What's going on now feels beyond comprehension. I have moments of feeling like the NWO folks may have been right about some things. I am still in wait and see mode. I think we are being manipulated in many more ways and from many more directions than we realize.
COVID is obviously not "fake." Strange how the conversation got taken to that point so quickly. Like some powerful forces wanted it to go there.
They have a plan for us.
Glad to see some sign of life here. Y'all are too talented to keep your light buried under a basket. And significantly younger than I am.
Was this all an accident, a perfect storm? Of course it's possible to imagine a Rovian plot to target the elderly and people of color. What happens when the rent moratorium ends and the landlords say "OK guys, I let you slide for ten months because you didn't have a job, but now you owe me $15,000 even though you don't have it"?
The consumer economy where half of the people could not put their hands on $400 for an emergency was not sustainable.
I have little doubt that the think tanks have prepared contingency plans for a lot of stuff. Long ago I recognized that life extension would increase competition for housing, and I'm sure the Republicans recognized that too.
Lots of informed people have warned that a pandemic was inevitable. Nothing "fake" about this.
The best case CoronaVirus pandemic scenario
is not only keeping the piles of corpses as small as possible, but it will stimulate a societal immune response for real resilience, sincere sustainabillity, compassionate civilization
herd immunity to Moron-a-virus-45: a permanent state of emerge and see global test of resiliency: everyone participates flatten the curve of the limits to growth on abundant, round, finite planet Earth
The best case coronavirus pandemic scenario
is not only keeping the piles of corpses as small as possible, but it will stimulate a societal immune response for real resilience, sincere sustainabillity, compassionate civilization.
The pandemic is a global exercise highlighting the wonderful and the hideous: international scientific cooperation and petty politics, aspirations of resilience and lack thereof, homelessness, prisons, mega-slums, refugees. We seem to have hit Peak Airplanes. Possibly Peak Food and Peak Population, too.
We are entering a profound break in the global economy. Coronavirus is a catalyst, a time out to consider the downslope ahead of climate chaos, peak everything, overconsumption, overpopulation, overshoot. It is a pause to consider where we are going as a civilization and species, to act as if we plan to stay part of the Earth.
We need to "flatten the curve" to the limits to endless growth on a round, abundant, finite planet.
In 2008, David Holmgren, co-originator of permaculture, said recession did more to lower greenhouse gas emissions than anything else. Future Scenarios: How Communities can adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change www.futurescenarios.org
The coronavirus economic crash reduced energy consumption faster than any other event.
It would be nice to use the remaining finite concentrated fossil carbon to make solar panels and wind farms, to relocalize food production, improve rail transport. Solar power is great - I've used it for three decades - but living on our solar budget cannot replace using millions of years of accumulated fossil fuels.
Modern medicine, computer manufacturing, long distance trucking, aviation, steel, concrete, asphalt, cargo ships all require fossil fuels.
Einstein said the splitting of the atom changed everything except the way we live and thus we drift toward catastrophe. What we are all about to go through challenges the entire paradigm of industrial civilization.
Our way of life - overconsumption, overpopulation, compound interest for money - is based on exponential growth (like a virus). Moving back toward balance would resemble the networks of mycelium (mushrooms are their fruiting bodies). Mycelia are networks, not hierarchies. They enable plants to share nutrients. Some species make medicinal mushrooms.
Health care, not warfare.
In the 1970s the global campaign to eradicate smallpox in the wild involved about a quarter million people for less than the cost of a B-1 bomber. This would be a better model to base crash programs to mitigate the pandemic than the Manhattan Project (which built the first nuclear weapons and nuked our democracy).
Our society - not only in the United States - delays action on most threats until the body counts pile up. This is true for warnings about the Boeing 737 MAX, the DC-10, nuclear weapons testing and nuclear power, countless toxic chemicals, the New Orleans levees and now, ignoring the spread of coronavirus until it engulfed much of the world.
The original SARS was about 10% lethal but fortunately not as transmissible as this one. If we had a pandemic with that lethality, there would not be any debate about the dangers, no campaigns to reopen anything, no plausible deniability that it might be a difficult flu. Instead, there might be much more religious zealotry about the end of the world due to a deity's wrath.
Coronavirus is an anagram of carnivorous, ironic given the role of eating meat in causing this and similar diseases. The COVID-19 outbreak is part of a pattern of diseases jumping from wild animals to humans: SARS-1, MERS, Ebola, Nipah, HIV. Eating "bush meat" is an excellent way for "zoonoses" (diseases from other species) to infect us. Factory farming for more conventional species such as chickens and cows uses more antibiotics than treating diseases in people, which created antibiotic resistant bacteria. The SARS-CoV-2 virus itself could be considered carnivorous because it eats our lungs. Making meat requires more energy, water and other inputs than growing food directly for people. Our overpopulated planet cannot sustain industrial meat production.
I hope predictions for a second wave, especially in the interior of the USA, are wrong. There are economic implications in this happening, but am even more concerned about the psychological breakdown of the society.
Remember, estimates for US casualties without staying at home were about 2 million, and with the shutdowns between 100,000 and 240,000.
Spikes in infections, hospitalizations, deaths may be part of the lesson about paying attention that we will learn, at great pain. Some of the "Dixie" states appear to be at the epicenters.
It's anyone's guess what happens to infection rates once restaurants, shopping mauls, hair salons and the like reopen. While viruses don't care about politics, it is probably noteworthy that many of the emerging hot spots are in places that voted for Dr. Trump. Painful lessons ahead.
Laurie Garrett, who wrote The Coming Plague in 1994, says her best guess scenario is a 3 year corona-crisis. 3 years to develop and mass produce and then distribute a safe and effective vaccine would be the record. She warns that there is a danger in having a vaccine's approval rushed by the Trump FDA to have SOMETHING ready before the presidential election. The stakes for getting the vaccine(s) "right" could not be higher, except
Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz, said in "Man's Search for Meaning" that suffering is endurable if it has meaning. Coronavirus catastrophe was preventable and mitigatible but our society ignored warnings about this pandemic when it was still focused on Wuhan, and broadly, public health and ecological crises for decades.
If we had really taken this seriously the pandemic would be over already, since the virus cannot live outside of a host and it's been long enough to starve it. Coronavirus is a Socially Transmitted Disease.
Moron-a-virus-45 and cov-idiocy make coronavirus more severe. Trump is the most famous infection but there are many strains: conservative, liberal, neither. The 25th Amendment is a partial treatment but herd immunity would require critical thinking.
It's not the end of the world but it could be the end of complacency.
Mark Robinowitz
Thanks for a thoughtful and well reasoned analysis, Mark.
In my town it's amazing to see the mountains in such clarity every day.
Michael Pollan said that without antibiotics the feedlot industry would not last a week. He also said the manure produced by the cattle was so loaded with antibiotics that it had to be disposed of as toxic waste and could not be used as fertilizer.
One thing you left off the list of planet-killing cultural attributes is the planned-obsolescent nature of so much of our consumer spending. I like to stand outside the Apple Store and make like a huckster: "Step right up, step right up! Get your slave-built planned-obsolescent toxic waste. Get your iphone 11, guaranteed to make you want an iphone 12 by the winter holidays."
The reason the car manufacturers resisted electric technology for so long is that a gasoline engine is self-destructing from the moment you drive it home, while an electric engine can last indefinitely. Even buildings are designed to be knocked down in a few decades -- as soon as the mortgage is paid off, the field must be replanted to benefit the banksters. In my smugly liberal home town where everybody puts three flavors of discards for pickup on the street, an old three-bedroom ranch house is not good enough. The native Spanish Colonial style is not good enough. They want an Italianate villa, 'cause people think they'll be considered losers if they settle for less. And these people who write checks to the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy say nothing to obstruct the destruction of perfectly good buildings, because all adults know that the developers' profits must be first priority.
My county has two million people, and was one of the first counties in California to get the virus. 3,300 cases in all these months.
My mom's home county in Central Washington State has a population of 250,000. When they got to 4000 cases two weeks ago, they finally got around to ordering people to wear masks. They're getting 1,000 new cases a week, and their population is only 12% of ours. There's going to be enormous suffering.
Do we believe the original article or the retraction? I'm assuming Johns Hopkins has pretty rigorous fact checking standards, so I don't believe everything in the original article could be false, but who knows.
https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/11/a-cl...
Editor’s Note: After The News-Letter published this article on Nov. 22, it was brought to our attention that our coverage of Genevieve Briand’s presentation “COVID-19 Deaths: A Look at U.S. Data” has been used to support dangerous inaccuracies that minimize the impact of the pandemic.
We decided on Nov. 26 to retract this article to stop the spread of misinformation, as we noted on social media. However, it is our responsibility as journalists to provide a historical record. We have chosen to take down the article from our website, but it is available here as a PDF.
In accordance with our standards for transparency, we are sharing with our readers how we came to this decision. The News-Letter is an editorially and financially independent, student-run publication. Our articles and content are not endorsed by the University or the School of Medicine, and our decision to retract this article was made independently.
Briand’s study should not be used exclusively in understanding the impact of COVID-19, but should be taken in context with the countless other data published by Hopkins, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
As assistant director for the Master’s in Applied Economics program at Hopkins, Briand is neither a medical professional nor a disease researcher. At her talk, she herself stated that more research and data are needed to understand the effects of COVID-19 in the U.S.
Briand was quoted in the article as saying, “All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers.” This claim is incorrect and does not take into account the spike in raw death count from all causes compared to previous years. According to the CDC, there have been almost 300,000 excess deaths due to COVID-19. Additionally, Briand presented data of total U.S. deaths in comparison to COVID-19-related deaths as a proportion percentage, which trivializes the repercussions of the pandemic. This evidence does not disprove the severity of COVID-19; an increase in excess deaths is not represented in these proportionalities because they are offered as percentages, not raw numbers.
Briand also claimed in her analysis that deaths due to heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza and pneumonia may be incorrectly categorized as COVID-19-related deaths. However, COVID-19 disproportionately affects those with preexisting conditions, so those with those underlying conditions are statistically more likely to be severely affected and die from the virus.
Because of these inaccuracies and our failure to provide additional information about the effects of COVID-19, The News-Letter decided to retract this article. It is our duty as a publication to combat the spread of misinformation and to enhance our fact-checking process. We apologize to our readers.
Archived copy of the article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201126163323/https:/...
Surprisingly, the deaths of older people stayed the same before and after COVID-19. Since COVID-19 mainly affects the elderly, experts expected an increase in the percentage of deaths in older age groups. However, this increase is not seen from the CDC data. In fact, the percentages of deaths among all age groups remain relatively the same.
“The reason we have a higher number of reported COVID-19 deaths among older individuals than younger individuals is simply because every day in the U.S. older individuals die in higher numbers than younger individuals,” Briand said.
Briand also noted that 50,000 to 70,000 deaths are seen both before and after COVID-19, indicating that this number of deaths was normal long before COVID-19 emerged. Therefore, according to Briand, not only has COVID-19 had no effect on the percentage of deaths of older people, but it has also not increased the total number of deaths.
These data analyses suggest that in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.
This comes as a shock to many people. How is it that the data lie so far from our perception?
....
The CDC classified all deaths that are related to COVID-19 simply as COVID-19 deaths. Even patients dying from other underlying diseases but are infected with COVID-19 count as COVID-19 deaths. This is likely the main explanation as to why COVID-19 deaths drastically increased while deaths by all other diseases experienced a significant decrease.
“All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers. We found no evidence to the contrary,” Briand concluded.
In an interview with The News-Letter, Briand addressed the question of whether COVID-19 deaths can be called misleading since the infection might have exacerbated and even led to deaths by other underlying diseases.
“If [the COVID-19 death toll] was not misleading at all, what we should have observed is an increased number of heart attacks and increased COVID-19 numbers. But a decreased number of heart attacks and all the other death causes doesn’t give us a choice but to point to some misclassification,” Briand replied.
is a disinfo debunking site that addresses this, published by an MD who is tired of the lying from science deniers
there definitely has been "excess death" from covid
the death toll, officially, in the USA today was about the same as 9/11, although 9/11 would have been much worse if the towers had not stayed standing as long as they did, the fourth plane had made it to the Capitol or the Pentagon had been hit in any other section.
Mark, your COVID questions debunking site looks and sounds like some tabloid clickbait site; not something calm and rational.
Here are a couple of his blurbs for posts:
Hawkers of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and other “miracle cures” for COVID-19 are just like snake oil salesmen going back to time immemorial. Sure, many, if not most, of them believe in their quackery, but it’s also always about the grift.
..
Ben Garrison, whose fame comes from his QAnon-invoking and Trump-supporting cartoons, has COVID-19 and is treating it with ivermectin. Because of course he is. Orac’s schadenfreude is tempered by the knowledge that when Garrison recovers he’ll attribute his good fortune to the quackery he’s using.
The WEF and the Pandemic
https://swprs.org/the-wef-and-the-pandemic/
Quoted from the article:
First, the WEF was, together with the Gates Foundation, a sponsor of the prescient “Event 201” coronavirus pandemic simulation exercise, held in New York City on October 18, 2019 – the same day as the opening of the Wuhan Military World Games, seen by some as “ground zero” of the global pandemic. China itself has argued that US military athletes may have brought the virus to Wuhan.
Second, the WEF has been a leading proponent of digital biometric identity systems, arguing that they will make societies and industries more efficient, more productive and more secure. In July 2019, the WEF started a project to “shape the future of travel with biometric-enabled digital traveler identity management”. In addition, the WEF collaborates with the ID2020 alliance, which is funded by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations and runs a program to “provide digital ID with vaccines”. In particular, ID2020 sees the vaccination of children as “an entry point for digital identity.”
Third, WEF founder Klaus Schwab is the author of the book COVID-19: The Great Reset, published in July 2020, which argues that the coronavirus pandemic can and should be used for an “economic, societal, geopolitical, environmental and technological reset”, including, in particular, advancing global governance, accelerating digital transformation, and tackling climate change.
Finally, the WEF has been running, since 1993, a program called “Global Leaders for Tomorrow”, rebranded, in 2004, as “Young Global Leaders”. This program aims at identifying, selecting and promoting future global leaders in both business and politics. Indeed, quite a few “Young Global Leaders” have later managed to become Presidents, Prime Ministers, or CEOs (see below).
Off Guardian has big list of COVID skepticism. There is some debate / debunking in the comments.
Off Guardian is not a medical source and some of the other topics they explore remind me of "no planes" for 9/11. Fail.
As for Event 201, there have been MANY pandemic exercises for decades.
I realize most people didn't know that pandemics were still possible and that was part of the shock for most of the public in March 2020.
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