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Beware: Our New Online Culture is a Feast for Mass Surveillance | The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on April 11, 2020

What! You still haven’t taped over your PC and selfie camera lenses?

Nothing is private online unless you are using VPNs and secure email. Even then…

Do you really think Facebook messenger and (Facebook’s) WhatsApp are secure?

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/beware-our-new-online-culture-is-a-feast-for-mass-surveillance/

Bill Blunden

The rapid spread of COVID-19 has caused network traffic to surge as Internet users resort to video conferencing to work remotely.

For example, last December online meeting provider Zoom hosted roughly 10 million participants. In March this statistic jumped to 200 million. The public’s stampede to the cloud is an auspicious development for the intelligence community as sensitive discussions that once occurred in physical office buildings are now channeled through a relatively small number of digital gatekeepers. The implications are unsettling.

From the vantage point of professional spies, the desire to eavesdrop on popular communication channels is all but irresistible. In the United States we’ve witnessed classified programs like PRISM, where the NSA succeeded in convincing all of the big names in Silicon Valley to participate. Chatting up tech CEOs on a first name basis. Authoritarian regimes like China are even more eager to tap commercial data streams. Which is particularly salient given that most of Zoom’s engineers work over in China and that Zoom has unfettered access to the online conferences that it hosts despite marketing claims to the contrary.

Hence, efforts to limit the spread of contagion offer a golden opportunity to double down on mass surveillance. Data collection tools wielded during an emergency on behalf of public safety —facial recognition, drones, mobile device apps, smart phone geolocation, payment card records— over time take on a hue of legitimacy. Furthermore the bureaucrats using such tools are loath to give up their newfound access and will actively identify additional threats to justify it.

China serves as an instructive example. The Communist Party remains in power through an unspoken agreement with the rest of Chinese society. It’s the sort of deal that exists in many repressive nations. The government assures economic growth and in return citizens are expected to stay out of politics and submit to extreme social control measures. The Chinese government asserts that growth will continue at around 6 percent, but keep in mind that it also aggressively censors bad economic news, in the same manner that it suppressed news about the COVID-19 outbreak.

It’s highly unlikely that the Party will be able to keep delivering results forever. The COVID-19 outbreak will simply hasten a looming economic crisis in China, despite the Party’s best efforts to maintain control. With China’s towering mountain of debt, zombie factories, and conspicuous industrial overcapacity, it’s just a matter of time before the average citizen realizes that they’re not going to get what they were promised. This raises the specter of military action as the government directs attention outward in search of enemies to mobilize its restive populace. Against this backdrop mass surveillance will be ramped up in a desperate attempt to buttress the status quo.

Common sense dictates that relying on technology that’s developed in a police state like China is inherently risky. The instinctive response for many users is to turn to American technology. However, thanks to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden the public record shows that domestic companies are also cooperating with the intelligence community as well as monetizing their access to user data. So if you’re wondering whether a particular online platform is secure, you’re asking the wrong question. The salient question is which group of security services and big data aggregators have access?

Sadly this makes achieving higher levels of communication security a sort of DIY affair. The key is to prevent the current COVID-19 setting from becoming the new normal by recognizing what’s at stake. The more that we rely on Internet platforms to communicate the more power we yield to a narrow set of vested interests. Such that our need to stay in touch with each other during a disaster secretly morphs into a feeding frenzy for spies. Just as it did in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. As always, freedom entails responsibility. This means leaving mainstream channels for sensitive discussions and doing so in a manner that doesn’t create baseline anomalies that might alert watchers.

Pervasive monitoring is not the behavior of a confident nation. Mass surveillance isn’t the harbinger of stability. It’s a dangerous political tremor. A display of anxiety rather than strength. An indicator that leaders have recklessly chosen to dispense with civil liberties behind closed doors under the guise of addressing perceived threats. As citizens we have an obligation to protect the values which actually make America strong. To encourage lawmakers to resist the impulse to trade essential liberty for short-term promises of security and to forge our own paths forward when they fail to do so.

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Boris Johnson Fights for Life… Russian Media Got it Right — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on April 11, 2020

Many consider RT more truthful than most media.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/04/08/boris-johnson-fights-for-life-russian-media-got-it-right/

Finian Cunningham

British newspapers delivered the grim news on their front pages Tuesday: Prime Minister Boris had been taken into hospital intensive care because his health deteriorated rapidly overnight from Covid-19 disease.

The Mirror splashed: ‘Sick Boris Faces Fight For Life’. Other newspapers conveyed similar shocked tones and the disquieting sense of a government in disarray. Who will lead the government if Johnson is incapacitated, they asked?

Compounding the sombre mood is a mounting death toll among Britons, with over 5,300 succumbing so far to the global pandemic. Britain has not reached its peak in the epidemic.

Only the day before, however, the Mirror and other British news outlets were telling the public that 55-year-old Johnson had been admitted to hospital as a routine precaution. It was roundly reported that he was “in good spirits” and that, so to speak, there was nothing to see here or worry about. Move along everyone.

In particular, the British media quoted the prime minister’s Downing Street office as dismissing as “disinformation” earlier Russian reports claiming Johnson’s health condition was more serious. There was a palpable sense of British disdain that the Russians were distastefully indulging in infowar at a most inappropriate time.

A report on Monday in RIA Novosti, and picked up by other Russian outlets, claimed that Johnson was hospitalized and he could soon be put on a ventilator. The claim was attributed to a senior source in the British national health service. That claim indicated the prime minister’s health condition was not “in good spirits” but actually in grave decline, requiring medical intervention to assist with breathing.

The pathology of Covid-19 as shown in other cases is such that it can rapidly go from mild symptoms to aggressively attacking a patient’s internal organs, especially the lungs in which case victims can drown from their own pleural fluids.

Johnson was first diagnosed as having contracted Covid-19 nearly two weeks ago. He had been self-isolating in Downing Street and taking conference calls as the head of government, while reportedly suffering “mild symptoms” of coughing and fever.

On Sunday, he was admitted to St Thomas’ hospital in London, near Westminster, because of “persistent symptoms”. But, as noted above, the British media were dutifully repeating the official version that the hospital admission was precautionary and nothing more serious.

Things took a dramatic shift on Monday evening about 7.30pm local time when the BBC delivered “breaking news” that Johnson had been taken to the intensive care unit (ICU) within St Thomas’ hospital. Still, the British media were maintaining that the latest move was more precautionary than an emergency intervention. Even though being in ICU is a big deal.

The Independent reported Tuesday: “Boris Johnson has been moved to intensive care after his coronavirus symptoms worsened, just hours after Downing Street insisted he was in good spirits and in control of the government’s response to the escalating crisis… The prime minister is understood to still be conscious and to have been moved as a precaution, in case he requires ventilation to aid his recovery.”

The outlet added: “He was given oxygen to help his breathing before he went into the intensive care unit, sources said last night.”

British media Tuesday were quoting Cabinet ministers as saying that Johnson had not been subjected to invasive ventilation, requiring the insertion of an oxygen tube into his lungs. Though it was admitted that oxygen was administered to him, presumably via a face mask.

Cabinet minister Michael Gove told the BBC on Tuesday: “The prime minister’s not on a ventilator. He has received oxygen support.”

If there is any change in his condition, “Number 10 [Downing Street] will ensure the country is updated,” Mr Gove added, according to the BBC.

At this point, Downing Street and the British media have lost credibility in their reporting on what is the exact condition of Johnson. Up to now, they have both been downplaying the matter and playing catch-up.

Was Johnson put on a ventilator on Monday, as Russian media were saying? Or was it a less invasive procedure of oxygen administered with face mask? It scarcely matters. The point is that the British prime minister’s life is in a lot more vulnerable condition than the British media were telling.

It was the Russian media who had the story largely correct and yet they were peremptorily dismissed as Russian “state-owned disinformation”. The dismissal by Downing Street was given added emphasis by British media outlets who seemed to be more keen to rubbish Russian rivals than actually check out the facts about Johnson. The rubbishing of Russian media also plays into the long-running dubious narrative about Russian interference and Kremlin-sponsored media influence.

Well, it looks like the Russian media had the scoop on Johnson’s deterioration. And it turns out the British media are the ones that were peddling fake news and keeping the public in the dark.

This is not meant to engage in petty oneupmanship and schadenfreude.

It’s a basic question of the British public’s right to know about a crucial matter on the state of their government in competently handling a public health crisis. The last thing needed is public uncertainty and distrust about what they are being told about a life-threatening pandemic, either by the government or by the media.

 

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The Project for a New American Century and the Age of Bioweapons: 20 Years of Psychological Terror — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on April 11, 2020

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/04/08/project-new-american-century-and-age-bioweapons-20-years-psychological-terror/

Matthew Ehret

A little over 20 years ago, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) conducted a military exercise that involved a “hypothetical scenario” of hijacked planes flying into both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

One year later, on October 24-26, 2000, another “hypothetical” military exercise was played out featuring an airline crashing into the Pentagon killing 341 people followed by yet another May 2001 Department of Defense “hypothetical scenario” which saw hundreds of medical personnel training for a “guided missile in the form of a hijacked 757 airliner” crashing into the Pentagon.

What arose from the smoke and debris of September 11, 2001 was unlike anything the sleeping masses or international community expected.

The shock effect so traumatized the masses that quite suddenly, citizens found themselves willing to give up their liberties at home while acquiescing to any retaliatory action desired by their government abroad. The scale of horror was so great that the international community banded together and showed their love and solidarity towards America in the wake of the tragedy with candlelight vigils across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and South America. Humanity’s natural tendency to embrace and aid our fellow man in times of crisis expressed itself like a bright light in a world of confused darkness and a hope for a durable peace awoke in the hearts of many.

Alas, as the world came soon to discover, that hope was short lived.

The Neocon Takeover of America

Police State measures grew swiftly with the Patriot Act and mass internal surveillance under the “crisis management” run by the neocon cabal in the White House. While a new type of regime change war was created abroad, Dangerous protocols for Cheney’s “Continuity of Government” were set into motion and with these procedures, new mandates for Martial Law were created amplifying the powers, financing and deployment of U.S. Military capabilities both within the USA “under crisis conditions” and around the world.

Governments that had no connection to 9/11 were swiftly targeted for destruction using false evidence of “yellowcake” produced in the bowels of MI6, and a broader unipolar military encirclement of both Russia and China was set into motion which President Putin called out brilliantly in his famous 2007 Munich Security Conference Speech.

Of course this should not have been a surprise for anyone who took the time to read the Project for a New American Century manifesto published in October 2000 entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ (RAD).

Under the Chairmanship of William Kristol (a neocon agent today leading the charge to impeach President Trump) and co-authored by John Bolton, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Donald Rumsfeld, RAD stated that to “further the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one-absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event- like a new Pearl Harbor”. Going further to describe its Hobbesian agenda, the cabal stated that “the Cold War was a bipolar world; the 21st century world is- for the moment at least- decidedly unipolar with America as the world’s sole superpower”.

While much has been said about the “inside job” of 9/11, a lesser appreciated terrorist act occurred over several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001 killing five and infective 17 in the form of envelopes laced with bio-weaponized anthrax.

The Age of Bioweapons and PNAC

This anthrax attack led quickly into the 2004 Bioshield Act with a $5 billion budget and mandate to “pre-empt and defend further bioweapon attacks”. This new chapter of the revolution in military affairs was to be coordinated from leading bioweapons facility at the Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. Since 2002, over $50 billion has been spent on Bioweapons research and defense to date.

The earlier October 2000 RAD document emphasized the importance which the neocon cabal placed on bioweapons (and other next generation war tech) stating: “Combat will likely take place in new dimensions: In space, cyber-space and perhaps the world of microbes… advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool”.

Lawyer and bioweapons expert Francis Boyle stated in 2007 that Fort Detrick’s mandate includes “acquiring, growing, modifying, storing, packing, and dispersing classical, emerging and genetically engineered pathogens for offensive weapon programs.” These new post-9/11 practices fully trashed the 1975 UN Convention Against Biological Weapons ratified by the USA by establishing a vast international network of bioweapons labs coordinated from Fort Detrick which would be assigned the role of doing much of the dirty work that the U.S. was “officially” prevented from doing on its own soil.

Where Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag to justify his enabling Acts, the neocons had their 9/11. The difference in the case of America was that Cheney failed to achieve the same level of absolute control over his nation as Hitler captured by 1934 (evidenced by pushback from patriotic American military intelligence circles against Cheney’s Iran war agenda). With this neocon failure, the republic lurched on.

The Rot Continues Under Obama

Obama’s rise was seen as a hopeful light to many naïve Democrats who still had not realized how a “false left” vs “false right” clash had been slowly constructed over the post WWII years. Either camp increasingly found itself converging towards the same world government agenda through using somewhat dissimilar paths and flavors.

It didn’t take long for many of Obama’s more critically-minded supporters to realize that the mass surveillance/police state measures, regime change wars, and military confrontation of Russia and China begun under Cheney not only failed to stop, but even expanded at faster rates than ever.

In the months before Obama left office in July 2016, the classified Directive 40: National Continuity Policy was enacted creating a line of “Devolution authority” for all branches of the government to a “duplicate chain of individuals secreted outside Washington available in a catastrophic emergency”. Days prior to Trump’s inauguration, Federal Continuity Directive 1 was issued to transfer authority to military forces who could be used to suppress “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy.”

The Importance of Knowing This History

There are very clearly two diametrically opposing methods of analyzing, and solving the existential crisis threatening our world currently: Multipolar or Unipolar.

While Russia and China represent a multipolar/pro-nation state vision driven by large scale development projects that benefit all- rich and poor alike exemplified by the New Silk Road, Polar Silk Road, Space Silk Road and now Health Silk Road, something much darker is being promoted by the same financial oligarchy that owns both right and left sides of the deep state coin. These later forces have provably positioned themselves to take control of western governments under crisis conditions and are not afraid to use every weapon in their arsenal to destroy their perceived enemies… including bioweaponry. This latter uncomfortable reality was asserted quite candidly by leading officials of Iran and even the Chinese Foreign Ministry just weeks ago.

Admittedly, whether or not the current coronavirus pandemic is a bioweapon is not yet fully proven (although growing body of evidence asserts that it is, as seen here and here and here and here). What we know for certain are the following facts:

Numbers are being systematically misrepresented to convey much greater rates of death vs infections as dozens of leading medical experts have proven. Contaminated test kits have started showing up in the UK on March 30 and countless false results are showing up since covid test kits are often not differentiating between covid-19 and the typical coronavirus strains of the flu that average between 7-14% of flu cases every year. This doesn’t mean that COVID-19 should not be taken seriously, but only that the reported numbers are being artificially falsified to generate heightened panic.

The COVID-19 Task Force at London’s Imperial College has been found to be the singular source of the false “left” vs “right” debate poisoning the west’s response to the pandemic. Teams working out of this British Intelligence nexus have generated BOTH the “do-nothing-and-wait-until-natural-resistance-evolves” herd immunity theory while simultaneously creating the “shut everything down one-size-fits-all” doomsday models being used by the WHO, UN, and leading Deep State assets like Michael Bloomberg, Steve Bannon, Bill Gates and George Soros. In case you doubt the influence of the Imperial College on world policy, a March 17 New York Times article described them in the following terms: “With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.”

Investigative Journalist Whitney Webb’s February 2020 research demonstrated conclusively that DARPA had received funding in tandem with Fort Detrick since 2017 on genetic modification of novel coronaviruses (with a focus on bats) as well as the development of never before used DNA and mRNA vaccines which change the structure of DNA both for an individual and potentially for a whole race.

Lastly, and most importantly, the pre-9/11 military exercises were not merely hypothetical scenarios but exercises which led directly into a new “Pearl Harbor” that modified the behaviour of Americans under terror, panic and misinformation like nothing ever seen before. The parallels to today’s coronavirus outbreak cannot be missed for anyone who has taken a serious look at the strange case of the Event 201 Global Pandemic Exercise on October 19, 2019 in New York. Event 201 was sponsored by the Michael Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and World Economic Forum which ran simulations under the “hypothetical” scenario of a novel coronavirus pandemic killing 60 million people. Reviewing just one of Event 201’s many recordings openly available on their official site features some very disturbing parallels to the events unfolding today:

EMBED: https://youtu.be/rWRmlumcN_s

Unipolar Martial Law or Multipolar Marshall Plan?

As I outlined in my previous paper, the mass-panic generated by COVID-19 has created a 9/11-situation with the expected police state laws being passed under the radar of many people who would normally be paying attention to such things. One of the most dangerous measures enacted involved a classified bill in February which formally mandates the head of NORTHCOM (who is also the head of NORAD) to become acting President of the United States under conditions of Martial Law, un-governability of the executive branch or general chaos in America. This later scenario is not terribly unlikely considering the danger of a financial blowout of the banking system combined with economic lockdowns of the west.

China and Russia both understand the nature of the game and both nations have acted responsibly in dealing with the outbreak of Coronavirus with China’s successful containment having won seven consecutive days of no new cases. It is important that unlike the remedies promoted by London’s Imperial College, neither Russia or China have totally shut down their nations, but have rather kept their economies alive which selecting methods for selective quarantines and lockdowns (China only locked down 15 nations plus Wuhan while the remaining 95% of their economy continued to produces and support the recovering component).

We know that President Trump has resisted the pressure by Deep State Experts to shut down America and has stated so repeatedly, but up until his recent conversations with Xi Jinping and Putin, there were very few options available to him beyond those proposed by Dr. Cauci, the Green New Dealing Dems or “bailout everything” monetarists around Mnuchin and Kudlow.

Now that China and Russia have begun sending cargo ships of vital medical equipment to America as part of the Health Silk Road (over the screams of neocons and neoliberal technocrats like), a new possibility for a cure has presented itself. If Trump acts decisively with courage and intelligence, there is still a chance that sovereign nation states may yet stay in the drivers’ seat and use this crisis as an opportunity to force through a debt jubilee, banking reform and new Bretton Woods emergency conference to establish a foundation for a new just economic system. If Trump is unsuccessful in this task, it is more than a little scary to think about what hell will beset the world in the coming months and years.

© 2010 – 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org.

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A Letter to the Staff of Belmarsh Prison – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on April 11, 2020

Left we forget.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/bretigne-shaffer/a-letter-to-the-staff-of-belmarsh-prison/

By

Dear Staff of Belmarsh,

A lot of other people are writing to politicians, elected representatives, celebrities, and other people who have “platforms” or “influence.” I’ve decided to write to you.

You are no doubt aware that there is a man being held in your prison by the name of Julian Assange. I am sure that you are also aware that a great many people believe this that he should not be there, or in any prison. They (and I) believe that the only crime he has committed is having revealed actual crimes committed by people and institutions much more powerful than himself.

We further believe that the only reason he is being held–and held at a time when other non-violent prisoners are being released in order to help minimize the spread of Covid-19–the only reason the most powerful government on earth has contorted the justice system of your own country to the point that it is no longer recognizable as such, is that that government (the government of my country) wishes to send a strong message to anyone else who ever thinks about making its crimes public:

“We can do whatever we want, to whomever we want. We are bound by no laws, no justice system, and if you dare to expose our crimes to the world as this man has, we will do this to you too.”

I am not going to repeat all of the charges against him, nor explain why they are nonsensical. Nor will I dwell on his treatment in prison, which according to UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer, constitutes torture. Nor will I take apart the various smears against him. Others have done a very good job of all of those things already, as you can read here, here, and here. You can also read detailed accounts of the mockery that his hearings have made of British Justice, with representatives of the US government almost literally pulling strings attached to the person of magistrate Vanessa Baraitser.

You can read all of that for yourselves, and I hope that you will. I will only say this:

There is a long-standing tradition in Western culture of honoring disobedience to immoral laws. In my own country, this tradition was upheld by abolitionists who defied the Fugitive Slave Acts and helped escaped slaves get to freedom; It was upheld at the Nuremberg trials after World War II, when some German officers were hanged for obeying laws that violated more fundamental principles of human rights; And it is enshrined in something much older, known as the “Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates.”

This doctrine dates back to at least 39AD, and was formally articulated by Christian pastors in the Magdeberg Confession of 1550. It can be summed up as follows:

When those in high authority command that those beneath them enforce laws that are immoral or unjust, those authorities beneath them have a duty to refuse to enforce those laws, and if necessary to actively resist them.

The persecution of Julian Assange is a grotesque abomination of justice. And it represents a direct assault on our ability to hold our governments accountable for their actions. If the government of the United States succeeds in extraditing Julian Assange, or if he is allowed to die in prison in the UK, then we will have lost much more than the life of one man. We will have allowed the most powerful government on earth to cement its lawless rule over us all, to effectively prohibit free and open discourse about its actions in our societies.

So why am I writing to you? Because I don’t believe in politicians. I don’t believe that “elected representatives” really represent anyone other than themselves and the people who keep them in power. But, strangely, I do believe in people. Not all of them of course. There are good people and there are bad people. But I do believe, very strongly, that out of all the people who happen to work at Belmarsh prison, there are some good ones. How many, I don’t know. Maybe a hundred? Maybe thirty? A dozen? Three or four? Maybe just one.

However many of you there are, you are the ones I am speaking to. I believe that there is something you can do–one of you, some of you, all of you–although I can’t say for sure what it might be, to change how this story ends. I am writing to remind you of the Doctrine of Lesser Magistrates, and to urge you to do the right thing. Not only for Julian Assange, but for all of us. Our history is quite literally in your hands.

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Coronavirus Hysteria and Big Conservatism: Corona Cons, the Dead Party – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on April 11, 2020

The Big Con has failed to bring to the public’s attention that no more than a month or so ago, Dr. Fauci revealed a very different face when he didn’t have remotely as large an audience (i.e. remotely as many people to scare).

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/jack-kerwick/coronavirus-hysteria-and-big-conservatism-corona-cons-the-dead-party/

By

“This [Northern Conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation.

“What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.

“American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted?

“Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip.”

                                                                                                                              –Robert Lewis Dabney

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Dabney’s characterization from a century ago of “Northern conservatism” remains unsurpassed in both eloquence and accuracy as a description of that contemporary phenomenon that styles itself, “conservatism.”

This is what I refer to as Big Conservatism, the Big Con, or the Conservative-Industrial-Complex.

A curious, or perhaps not so curious, thing that has unfolded before our eyes during The Great Panic of 2020 is the readiness with which the Big Con has labored indefatigably to exacerbate it.

Indeed, Fox News and The New York Post are indistinguishable from CNN, MSNBC, and The Washington Post in their breathtaking, hyper-sensationalized coverage of…The Virus.

The Big Con, in other words, has been every bit as much a purveyor of Fake News and fear as has their leftist counterparts.

As of this writing, April 8, 2020, some in the Big Con have begun—even if, like the prisoner in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who, with no small measure of reluctance, breaks free of his bonds to ascend into the blinding light of the sun—slowly, carefully note holes in the official narrative on The Virus.

Still, though, those in the Big Con who have gotten just this far are in a minority.  The Big Con will not dare say anything so much as remotely critical of Dr. Fauci, for example, or Dr. Birx. Hell, for that matter, I don’t recall them uttering a negative syllable even about Andrew Cuomo.

The Big Con, however, is behaving now as it always does: In order to maintain the illusion that it represents an opposition party to that of the left, it seeks to quarrel with the latter over differences in degree—never differences in kind.

Examples:

Race and “Racism” Read the rest of this entry »

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What Governors Can Do | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on April 10, 2020

The bad press is already started regarding Sweden. How they make out will be interesting.

Too bad it will be years before reliable information will be leaked.

To my Pennsylvania comrades-don’t expect relief anytime soon.

https://mises.org/power-market/what-governors-can-do

Jeff Deist

Which state has the courage to become the Sweden of the US, and take a different (read: better, freer) approach to coronavirus?

As of yesterday, five US states remain at least reasonably “open” in terms of their implemented measures to fight the pandemic. Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota have no state orders in place closing businesses and forcing residents to stay home, while Iowa and North Dakota shut down “nonessential” businesses but have not issued stay-at-home orders.

Three states, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Utah, have partial lockdowns in place.

The other forty-two states have varying orders in place, and some regions such as the San Francisco Bay area have issued their own stricter shutdown policies. Population-wise, nearly 95 percent of all Americans today live under some kind of restrictions on movement and business, decreed either statewide or by counties and cities.

There is a tremendous opportunity here for state and local politicians to distinguish themselves. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem in particular has been steadfast in resisting political pressure to order a statewide lockdown, and surely most Americans readily understand how sparsely populated Western states might approach a pandemic very differently than big urban cities.

What should that approach look like? Here are some broad brushstrokes:

  • First, one brave governor (or county supervisor, mayor, etc.) gets the ball rolling by forming an impromptu coalition of states interested in staying open or reopening. Political pressure to go along with other states is strong, and the federal government has a long and sordid history of bullying states into compliance with national edicts using the carrot and the stick. The Trump administration thus far has been surprisingly reluctant to issue a nationwide shutdown, and governors looking for daylight should seize on this. They will need each other to stand against the tide—see, e.g., this broadside, against Noem.
  • Hold a press conference to announce the coalition, pick a marketable name for the effort (something like “South Dakota—Open for Business!”), and hold weekly calls open to media. Discuss conditions, options, and ideas, but make it clear that each state is wholly independent and that decisions are necessarily localized—this is not an interstate compact.
  • Announce guidelines, not orders, to citizens along these lines: people over seventy are strongly encouraged to self-quarantine in a strict manner. Those over fifty who have existing medical vulnerabilities to the virus are encouraged to do the same. Healthy people under fifty are welcome to return to daily activities but are strongly encouraged to wear masks (proven to be effective in several Asian countries). Of course many residents will self-quarantine regardless, and some businesses will choose to shut down regardless, per their individual choices.
  • Reopen government courts, and set a deadline of sixty or ninety days hence for resumption of contract enforcement (including evictions). Ask the state bar association to set up statewide centers for landlords and tenants to meet and renegotiate—using realistic numbers—rental agreements. Hard-line landlords can go to court, and hard-line tenants can refuse payment, but evictions benefit neither party in the immediate term.
  • In stages, reopen public schools and universities based on local conditions. Hold parental votes online to determine whether each school district will continue online classes or revert to physical attendance.
  • Announce that restaurants, bars, and retail outlets are open as usual, with the strong caveat that provable cases of virus transmittal will be heard in state courts under a broad doctrine of premises liability. This will encourage the kind of measures by owners that have been seen in Taiwan and Singapore, ranging from using digital thermometers at store entrances to relentless scrubbing of surfaces in restaurants.
  • Immediately bid out a statewide insurance claims facility for coronavirus deaths so that in worst case scenarios families will be compensated for loss of loved ones. Insist that payments are retroactive to cover deaths prior to the bid, and use the model of airlines after crashes (quick payouts, little paperwork, claims personnel with good bedside manner). Payouts of $1 million would not be impossible to insure against in low-population states, where deaths likely will remain well under five thousand. Insurers themselves can go to the reinsurance markets, and insurance companies would have every incentive to test, treat, and take measures necessary to keep citizens alive. They would become de facto partners when it comes to securing medical equipment, hospital beds, and personnel. Insurance companies also would have a strong incentive, unlike politicians, to determine what constitutes death “from” the virus as opposed to death with the virus simply present in the body. Use bond revenue (discussed below) to cover premiums.
  • Immediately bid out to pharmaceutical companies for a supply of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and other promising drugs. Eliminate unnecessary state restrictions on prescribing and dispensing such drugs, and consider making them available over the counter until infections subside. Distribute them widely across the state, and charge break-even (cheap) prices for generic versions.
  • Issue state bonds for sale to private equity investors, hedge funds, foundations, and individuals. Take a deep breath, and secure them with real estate owned by the state—make government, rather than taxpayers, sacrifice for once! Price them aggressively, with higher than market rates of interest (but not junk bond rates). Make these bonds nontaxable by the issuing state itself, both with respect to income and capital gains. Use the funds to provide insurance, medical equipment, hospital capacity, testing centers, and protective gear as needed.
  • Encourage regional airlines, or major airlines serving the state, to relocate aircraft there and resume “domestic” flights (and/or flights between “open” states).

None of these ideas is particularly difficult to implement per se, but do any governors have the political will to do so? They should if they take an honest look at the landscape of a country that is coming unglued. Every day there is less and less to lose by trying something different. In a crisis, bold usually wins. So the choice at present appears to be bold freedom or bold tyranny.

Americans are reconsidering federalism and even nullification in an era of intensely polarized anti-Trump sentiment. The Left argues for soft secession in the form of “Bluexit” from the hated red states; conservatives such as Angelo Codevilla call for strategic defiance of the feds in what he terms a “Cold Civil War.” Golden State governor Gavin Newsome even recently referred to California as a “nation-state,” and why not? With 40 million people, a huge economy, tourism, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, ports and coastlines, and major universities, not to mention beaches, deserts, and mountains, the state easily could be an independent nation.

We were already in uncharted territory, but the coronavirus truly laid bare the deep and intolerable political divisions wracking our country. Governor Noem and others could begin the healing process now, literally and figuratively, by showing us a way forward without DC. The virus could be the catalyst for a new map of America.

Be seeing you

 

 

 

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How the CDC Prevented Fast and Accurate Testing for COVID-19 | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on April 10, 2020

Labs could only use tests that they had developed themselves if granted an emergency use authorization—which was given solely to the CDC on February 4. All other labs were prohibited from using their own tests, though many were already in the process of manufacturing them.

The CDC publicly recognized its blunder on February 12 and committed itself to making quick amends. At that point, only the three labs not facing reagent problems (out of more than one hundred) were allowed to continue testing.

https://mises.org/wire/how-cdc-prevented-fast-and-accurate-testing-covid-19

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

The coronavirus crisis has exposed how the federal health bureaucracy (i.e., the CDC and the FDA) has stymied progress and a quick response over and over again.

Crucial to understanding and potentially preventing a virus’ spread is having a sufficient stock of diagnostic test kits. If tests are plentiful and used properly, infected persons can be properly quarantined and treated, and health officials may begin monitoring those with whom infected patients were in close contact during the incubation period. For SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, the virus causing the coronavirus disease) the incubation period can range anywhere from two to fourteen days (with a mean of 5.1), making it of special importance that patients showing respiratory symptoms be tested as soon as possible.

Early Failures at the CDC

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began working on a test within the first few weeks of the virus’ global outbreak in conjunction with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). With the federal government in control, all the country’s eggs were placed in a single basket—any mistakes were bound to carry wide, rippling effects.

On January 21, all plans and anticipations were suddenly brought to term when the US confirmed its first case of the virus—a thirty-five-year-old Seattle man who had recently visited Wuhan, China. This “patient zero” had checked into an emergency care center two days prior, which was able to send clinical samples from his nose, throat, and bloodstream on an overnight flight to the CDC lab in Atlanta. By the following afternoon, the lab had reported that the test had come back positive, and by nightfall the patient was being moved to a small containment unit originally built to house ebola patients. Despite these measures, the virus managed to infect others through some unknown carrier. The crisis, at last, had breached mainland America.

On January 24, the CDC digitally published information on its tests, essentially providing a blueprint for manufacturing them. It was clear that clinical and public health labs had to be capable of testing in case the virus became widespread.

But on January 31, the Department of Health and Human Services designated the coronavirus a “public health emergency, and four days later declared this condition just cause for the FDA to authorize the emergency use of diagnostic tests. Emergency use authorizations bypass the years-long approval process and accelerate the pace at which medical products reach labs and hospitals—the FDA at its most flexible. However, the layers of red tape still in force during such an emergency were thick and tangled.

Labs could only use tests that they had developed themselves if granted an emergency use authorization—which was given solely to the CDC on February 4. All other labs were prohibited from using their own tests, though many were already in the process of manufacturing them.

The CDC’s kits used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, a common and inexpensive diagnostic method that’s been used for decades. As long as state and clinical labs could ensure the uberclean lab conditions required to develop coronavirus PCR primer (short DNA strands complementary to the SARS-CoV-2 viral sequence) there would be no trouble manufacturing test kits—they were fully capable. Giving the CDC the sole power to manufacture tests, on the other hand, would ultimately mean that fewer would be made and of a lower quality. But—against the interests of public health and practicality—production was centralized with the CDC anyway.

Slowing Everything Down

For more than two weeks, all testing had to be conducted via mail-in samples sent to the CDC, as with “patient zero.” On February 6 and 7, the CDC finally sent public health labs the test kits they’d been anxiously awaiting. At the time, this was a total of only ninety tests, though each one could process 700–800 patient samples—a suitable capability for the time, but one which would have to be expanded as the virus spread further.

After receiving the tests, the labs began to check them to ensure that they would produce valid results. However, nearly all of the labs ran into a problem with one of the test’s negative control reagents (mixtures used in chemical analysis). The test’s reagents contained genetic material unrelated to SARS-CoV-2 and that was not supposed to react; that’s how the labs would have been able to validate the tests’ accuracy. But in most labs, one of these reagents—called N3—did react, causing a stir of panic that the tests were defective.

The CDC publicly recognized its blunder on February 12 and committed itself to making quick amends. At that point, only the three labs not facing reagent problems (out of more than one hundred) were allowed to continue testing. All other labs had to again send their samples to the CDC’s Atlanta lab, delaying results by up to two days (which would have otherwise taken four to six hours to produce) at a time when knowledge of the virus’ spread was crucial.

To address its failure, the CDC initially planned to manufacture new, operative copies of N3 to send to the labs that had had difficulties, but this never came to fruition. Instead, for the next few weeks CDC officials continuously declared that they were working on the problem, ultimately helping to equip only an extra nine public health labs with the ability to test. A cocktail of bureaucratic incompetence and FDA lethargy left all the other labs without usable tests as the virus spread undetected across the country.

Finally, on February 26, the CDC announced its grand solution—that labs could simply disregard the faulty N3 reagent and otherwise continue using the tests as originally sent to them. That means that there was never anything fatally defective about them in the first place and that testing could have continued uninterrupted for the prior couple of weeks.

The real issue at hand was not with the tests, but with changing the test protocol to reflect what many virologists already knew—that having a third reagent was superfluous to begin with. That’s not even to mention the five public health labs that experienced problems with reagents besides N3, to which the CDC failed to propose a solution.

But just when most labs had at last resumed testing, a new—though unsurprising—problem presented itself: test kits were in short supply. The amount of kits distributed at the beginning of February was nowhere near enough to confront the hordes of patients requiring testing by the end of the month. Without sufficient ability to diagnose patients over the course of the month, the crisis quietly intensified.

Feds behind the Curve

CDC data records only twenty-four confirmed cases of coronavirus in the US by the end of February—a seemingly manageable number. But it was later learned that by that time a whopping 597 infected individuals had already begun to show symptoms. Each of these cases required testing, as did the thousands more who mistakenly feared themselves to be infected.

Virologists knew the reality of the matter to be much worse than the official figures were reflecting. Scarier yet, it’s likely that—without knowing it—the US had in excess of seventeen hundred cases by February 29 when asymptomatic carriers are taken into account—a far cry from the mere twenty-four that had been confirmed by that date. Much testing was needed right away, even if that wasn’t immediately apparent.

But then, at a moment of critical importance, the FDA updated one of its emergency testing policies, allowing certain certified labs to use their own tests before FDA review—a deus ex machina in the diagnostics narrative. The same day, a test from New York’s Wadsworth Center was also granted an emergency use authorization. The approval of many more tests beginning in mid-March followed.

The FDA could only salvage the testing situation by releasing its tight stranglehold over it. After all, the whole debacle had originated and then further worsened under the federal government’s watch—it was simply unable to manage the crisis correctly.

But even after giving innovation more room to operate, shortages did not immediately disappear. The first few weeks of a virus’ spread are always the most pivotal, making it very difficult to catch up if that precious time is squandered. The insufficiencies in diagnostics experienced early on allowed the coronavirus to spread more quickly and widely, causing an untold number of deaths later.

If the FDA had properly vetted the CDC’s tests before distributing them, everything might have been different. If public health labs had not, for weeks, been barred from using the tests sent to them, everything might have been different. If clinical labs could have used their own tests from the beginning, everything might have been different. But none of that happened—in fact, the worst of the worst happened when it came to test kits—and the blame for that lies solely with the federal government.

 

 

 

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2 Trillion Dollar Bailout

Posted by M. C. on April 9, 2020

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Nolte: CBS News Plays Italy Hospital Footage — Again — for Report on U.S. Coronavirus Response

Posted by M. C. on April 9, 2020

Ask yourself this… Why is CBS News forced to use another country’s B-roll to try to fool the American people into believing things are worse than they are?

But as we have seen over the past few weeks, although things are bad, they are nowhere near as bad as the media hoped.

Take NOTHING about coronavirus about face value. Especially statistics.

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/04/09/cbs-news-caught-broadcasting-fake-hospital-footage-second-time/

by John Nolte

In this photograph taken from behind a window, doctors work on Covid-19 patients in the intensive care unit of San Matteo Hospital, in Pavia, northern Italy, Thursday, March 26, 2020. The San Matteo hospital is where Patient 1, a 38-year-old Unilever worker named Mattia, was kept since he tested positive …

Far-left CBS has been caught broadcasting misleading hospital footage for a second time during the coronavirus pandemic.

About two weeks ago, on March 22, CBS News used deceptively-edited footage the first time. Breitbart News reported then that “Far-left CBS News was caught red-handed using chaotic footage from an Italian hospital in a story about New York City hospitals.”

“It was an editing mistake. We took immediate steps to remove it from all platforms and shows,” CBS News explained unconvincingly at the time.

The establishment media’s coronavirus agenda is as sociopathic as it is obvious: up the death count. Why else would the media be actively looking to discourage those suffering from the Chinese virus from taking perfectly safe (as long as it’s in consultation with a doctor) anti-malaria drugs?

Simply put, the more Americans who die, the more it hurts President Trump’s 2020 reelection chances. And one way to mislead the American people into believing the death count is unnecessarily high is to air chaotic hospital footage from Italy — a country with socialized medicine, by the way — and tell us this is an American hospital.

In the case of the first CBS fake news broadcast, the Italian footage was used to exaggerate and misrepresent a New York hospital.

Over the weekend, CBS News again used this video to mislead its viewers, this time while talking about a Philadelphia hospital:

As I mentioned in my earlier piece the first time CBS intentionally misled its viewers with this footage:

Am I the only one who’s noticed how these so-called “mistakes” only ever fall in one direction?

…

Am I saying the media are hoping for death and chaos? Am I saying the media care more about beating Trump in 2020 than they do American lives? You’re goddamned right that what’s I’m saying.

And that’s why these mistakes only ever fall one way: in favor of the fake news media’s anti-Trump agenda.

Has the media ever made a mistake in Trump’s favor?

No. But you already knew that.

Look at the legion of coronavirus lies we have already caught the establishment media spreading, and now we’re supposed to believe this was just — oopsies! — an editing error.

What’s more, and let’s never forget this… CBS was also caught lying when it spread the fake news that Trump told those suffering from the coronavirus to go to work.

After CBS was busted using this footage the first time, CBS said it “took immediate steps to remove [the clip] from all platforms and shows.”

Well, obviously CBS didn’t.

But here’s the thing…

Ask yourself this… Why is CBS News forced to use another country’s B-roll to try to fool the American people into believing things are worse than they are?

The asking of the question answers the question… because CBS cannot get its hands on legitimate footage of U.S. hospital chaos.

And don’t for a minute believe that’s due to a lack of trying.

But as we have seen over the past few weeks, although things are bad, they are nowhere near as bad as the media hoped. Everyone who has so far needed a ventilator has gotten one. Nearby hospitals have been able to handle any overflow, so our hospitals are not overwhelmed, not even in New York,  and coronavirus patients are not stacked one upon the other.

But just don’t call CBS News the enemy of the people. That would be wrong.

Be seeing you

Lies

 

 

 

 

 

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New Yorkers Escaping to Surrounding States

Posted by M. C. on April 9, 2020

PA Governor Wolf won’t let us buy seeds but allows refugees from the US Coronavirus epicenter to infiltrate the state.

Governor Wolf! Build up that wall!

https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/lancasteronline.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/3/06/306b602a-6b91-11ea-85fa-6f092cfd50b6/5e76412496909.image.png

This year's big Comic-Con collectible? Posters. Especially ...

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