying” over “a peace that comes too early,” rejecting any outcome that could be sold as a “victory” for Moscow.
Though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly acknowledged that his country will not join the NATO alliance in recent weeks, some members are loath for Kiev to accept that key Russian demand, according to officials and diplomats cited by the Post.
“Even a Ukrainian vow not to join NATO could be a concern to some neighbors,” the outlet reported. “That leads to an awkward reality: For some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe.”
The truth is “some in NATO” are not concerned with “a peace” that comes “at too high a cost” to Kiev or Ukraine, rather they fear a “peace” that comes at too low a cost for Moscow and Russia.
Shortly after the aforementioned Washington Post article was published, Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas warned against “peace at any price.” This view is shared by the European Union and the United States. As Dave DeCamp, news editor at Antiwar.com, reports,
“We want it to end as soon as possible, but not in any way,” Borrel said. “Because if we’re going to have a destroyed country that has been dismembered territorially and neutralized, with millions of people in exile, and millions of people dead, then no, we don’t want this war to end like this.” He said this is why Europe must “continue arming Ukraine … More weapons, that is what the Ukrainians expect of us.”
And the winner of the most ironic sentence of the day goes to White House spokesperson Jen Psaki, who after relying on court ruling after court ruling to enforce varying levels of health tyranny for the last 15 months, uttered the following in her out-loud voice…
“Public health decisions shouldn’t be made by the courts. They should be made by public health experts.”
Can you smell the fear?
BY TYLER DURDEN
In a stunning move – soon to be filed under the “completely lost touch with America” folder – the Biden administration is reportedly planning to appeal the ruling that lifted the COVID mask mandate on travel, just hours after most major airlines and airports (and ground transportation) has dropped their mask rules.
It was evident this was coming earlier in the day after White House spokesperson Jen Psaki warned and Xavier Becerra, Biden’s health secretary, told reporters in Nevada, that “we are right now in the process of deciding, and we likely will appeal that ruling, but stay tuned.”
Jonathan Turley offered some insight before the actual decision was made to appeal if CDC thinks it necessary:
The Administration is going to have a hard time making this cat walks backwards. The cheering of passengers and pilots seemed as much as a communication to the Administration as it was a celebration. A large number of airlines immediately declared the mandate to be dead and unenforceable. It is like throwing a retirement party for an employee before they have decided to go. It is a tad awkward to express doubts when someone is showing you the door.
That is why those cheering videos could have a greater impact on the White House than any CDC or DOJ recommendation. The Biden Administration could still appeal as it has in past such cases. There will certainly be many DOJ lawyers asserting that they could win on appeal on the basis of agency deference. The question is who would tell the public. They may have to wait for the “ding, dong” parties to end.
But, given all that, they decided it was worth it…
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said on the weekend talk shows that it’s time to start talking about sending US troops to directly fight Russia in Ukraine. Thus to defend Ukraine’s borders, this member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee openly calls for that launch of what would be WWIII. Coons is joined by plenty of Republican Members calling for direct conflict with Russia, including disgraced neocon Rep. Adam Kinzinger. Also today: Fauci spills the beans on lockdowns and MSNBC spills the beans on its view of the role of media in a “free” society…
@ 28:50MSNBC on Musk in media: He is trying to control what people think, that’s our job!
The crisis could still be avoided, but only if Congress becomes serious about cutting spending, starting with the military industrial complex. Congress should also start to reform monetary policy by auditing the Fed, legalizing alternative currencies, and exempting precious metals and cryptocurrencies from all capital gains taxes.
Apr 18 – The Biden administration and its allies continue to use Russian President Vladimir Putin as the convenient excuse for their economic failures. The most recent falsehood is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused March’s 8.5 percent year-over-year increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI).
Prices were surging long before Russian troops entered Ukraine. Furthermore, Putin did not stop exporting food and gas; it was the Biden administration and Congress that imposed sanctions, making US consumers suffer additional price increases. The blame for the economic effects lies with the US government, not Russia.
The United States has for years been meddling in Ukraine’s affairs with the explicit goal of moving US and NATO military forces ever closer to Russia. The most notorious example was the 2014 US-orchestrated coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected government.
Russia has a legitimate grievance over the US supporting expanding NATO to include Ukraine, despite the US having promised not to support expanding NATO beyond Germany’s borders during negotiations over how to end the Cold War. Foreign policy experts, including George Kennan, the architect of the Cold war “containment” strategy, warned that Russia would respond adversely to NATO expansion near Russia.
Before the Ukraine conflict, Biden and his fellow Democrats blamed price increases on “greedy” corporations, going so far as to claim that increasing antitrust prosecutions would somehow bring down prices. Then Putin became the new excuse.
The main culprit behind rising prices is neither Putin nor “greedy” corporations. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues are to blame. Starting in September 2019, when the Fed panicked over a spike in interest rates in the “repurchasing” market that banks use to give each other overnight loans, the Fed has engaged in an unprecedented spree of money creation. The Fed further stepped up its easy money and low, and even zero, interest rate policies in response to the lockdowns. Increasing prices are the direct result of the Fed’s policies.
The Fed is planning to try to tame prices by increasing interest rates and reducing its balance sheet. This will likely tip the economy into a recession. Increasing interest rates will also cause the federal government’s debt payments to increase, which is a reason the Fed will not increase rates to anywhere near where they would be in a free market.
The best-case scenario may be a return to 70s-style “stagflation.” The worst-case scenario is that the Fed’s failure to rein in inflation, fueled by Congress’s failure to stop spending, combined with the continued resentment over the US’s hyper-interventionist foreign policy, will cause a rejection of the dollar’s reserve currency status and lead to a major financial crisis. Such a crisis could result in widespread poverty, as well as violence, crackdowns on liberties, and even the rise of a totalitarian government.
The crisis could still be avoided, but only if Congress becomes serious about cutting spending, starting with the military industrial complex. Congress should also start to reform monetary policy by auditing the Fed, legalizing alternative currencies, and exempting precious metals and cryptocurrencies from all capital gains taxes. The welfare-warfare-fiat money system will end. What is not known is when it will end and whether it will be replaced by an even more authoritarian government or by a return to limited, constitutional government.
What do these endless thousands of migrants at the southern gates of our country bring with them? A desire for a better life, surely, but also a vast dependency on a deeply indebted America for social welfare, housing, health care and education
Their first act on the road to residency and eventual citizenship in this country is to break the laws of the United States by first breaking into our country.
“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion.”
So reads Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution.
Historically, that constitutional duty — to protect America’s states against invasion — has been the province of the president of the United States, the chief executive, who today is Joe Biden.
How did Biden’s predecessors do in discharging their duty to secure America’s borders?
During the War of 1812, President James Madison assigned the defense of New Orleans against an invading British army that had just burned the Capitol and White House to Gen. Andrew Jackson.
On Jan. 8, 1815, Jackson crushed the battle-hardened and numerically superior British force that had invaded our country.
Jackson was also the chosen instrument of President James Monroe to punish and expel Indian marauders raiding Georgia from Spanish Florida in 1818.
Exceeding his mandate, the resolute Jackson entered Florida, expelled the Spanish governor and annexed the peninsula for the United States after executing two British subjects and almost igniting a war with Great Britain.
In 1845, President James K. Polk sent an American army to Texas to validate our claim to all the land north of the Rio Grande that had belonged to the Lone Star Republic when it seceded from Mexico in 1836 and joined the Union in December of 1845.
President Andrew Johnson sent an army to the Mexican border to effect the removal of a French army and Paris-backed regime that had colonized Mexico while the Union was preoccupied with the Confederacy.
The French departed, leaving behind the hapless Habsburg emperor they had installed to face a firing squad.
When Pancho Villa conducted his murderous raid into Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, Woodrow Wilson sent Gen. John Pershing with an army of 6,000 into Mexico to run him down. They never caught Villa.
By Dwight Eisenhower’s first term, 1 million illegal immigrants had moved into the United States from Mexico. Ike commissioned his friend and West Point classmate Gen. Joseph Swing to effect their removal.
All of these incidents involved America’s southern border, and each of the presidents of that day took seriously their constitutional duty to defend the nation’s borders against invasion, violent or nonviolent.
And how has President Joe Biden discharged that obligation?
In Biden’s first year as president, some 1.7 million Illegal migrants were intercepted crossing into the United States.
The monthly figure from Fiscal Year 2021 was exceeded by the March 2022 figure of 220,000 migrants crossing over into the USA. If sustained, this rate would translate into an invasion of 2.6 million people, predominantly young and predominantly male, in this fiscal year alone.
“Gotaways,” those who breach our borders without ever being stopped and identified by Border Patrol or other authorities, are now estimated at 30,000 a month. Among these clandestinely crossing our border monthly are cartel members, child molesters, drug traffickers and sex offenders. We don’t know who they are, but we do know where they are. They are now our neighbors inside our homeland.
Biden is now planning in May to lift Title 42, which requires that unvaccinated migrants seeking entry at the border remain in Mexico.
According to ABC, the Department of Homeland Security is bracing for as many as 18,000 migrants per day at the US southern border if Title 42 is revoked.
Most of these migrants still come from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, but growing numbers now come from all over the world. They are of every race, nationality, culture, creed and ethnicity, and they are steadily converting America from a First World Western nation into a predominantly Third World country.
By failing or refusing to do his constitutional duty to defend the nation from invasion, Biden is letting this happen. Through his passivity and inaction, he is remaking America. What we are witnessing is the Third Worldization of the USA.
What do these endless thousands of migrants at the southern gates of our country bring with them? A desire for a better life, surely, but also a vast dependency on a deeply indebted America for social welfare, housing, health care and education
Most come with little in the way of skills and almost nothing in the way of personal wealth or a knowledge of our history, heritage and language.
Their first act on the road to residency and eventual citizenship in this country is to break the laws of the United States by first breaking into our country.
A move is afoot to impeach Biden for his failure to do his constitutional duty and defend the southern border of the United States from the invading millions of illegal migrants.
But that would make impeachment the subject of national debate, not the massive illegal migration and the changes it is producing in the character of our country.
Indeed, who stands first in line to succeed an impeached and convicted Joe Biden? Kamala Harris, Biden’s designee to act as America’s “border czar.”
Untangling the core values of America from the Empire of America is made all the harder by tons and tons and tons of physically and mentally destructive drugs coming up through open borders, and by many of the migrants who are coming here and overloading the system of public services, gaming the system, and voting for the system.
The American Immigration Council reports that, as of 2019, there were 44.9 million immigrants living in the US.
In case you’ve been living in a cave, the Biden administration is trying its best to make the southern border a sieve.
But of course, this is a humane act. It has to be. Otherwise, it’s a plan to overwhelm public services, ramp up the Democratic vote, and generally stage a soft invasion whose result will be catastrophic.
For many people, 44.9 million immigrants—or the other figure I found a few months ago, 50 million—are not nearly enough. 44.9 million reflects nothing more than stone cold indifference to suffering.
“Humane” and “caring” mean there must be NO CEILING on immigration. No end to it.
In fact, you can find churches across America whose pastors and parishioners will tell you exactly that. These proud people are evidently tuned into a special broadcast by God or a special edition of the Bible.
How THEY FEEL is the most important factor. To them. Beyond that, no thinking is necessary.
Any suffering of any kind anywhere in the world that might be mitigated by living in the US has one remedy: open borders.
And I’m not even talking about the hordes of American Lefties for whom virtue signaling is a profession. For those credentialed people, life itself IS unlimited immigration.
As I’ve written before, and will write again, open borders is an elite operation, and one of its purposes is supporting the transport of drugs into the US—a trillion-dollar business involving the washing of money through major banks.
The drugs ruin and kill huge numbers of people here in America. The drugs are extremely effective weapons of war. Those who physically survive do so with addled minds.
If you need to bring yourself up to speed on this, talk to an honest DEA agent who has seen the effects up close and personal. Or someone who has lost a relative.
Drugs are taking down America. This has been going on for 50 years.
A confluence of circumstances has come together to create a “perfect storm” for global food production, and now that “perfect storm” is about to get even worse. For months I warned that this crisis was coming, and in recent weeks I have been documenting how dire conditions have already become all over the globe. The head of the UN World Food Program is warning that this is going to be the worst worldwide food crisis since World War II, and even Joe Biden is admitting that the approaching food shortages “are going to be real”. Unfortunately, there have been some new developments which threaten to significantly escalate things.
In recent days, the number of newly confirmed COVID cases in China has soared to record highs, and Chinese authorities have responded to this with unprecedented lockdowns.
Nearly 400 million people across 45 cities in China are under full or partial lockdown as part of China’s strict zero-Covid policy. Together they represent 40%, or $7.2 trillion, of annual gross domestic product for the world’s second-largest economy, according to data from Nomura Holdings.
Analysts are ringing warning bells, but say investors aren’t properly assessing how serious the global economic fallout might be from these prolonged isolation orders.
Chinese lockdowns are a lot more brutal than lockdowns in the western world.
I have never seen anything like that before, and these lockdowns will continue as long as COVID keeps spreading.
To put this in perspective, the number of people that are currently locked down in China is greater than the total population of the United States.
Needless to say, these lockdowns are bringing the Chinese economy to a grinding halt, and that is going to affect the entire planet. At the Port of Shanghai, activity “is essentially at a standstill”…
The Port of Shanghai, which handled over 20% of Chinese freight traffic in 2021, is essentially at a standstill. Food supplies stuck in shipping containers without access to refrigeration are rotting.
This is an enormous problem for those of us in the western world, because our stores are normally filled with goods that have been made in China.
And this even extends to our food supply. For example, we send giant mountains of apples to China where they are processed and sent back to us as apple juice.
We need to hope that the lockdowns in China end soon, because if that does not happen it will likely create tremendous shortages all over the planet.
Meanwhile, the fertilizer crisis in the United States is about to get even worse.
Previously, I have written about how the skyrocketing cost of fertilizer is going to cause massive problems for many U.S. farmers, and now many of those farmers may not be able to get the fertilizer that they need at all due to “railroad-mandated shipping reductions”. The following comes directly from a notice released by CF Industries…
CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: CF), a leading global manufacturer of hydrogen and nitrogen products, today informed customers it serves by Union Pacific rail lines that railroad-mandated shipping reductions would result in nitrogen fertilizer shipment delays during the spring application season and that it would be unable to accept new rail sales involving Union Pacific for the foreseeable future. The Company understands that it is one of only 30 companies to face these restrictions.
CF Industries ships to customers via Union Pacific rail lines primarily from its Donaldsonville Complex in Louisiana and its Port Neal Complex in Iowa. The rail lines serve key agricultural areas such as Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and California. Products that will be affected include nitrogen fertilizers such as urea and urea ammonium nitrate (UAN) as well as diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), an emissions control product required for diesel trucks. CF Industries is the largest producer of urea, UAN and DEF in North America, and its Donaldsonville Complex is the largest single production facility for the products in North America.
MCViewPoint 
