Why the Lockdowns?

Why would you shutter much of your economy, create Great Depression unemployment rates, and drive government budget deficits sky high, merely to combat Covid19?

If you've been listening to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or just about any other major media outlet in the Western world, you must know the reason: Covid19 is an existential threat on the scale of the Black Death that killed something like half the population of Eurasia during the Fourteenth Century. 

Except that it isn't. 

Covid19 kills almost no one. Well, almost no one compared with most other causes of death. In Canada, for example, about six and a half thousand deaths have been attributed, reliably or otherwise, to Covid 19. However, most of those deaths, 82% as of early May, have been of sick and elderly inmates of so-called care homes. So other than knocking over a few people within days, weeks, or at most, months of death due to other causes, Covid19 has thus far killed about 1200 Canadians, most of whom were old, or suffered other predisposing conditions such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, or respiratory disease. 

“It’s All Bullshit” Three Leaks that Sink the Covid Narrative. In recent days a series of leaks across the globe have further shown the “official line” on coronavirus does not hold water. Kit Knightly: Off Guardian May 31, 2020: The science of the coronavirus is not disputed. It is well documented and openly admitted: Most people won’t get the virus. Most of the people who get it won’t display symptoms. Most of the people who display symptoms will only be mildly sick. Most of the people with severe symptoms will never be critically ill. And most of the people who get critically ill will survive. This is borne out by the numerous serological studies which show, again and again, that the infection fatality ratio is on par with flu. There is no science – and increasingly little rational discussion – to justify the lockdown measures and overall sense of global panic. Nevertheless, it’s always good to get official acknowledgement of the truth, even if it has to be leaked. Read more

We mourn for the 1200, and indeed for all of the six and a half thousand who's death was hastened, whether only slightly or substantially, by Covid19. But we strive also to keep things in perspective. While 1200 non-care home residents in Canada have been felled by Covid19, in 2018, the most recent year for which Stats Canada provides data, almost four times that many people killed themselves. Alzheimer's disease and diabetes each ended the lives of about five times as many, while the big three, cancer, heart disease and stroke between them carried off about 120 times as many. 

If combating the novel corona virus demands such heroic efforts to suppress it, should we not be devoting most of the national GDP to eliminating cancer?

Or are there sinister forces at work that guide the government of our Castro-loving, Communist dictatorship-admiring, black-face wearing, Mr. Dress-up Trudeau?

The question came to mind in response to a reader's comment:

"We still do not have mass testing or any truly statistically valid handle on the virus."

This fact is quite bizarre. 

Why would a government not monitor the spread of a disease by repeated serological surveys or other means, if it were seriously attempting to stop disease spread?

Image source: South China Morning Post

The challenge of such testing is not insuperable. China just completed 1.4 million tests in Wuhan in a single day, with the objective of testing the entire city -- population 11 million -- within ten days. 

Now Americans, Brits, Canadians, etc. are obviously not as smart, diligent or technically competent as the Chinese.

Still we could surely do a random survey -- you know, like an opinion poll. You select a few hundred people at random and, for a fee or some other inducement, you get them to submit to testing.

You do that every couple of days and then you know what you're dealing with.

However, if the goal is not to end the epidemic but to scare people, real information about the prevalence and lethality of the disease, even if it has been obtained, will naturally be withheld.

But why would governments want to scare people (and there is clear evidence of intent, e.g., here)? 

In order to maintain the lockdown.

And why would governments want to maintain the lockdown?

That, surely, is the essential question. 

What is the answer, I am unsure, but here are what seem the most obvious possibilities:

(1) To kill most of the small business sector, to the benefit of the big boys - Starbucks, MacDonald's, Amazon, etc. The objective, in other words, being to complete the transition in government from any semblance of democracy to a purely plutocratic system organized on a global basis. 

(2) To drive up unemployment and thus depress wages, also to the benefit of the big boys.

(3) To drive down GDP and hence consumption spending leading to reductions in all kinds of pollution, carbon dioxide, plebs at the better beaches and tourist spots, traffic congestion, etc.

(4) To drive down fertility rates and hence population worldwide (despite the fact that fertility rates in Europe, North America, Japan, etc. are already well below replacement).

But perhaps others have better suggestions. Comments welcome. 

Meantime, doctors warn that lockdowns cause more deaths than Covid19. 

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How Most Canadians Used to Handle a Cold

About a fifty years ago, "How Most Canadians Handle a Cold," was the caption to an add for Beyer aspirin. But, wow, how the country has changed. Today, frightened by models devised by mathematicians entirely divorced from reality -- people who would approximate a donkey by a sphere, a triangle or whatever made the mathematics work -- Canada's leaders have trashed the economy to minimize the risk of what appears to be not much more than a cold.

What’s amazing is that neither the modelers nor the politicians nor their medical advisors have yet been dunked in a pond.

What we have done is shutter something like one third of the economy because of a virus that has, supposedly (i.e., based on extremely dodgy statistics), killed about six thousand Canadians of whom, all but 1200 were elderly care-home residents who received a death sentence from the medical establishment that decreed that sick old people with Covid19 should be moved out of hospital into a care home. The result? Patients with Covid19 transferred to care homes infected, and thus cause the death of, multiple other care-home residents.

The twelve hundred Canadian deaths of non-care home residents attributed thus far to Covid19 is less than a third of Canada’s yearly death toll from suicide, one sixth of the annual rate of death due to diabetes (i.e., excess sugar consumption in a diet of which almost one-third of calories come from sugar), and one tenth of the rate of death due to accidents.

But apparently, to suppress a virus that has thus far killed fewer than the seasonal flu, we in Canada opted to wreck the economy, and gave our Communist dictatorship-admiring, Castro-loving, jet-setting environmentalist, Prime Minister Dress Up freedom to piss away about a third of the GDP paying people not to work.

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Coronavirus Not As Deadly As Flu? Oops Did We Wrecked the Economy By Mistake?

Ross Clark

The Spectator, May 20, 2020: One of the great unknowns of the Covid-19 crisis is just how deadly the disease is. Much of the panic dates from the moment, in early March, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a mortality rate of 3.2 per cent – which turned out to be a crude ‘case fatality rate’ dividing the number of deaths by the number of recorded cases, ignoring the large number of cases which are asymptomatic or otherwise go unrecorded.

The Imperial College modelling, which has been so influential on the government, assumed an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.9 per cent. This was used to compute the infamous prediction that 250,000 Britons would die unless the government abandoned its mitigation strategy and adopted instead a policy of suppressing the virus through lockdown. Imperial later revised its estimate of the IFR down to 0.66 per cent – although the 16 March paper which predicted 250,000 deaths was not updated.

Epidemiology versus reality: Uppsala University model —predictions of Covid deaths in Sweden under various management scenarios including doing nothing (Lowermost line). Source

In the past few weeks, a slew of serological studies estimating the prevalence of infection in the general population has become available. This has allowed professor John Ioannidis of Stanford university to work out the IFR in 12 different locations.

They range between 0.02 per cent and 0.5 per cent – although Ioannidis has corrected those raw figures to take account of demographic balance and come up with estimates between 0.02 per cent and 0.4 per cent. The lowest estimates came from Kobe, Japan, found to have an IFR of 0.02 per cent and Oise in northern France, with an IFR of 0.04 per cent. The highest were in Geneva (a raw figure of 0.5 per cent) and Gangelt in Germany (0.28 per cent).

The usual caveats apply: most studies to detect the prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the general population remain unpublished, and have not yet been peer-reviewed. Some are likely to be unrepresentative of the general population. The Oise study, in particular, was based on pupils, teachers and parents in a single high school which was known to be a hotspot on Covid-19 infection. At the other end of the table, Geneva has a relatively high age profile, which is likely to skew its death rate upwards.

But it is noticeable how all these estimates for IFR are markedly lower than the figures thrown about a couple of months ago, when it was widely asserted that Covid-19 was a whole magnitude worse than flu. Seasonal influenza is often quoted as having an IFR of 0.1 to 0.2 per cent. The Stanford study suggests that Covid-19 might not, after all, be more deadly than flu – although, as Ioannidis notes, the profile is very different: seasonal flu has a higher IFR in developing countries, where vaccination is rare, while Covid-19 has a higher death rate in the developed world, thanks in part of more elderly populations.

The Stanford study, however, does not include the largest antibody study to date: that involving a randomised sample of 70,000 Spanish residents, whose preliminary results were published by the Carlos III Institute of Health two weeks ago. That suggested that five per cent of the Spanish population had been infected with the virus. With 27,000 deaths in the country, that would convert to an IFR of 1.1 per cent.

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And here's a sample of the Medical baloney to justify prolongation of the economically and socially disastrous rule by ignorant bureaucrats and doctors.

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Why IQ Tests Don't Measure Intelligence

Consider a surgeon, a composer, an artist, and a physicist. Each is the world's best. Each therefore is highly intelligent as the Oxford English Dictionary defines intelligence:

the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills,

And as they are all highly intelligent, then, according to the psychologist's understanding of the term intelligence, they must all have really high IQ's. But do they? And even were it so, what would that mean?

The surgeon for all his astonishing deftness with a scalpel, and his knowledge of human anatomy, may be dumb as a brick at math, and not especially articulate either. The composer probably can't draw, and the artist may be unable to carry a tune. And the physicist,  may, like the great Paul Dirac,  be linguistically monosyllabic. So to say that these highly intelligent people are equally intelligent, even in the unlikely case that they scored equally on an IQ test, would be meaningless. They are not equally intelligent at all. They are each vastly more intelligent, than all the rest in their own particular way.

What's hard to understand about that? Everyone knows that that is how it is. Intelligence is not one thing, one faculty, one gift: it is an array of abilities, each person having intellectual strengths and weaknesses. How then did psychologists come to adopt the seemingly nonsensical idea that one number, the so-called Intelligence Quotient, could measure a persons intellectual worth?

The answer to that question is two-fold. First, IQ testing is like the busted science of phrenology — the reading of cranial bumps: it allows the practitioner to claim to know a person's intellectual standing in the world, and hence their future potential. It is this claimed ability to judge the worth of a man that places the psychologist in a position of authority.

The second reason that psychologists proclaim the power of IQ tests to measure mental horse-power is a piece of mathematical data manipulation invented by a Victorian eugenicist and statistician, Karl Pearson. The math in question is called factor analysis, and what factor analysis does is to examine the relationships among various characteristics of some class of things, for example, towns, countries, planets, acorns, or apples, thereby to discover whether there is a common factor or factors underlying these relationships.

An underlying factor, is exactly what the psychometricians — as the quantifiers of mental capacity call themselves — found when they examined variation from individual to individual in mental abilities. Those who score high on mathematical logic, tend to do relatively well on other tests such as verbal reasoning, or the interpretation of geometric puzzles. This factor, quantified by Pearson's factor analysis, they named "G" for "General Intelligence."

Having gone thus far, it was a small step to the conclusion that a person's mean score on the various components of a test of cognitive abilities was a valid way to estimate General Intelligence, hence the results of tests of multiple cognitive tasks was called an "Intelligence Quotient" or IQ, and the test itself, an IQ test.

This view led to a general belief that intelligence is just one thing, underlain by some as yet unidentified common factor, which determines a person's overall intellectual capacity.

But the correlations among cognitive capacities are low. In fact, mostly very low. See here, for example, where correlation coefficients (r values) among a large number of tests averaged less than 0.3. That means that, on average, less than 10% (r squared values) of the variation in any one ability is explained by variation in any other ability.

So yes, mental capacities share at least one common underlying factor, but its effect is weak, meaning that an individual's relative ability at one kind of mental activity will rarely be an accurate guide to their ability at another type of mental task.

It is the weakness of G, and the dependence upon it of their conception of IQ as a measure of intelligence, that psychologists have been loathe to admit. Thus has emerged a widely held idea that G as estimated from an IQ test score measures the essence of intelligence, just as chip speed measures the power of a computer central processing unit. What this is widely understood to imply is that intelligent mental activity depends on either a common mechanism, or a common feature of nerve cells that dictates the scope and power mental activity. However, the slightest awareness of brain anatomy and physiology would disabuse one of the notion that the brain has anything equivalent to a CPU, or even a uniform functional cellular capacity. On the contrary, different mental activities depend on different neural lobes, networks and ganglia, or on hierarchies of lobes, networks and ganglia.

Moreover, these components of the brain are far from identical in physiology and structure. There are many types of nerve cells or neurons and their supporting glial cells, as there are many different signalling methods within the brain, these involving at least eighty neurotransmitters. Despite the subjective unity of mind, the brain is thus a collection of many neurological machines, each with its own genetic determinants and its own history of past experience.

Thus, G or general intelligence, far from representing a fundamental component of intelligence, reflects only the dependence of the functioning of the entire brain on either other organs or some weakly influential characteristic of all brain tissue.

For example, brains without oxygen die within seconds, which means that brain function depends on lungs, heart and the vascular system. Moreover, without a continuous supply of glucose brains cannot function, which means a dependence on the liver and on the endocrine system that controls blood sugar. And without means to dispose of waste products, the brain is rapidly poisoned, meaning dependence on the kidneys. As to general properties of brain tissue, effective function depends on  many general features such as mitochondria, ribosomes, microtubules, and much else, all of which must function properly or the brain will function poorly or not at all.

Thus the mystery of G is revealed. It is a reflection, simply, of the brain's dependence on the rest of the body and on the cellular machinery common to all nerve cells. If all supporting systems and sub-cellular components are in the highest working condition, then the multiple components of the brain can all function at the peak capacity. But all defects or limitations in the performance of supporting systems and cellular organelles limit mental performance. Thus, beside variation in relative power of the various components of the brain there will be variation from brain to brain due the functionality of the brains support systems and components.

Thus just as a large town will tend to have more crime, traffic congestion and air pollution than a small town, so those with the best overall health and the best cellular machinery, will tend to have higher IQ's than those whose mental function dependent on defective support systems or cellular machinery. But still, among individuals, the big differences in intellect, are on specific tasks not on overall performance, or G, as assessed by a so-called IQ test.

So, yes, IQ-ism is largely bunk and the sooner we're rid of it the sooner will psychologists be able to study intelligence more intelligently.

Covid-19 in Britain: Herd Immunity Achieved

A team of researchers from The University of Manchester, Salford Royal and Res Consortium, have shown that a significant proportion of people in the UK—over 25%—is likely to have been infected already by the COVID-19 virus. The study—published this week in the International Journal of Clinical Practice—is the first to use the published local authority data to assess the cumulative impact of infection since the COVID-19 outbreak began. This has enabled them to calculate the R-value—the number of people infected by one person with COVID-19—within each local authority area. The published case data from the 144 Local Authorities analyzed by the team now gives an R value of well below 1. Source

So,  with a reported UK Covid19 death toll, so far, of 33,614, a 25% infection rate, and a population of 67 million, the infection-specific Covid19 mortality rate is just under one in 2000, or 0.05%, about the same as the seasonal flu.

If, as in Canada, Italy, the US, and many other countries, most Covid 19 deaths in the UK are among elderly residents of care-homes, those numbers imply a Covid19 death toll among the non-care-home-residents of between 0.01 and 0.25%, or one per 40,000.

Ample justification for wrecking the economy, and driving people nuts due to weeks of pointless incarceration, no doubt, but time now to end the insanely obsessive caution and allow people to get on with their lives.

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Covid-19: Why the Panic?

Referring to the panic reaction to Covid 19, a commenter at the Unz Review remarked:

This is looking more and more like an epidemic of mental illness.

But although what is being done to the mass of ordinary folk may cause an epidemic of insanity, the politicians and their media enablers, mainstream or "alt", who are using the Covid pandemic as  a pretext for destroying the livelihood of tens of millions, are surely not insane.

The question, then, is what's the objective? And the answer to that question must be something that can be inferred from the consequences.

So what are the consequences?

(1) The sharpest rate of job losses every recorded, leading to Great Depression levels of unemployment.

(2) Consequent upon (1), massive loss of income for the salaried workforce, business owners, and beneficiaries of pension funds etc., (the last having sustained large and soon to be larger investment losses).

(3) Consequent upon (2), massive reductions in consumption spending.

(4) Consequent upon (3), big cuts in imports to the West of products of cheap Third World labor.

(1) Means real wages will fall, thereby raising potential economic competitiveness of manufacturing in the US and other Western nations, i.e., reindustrialization of the West as will be essential in an emerging East-West cold war.

(2) Means many small businesses will fold, opening the way for expansion by the big boys: Starbucks,  Dominoes Pizza, Amazon, etc.

(3) Means fewer goddam plebs cluttering the best beaches, ski resorts, tourist meccas.

(4) Means a slowing of China's economic growth and reduced Chinese access to dollars with which to buy American and European technology and businesses, from GE Appliances to Motorola Mobility, and from the Chicago Stock Exchange to the Waldorf Astoria.

As for those few the virus kills, they're just old geezers, useless eaters, wasn't that what Adolf called them?

So, nothing crazy about this fake plague: what's not to like about it?

And to put things into context, the situation is much like that during the Great War that led to the still ongoing destruction of Europe. Then, British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George remarked:

If the people knew what is happening, this war would end tomorrow. But of course the people cannot know what is happening.

Likewise, they cannot know now, thanks to the MSM and its "alt" auxiliaries.

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Covid-19: An American Bioweapon? A Proposition Only Those of Exceptionally High IQ Can Believe

For some time now, Ron Unz, an anti-Semitic Jew, who has claimed an IQ of 214 (which would place him in the one-in-a-trillion category), has deployed in his web "zine," the Unz Review, articles and reader comments promoting the idea that Covid-19 is a bioweapon unleashed on China by the United States government or Zionist Jew elements therein.

 That the idea may be self-evident to those of exceptionally high IQ, is suggested by its endorsement by comics publisher Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day or Vox Popoli, who's high self-assessed IQ is implied by his frequent disparagement as "gammas" those whose views he derides. Thus, Beale quotes approvingly an Unz response to a comment at the Unz Review:

Well, ignorant retards like you can believe whatever ridiculous nonsense you get from FoxNews or similar sources. But the actual evidence is pretty strong that the Coronavirus outbreak was an American biowarfare attack on China (and Iran), presumably arranged by the Deep State Neocons in the Trump Administration. Otherwise, how could our Defense Intelligence Agency have distributed a November report to all our top government officials and European allies describing a “cataclysmic” disease epidemic taking place in Wuhan OVER A MONTH before any Chinese officials had become aware of it: Four separate government sources described the report to ABC News and its existence was independently confirmed by Israeli TV: Now go back to watching Mike Pompeo’s silly accusations on FoxNews…

Well, LOL, where to begin.

First, "Well." 

Not the pithiest way to begin an argument.

Second, " ignorant retards like you."  

Well, LOL again. Nothing like a bit of abuse to begin a high IQ argument.

Third, "you can believe whatever ridiculous nonsense you get from FoxNews or similar sources." 

Here there is some ambiguity. Is this the granting of permission to believe "ridiculous nonsense," or a statement about his protagonists gullilbility? Most likely the latter, i.e., a reiteration of the "ignorant retard" label.

Fourth, "But the actual evidence is pretty strong that the Coronavirus outbreak was an American biowarfare attack on China (and Iran), presumably arranged by the Deep State Neocons in the Trump Administration."

Here we come to the heart of the argument: "[T]he actual evidence," none of which (actual or otherwise) is to be sourced, is "pretty strong". So, boy, you'd better believe it.

Fifth, and here's what's supposed to be the clincher: "Otherwise, how could our Defense Intelligence Agency have distributed a November report to all our top government officials and European allies describing a “cataclysmic” disease epidemic taking place in Wuhan OVER A MONTH before any Chinese officials had become aware of it."

Well I dunno how they could, but could we please have a link to the text of that "Defense Intelligence Agency report distributed in November," or other evidence of its existence and contents.

Maybe here really is a killer argument. But we're supposed to take it on trust from someone who'd call us an "ignorant retard" if we refused to swallow without demur his unsupported account of the contents Defense Intelligence Agency report? Surely only a gamma, or probably a sub-gamma, would buy that.

And even if the high IQ Mr. Unz has seen, or been given convincing evidence of, the contents of a report such as he describes, what is so conclusive about it? The novel corona virus, Covid-19, is reported to have been circulating in Wuhan in November of last year. Why then should the US Government not have been aware of it? The US has a world-spanning network of virology labs designed, at least in part, one assumes, for precisely such detection -- a network that, for some reason, both China and Russia demand be shut down. Moreover, as Cambridge University virologists have reported in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences, Covid-19 was circulating in China earlier than November, not in Wuhan, but far to the south of that city. So the US  probably had at least several months to detect the circulation of Covid19 in China prior to the end of November. 

Sixth, more proof without any actual evidence:  "Four separate government sources described the report to ABC News and its existence was independently confirmed by Israeli TV".  Now you're really screwed. Proof positive of what you deny based on "four separate government sources" to none of which a reference is provided, merely a reference to one of America's mass media "News," sources, which Unz has already derided as totally useless. And, plus, Israeli TV, which you no doubt watch every day. 

Seventh, another sneer: "Now go back to watching Mike Pompeo’s silly accusations on FoxNews."

Then, Beale continues, in case you are beginning to feel uncertain what to believe, "remember to apply Vox's [i.e., Beale's] First Law of Media": 

the Official Story put forth by the mainstream media is always false. 

Which is an odd way of endorsing Unz, since the mainstream media, i.e., ABC News and Israeli TV are the only information sources Unz explicitly mentions in support of his claim that Covid19 was a bioweapon deployed against China by the United States or rogue Zionist elements therein.

Furthermore, as an aside, it should be noted that Vox's (i.e., Beale's) claimed First Law, dates back at least to the Middle Ages, and probably, to Nineveh and Tyre, if not since the dawn of civilization. Moreover, it is an apothegm that is usually stated, probably since the days of Gobekli Tepi, more pithily thus:

Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.

Beale then lays on more oleaginous approbation of Unz's huge brainpower applied to the mentality of the gamma, stating:

Unz further lays out his logic:

There are multiple, independent sources in both the US government and Israel that agree that our Defense Intelligence Agency distributed a report in November warning of the “cataclysmic” disease outbreak that was taking place in Wuhan. Those facts seem almost incontrovertible. As it happens, that was indeed right around the time that the Coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan had actually begun, but at such an early stage that no Chinese officials were yet aware of it, just like the virus later began circulating in various parts of America several weeks before people noticed it. So unless you believe that our DIA has developed “precognitive technology”, how can they have possibly been aware of the outbreak before anyone in China unless elements of our national security establishment had themselves released the virus in Wuhan as a biowarfare attack against China?

Taking that apart, we see that the first paragraph is merely a reiteration of what the US and, apparently, the Israeli Governments are supposed to have known in November 2019 about a disease outbreak in Wuhan, all public knowledge of which Chinese authorities were, at the time, vigorously attempting to suppress. But, again, there are no actual references, leaving the reader without evidence of the validity or plausibility of these alleged sources, assuming such sources exist. 

The second paragraph spells out the claim that the US was well informed about the emergence of a virulent corona virus infection in China, whereas the Government of China knew nothing about it. But there is abundant evidence that the Government of China was well aware of the outbreak, but was attempting to suppress public knowledge of it. 

So is Unz's claim bullshit, or what? 

And finally : "So unless you believe that our DIA has developed “precognitive technology”, how can they have possibly been aware of the outbreak before anyone in China unless elements of our national security establishment had themselves released the virus in Wuhan as a biowarfare attack against China?"

Hows that for a high IQ line of reasoning? 

First the sneer, "unless (your are such a total moron) as to believe that our DIA has developed “precognitive technology.” Then the question claimed to be unanswerable except by acknowledgement of an act of war by the United States against China: "how can they have possibly been aware of the outbreak before anyone in China unless elements of our national security establishment had themselves released the virus in Wuhan as a biowarfare attack against China?"

Fall for that and I would be inclined to think that your IQ can be stated with a single digit.

As noted, the US has a global network of microbiology labs a function of which must be to detect and follow the emergence and spread of viral and other disease agents. Why, then, would the US not have picked up early on, perhaps even sooner than the Government of China, that a novel corona virus was spreading in China? No reason.

And here's one more reason to consider Unz's claim that Covid19 is US bioweapon deliberately loosed on China, evidence of a loose screw:

As that graph shows, if it were true that the US did attack China with Covid19, it would indicate a degree of incompetence comparable to that of having accidentally dropped the first atom bomb on Chicago, rather than Hiroshima -- but with more US casualties from the virus than would have resulted from the nuke.

Amazingly, the source of that graph? The Unz Review.

 And here are two more interesting graphs (source), which indicated the existence of two strains of the Covid-19 that differ markedly in virulence. China, it is claimed was afflicted only by the milder, orange strain (see image below), whereas countries that have suffered the highest mortality from Covid-19 have been afflicted mainly by the blue strain. Are these claims true? I have no idea. Anyone with relevant details, please comment.

Related:

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Dennis Prager: The Worldwide Lockdown May Be the Greatest Mistake in History
Rand Paul demolishes Fauci on the need for continued lock-down:

Why Lock-Downs Were a Mistake: The Swedish view

Johan Giesecke, Swedish State Epidemiologists, on Sweden's Covid19 response.



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The Economy: Why It's Different This Time

Excerpt from This Isn't Just Another Crash, by Charles Hugh Smith

1. Households have never been so dependent on debt as a substitute for stagnating wages.

2. Real earnings (adjusted for inflation) have never been so stagnant for the bottom 90% for so long.

3. Corporations have never been so dependent on debt (selling bonds or taking on loans) to fund money-losing operations (see Netflix) or stock buybacks designed to saddle the company with debt service expenses to enrich insiders.

4. The stock market has never been so dependent on what amounts to fraud — stock buybacks — to push valuations higher.

5. The economy has never been so dependent on absurdly overvalued stock valuations to prop up pension funds and the spending of the top 10% who own 85% of all stocks, i.e. “the wealth effect.”

6. The economy and the stock market have never been so dependent on central bank free money for financiers and corporations, money creation for the few at the expense of the many, what amounts to an embezzlement scheme.

7. Federal statistics have never been so gamed, rigged or distorted to support a neo-feudal agenda of claiming a level of wide-spread prosperity that is entirely fictitious.

8. Major sectors of the economy have never been such rackets, i.e. cartels and quasi-monopolies that use obscure pricing and manipulation of government mandates to maximize profits while the quality and quantity of the goods and services they produce declines.

9. The economy has never been in such thrall to sociopaths who have mastered the exploitation of the letter of the law while completely overturning the spirit of the law.

10. Households and companies have never been so dependent on “free money” gained from asset appreciation based on speculation, not an actual increase in productivity or value.

11. The ascendancy of self-interest as the one organizing directive in politics and finance has never been so complete, and the resulting moral rot never more pervasive.

12. The dependence on fictitious capital masquerading as “wealth” has never been greater.

13. The dependence on simulacra, simulations and false fronts to hide the decay of trust, credibility, transparency and accountability has never been so pervasive and complete.

14. The corrupt linkage of political power, media ownership, “national security” agencies and corporate power has never been so widely accepted as “normal” and “unavoidable.”

15. Primary institutions such as higher education, healthcare and national defense have never been so dysfunctional, ineffective, sclerotic, resistant to reform or costly.

16. The economy has never been so dependent on constant central bank manipulation of the stock and housing markets.

17. The economy has never been so fragile or brittle, and so dependent on convenient fictions to stave off a crash in asset valuations.

18. Never before in U.S. history have the most valuable corporations all been engaged in selling goods and services that actively reduce productivity and human happiness.

Related: 
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Comparing Covid-19 With the Flu

According to the Covid19 Dashboard maintained by folks at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the world-wide Covid-19 death toll to date is 252,000.

How does that compare with the seasonal flu?

According to a paper entitled Global mortality associated with seasonal influenza epidemics, authored by an international group headed by John Paget of the Netherlands Institute for Health Services, it compares rather modestly, although obviously the final total will be higher.

 According to that paper, which was published last December, during the period 2002-2011:

an average of 389 000 (uncertainty range 294 000-518 000) respiratory deaths were associated with influenza globally each year during the study period, corresponding to ~ 2% of all annual respiratory deaths. Of these, 67% were among people 65 years and older.

So the mortality due to the seasonal flu has averaged 0.05% of the world's population, versus Covid-19's toll thus far of just 0.03%. If the final toll for Covid-19 is twice the toll thus far, then, at 0.06% it will slightly exceed the estimated death toll from flu in the worst year during the period 2002-2011, but it will likely come far short of the worst flu seasons in living memory.

Among the most deadly flu seasons was the year of the Asian flu (1957/58) that killed 70,000 out of 149 million Americans for a death rate of 0.05%, and 1968, the year of the Hong Kong flu (H3N2 virus), which also killed about one out of every two thousand Americans. A final American death toll from Covid-19 of 0.05% would be 280,000, or almost four times the current total. To match the lethality of the Spanish flu of 1918, the death toll would have to be in excess of a million and a half.

Related:
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