the Corona Virus Response: A Media Induced Panic For What Reason?

Here's a comment from an actual expert on viral respiratory diseases:

Dr. John Oxford, virologist, Professor at Queen Mary College, University of London, and a leading expert on influenza, including bird flu and the 1918 Spanish Influenza, and HIV/AIDS.

What he says:

Personally, I would say the best advice is to spend less time watching TV news which is sensational and not very good. Personally, I view this Covid outbreak as akin to a bad winter influenza epidemic. In this case we have had 8000 deaths this last year in the ‘at risk’ groups viz over 65% people with heart disease etc. I do not feel this current Covid will exceed this number. We are suffering from a media epidemic! Source

So why the continued lock-down?

Many unofficial reports are now emerging that reveal Covid19 infection rates in the general population that are huge multiples of officially reported rates.

 That means that infection rates in many communities are pretty certainly past the point necessary to achieve herd immunity, which is to say the point at which the disease spreads with ever increasing difficulty before dying out entirely.

Yet no government has reported a survey of the general public to determine whether herd immunity has been achieved.

Why not?

Presumably, because governments do not want the public to know.

And that presumably, is because governments want the lock-downs to continue for reasons quite other than those stated.

What are those ulterior and unstated motives?

Interesting question that:

To drive up unemployment while destroying small businesses that are the chief employers of low-wage labor?

Why would governments want this?

Many reasons come to mind. Here are a couple:

1. By creating a much larger pool of the unemployed, a desperate and docile pool of cheap labor is made available to the corporate giants that own the government.

2. While thousands upon thousands of small business that have been forcibly closed -- shops, restaurants, a multiplicity of service enterprises -- the big boys, Amazon, Star Bucks, Tim Hortons, Crispy Kreme will have been planning how to take over the space newly created for their own expansion.

3. Or is the objective simply to create widespread poverty on a permanent basis?

Is it the idea that living standards for the majority having been crushed, they are to remain crushed?

What, after all, is the point of so many people stuffing their faces with junk food, pissing away energy and other resources on  hedonistic cruise vacations, trips to Vegas and stuffing themselves with toxic, obesity- and diabetes-inducing  grease- and sugar- loaded junk food.

Welcome to the new peonage.

Other possibilities? Suggestions welcome!

And here's one obvious alternative: a Deep State plot to get rid of Trump.

Related:
LA Times: Hundreds of thousands in L.A. County may have been infected with coronavirus
Perspective on the Pandemic: Interview with Prof. John Ioannides

Thierry Meyssan: Covid-19: Neil Ferguson, the Liberal Lyssenko
Ron Paul: What If The Lockdown Was A Giant Mistake?
Jim Fedako: Exactly How Many Deaths To Justify Giving Government's Control Of Everything?
ZH: Why The Shutdown Must End

Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME): Will Google Win the Presidency for Hillary?

A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.

Kenneth Boulding

I read a good deal. Occasionally I provide a link to what I think is really interesting or important — confirmation by a billion-dollar experiment of Einstein's prediction about gravity waves, for example, or how to access publicly funded scientific research findings without paying ridiculous fees to commercial publishers. But here is a link to something orders of magnitude more significant.

The article, by Robert Epstein, provides an overview of a peer-reviewed study that represents perhaps the most important discovery in social science since the term "social science" was invented. What it tells you is how the Borg empire will be established here on earth without even the necessity of fitting everyone up with one of those snorkel thingies. What it reveals is how Google and other big data owners and manipulators can most likely determine what you think and, hence, how you behave. The result? The perfect democracy: a society in which the elite unfailingly persuade a psychologically enslaved mass to vote for the elite and to support whatever it is that the elite want to do to the psychologically enslaved mass (Think US public support for George Bush's Patriot Act and Homeland Security with six hollow point bullets for every citizen, and FEMA detention camps), or think Farenheit 451.

There is, of course, nothing tremendously new about this. For more than a century, the mass media, owned by the very rich, have been telling people what to think and how to behave, the people for the most part submitting without complaint to such control. But at least there was the appearance of choice. You could read the NY Times, the yellow press, or even some small circulation Communist paper. Likewise, the broadcast media seemed to provide some choice, CNN versus National Public Radio, for example. But in the search engine business, power is much more heavily concentrated. Moreover, the evidence of bias, if bias there be, is not, as this research shows, readily evident, or indeed evident at all. And it is precisely the lack of visibility that makes such bias deadly to a free society.

But does Google really skew search results to sway the opinion of voters to favor certain electoral candidates or to persuade consumers to purchase certain products? Well, as Robert Epstein points out, here's a clue: if they don't, then they are probably in breach of their legal responsibility to maximize shareholder value.

Related:

CanSpeccy: Why Freedom Was Greater Under the Absolute Monarchy of Elizabeth I, Than Under the Democracy of Barak Obama