Hyperbolic much? At this point, the burden of proof surely now has to be on the optimists, who’ve been alternately barraging us with “iTs JuSt LiKe ThE fLu”, and/or “it’s not going to kill non-East Asians anyway” (not that CNN’s Sanjay Gupta will admit it).
But with epidemics, it’s usually a case of go big or go home. It’s not going home. As of the past couple of days, we can definitively state that containment has failed. The proof of this is Italy. Consider:
- Italy has only a moderate level of air traffic with China – approximately comparable to Russia and France, lower than Germany and the UK, fivefold lower than the US.
- Italy was the only country in Europe to ban all direct flights from China on January 31. (This appears to have actually no less hard a response than Russia’s ban on Chinese citizens on February 20, which however excluded transit and business visitors).
- Belying stereotypes, the Italian epidemiological response has been highly competent (if by unexacting global standards), with most or all people displaying flu-like symptoms apparently being tested.
Even so, well over 200 cases in Italy have sprouted up in a matter of days, with deaths starting to tick up (seven as of the time of writing), a dozen cities under quarantine, and with no end in sight.
Coupled with the cluster in Iran, this means that COVID-19 now also meets the definition of a pandemic, even if the WHO has chosen this moment to erase this word from its lexicon.
It beggars belief that there aren’t similar or bigger clusters all over Europe, North America, and much of the world even outside East Asia.
To which one might rejoinder, why haven’t they been detected yet? Well, recall how COVID-19 works. Most cases are asymptomatic; in cases where symptoms do appear, which can happen as much as 2 weeks after infection, they are easily confounded with the flu. From the earlier days, it has been estimated – and repeatedly confirmed – that COVID-19 has only a 10% detection rate (BTW, Davide Piffer estimates it at 18%). Meanwhile, carriers need not be symptomatic to transmit. At such early stages, you are only going to identify these clusters by intensive testing, which as I understand nobody apart from Italy and South Korea is really doing yet. One might make a comparison to a tsunami. Undetectable when it’s out in the deep ocean, unless you’re specifically looking for it… until it comes to shore and crashes down on local healthcare systems.
At the global level, short of some late stage miracle, the cat is out of the bag and every country or bloc will now largely have to fend for itself. The one positive point is that China’s radical quarantine measures – now encompassing 10% of the world’s population – appear to have worked… at least going by official figures (e.g. only 11 new cases outside of Hubei this past day seems too good to be true – there have been some other oddities). Another obvious question is whether this stall will hold once the quarantines are eased and people are allowed to start going back to work – as they eventually must, if China is to avoid a full-fledged depression.
Nonetheless, there are many places in the world – probably the great majority – that are less functional and competent than China. Certainly there are very few countries with the political wherewithal to put half of their population under varying types of travel restrictions and basically implode their own economies. There are going to have their own outbreaks, time lagged ~2 months relative to China (note that the first death in Wuhan didn’t take place until January 9), and will then start catapulting the disease back into areas where it had previously been checked – at least short of a total shutdown of globalization on the Best Korea model.
At this point, probably the most efficient thing that most countries can do – bearing in mind that mortality with ventilators, drugs, doctors, etc. seems to be ~1% versus 2-3% for people left to their own devices – is to try to draw out the infections for as long as possible to prevent hospital facilities from becoming overwhelmed and so maximize the number of people who can be treated. Robin Hanson has some even more “powerful” ideas on how to minimize mortality rates, but I doubt there are any governments powerful enough to “consider controlled infection.”
Official China says its growth rate will be 6% in Q1 2020. Who knew that sitting at home mining gold on World of Warcraft could be so economically productive as to counterbalance the effects of a 25% reduction in coal production and CO2 emissions, a ~70% reduction in air flights, and a 90%+ (sic!) reduction in automobile sales.
24 hours of China region airplane movements on a normal Friday in November 2019 (UTC time) vs last Friday the 14th Feb, 2020. #COVID19 @bnoDesk @flightradar24 @aspoerl1 pic.twitter.com/8bE0Q3Aejx
— Justin (@Trumpery45) February 15, 2020
Nonetheless, the absence of any corresponding commotion in the markets had started to become puzzling to me. But it appears that today the dam is finally breaking, with betting odds on a US recession jumping from 25% to 32% in just the 24 hours.
I think the odds are way worse. The global economy is already on unsteady footing – a manufacturing recession in the US, zero growth in Germany, outright -1.4% shrinkage in Japan during Q4. More generally, the American tech sector has long given off signals of being a bubble.
This is going to have some important consequences:
(1) Conventional wisdom has it that Bloomberg is much more competitive against Trump than Bernie. However, in a scenario in which COVID-19 creates a real crisis, this may no longer hold true – especially if it is handled badly. Wall or no wall, COVID-19 isn’t crawling up north through Mexico, whereas being able to see a doctor without getting slammed by massive bills is actually a good thing in an epidemic. With Trump proposing to cut 16% from the CDC’s budget for 2021 – released just a couple of weeks ago – this would not even be undeserved.
(2) In Italy, it may well be Salvini who gets a boost. He was calling for a China travel ban since early January.
(3) Geopolitically, this will turbocharge what Trump’s trade war initiated: The Great Bifurcation of the world economy between the “Blue Empire” and the Sinosphere. I’ll do this in a separate post.
(4) Global recession will also mean a collapse in oil prices. I don’t expect Russia to be particularly badly hit this time, since it has spent the 2014-19 period doing fiscal and monetary belt-tightening at the price of very low growth. On the upside, it now has the lowest breakeven oil price of any major oil-producing state. But Saudi Arabia might be worth watching out for.
This all sounds very gloomy and depressing. But is it really all so bad?
Although comparisons to the flu are a very “smol brain” take – a virulence differential of well more than an order of magnitude is nothing to sneeze at – it’s still, in practice, almost irrelevant to young people’s mortality profiles. Even if it increases the risk of a 20 year old’s death in that year by 50%, that would still just basically be equivalent to having to live that year as a 20 year old in the 1970s.
The effects on boomers and older generations are going to be much worse, since COVID-19 affects them much worse. Still, even this will just be a one-time “shock”. If you look at historical charts of life expectancy, you will see that before the universalization of vaccines, antibiotics, etc. in the 20th century, life expectancy jumped wildly from year to year, spiking in tandem with the virulence of the bugs going around in that particular year (and sometimes with failed harvests). Since the late 19th century, at least in the developed world, these graphs have become smoothed out.
All manner of COVID-19’s were a mundane thing a century ago and earlier. Today, they are a freak occurrence on whose mitigation China and much of the world seems willing to sacrifice a significant proportion of their GDP. That sounds almost Pinkerian.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Has anyone found an estimate for the mortality rate by an expert taking into account the lag effect and undetected cases?
Ok doomer.
Please, can anyone provide real data on infectivity and virulance rates for Caucasians and Africans, vs. East Asians.
Some data suggest that corona rates are higher in men than women.
Rule of thumb figures that I think are generally accurate/within scientific mainstream are r0=4 and mortality of 1%.
* r0 under assumption of no counteractions, such as quarantines or social withdrawal.
* Mortality obviously differs widely – higher without hospital treatment, perhaps 0.5%-1% with hospital treatment.
Not sure racial differences are going to be significant. Main consideration, apart from obvious ones like healthcare system quality, development, age structure, etc. would seem to be smoking prevalence and air pollution.
Fits in with above, many more men than women smoke.
Don’t the Chinese set time limits on how long people can play video games? I wonder if they modified that under current circumstances.
I’ve also been wondering if there is anyway that the Chinese could turn this lemon into lemonade. Like, could they turn it into a baby-boom by using appropriate propaganda, or subliminal messages?
I am interested in what effect this will have on the PRC’s soft power.
Soft power is universally acknowledged as real, if amorphous and hard to quantify.
I’d say China was making slow but steady gains in the 2010s, and then, poetically, in the very last week of the decade, this new virus began to get mentions, setting the stage for a Q1 2020 that has got to be among the worst for China’s image in a long time; possibly since June 1989.
Effects on image / soft power: On one hand, the virus started in China, apparently because of “non-First World” behavior by some Chinese at that live-animal market; and there is no way to make the PRC regime look good in its initial reaction (the cover-up, including the secret-police’s threatening of the doctor who discovered it, the doctor in his 30s who later died of the virus). On the other hand, their efforts, as Anatoly writes here, have been effective within China itself at containment.
Net effect on China’s soft power for the 2020s?
I agree that many Chinese people will die and probably many people elsewhere in East Asia. I also agree that the coronavirus will get blamed for the coming global recession (which was coming anyway).
Outside East Asia, the death toll will be comparable to what we see with a typical flu epidemic. Keep in mind that many people die every year because of influenza, no matter how mild it is.
To date, no one has disproved the study by Zhao et al., who found that Chinese lung tissue is five times more receptive to coronoviral infections than lung tissue from non-Asian donors. Yes, there was only one Chinese donor in that study, but the chances are very low that the same normal distribution would produce such an extreme outlier.
Most coronaviruses are mild. I suspect that a process of coevolution has caused the Chinese population to become much more receptive to these viruses, perhaps as a means to boost immunity to more serious pulmonary infections, like tuberculosis and pneumonia. Furthermore, I suspect that modern sanitation has opened a Pandora’s box by reducing regular exposure to mild pulmonary infections. Unwittingly, the Chinese population has been left defenseless in the face of the current deadly infection.
If we go back to the Spanish flu of 1918, China was one of the few areas where the flu killed relatively few people. How come? I suspect that the Chinese people had some kind of natural defense against serious pulmonary infections that has since been largely removed … with the best of intentions.
Our economy and society might be less resilient than a century ago. A high enough portion of people not coming to work might in itself cause significant issues, like a collapse of certain essential services, even several of them. (Electricity? Water? Mass transit? Grocery stores? Healthcare? Police? Fire department?)
What is interesting is that the collapse of antibiotics production would probably drastically increase mortality (it’s believed that the Spanish Flu was so deadly only because of the secondary bacterial infections, responsible for maybe half of the mortality), and might result in further lethal epidemics.
So I guess the Chinese shut down their economy over fears of a systematic collapse, and not because they were so worried about some pensioners dying.
There was another study, which found more such receptors among smokers, but no difference between racial groups.
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202002.0051/v1/download
Now with a pretty bad epidemic in Iran and increasingly in Italy, it certainly doesn’t seem to be very likely.
A lot of people – in different sources, some more unreliable than others – hypothesize that warmer weather of summer, as well as higher humidity, will slow spread of the virus.
If this is true, then Northern Europe/Russia/Canada will have at least an extra 1-2 months vulnerability if there will be a pandemic, as warm weather can be delayed as late as May and June.
So in Seville, for example, the mean daily temperature will be 20°C in May, while in Saint-Peterburg it is just above 11°C for daily mean temperature in May. And in Miami, it is almost 26°C.
For old doomer immunocompromized pensioner, with sufficient funding, it might be time to immigrate somewhere like Miami or San Diego. I’ll be surprised there is not at least increase in demand for airbnb apartments in such places, and at least for internal migration of worried pensioners in those countries, soon.
Official Figures February 24
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Coronavirus Cases: 79,774
Active cases: 51,873
Mild Condition 40,306 (78%)
Serious or Critical 11,567 (22%)
Resolved Cases: 27,901
Recovered 25,272 (91%)
Deaths 2,629 (9%)
See also the ‘Daily Increase’ plot at:
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
that shows that for the last six days the number of ‘New Recovered’ cases is larger than ‘New Confirmed’ cases by a factor close to 2. This means that at least China was able to arrest the epidemic.
“…mortality rate by an expert taking into account the lag effect…”
Around 4% for China. It may go lower with improved treatment.
Be interesting to see if the virus in Italy behaves as it does in Iran. If so we may be seeing a secondary release getting out of hand.
As proud member of the “smol brain/just a flu” optimist faction, i say this pandemic is nothing to worry about for people of breeding age. If anything, it will reduce long term health care costs by running through the old people.
It will be blamed for upcoming recession for sure, but that recession was long time coming anyway. On the bright side, it will give Central Banks an excuse to print money, so once stock markets drop a few 1,000 points, it will be an amazing time to buy. Negative interest rates will make Basic Income easily affordable to support global demand. Few million or 10’s of millions of deaths are a rounding error for a population gunning for 8 billion.
It will all turn out great in the long run – few people even remember 1918 flu today, we will get over this one as well.
Imagine millions of people sitting at home, solving captchas.
Good article.
For the sheer size of the country, China is almost completely devoid of soft power. Unlike South Korea and Japan, China has almost no cultural exports that are popular anywhere else in the world. All China is known for is its authoritarianism and exporting huge amounts of cheap goods, most non-Chinese people would struggle to name a famous person or movie, etc, from mainland China.
The only internationally well known pop culture figures that Chinese culture has produced have been from Hong Kong, which is obviously highly Westernised in comparison to mainland China. People like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan.
Life Style Strategy
Male type 2 diabetic with a stent (courtesy of an infection acquired on a Russian train) approaching three score and ten. I run; I lift weights and swing kettlebells. My lung capacity must be far better than most my age. But there was the one clot at the botton of the artery that the surgeon couldn’t reach supplying the chamber that pumps blood to the lungs.
If I was in Russia, I could buy antivirals over the counter (not possible in the UK without a prescrition) to use as prophylatics. I imagine paying $30 for postal delivery of a $2 packet would not get me delivery in a meaningful time anyway.
Do I get my food delivered by Ocado – internet grocer – very highly automated warehouse. Not many people in the process? My sister in law is a District Nurse. She has actually been dressing in hazmat gear to go and test suspects at home. I guess we don’t invite her around for a while. 100 suspects in Wales so far, 90 of them stayed at home until tested. All negative. What about the 10 who weren’t public spirited. R(0)=4 so 10*4 = 40. Lets say the 90 manage to infect one person each as well. That’s 130 per 100. we are doomed! Time to go to Zambia until say May? I was planning to go to Saratov and Izhvesk.
So guys, what challenges do you face?
I would group the world into 3 classes for evaluating changes in Chinese soft power.
Many important countries don’t quite fit into these categories like Russia (non-Western, self sufficient white country), Pakistan (long standing ally), Japan (non-Western, default enmity towards China), South Korea (a country that for entirely its own security reasons and geography is coming to a juncture and may decide to abandon the US for China).
The last decade saw Chinese soft power considerably drop in (3) but rise in (1) and (2) due to the strength of China’s economy, increasing technical achievements by Chinese companies and universities, export of capital by Chinese investor and banks, and lack of human rights preening by the countries themselves. In (1) there is both recognition that China is transforming the landscape but also caution about exposure level. In Africa, China’s prominence makes it a target for counter narratives which Africans are more susceptible to than other 3rd world countries (colonial trade relationship, debt trap, racism, etc.) But others in (1) are not as interested as Africa in blaming China for ills. Nonetheless, the higher profile of China in any region of (1) comes with higher exposure to counter narratives in large part because of the propaganda efforts of Washington (and to less impact Delhi). The counter narratives gain traction easily because in both (1) and (2) there is low trust of China. That lack of trust has not improved in the 2010s despite the huge increase in (1) and (2) in respect for China as a capable and achieving nation.
The Belt and Road Initiative is intended to change perceptions worldwide. The brand China wants to project through BRI is an image as the great connector of the infrastructure hungry developing world. That means building cross-border pipelines and transport networks to bring together Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. This brand image has excited business communities and the political classes of (1) and (2) but has not made headway in popular perception in those same places. If this brand image can stick then I think (1) and (2) will see China as more benign and thereby more trustworthy (seeing China as the connector, reduces perceptions of China as belligerent).
Coronavirus has tainted the image of China as the great connector of the 3rd world. It has even tainted cross-border connectivity. How badly tainted depends on whether the situation in Iran can be contained.
@Europe Europa
Not at all, recent Chinese series became popular specially in Asia, to name a few:
1-Story of Yanxi Palace, (Most googled global tv shows in 2018!)
2- Meteor Garden, (its lead Dylan Wang, became one of the most googled famous people in countries like Philippines)
3- The Untamed, (Became the major international Chinese hit of last year)
So kudos to China for doing good soft power stuff, yeah I watched those tv series and liked them, mostly Yanxi Palace.
Jackie Chan considers himself Chinese.
COVID-19 started at the beginning of December 2019. We are entering March. There have been 2,628 deaths attributed to COVID-19.
Each day in China an average of 26,974 die. Out of that 29 of those deaths have been from COVID-19.
The number of births in the next 90 minutes in China will be larger than the total number of deaths from COVID-19 over 3 months.
In China:
Live births in the past year: 17,404,093
Deaths in the past year: 9,795,057
Coronavirus deaths in the past quarter year: 2,628.
“I agree that many Chinese people ” – Do you think 4,000 to 5,000 is many? If China continues doing what it has been doing so far it does not look that there will be more than 5,000 death providing that the official data are more or less accurate.
Well, not even a competent govenment could create “baby-boom by using appropriate propaganda, or subliminal messages”. Even large financial incentives popular in developed countries today likely have no effect in fertility, and even laws of Nicolae Ceausescu to criminalize contraception only had a temporary, soon mostly reversed, effect.
On the other hand, allowing third-world sanitary conditions, and then incompetent disease control, discovery and containment of the unknown viruses newly transmitted from animals to man in their territory, and allowing the virus to soon spread to other countries – this is more appropriate for the skill level of the Chinese authorities today.
Were Chinese actually as mobile on average in the late 1910s as Westerners or even Japanese were, though?
So guys, what challenges do you face?
Trying to find information as to whether Corona Extra offers more protection than Corona Light.
Trying to undertand why after reading comment #12, I thought to myself, “San Diego would be nice, but I would just as soon go ahead and die instead of going to Miami.”
If “flu” kills thousands of people every year, why, in spite of being around for 70 years, I do not have perssonal knowledge of anyone who has died from the flu.
Well, personally I think the jury is still out whether East Asians are far more vulnerable to the new coronavirus than whites. The outbreaks in Iran and Italy shift the likelihood somewhat, but it’s still early. Personally, I think the evidence from that cruise ship might be most definitive.
But if whites are indeed as vulnerable, I’d think that the West might be hit much harder than China. After all, can we possibly imagine the sort of national lock-down that China has implemented, apparently with considerable success?
And I’m still very suspicious about the circumstances of the outbreak. It hit China just before Lunar New Year, the absolutely worst possible time, and the epicenter was Wuhan, a key transport hub. It really seems an astonishing coincidence that 300 American military servicemen had been visiting Wuhan just prior to the outbreak, at a peak of international tension.
How would Americans react if 300 PRC officers had visited Chicago, and immediately afterwards, a deadly new plague broke out in that city, with a major risk of spreading throughout the country?
Isn’t it also rather suspicious that Iran has been hit so hard? So the two countries in the world most subject to current American hostility just tend to be especially “unlucky”…
As for “soft power,” I suspect it largely reflects a heavily-lagging indicator of economic/political power, only somewhat shifted by considerations of pop-culture. If China continues on its economic/political trajectory, I think it will have plenty of soft power 30-40 years down the road. And if American society/economy collapses, so soon afterward will our soft power, ignorant rap-stars and basketball players notwithstanding.
China doesn’t waste its money on soft power because it knows that soft power isn’t real.
I guess China’s lack of cultural production is predictable from their economic and social disasters of the 20th and 19th century. China was too economically poor and undeveloped to dedicate much resources on creating culture, until the 21st century. Others might argue that the cause of low cultural production is fear from a only nominally communist – but still very strict and controlling – government. Yet the counterexample, is the high level of cultural production of the USSR.
In the USSR, there was maintained still the highest level of cultural production, despite the damage authorities have made to literature and painting. It’s in the last 30 years, with a capitalist system, that the cultural production in Russia has been declined, more than in 70 years of commmunism, which had included execution and oppression of many of the most talented creative professionals, as well as deformation of many others’ art to match stupid political requirements. And despite this difficult governance, great films were made both in popularist and elitist genres, great music created which is beloved around the world, and even some good books.
It’s the precursor of pneumonia and heart attacks rather than a kiler itself. I suspect that if I hadn’t been so fit that I would have had a heart attack rather than crippling angina from a sudden 95% blockage, 300 m into a run.
There have been a lot of failures, when it comes to fertility incentives – Lee Kuan Yew failed. But I don’t think the right level of incentives and propaganda has been tried. Can it be done in a democracy? I don’t know, but I’m sure it can be done, and China isn’t one.
Mostly, one can reduce the failures down to a single factor: it has not been thought of as a first-order problem, so attempts have been half-hearted. For instance, at the end of the day, Singapore can just import people, very much like the people already living there, but in the coming decades, this will certainly change – people will think of it as a first-order problem, requiring dramatic efforts and concentration.
It is not just the falling numbers of people in some countries – it is the dark tide, which threatens all ice peoples. I just saw a preview for a movie titled The Green Knight, the ancient Celtic tale, which starred an Indian. The same actor also recently played David Copperfield.
I wonder if there might be changes here. Will they shut down the wet markets, or crack down on bad conditions with inspectors? Or make sure all large groups of chickens are warehoused. IMO, there will be political pressure to make changes, though China has a lot of questionable street food.
Modern Russian pop culture is highly memeable troll stuff, and of high quality.
This one is in English, so it has international appeal. 61M views is not bad for a local St Petersburg punk band.
I also liked Leningrad (i think they broke up recently), but those guys sang in Russian, and even though they were very funny, i can see how that would be a problem for non-Russian speakers.
Modern Russian pop music is quality stuff i would say, and has soft power potential.
Movies are a different story. I watched “Vtorzhenie” in a movie theater – not bad as far as effects go, but storyline could use a bit of a cleanup. Amusingly, TV shows are the opposite – i watched a bunch of crime drama miniseries (family likes them), and i liked acting and stories, but they definitely look low budget compared to American TV.
Fun theory but it would make more sense if paired with some theory of how the US took secret steps to protect its own population, e.g., slipped a vaccine in the drinking water. But it is hard to think of a plausible theory of that sort.
China’s lack of soft power is old news, actually China since 2017 has more soft power than ever.
New icons of Chinese Internet-culture such as TikTok, fantasy novels and online dramas are gaining traction in Thailand, bringing fresh elements to the promotion of Chinese culture in the Southeast Asian country.
As a teacher of Confucius Institute at Mahasarakham University, he has been working in a high school in Nongkrusi county, Kalasin Province since June of 2018. However, on the platform of TikTok, a leading video-sharing app, he managed to become a Chinese teacher with influence beyond Kalasin.
“I’ve got over 10,000 followers on TikTok and most of them are Thai students who are learning Chinese,” said 25-year-old Zuo, who has become a Internet celebrity by posting videos of Chinese-teaching lessons on TikTok.
In addition to platforms like TikTok, Chinese online dramas and novels also gave Thai fans reading and watching frenzies.
In renowned chained stores named “Asian Books” in Bangkok, capital of Thailand, a number of Chinese web novels featuring Wuxia (martial heroes), Xianxia (immortal heroes) and Xuanhuan (fantasy featuring adventures and wars) have been translated into Thai and have topped the best-seller list in the area of Chinese books for a long time.
In 2019, a Chinese web series named The Untamed, telling adventures of two investigators who travel around to solve a series of murders, has become a real hit in Thailand.
“Its beautiful scenery, vivid CGI, intriguing plots, and good acting make it very attractive to young people in Thailand. When the cast of The Untamed visited here in September, it became the hottest topic on social networks,” Nid said, adding that many of her friends followed the series like crazy.
If you are talking about the schema of China in the heads of the average African, etc., then it won’t be but the tiniest blip. I am sure it doesn’t even register in many people of the third world.
In the West, China will remain the big non-white country, so it will be lionized, as people are attracted to power, and it is relatively safe to reference.
If we are speaking of the decade as a whole, it is microscopically trivial compared to the effect another decade of immigration will have on the West. Western Europe may be facing its 11th hour, right now. There are rumors that the UK will do away with the next census.
Somehow, I think China’s most famous symbol in the near future will be Corona-chan.
Technically, all China really needs to do is to dub and censor Japanese and Korean stuff. That should keep them out of the globohomo sphere, in the short term.
Though, it is like oil. Strategically, it is better to have your own supply. And only they have the scale to make blockbusters.
Isn’t it suspicious that Italy has been hit so hard? Isn’t suspicious that South Korea has been hit so hard? Isn’t it suspicious how pro-Chinese Cambodia hasn’t been hit so hard?
hmmm, suspicious, suspicious…
“Crater the World Economy”
The “world” economy was a system controlled by and for the ZOG world order, the end of this system would a great blessing in many ways.
Well, there were some early indications that the virus was especially deadly towards Chinese and perhaps East Asians rather than whites, though the picture is currently much more cloudy. But you’re looking at things entirely the wrong way…
Under normal circumstances, I would be extremely skeptical of a possible US biowarfare attack against China since it would be such a totally insane thing to do. But just last month, we assassinated a top Iranian leader, and much of everything our government does is totally insane. So an insane biowarfare attack would just fit into this larger pattern.
Also, consider that a mysterious Swine Flu epidemic suddenly appeared in China during 2019, and destroyed 40% of its primary domestic meat source, certainly a highly suspicious coincidence.
I’d very strongly recommend that people read this very lengthy article we published a week ago, which provides a vast amount of background information on the issue. The author is a highly eccentric American ex-pat living in China, and his own views should be given little weight. But he provides an enormous wealth of useful information and links, totally excluded from our worthless MSM:
https://www.unz.com/article/was-the-2020-wuhan-coronavirus-an-engineered-biological-attack-on-china-by-america-for-geopolitical-advantage/
For those who are still sceptical it might be useful to apply even just first-order mental states (second-order could also be applied, except I don’t know how many people have thought that far ahead and thus applicable).
Even if you believe there is no serious danger, it will still be useful to stockpile necessities because as soon as there is a significant report of infected people are going to start hoarding food, masks and other essentials.
So as long as most people and the government is acting as if it is serious, doubters should still act as if they take it seriously because, well, being unable to buy food isn’t a particularly appealing option.
Is there a relevant point to this article?
No, of course not. The Military World Games were being held in Wuhan, and 300 American servicemen participated. The Wuhan viral outbreak occurred immediately afterwards, which seems extremely suspicious timing to me. Naturally, none of this has been reported in our totally worthless MSM:
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-10/15/c_138473332.htm
https://www.unz.com/article/was-the-2020-wuhan-coronavirus-an-engineered-biological-attack-on-china-by-america-for-geopolitical-advantage/
Again, how would America react if 300 Chinese servicemen visited Dallas for an international event, and immediately afterwards a deadly—and rather mysterious—viral outbreak suddenly occurred in that city…
This is exactly what you’re looking for: https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-covid19-death-rate-is-much-higher.html
China exported the coronavirus to the rest of the world by refusing to ground all their outbound flights a month ago. The CCP cares more about money than good will. In trying to act like business as usual and continuing to let their people travel overseas to spread this disease, they are engendering a lot of anger and ill will the world over. As more Europeans, Iranians, Iraqis, Africans etc. die from this virus, the world will turn on China in a hurry. All their goodwill is being wiped out. Ethnic Chinese will not find the welcome mat being rolled out wherever they go. In fact, mainland Chinese are already pariahs in every country, even in Asia. China’s globalist ambitions will take a major setback when this is all said and done.
On AK’s track record.
His prediction on Dem candidates. Now Yang’s out, Biden is not winning, and the Cal woman long gone.
His talk about WWIII when the Iran guy got killed.
I say, calm down!
(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧Cowona Viwus-chan wuvs u~ (◕ω◕✿)
H/T: The Wild Geese Howard
Many people on this board seem to have little idea about how medical stuffs are made. They are made by that damned global economy!
When you guys talking about economy, it’s not just fancy numbers or just iPhones and stupid Globohomo movies. It is many stuffs including the critically important, at this moment, medical supplies!
You don’t go crazy like it is just some political parade thing.
As far as I know, no one here has mentioned that because of the
globalization drive by Clinton, Bush, and Obama, 85% of the medicines
used in the United States are manufactured in China. Even U.S. troops
depend on medicines from China! China could bring the entire health
system in the U.S. to a stop in a matter of months. This is what our inept
elites have done to America – they gave away the shop. People are beginning
to realize that manufacturing our own medicines is a matter of national
security but it’ll take years to bring the factories back to the U.S. So
much for globalization.
Rod Dreher’s blog IMHO is the best source for quick info on the coronavirus
because he is in touch with American M.D.’s who are married to women
from China who in turn are in contact with relatives at home and the Chinese
media. Of course, Rod himself can be hysterical at times but, apparently,
that’s what it takes to have a successful blog. The M.D.’s are reporting
that the U.S. is already beginning to run out of certain medications, and
recommend stocking up on the basic necessities, i.e., recommend assuming
the mental framework of the survivalists – have plenty of canned goods, etc
and refill your prescriptions ASAP. This is what many people here seem to
forget – the coronavirus’s indirect effects due to having no access to medications
may be much worse than the direct pathogenic effects.
“China and other cheap goods producers will have problems. Without the ability to make and sell junk, how will they pay for imported oil?”
Who says staying home doesn’t save you money? Total Chinese tourists in 2018 was 149 million with total spending at $130 billion. Cutting out international travel will allow them to divert money elsewhere.
I am scared out of my wits!
At least you are not hiding where your allegiance lies J(ew)USA.
I heard it’s already been decided that the official death toll when it’s all over will be six million.
Architects are busy drawing up plans for taxpayer-funded museums, and legislators are writing bills to outlaw questions about the virus. A string of Hollywood movies about the pandemic will follow. Mandatory lessons we be added to public school curricula, starting in kindergarten.
The incubation period was 14 to 28 days during which time an infected person was already contagious to others. There is no way the Chinese Government could have known during the incubation period:
1) this is a new strain of virus
2)how lethal the virus was
3)that the incubation period was longer than usual
There was a travel ban issued by the govt against group tours outside of China once 1 and 2 become known.
You seem unnaturally concerned that any goodwill towards Chinese people will be wiped out. Of course ignorant people will find a reason to be hostile and probably didn’t have any goodwill to start off with.
If Covid-19 truly has a detection rate of only 10%, then the actual mortality rate is much lower than what is currently being reported, down to 0.1% with medical treatment versus 0.2-0.3% to people left to their own devices. For comparison, 0.05% of people catching the flu this year have died. The pandemic of 1918 had a 2.5% mortality.
There seems to be something unusual about the Covid-19 infections in Wuhan that are not borne out in other areas. There must have been something going on beyond only person-to-person contact. The virus may have been introduced in an artificial way, perhaps sprayed as an aerosol over a large area or spread through some other means that would have had a comparable effect. Outside of Hubei Province, it has proven much easier to control the disease, and there is a far lower mortality rate.
Isn’t it suspicious that Italy has been hit so hard? Isn’t suspicious that South Korea has been hit so hard? Isn’t it suspicious how pro-Chinese Cambodia hasn’t been hit so hard?
If after planting viruses into the 2 enemy territories of China and Iran, the “planter” would hope and expect a lot of direct damage.
As for the indirect damage, it is outside of their control.
“Isn’t it also rather suspicious that Iran has been hit so hard? So the two countries in the world most subject to current American hostility just tend to be especially “unlucky”…”
We’ll see if Venezuela also gets ‘unlucky’…….
Film production in Russia became a way to cut the budget, or take some money with “creative accounting”.
So this decline from Mosfilm, to the shit produced now, is a scary decline. In the 1970s, Russian films were considered everywhere to be one of the best three in the world (along with maybe Japanese and America), and already we just one and a half generation later, and it’s amazing shit.
That said, I like Zygantsev, and also Yuri Bykov has maybe future talent. There’s still some remains of talented people.
There is are distinctive techniques, melody and sound in Russian pop (not in your example, though which is just eurodance), which is better than you can say for Kpop. Although this sound and melodies of modern Russian pop was developed in the 1970s.
Also 1980s Soviet electronic/synth music, was already one of the coolest ones in the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIfKmeSq6J4
And I even prefer the sound of old pop music of the 1980s…
Okay boomer.
“medical stuffs” “many stuffs”
Are these “stuffs” the material put in stuffed animals sold at toys-r-us?
Not true. There are Chinese drama series, movies, literature, music and dance (pop or classical), etc that are very popular in Korea, Japan, ASEAN, central Asia and other developing countries. Many Chinese (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) movie and music stars are very famous in Asia. Some forms of Chinese arts like martial arts (TaiChi, Shaolin, etc), cuisine, calligraphy, ancient philosophies and thoughts, etc are also popular in western world. Chinese language is the second most popular foreign language that people study in the world.
Of course, Chinese-bashing and Chinese-boosting are two of the most lucrative industries in the West. Not to mention Chinese-gazing, Chinese-guessing and Chinese-bickering, etc. They are also the most favorite hobbies of netizens worldwide.
I’m not an M.D. so it’s not clear to me why India, despite even lower standards
of public hygiene than China, is not known as an exporter of major epidemics.
In China until recently people were known to urinate and sometimes even to
defecate in public. In India, it’s even worse – this kind of behavior, as we all know,
has not been eradicated at all.
Is it that (1) India is protected by being heavily vegetarian? In India, unlike in
China, people don’t consume bats, dogs, cats, and such delicacies as the bulls’
and horses’ penises; (2) The flu viruses cannot survive long in a tropical
climate.
As I mentioned before, the Chinese culture has never gone through the
cleansing Enlightenment stage (Age of Reason) so its cosmology is
superstitious through and through. For example, many Chinese, even
those with advanced degrees, believe that 2020, being the year of the Metal
Rat, is supposed to attract to itself certain events, incl. plagues and
locust infestations. It may seem surprising that even getting Ph.D.’s in
physics or mathematics can leave the deeper portions of the mind
dark and primitive in countries such as China, Japan, and India,
and even Germany, Russia, and Scandinavia where the purification by
Enlightenment was rather superficial. No wonder that Russia erupted
in an orgy of Bolshevism and Germany in the bloodbath of Nazism.
Video on the networks which supposedly (according to how people are spreading it) shows people in quanrantined Wuhan shouting in the night – I guess becoming crazy from this quanrantine.
The lack of consideration for alternative explanations such as the correlation with 5G installment and this epidemic is not surprising. I say correlation loosely, as I do not have all relevant data to run a proper test. However, so far mild to severe radiation poisoning should be considered before blaming it on another virus.
Indeed, even toxic exposure could elicit various symptoms associated with the flu or other infections, although the widespread nature in this case makes this account unlikely.
Generally agreed,
Yet, correct me if I am wrong, but most do not die of influenza these days, while instead pneumonia that can and do accompany it. They seem to get bundled into one as the flu, though.
That’s some hard projection mister J.
Things were not helped by events like holding 40,000+ families banquet celebrations in Wuhan.
Just to add more detail. Even with one of the largest contingent among all participating countries, an Olympic game giant like US didn’t manage to get a single gold medal in Wuhan, falling behind countries like Tunisia and Namibia. Wonder why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games
This is one conspiracy theory that I am willing to believe in. I don’t know if anybody remembers couple of years ago, some suspicious Americans were caught in Russia trying to collect blood samples from Russians.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41816857
So here is my addition to the conspiracy theory. Maybe they were trying to include the Russians to the list of nations that would be vulnerable to this biological weapon – the corona virus. My theory is that after they did some preliminary experiments in the lab on the blood samples from the Russians – they found that the Russians are practically immune to the virus. Then upon further checking of the blood samples, they discovered that those blood samples contain high levels of alcohol. They concluded that the Corona virus doesn’t stand a chance against the vodka. The Russians are safe – as long as they drink vodka.
It’s only high because of Hubei, where hospitals got overwhelmed. But we’re probably getting there, too.
I am surprised that it isn’t spreading like wildfire in India
Japan in 1918 was a far better organised country than China and it used to be the conventional wisdom that Japan was relatively little affected by the Spanish flu. That view has recently been called into question. The flu is not cholera. Death from cholera will be listed as death from cholera. Death from the flu can be listed under all sorts of different headings.
Assuming you believe the official number. I certainly hope it’s true.
Japanese and Korean pop culture is pretty feminine in my opinion, it needs to be avoided at all costs
Really?? The fatality of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_by_country
NfatalCN = 800, perMCapitaCN = 0.58
NfatalCA = 429, perMCapitaCA = 11.82
perMCapitaCN/perMCapitaCA = 0.049
NfatalUS = 3433, perMCapitaUS = 10.59
perMCapitaCN/perMCapitaUS = 0.055
Swine flu originated from US. Originating country usually was unprepared and taking a big hit and other countries controlled entry. So is the case of COVID19 for China.
It has been reported in refereed paper that people with some gene variants are more susceptable to SARS.03 and most probably also to SARS-CoV2. As proxied by rs4804803 SNP,
The observed Odd Ratio OR for SARS.03 is 1.60, i.e. on average for every infected person with genos GG or AG there could be 1.6 corresponding person with geno AA.
From the 1KGP data, the Chinese fraction with geno AA, CHB.AA=0.874, for Whi CEU.AA=0.624, thus the weighted Odd Ratio OR between the two pops is OR=1.109. So on average when the virus is well dispersed, if 1.109 Chinese perished there could be 1 Whi deceased. If it is not yet well dispersed, then it cannot be concluded that the difference is due to genetics. Incidentally, some experts claimed that 60% of global population could be infected by SARS.CoV2. From 1KGP data, World.AA=61.3%.
Compare to other diseases, OR of 1.109 is small. For the swine flu the observed OR is about 0.05 or the reciprocal Whi/CHB ratio 20.0
For an American bioweapon able to paralyse China, the alleged mastermind appears rather incompetent.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-budget-proposes-cuts-global-health-amid-global/story?id=68911515
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/covid19-coronavirus-united-states-faulty-test-kits-12429566
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/21/only-three-us-states-can-test-for-coronavirus-says-public-lab-group.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/coronavirus-diamond-princess-cruise-americans/2020/02/20/b6f54cae-5279-11ea-b119-4faabac6674f_story.html
Putting aside the bioweapons angle for a while, it seems India doesn’t export these novel epidemics because they don’t eat exotic meats.
All these weird and wonderful diseases seem to start when humans eat unconventional meats, ebola was from Africans eating monkeys iirc.
The types of behaviours you describe only result in the proliferation of ‘vanilla’ diseases like malaria, cholera and dysentery.
If over the past 200 years scientists had cherry-picked evidence as eagerly as Mr. Unz, science would not have developed beyond the level of voodoo.
Ok, English is not my first language. Big deal. Do you need a formal apology?
Humanitarian issues aside, older people dying at increased rate can obviously be beneficial for the world economy
‘Corona Will Kill Millions & Crater the World Economy’
I haven’t taken the time to see if the author was joking or really means it.
But of course the title is wrong. Coronavirus may be used as a scapegoat for bringing down ‘the economy’, and it will not kill millions, since if it would have, we wouldn’t have seen the pathetic numbers that are ‘out there’ trying to scare us into believing that corona is for real.
In terms of burden of proof:
Show me how many people had or have coronavirus (we don’t know, all we know are numbers from admitted people)
Show me that coronavirus is the cause of death in those who died (we don’t know, all we know is that people with lots of comorbidity died, and if corona is the final cause is unknown)
The quarantine measures of China are excessive. But who says that they were needed or that these measures are just a big side-show to be used as explanation that China’s economy is imploding?
What Corona surely did is that the Hong Kong protests suddenly stopped. For me that is an alternative explanation why China went along with this corona virus meme.
But if you want to believe that coronavirus is going to get ya, please keep in mind that all the news from coronavirus comes from the same media that tried to make you believe that Muslims were going to get ya, Bolshewiks, Facists, Socialists or (specialty of UR) Jews.
It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out
A lot of people are saying that the WHO is negligent for not calling this a pandemic. Some people claim that China is putting pressure on the WHO or that the WHO is “in the pockets” of China.
This is manifestly untrue. If the WHO were to declare this a pandemic, they would stand to gain financially as this article proves.
https://d33wjekvz3zs1a.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/World-Bank.jpg
Half-Billion $ Pandemic Derivatives | Armstrong Economics
Iran’s largest trade partner is China. There’s an outbreak in Japan, South Korea, and Italy. There’ll be an outbreak in the rest of Europe and the USA shortly. I don’t think this is very meaningful, next year no-one will remember which country got it the second time.
I hope “m” doesn’t mean miles. Heart attack indeed!
You just like old stuff. 🙂 Those tracks were pretty neat. On the dance music front, Russia was pretty innovative, yeah.
This song is from the 90’s, and was copied by a Western band (ATC – Around the World), which exploded in popularity.
Sergey Lazarev also did well in Eurovision not too long ago. But politics prevents Russians from winning.
I am skeptical how is “soft power” supposed to help the producing country. People all over the world watch Japanese anime – does it make them to support Japanese state and government?
People all over the world watch Brazilian telenovelas – does it make them to support Brazilian state and government?
People all over the world love gangsta rap, superhero movies and other products of American culture, does it increase love of America? 😉
Everyone knows that education is communist plot.
Damn the commies.
https://twitter.com/akoz33/status/1232052025514496002
24-02-2020
China coronavirus hype straight out of the CDC flu playbook by Jon Rappoport
In today’s episode of Numbskulls and Deceivers in Medical Science, I ask the question: Are Chinese researchers copying an old CDC scam, or have they independently come up with their own lies which happen to mirror CDC hype?
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/02/24/china-coronavirus-hype-straight-out-of-the-cdc-flu-playbook/
It probably is, but if you don’t test for it you don’t have an outbreak.
The US says there is no evidence of community transmision. Yeah, and they have only tested 414 people. It may be that Indians (or Americans) are already dying from it but the cause is being recorded as pneumonia, influenza or something else.
While I have appreciated Jon’s work, I think he has gotten to the point where he seems to think that there is no such thing as infectious disease. I just don’t find it credible to think that the Chinese have shut down their economy and cancelled their party congress because of some hype.
Realpolitik dictates how top-level decision making occurs, soft power is pretty irrelevant there.
But it might make it less easy for one nation to incite it’s populace against anothers. If Westerners are immersed in anime, it will be less easy to demonise the Japanese using propaganda.
It is interesting that there is so little quantification of mortality rates as yet.
However….
While doing some research into the efficacy of vitamin C on COVID-19 I came across a clinical trial ongoing since Feb 11, 2020.
Although the study has not concluded, in the body of the introduction was a reference to a JAMA report that had culled 41 infected patients for observation.
Goto:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/home
Identifier number: NCT04264533.
Although stated only to provide a reason for the clinical trial on C efficacy, the intro states:
While this is not a control group nor clinical result, the reference strongly indicates that for those who are admitted to ICU ( you can find the WHO triage protocol online) a far larger percentage than currently being reported ended up on life-sustaining ventilation and/ or died.
This example is by far worse than the proffered 1-4% used by the media.
No test = no virus. Just putting all deaths down to normal flu is a good strategy to avoid panic and other nonsense. As Katlin shows, this virus mainly kills old people and barely affects the young. Nobody would really notice this virus if the news hadn’t made such s big deal out of it.
I agree.
This narrative, as suggested, is starting to take hold, as evidenced by yesterday’s published denial of these claims by the US. While the Chinese are very busy fighting the virus, it is a safe bet that they, too, are investigating the origin of the virus, which as everyone ( with a brain) knew had nothing to do with bat stew and the likelihood of it escaping a level 5 bio-hazard facility could not have been done by accident.
If the Chinese find the allegations of US involvement true ( despite US plausible deniability) the likely result will be war, since the virus attack would be, by definition, exactly that.
This story is bigger than just a possible pandemic.
The Russians are safe – as long as they drink vodka.
I am in a Slavic country at present. I hope you are correct. The supermarkets here seem to dedicate 1/3 of their shelves to beverages. A bottle of Corona Extra is only $1.50. Local beer is a lot cheaper. 🙂
However, I never cared much for beer and alcohol. I had to look up the price.
Just one difficulty with your insouciance. Getting this disease once does not confer immunity. Moreover, there is some evidence that getting it once sensitises you to further infection – instead of the usual immunue response the ACE2 cells act as door keys into your cells.
It may be that the apparent vulnerability of older people is a statistical artefact of them being more likely to die from the first onset. The second infection may be what kills more of the younger and healthier subset of the population. We need more data.
Never underestimate the power of presumption. If something is assumed as indisputably true, it is the reality, and any contrary evidence or argument ludicrously absurd.
For an American bioweapon able to paralyse China, the alleged mastermind appears rather incompetent.
No one suggested that the USA is competent.
The Neocons killed Soleimani. When Trump found out, he claimed it as his own. The perpetrators had no idea that this catalyst would lead to them being eventually expelled from Syria and Iraq.
Last week, a US convoy in Syria had to be rescued from the locals by the Russians. But you won’t find that in your lying MSM.
In Syria, Russian Army called to the rescue by its US “colleagues”
Corona Will Kill Millions of whom? Ok Boomer, bye bye!!!!!!
There is also the matter of evolutionary increase in virulence. A fair amount of mathematical theory exists about the evolution of virulence.
The probability of transmission to a new host is a critical independent variable in this theory. From the review paper linked below, “The consensus of mathematical theory based around a transmission–virulence trade-off, therefore, is that increasing environmental transmission will lead to the evolution of increased virulence under most scenarios. ” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4873896/
If Covid-19 is currently relatively benign in many individuals, that situation is not at all guaranteed going forward. And massive quarantine is a way to prevent the evolution of a more virulent strain of Covid-19.
Insouciance is so common among youth because it is caused by ignorance, which itself is regenerated and rather little mitigated every generation.
While technically a true statement, it’s more of a semantic difference.
Pneumonia is a life threatening condition along with the associated opportunistic infections. And it’s more or less directly caused by influenza. If someone pushed another person off a cliff, you would say that it was murder, rather than pointing out that the fundamental force of gravity and weakness of the falling man’s bones was what did him in.
For a more medical example, it’s similar to the case of HIV/AIDS. By itself, HIV is a virus that gradually wipes out the immune system over a decade or so. In all cases, it’s either an opportunistic infection or cancer that actually shuts the body down permanently. You can trace the causes as far back as you wish, but the HIV virus is the first pathogen entering the body that ultimately results in its demise.
I see that a lot of people use volume of pop culture exported as the metric for soft power. I think of it in a different way. I see soft power as revolving around 2 questions.
1) How respected is a country for its capabilities?
2) How benign is a country perceived?
America is of course very respected for achievements for putting a man on the moon, richest economy, on and on. America is also considered benign. The world is aware of US aggression in the Middle East but still, at the end of the day, America is considered benign because of its anti-racism. If 1 million Muslims were given residence in America in the 15 years after September 11, then America isn’t truly bad at heart? I think that’s how the thinking goes.
China is obviously not as capable as the US and struggles to be thought of as benign. However, America pays a heavy price for its soft power, going from 90% to 60% white in a span of 70 years. So having crummy soft power is not too bad.
There is a considerable Chinese work-force in northern Italy – thousands of Chinese who are working in sub-contract sweat-shops, not least for the Italian fashion-industry.
I must say, I’m astonished, that this well-known fact gets no coverage, now that Corona hits – in northern Italy.
No soap? No lampshades? No automated death-by-masturbation machines?
Yes, that was a nice sub-plot in “Gomorra”, the best mafia show ever made.
From the German “handelsblatt” via google translate about Chinese businesses in northern Italy:
2,500 Chinese textile companies were registered in Prato last year alone – almost twice as many as three years earlier. And some of them are already preparing for the next revolution: the step into the more expensive and high-margin segment, as Xu Qiu Lin shows.
He came to Italy 20 years ago. “As the youngest of four children, there was no place for me in the parental company in Wenzhou,” he says. And so he packed his bags and made his way to Prato, where he could count on the support of his compatriots. Today he is the first Chinese member of the Confindustria industry association, the Italian version of the BDI.
His company Giupel sells more than 300,000 jackets annually and generates double-digit millions. Some of the goods, especially leather jackets, are made in Prato, while down jackets come from Shanghai, where Xu Qiu Lin also has a factory.
Last year he presented his first noble collection at the renowned men’s fashion fair Pitti Uomo and has also found a prominent advertising medium for this: Gabriel Batistuta, the Argentine ex-football striker of the Fiorentina club. “Gabriele Batistuta Menswear” is what Xu Qiu Lin called his high-quality men’s fashion line.
The man is one of the flagship Chinese in Prato not only because of the quality of his goods. The local mayor also praises Xu Qiu Lin paying taxes, working hours in his company, and legally employing Italians and Chinese.
There are now more than 25,000 Chinese living in the city of 180,000, and they don’t just work in the fashion industry.
Some considerations wrt fatality rate:
The state of immune system at the moment of infection seems to play a big role. Initial depressed lymphocyte count could spell the difference between a week long flu and severe viral pneumonia with acute kidney injury. Big implications for the third world populations, chronically sleep deprived shift workers, recently recovered or still suffering from other infections, etc.
I probably don’t need to mention it, but early supportive care is important.
Now, I believe that the consequences of Corona could be much larger than mortalities from Corona itself and that’s not limited to triggering the global recession that was long overdue as is. From the top of my head some possibilities are:
Any clinical setting would become a nightmare to be in for the foreseeable future.
Even a bad seasonal flu epidemic can push a healthcare system to its peak capacity. A turboflu like Corona would just shatter it. Some smaller countries in Europe have less than 500 ICU beds, at least 75% of which are in use at any given time. People with otherwise treatable conditions would start dying even without being infected.
Corona would decimate upper echelons of bureaucracy and academia in much of the first world. Regardless of whether you think it’s a good thing or not, the impact would be ‘uge.
Consequences for the undeveloped countries. With the global economic downturn, essential goods exporters starting to hoard and a new disease raging through the population, what would happen to the poorer countries? The possibilities are endless. Staying on topic of disease, I seriously doubt that 2014 West African Ebola epidemic or 2018 Kerala Nipah outbreak would be contained as easily (if contained at all) in the context of Corona pandemic. The Ebola outbreak still isn’t fully contained in Eastern Congo as far as I can tell. That could be a spark that turns into a fire if left unchecked due to bigger problems.
South Korea has 20 times the soft power of China frankly speaking.
Personally, I couldn’t care less what some aging rock stars think about an epidemic! Let em stick to music!
Could it be a solution for many of muh Africa problems?
Soft power is determined by the media, most of which is Western owned as the West pioneers the art of mass media in the first place.
Japan has soft power due to things like anime, nintendo and robots. I also think some admire Japan very much due to the war America fought against them, interestingly Japanese war crimes do not take the centre stage of the discussion as is the case with National Socialist Germany.
Coincidences or conspiracies?
Plum Island Animal Disease Center (known research on tick-borne diseases) — Lyme, Connecticut (1st case of Lyme Disease): 27 kilometers (Lyme is nearest town, directly across Long Island Sound from Plum Island)
Porton Down (UK biological/chemical weapons research facility) — Skripal home: 13 kilometers
Wuhan Institute of Virology (only Chinese biosafety level 4 facility) — Wuhan South China Seafood Market (where virus originated and/or was spread): 13 kilometers
South Korea has 20 times more worldwide media impact than China. But the point of my post is I don’t see cultural exports as the metric for soft power. I look at soft power as revolving around 2 questions. Cultural exports can influence the answers to 2 questions. But in the grand scheme of things cultural exports like entertainment really aren’t that important for soft power (according to the way I look at it).
Soft power is determined to a large extent by media. But so much of what is talked about in this thread is entertainment. Who cares about entertainment in terms of soft power? All this talk of Japanese cartoons and video games seems silly.
For example yoga’s popularity doesn’t boost India’s soft power in a meaningful way. However, it’s huge, high quality English language newspaper industry does. In a conflict, India’s version of events will have an edge. If India’s version prevails, it could box in the other side in on the world stage (e.g. forcing withdrawal in the face of widespread global diplomatic condemnation).
This is absolutely incorrect. China looms very large in the minds of the African middle class. Some believe China will transform Africa economically. Others believe Africa will be colonized by China. Good or bad, the African middle classes (broadly defined) have strong opinions about China.
This would be great for Russia. Nothing would lift Russia out of itself and into a new era swifter than the shuffling, where’s-the-breadline Soviet generations being killed off. May roughly forty-million flowers bloom!
I do not think the 300 American servicemen is particularly strong evidence because a) one person would be enough and b) the connection is obvious. Why would the perps want to leave an obvious connection?
You’re actually astonished it is suppressed?
“Isn’t it also rather suspicious that Iran has been hit so hard? So the two countries in the world most subject to current American hostility just tend to be especially ‘unlucky’…”
Makes you wonder. And Italy, the third most important member of the EU, right behind Germany and France, is also being hard hit. Salvini (anti-globalist/anti-neoliberal) is poised to become the next President. With Merkel on her way out and Macron failing, Salvini could pose a serious threat to EU existence.
Italy’s cases went from three on Friday to 200 on Monday. That’s a big leap.
Gold continues to soar, congratulations to everyone who listened to me and bought some.
Interesting that despite a fair number of initial cases Australia hasn’t had a breakout, despite the number of Chinese there. This suggests that it is summer and very hot there has a big impact, if Europe can delay any breakout closer to summer we might be alright.
Germany is holding a carnival in Cologne, and an Italian went there sick. So far he hasn’t been tested, nor quarantined, because Lombardy has not yet been declared a risk region.
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1231912076387418112
Meanwhile, the governing party is tweeting about how safe Germany is.
https://twitter.com/cducsubt/status/1231996332182843398
How is that different? Okay, they are not arresting the fear mongers. But they don’t have the power to do so anyway.
At the end of the day, China’s response won’t look bad at all.
But how many people actually partake in yoga activities? How does it compare to the people who played Japanese video games, there is even a category for those who love all things Japan: ‘weaboo’.
The image of Japan seems to be these peace loving people, a group of smiling Japanese teenagers doing the peace symbol and generally not bothering anyone, China is meanwhile seen as the aggressor. When China does things like get aggressive against NBA or Blizzard, it basically gives the hostile Western media even more ammunition to portray China as this totalitarian state that can’t handle a joke.
The only benefit of soft power is that it is harder to incite a war against a country which has a good reputation. All relationships are built on realpolitik but soft power helps.
China probably knows this which is why it is making inroads in this department with things like the Confucius Institute.
There are some who believe bio-attacks have happened many times before.
Could it be a solution for many of much of Africa’s problems?
Black Africans have superb immune systems. No one can survive there otherwise.
A study released today in Cell has found that Africans have a stronger immune response to infection when compared to Europeans, in part because early Europeans interbred with Neanderthals. We talked to lead author Lluis Quintana-Murci of Institut Pasteur and CNRS in Paris to find out why there are both positives and negatives to having a weaker immune system.
Europeans have weaker immune systems than Africans, in part because of Neanderthal DNA
Well, I mean – Anatoly Karlin should take it into consideration.
Except for that – I see your point. My answer in the last days to myself – whom I’ve been asking this question a few times: Why is it that the media and the experts don’t mention this considerable Chinese workforce in northern Italy? was twofold: Of course such are the downsides of globalization, so: Shhhh, don’t say a word! and b) it is some kind of a strange taboo even in Italy, that there are tens of thousands of Chinese working in northern Italy – not least, because the unemployment rate especially amongst the Italian youths, is high. So. Here you have it: Our actual globalist conundrum.
“There are some who believe bio-attacks have happened many times before.” – I do. I do suspect that the 2003 SARS was a type of a diversionary psyop just before the Iraq war.
Another thing is that there are a large number of Sikhs working on Italian farms, a fairly unskilled job. And I too was surprised to see the number of Chinese in Italy. The latters’ numbers will only increase on the future owing to Italy’s participation in the Belt & Road Initiative. The Chinese even offered to build Britains new high-speed rail line…with Chinese workers!
It is probably like here in the UK, where many Eastern Europeans come to pick fruits for farmers because the natives simply won’t work for the wages they give out.
I bet all those dead in Italy are ethnic Chinese.
Better if it was a solution to the jewish problem.
So you are saying that the medical industry “knows” that the flu kills people, but they just put down things like pneumonia and heart attack on the death certificates?
So why are they still dropping like flies to Ebola, AIDS, and Cholera?
Not really. Assets of great strategic value could be snapped up at bargain basement prices and leave them with even greater power than before.
Chinese can now hijack a passenger Jet by merely threatening to sneeze. The Chinese ‘achoo’ has become as scary as the Muslim ‘Allah o Akbar.’
I agree, I would say that the pass Japan gets on its WW2 war crimes is largely a result of its considerable amount of soft power. Most people like Japanese culture to the point they find it difficult to see them in the context of being the “bad guys”, not so with Germany and German culture.
The virus is here and it will do as it pleases. We can’t change that in the short term. The effects will be bad for China and its coalition of bottom feeder states. Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and North Korea will be hit hard.
Whatever you think of Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ program on Iran the virus has ramped it up and made it leakproof as Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan et al close their borders to Iran. The drop in oil demand even more than the fall in price will hit Russia and Venezuela hard. Venezuela will likely default on the loans Russia and China made to it. North Korea is finished too.
Western companies will flee China and bring their factories home. Clients of Xi will rue the day they signed up for Belt and Road projects and only get coronavirus in return. Its almost as if coronavirus was designed to vindicate Trump and MAGA.
You may be right that TPTB will see an economic benefit in wiping out Boomers once they’ve wrung all they can out of them, but then who will help you wipe your nose or tie your shoelaces?
According to the Johns Hopkins tracker:
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
The global total number of active cases (confirmed – recovered – dead) has declined from a peak of about 56,000 a week ago to about 49,000 today. That means 1000 more people are recovering every day than are contracting the virus.
Those numbers suggest the virus may in fact be out its way out in the next three or four months.
Practically every country has shown incompetence since the start of this year, at this point I don’t blame them for that. I am merely rejecting ideas like “perhaps someone artificially sprayed the virus as an aerosol over Wuhan”.
How on earth are they going to host the Olympics in Tokyo? Imagine Athletes running with face masks. What if there is an infected swimmer? What a nightmare.
“…most non-Chinese people would struggle to name a famous person or movie, etc, from mainland China”.
Yes, because that’s what is really important. Not civilization, culture, raising literally hundreds of millions from poverty to middle-class comfort, fairness, the rule of law, and a dedication to peace.
National importance depends critically on the number of celebs. The nation with the Kardashians and Trump wins hands down.
Post-Brexit Britain will almost certainly have to look to China for investment and trade deals. Brexiteers have delusions of being the centre of a renewed Anglo Empire, but it’s becoming clear that it’s not going to work out that way.
The reality is the British are not very popular in the former empire, the idea that USA, Australia, etc, were all going to team up with Brexit Britain was a naive delusion from the start. I would say that the reputation of Britain is considerably better amongst Chinese people than it is in its own former colonies.
That wasn’t his point. Chang grew up in Hong Kong – not just Hong Kong, but for his most formative years on the premises of the French consulate, where his parents worked.
That said, who is famous or not has much more to do with the celebrity gatekeepers than with celebrity talent.
And all of Trump’s MAGA Chumps can celebrate that with a trip to Disneyland?
In every country with an outbreak, the disease was introduced by infected Asians.
China will face an ageing problem on the near future. They should have just allowed the virus to spread and used censorship to keep a lid on any dissent. I was expecting something brutal yet pragmatic from the Chinese buy instead they over-react and actually start fixing things.
Nevertheless I still enjoy my Volkswagen.
I have not sensed any changes to daily life.
There must be millions of Chinese in Africa but not a single infection strange!! You could argue that Africa’s primitive health care infrastructure is unable to detect them but that doesn’t count you can’t just hide the bodies and besides that states like Kenya, Ghana, SA and Rwanda are by African standards pretty decent states and in this climate of hysterical paranoia its impossible to hide infections. What gives – tropical climate?
OK, Nostradamus.
I think this is some worthwhile information.
https://www.uab.edu/reporter/know-more/publications/item/8909-here-s-a-playbook-for-stopping-deadly-cytokine-storm-syndrome
It seems there is a genetic component to susceptibility to the cytokine storm that is responsible for most of the deaths. Two copies of the gene is (or was) a death sentence, but a single copy just raises susceptibility. There seem to be more than one genetic pathway.
Maybe the genes offer some protection for other problems, like the sickle cell anemia gene does with malaria.
If you follow the link in the article to the Journal of Immunology article (pdf) it provides more info.
IF there is a genetic susceptibility, then maybe the herd will just keep moving on after losing a few million.
I think the funny part will be when government agencies (and even private sector) issue directions to employees to avoid work if they have symptoms, or better yet, procedural guidance to supervisors on how to handle employees demonstrating symptoms. Because once employees learn they are being “ordered” to go home, they will counter that they do not have enough vacation days/leave, and demand they be paid (this not withstanding regular teleworkers). “I wanted to come to work, but a non-doctor who is my boss, ordered me to stay home…I demand backpay, etc” Some of this will be litigated.
In the end, companies and governments, state, local, fed, are going to wind up paying people to stay at home, possibly do no work, who are not officially diagnosed, but who are instead “self quarantined” at home (*by their own request or that of their employer). They wont be officially diagnosed because hospitals (via gov direction) are going to state that you are not to just show up with what you “think” are symptoms, so as to avoid overloading the hospitals with everyone who has the sniffles. This is going to be like bumper-thumper vehicle accidents and whiplash.
This has boondoggle written all over it.
When in 1804 (?) the slaves revolted in what is today Haiti, Napoleon sent a force of 25,000 soldiers and sailors to suppress the revolt. The French died en masse of yellow fever and the revolt went unsuppressed.
Great catch.
I agree that it is completely out of character for the US to be so non-competitive.
Heck, they barely took any medals at all.
From the Journal of Immunology article:
Re ‘yes boomer’
Do you not think it strange how willingly younger people have decided to replace their critical faculties with memes?
It must be very convenient. Instead of forming and then expressing an opinion, you can just blurt out a meme.
Intellectually, it is an achievement that we would normally applaud in a parrot, but not so much in a human.
It’s summer. That big orange globe in the sky gives a body a natural antiviral in Vitamin D. Plus the sun is a disinfectant. Great for drying clothing and bedding. I believe they still hang out clothing in Africa.
Illness is also made by that damned global economy.
Diabetes, cancer, heart disease, obesity…they are all modern epidemics and are all products of global Big Ag and Big Chem and ring up big profits for global Big Pharma.
Reiner,
Two points:
A third study has found ethnic differences in the allele frequencies for receptors that are susceptible to the current coronavirus. This is a study that has actually gone through peer review (unlike the previous two).
Cao, Y. et al. (2020). Comparative genetic analysis of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2) receptor ACE2 in different populations. Cell Discovery 6(11).
https://www.nature.com/Comparative genetic analysis of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2) receptor ACE2 in different populationsarticles/s41421-020-0147-1
The ACE2 gene encodes the angiotensin-converting enzyme-2, which has been proved to be the receptor for both the SARS-coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and the human respiratory coronavirus NL63. Recent studies and analyses indicate that ACE2 could be the host receptor for the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2
The AFs [allele frequencies] of the 15 eQTL variants were compared among different populations. Notably, our results showed most of the 15 eQTL variants had much higher AFs in the ChinaMAP dataset and EAS populations compared to European populations (Fig. 1c and Supplementary Table S3). The AFs of the top 6 common variants (rs4646127, rs2158082, rs5936011, rs6629110, rs4830983, and rs5936029) were higher than 95% in EAS populations, whereas the AFs of these variants in European populations were much lower (52%–65%).
[…] These findings suggested the genotypes of ACE2 gene polymorphism may be associated higher expression levels of ACE2 in EAS [East Asian] population.
Recent reports of the ACE2 expression analysis in lung tissues from Asian and Caucasian populations are still controversial. The single-cell RNA-seq analysis reported that the Asian donor had much higher ACE2 expression cell ratio than white and African-American donors6. In contrast, the ACE2 expression analysis using the RNA-seq and microarray datasets from control lung tissues indicated there were no significant differences between Asian and Caucasian, or male and female11. The ACE2-expressing cells are a very small part of cells in lung tissues. The sample size and the purity of ACE2-positive cells in the selected samples would influence the conclusions. Our analysis showed the differences in distribution and AFs of eQTLs for ACE2 in different populations, indicating the diversity of ACE2 expression pattern in populations
The SARS-COV-2 virus (which causes COVID-19) attacks the body by preferentially binding to the ACE2 receptor which disrupts various critical functions in the body. This is similar to SARS but apparently the binding is much more pronounced (which is why anti-SARS vaccines have not been effective), though with much less mortality rate from 10% of SARS to anywhere from 0.2%-2% (estimates differ over a magnitude because of the number infected is not known and from what data is known, different regions, even within China, have vastly different mortality profiles – Hubei has 4% while the rest of China has 0.7%. A possible explanation is that many more in Hubei are infected but not tested due to the prioritization in Hubei, esp the epicenter Wuhan, to handle only obvious cases which is already in the 100,000s tested).
Investigations into where ACE2 differs across populations have been published. Here’s one from yesterday https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-020-0147-1 which concludes that at this time there is not evidence that racial/ethnic/gender variation of ACE2 is statistically significant
What appears to be a more statistically significant variation is the susceptibility of ACE2 receptors in smokers vs non-smokers (or those whose lungs/other tissues – eg the heart – are compromised). See for example https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.05.20020107v2
Thus the gender difference noted in China (which has the largest data set so far) can be explained by lifestyle differences between genders rather than genetic differences.
Thanks for that superbly informative article!
It may be a real life-saver for many people and I am sure the vast majority of physicians out there have absolutely no clue about this problem.
I will forward this to my primary care internal medicine specialist. He’s a young kid (late 20’s) with a great attitude. If even one life can be saved with this knowledge, it’s a major blessing to all those concerned.
That’s why I love The Unz Review: you can really learn a lot around here from people who want to share their knowledge that many of us would otherwise be ignorant of. You just did so. Cheers!
(And once again, TGFRU!)
MM
The Iranian deputy minister of health has caught the infection. On this twitter video, he is addressing the Iranian people. He says that he has a fever but that he expects to be back at work in a few days. He is telling people to follow the recommendations of the authorities. Towards the end he vows that the Iranian people, with the help of God, will conquer this infection.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1232269566476193794
I don’t think I have seen any ethnic-Chinese people with the infection making a similar speech. Does this mean that the Iranians are somewhat immune? I don’t know.
I’m impressed with the level of understanding that some of the commentators here posses about the biological processes involved with the corona virus. I see that a new vaccination is already being developed and is moving right along. I’d be grateful if somebody could answer a couple of questions that I have:
1) Will the corona virus still be around next year, 5 years from now, 10 years down the road? Or will it disappear like other flu strains that mutate and change year to year?
2) Is it possible that any vaccination against this particular virus will just be incorporated into the whole battery of viruses that are included within the yearly “flu shot”?
Thanks!
LOL read my comments and you’d know why I picked that handle. I’m anything but a fan of the Satanic Zionist cult.
Too many here have their rose colored lenses on when it comes to China. I’m just telling it like it is. China’s image is taking a big hit abroad.
So why are they still dropping like flies to Ebola, AIDS, and Cholera?
Hygiene.
Ebola is no less lethal for Whites. Infectious people are quickly recognised. Strict quarantine stopped it from spreading. If Ebola remained dormant for days or weeks, it would have reached Europe.
If Europeans went around screwing one another with such abandon, the HIV situation here would be a lot worse than it is. It is hard to find any bar in Black Africa that does not have throngs of prostitutes at all hours. They can be quite aggressive about entering into your hotel room when the bar closes – I have had them knocking on my door and shouting after midnight.
Raping virgin girls is a favourite way of “curing” the infection.
On the virgin cleansing myth: gendered bodies, AIDS and ethnomedicine.
In some tribes, the younger brother of a dead man must fuck his widow.
when a man dies, his brother or his sister’s son must marry the widow, a failure in this duty occasioning feuds
Cholera is easily conquered with clean drinking water and simple hygiene. Again, Europeans are highly susceptible to it.
From a contact working at the very highest research levels in a very senior position.
1 Coronavirus mortality is running at 4.5-5%
2 They believe the virus has been modified in a laboratory
3 There will be a pandemic.
4 The United States Federal Government is making contingencies for millions of deaths.
When are you moving to China, Ron? It seems as if you’re giving up on the last earthly paradise for all dissenters. I hope the Chinese turnout as pliable as the Ango-Americans have been or it would be the end of the road for the rabble rousers.
That is interesting. Iranians (Middle Easterners in general) are awful fond of their hookah, and Italians are (or at least were) known to be bigger smokers than say, Germans or Americans. The Chinese/Japanese/Koreans are also big smokers, or at least used to be, like the older generation.
The French died en masse of yellow fever and the revolt went unsuppressed.
British civil servants sent to what is now Nigeria much later on died an average of 3 years after arrival. The problem was largely solved by filtering drinking water. Of course, that did not stop malaria and other diseases.
I strongly recommend this book about Africa. It is hilarious. The author lived in Africa in his youth and understands it somewhat.
A Good Man in Africa (William Boyd)
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41TPMJfvf7L._SX324_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Soft power usually comes after a country reaches OECD status, i.e. when it has satisfied its basic needs. People in the world don’t usually look up to or try to emulate poor peasants and beggars. Also most countries in the world do not have soft power due to language barriers. Name one famous entertainer or recent movie from Scandinavia, France or Germany? English is the only true lingua franca of the world.
Japan’s soft power comes from its food, not too many are familiar with their pop stars or movie stars.
K-pop only succeeds because it blindly apes US pop music. Nothing original comes out of Korea, a Hyundai looks like a Mercedes, a Kia looks like a Toyota, Samsung phones all look like iPhones. Now even their pop music looks like carbon copies of US pop music, and their pop stars all have massive plastic surgery to try to look as Western as possible.
If only the government was so efficient.
I think it is important to identify the infectious elements in the virus.. to educate all of the people with a full academic treatment of what is known about life cycle, infection site, detection, so millions of people can work on discovering a solution.. instead of just the trained few.. sometimes something as simple a chromophore in a strange plant can detect infections. render a remedy. or indicate a way to eliminate risk in locations<=so one can clean up the spot before sitting on it, or picking it up or whatever. .. This virus is a threat to humanity (and much background data suggest death rate expectation after infection might reach as high as 16%) , but community work of the population as a whole has two great benefits, 1. it could organize humanity to handle threats the massive corrupt nation state system, can not satisfactorily handle and 2. it could education one hell of a lot of people about how viri work and teach them what is known and not known about the virus <=better than a college education in microbiology. <teach the basics, teach the research, and listen as those impacted discover the answers.
One of the big problems our society faces is that our 8 billion humans have been divided into 206 nation state people containers, and each contained group is subject to the wisdom, integrity, and diligence of those who conduct the affairs that control the behaviors of those trapped within one of the nation state containers
Humanity has a big problem, the nation state system favors big pharma and the hold of big pharma on information is second only to government restraint against citizen action again instituted by big Pharma.
BP wants to own (that is they want to patent or to by the patent before they allow anyone its use) the discovered improvements on survival, detection and so forth.. This hide everything mentality can kill millions. as it allows those who can profit from the threat to use government to hide the answers until big pharma can make a profit while millions are dying.
Sorry, it won’t have time for that: the end of the world will happen tomorrow at 5:30 am Greenwich time.
If the Joker was in charge of the American biowarfare projects you might have something. Because releasing a contagious disease is a pretty insane thing to do intentionally even if you have a cunning plan to keep it away from your own army. I place the probability that this was a weapon at less than one in 50 million.
So no I am not even kind of suspicious let alone rather suspicious.
Just read the medrxiv abstract you so kindly linked. Looks like bad news for ‘former’ smokers, although it was a bit unclear if current, active smokers of caucasian descent may be better off than those who have quit smoking. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants (and maybe a short-term boost to tobacco stocks.)
And with the current cannabis mania overtaking the US and many other Western nations, does the term ‘smoker’ mean tobacco only, or does it include all smokers, tobacco and cannabis? In China, it must be assumed it is tobacco only (as the laws against cannabis usage in mainland China are among the strictest outside the muslim world.) Very likely so for the caucasians studied as well.
Thanks again for the link.
https://ia802609.us.archive.org/12/items/pdfy-tNG7MjZUicS-wiJb/Scenarios%20for%20the%20Future%20ofTechnology%20and%20International%20Development.pdf Recommended reading – Page 18 ” Lock Step “
Oh, the world will end tomorrow morning – but that’d be soon. You sure, sir? If it ends at 5:30 Greenwich time, when will it end then in – Australia, say – sooner – – or later? – The latter ‘d be good, wouldn’t it? – This then might give me a little hope – at least for all the lovely kangaroos, that they’d have one more day or so? – It would be nice, but is sad! – Maybe at least some White Kangaroos can survive? – What do you think?
Too many chicken littles. The Y2K of 2020.
Is Corona anywhere near the flu deaths?
US flu still elevated but dropping; deaths as high as 57,000
Filed Under: Influenza, General
Jim Wappes | Editorial Director | CIDRAP News | Apr 19, 2019
Feb 22, 2020 Coronavirus: How WHO Corruption Helped It Spread
Rampant corruption within the United Nations World Health Organization is putting lives at risk during the deadly coronavirus outbreak from Wuhan, China. Why did the WHO delay issuing a global emergency? Has Chinese money influenced the WHO and it’s Director General Tedros Adhanom? And what about poor Taiwan?
https://youtu.be/AwFTZawOc9k
Does it indeed? Are there people out there who believe that virulence is an asset for a virus? How can it be an advantage to kill your own host population? Probably the most successful viral disease of all time in humans is the common cold. Why so? because it doesn’t kill its own hosts!
Never underestimate the stupidity of the imperial elite. Especially when it is desperate.
I agree that there is subversive tendency to feminize men in Japan and Korea, but that’s what the censors are for.
I don’t know where Japan, China, and Korea are ranked on a scale of sex differentiation in behavior and clothing, but I think Japan is quite notable for being much more differentiated than the West. I would guess that it is easily more differentiated than China, since it lacked the influence of communism.
Maybe, someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that in China girls at school often don’t wear uniforms that include skirts. It has occurred to me that the skirt uniform might be part of Japan’s success over the West, in the perpetuation of traditional sex relations, though perhaps it may be more deeply routed in psychobiology.
On the street-level in Japan, you definitely see many more young women wearing skirts than in the West. It’s not just the schools. The culture of the schools gets repeated on TV and in the movies, so normal entertainment amplifies it.
I’m guessing that this transmania doesn’t even exist in Japan.
You hit the nail on the head. How did you guess? Thing is, it cannot be averted: vogons have already accepted the bribes.
I guess they threw Italy into the mix just to put us off the trail. They didn’t like Salvini anyway.
Don’t know if buying government officials qualifies as “soft” power, but they seem to invest heavily (and successfully) in that.
I consider America malignant because of its “anti-racism.”
Seasonal flu is over a hundred different strains of influenza that were endemic for quite a while. What Corona should be compared to are novel flu pandemics.
Day 45 of WHO observation
Swine flu: 25,272 infected; 139 dead
Corona: 79,774 infected; 2,628 dead
Estimated results of Swine flu pandemic: 15%-20% of the world population infected and 250,000-500,000 people dead.
Estimated results of Corona pandemic: ?
Absolutely filthy habit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookah#Health_effects
Interesting re S. Korea soft power. The spouse has been watching K dramas/romcoms lately, and they consistently hint at N-S Korean re-unification.
In the early 1900s, the French sent out officials to administer their French Guiana colony, with the promise that after 5 years they would be returned to France. Less than 10% survived the 5 year tour of duty to return.
Assassinating a top Iranian leader is not in the same league as targetting a huge population with a bioweapon. The latter is a much bigger provocation and the US would be much more vulnerable to a revenge strike than most countries. The only benefit to the US ruling class would be another excuse to crack down on US citizens as in post 911. The only problem for them is their credibility is near zero now.
Some of the fear-mongering and barely concealed glee is a little disturbing.
As much fun as Mad Max was to watch, 99.999% of us are not Mad Max and have no hope of being Mad Max.
Several readers have commented that this virus no longer appears to be Chinese-specific. Not true. Of the nearly 80,000 infections, nearly 99% are ethnic Chinese, and of the nearly 2,600 deaths, 99% are also ethnic Chinese.
The death rate (as a percentage of infections) is around 3% for Mainland China and Hong Kong, only 1% for South Korea and only 0.5% for the cruise ship. Most others are insignificant. No idea why Korea and the cruise ship appear to be so comparatively low, nor why both seem to be panicking. They appear susceptible to mild infection but no more.
The big surprises are Italy at about 3% while the remainer of Europe is at about 0%. Further with Italy, another surprise is that the infections occurred in Lombardy and the Veneto (Northern Italy) and in the South. But Southern Italians are a very different species from those in the North, almost a different race. And Rome, in the center of Italy, with the greatest mixture of races in the country, is left untouched.
The next surprise is Iran which has a death rate of about 25%. This may be partially caused by lack of early identification, permitting the virus to progress unmolested, but that still doesn’t explain the high death rate even among the young and middle-aged.
The virus still seems to ignore blacks, so good for them.
Those readers riding the non-hygenic horse, should probably dismount. Several recent research studies have concluded the coronavirus did NOT originate at the seafood market, and it sure as hell did not arise from eating bats (which the Chinese do not do).
The researchers have tracked and analysed nearly 100 examples of the genome from 12 different countries on 4 continents, have identified all the varieties and mutations, and have conclusively demonstrated that the virus had a so far unidentified source, and was then exposed to the seafood market from where it spread everywhere.
A couple of days ago, Ashai Shimbun (and a Japanese TV station) made the claim that the coronavirus originated in the US, not in China. I don’t have the video, but they had documentation for their claims. Japan did not claim the virus was man-made in the US, but rather that the outbreak occurred there. It may also have been made in the US, but they didn’t make that connection.
The US may have a great many coronavirus infections. But the CDC are not – and cannot – test for them because their testing materials proved to be so faulty as to be useless, producing random results either positive or negative, that are totally unreliable, and thus have instructed everyone to discard the equipment. To my best knowledge, the CDC is not preparing new testing equipment or procedures, but is doing nothing. The reason the CDC can claim no positive tests in the US is because they are not – and cannot – do any reliable tests. Further, the CDC shipped their coronavirus testing materials all over the world, but to my knowledge have not relayed to those countries the information that the tests are useless.
India might be quite protected from coronavirus by higher temperatures?
https://akm-img-a-in.tosshub.com/sites/btmt/images/stories//Newstaffpics/tempreture_heat-map1_150220035817.jpg
https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/trends/novel-coronavirus-rising-temperatures-india-keep-deadly-virus-at-bay/story/396216.html
Coronavirus is just more proof why Globalization is a bad idea.
How did WHO determine that on “day 4 ” 79,774 people were infected with “Corona” ? I believe that there is no reliable field test to determine whether or not someone has been infected with COVID-19. As an aside , former employees have accused both the CDC and WHO of corruption and the CDC of grossly exaggerating the number of deaths from the flu .
I would actually say Britain has less soft power today than in the past despite being an English speaking country. How many people outside of Britain could name many current famous British singers or entertainers? It seems to me that Britain has excelled far more in past decades at this than it does today.
Other than James Bond and Monty Python, etc, (which are all from decades ago), how many non-British people could name recent British films and TV series? A lot of Britain’s soft power used to be derived from the royal family but they are increasingly disliked and regarded as a laughing stock around the world so it’s debatable if even they generate much soft power any more. Britain also under performs in the tech/innovation world in comparison to Japan and South Korea in my opinion, what has Britain invented/produced in relatively recent years that people associate as British technology? I can’t think of anything.
Apart from a few well-known classics (some of them quite undeserved and driven mainly by boomer nostalgia – The Diamond Arm in particular comes to mind), vast majority of it was insufferable kitsch or derivative works with totally senseless plots.
Can’t really judge as to the quality of today’s Russian filmography as you only watch 5 movies a year. But I’m quite certain it’d be regarded as a Golden Age if there was no Hollywood as a basis of comparison.
Agreed
Moldbugman had an interesting thread about that. Last save for Welton? 🙂 Though first Italian dead was confirmed to be ethnic Italian. And would still need to account for Iran.
https://twitter.com/moldbugman/status/1231981495352348672
Now imagine those video footages get cut and edited together for Chinese public consumption. Instant war preparation material for the Chinese govt.
Anatoly Karlin said:
” . . . mortality with ventilators, drugs, doctors, etc. seems to be ~1% versus 2-3% for people left to their own devices . . .”
I have seen no evidence to justify this claim. Nobody is collecting statistics on which infected persons have been treated (the control group) and which left on thier own to die.
I suppose I shouldn’t complain, but much of this article is similar, poorly-thought-out ideological wishful thinking, masquerading as authoritative fact.
Karlin has no apparent credentials to support 80% of his statements, and the same seems to be true of other of his articles. If I’m to believe what I read, Mr. Karlin is a statistician, actuary, economist, philosopher, engineer, micro-biologist with a specialty in pathogen epidemics, a world-class political analyst, renowned social historian and many other things.
I’m sorry to say this but, if I possessed half the credentials of Mr. Karlin, I wouldn’t be writing small articles and asking readers for a few dollars in contributions to support myself.
Feb 24, 2020 Coronavirus Crisis in China: What To Believe? Brave Journalist Lifts Veil of Secrecy
Jennifer Zeng, born and raised in China has been a key figure in the information war surrounding the ongoing crisis in China as the Chinese Government continues to suppress and control information.
https://youtu.be/AsKvEC0KV0Y
Okay boomer.
Clearly Ernst Blofeld is behind it.
Oh!….and he is Jewish. Coincidence?
https://forward.com/news/israel/9024/bond-s-semitic-villains/
….sorry. Not Jewish. But has a “Semitic-sounding” name. So there’s that. Haha
What would you be doing instead? Drinking yourself to death?
I was peaking to a doctor recently and she told me that the Corona Virus doesn’t do too well in higher temperatures. The upper limit she mentioned was 25 degrees centigrade. I just read that all 14 people infected in Vietnam have recovered. All the countries, including Bahrain, Iraq, Iran, S Korea have temperatures lower than the one I have mentioned. I hope I’m right.
Time to take a tropical vacation??
The dead in Italy as of today were octagenerians, so it’s unlikely that they were ethnic Chinese.
So refreshing and INFORMATIVE to read about the Public Health Event by people who know nothing about Biology, Medicine, Public Health or anything related to these subjects. Wild Speculation which serves the purpose of the dis-information managers who plant the seeds for the Wild Speculation.
Corona Virus doesn’t need to do anything. Humans spreading BS is all that is needed today to bring down Civilization, if you could call the current state of affairs Civilization.
The Corona Virus Pandemic story has the same level of factual basis as the story the Russians are backing both “The Donald” and “The Bern”. All are farcical beyond belief and would be humorous if not taken so Seriously by the Serious.
China’s response to the outbreak of the disease is without question over the top and unprecedented. This has caused a spread of over the top and unprecedented actions around the world.
Are any of these actions necessary?
Have these actions really contained the spread of the disease?
Is the Chinese Government using the Corona outbreak as a cover for some other purpose?
Certainly, the US is using the Corona outbreak to spread Wild Speculation for the benefit of Who?
Bioweapon my Ass. Bullshit story line and free Terror and Fear Creator, you BET!!!
Be very FEARFUL my Citizens. The Intelligence Community is here to protect you. Have complete and unwavering Trust in us.
You sound like you don’t believe that scientists should think deeply about how the world works, test their ideas and communicate their results. Unless I am misinterpreting your scornful tone, you apparently would rather rely on the intuition of an uniformed person. That’s your option of course.
However in case you would like to know something about the theory of virulence, I’ll try to explain the basic concept. First, get rid of the idea that there is “a virus.” As is typical of organisms, within a large virus population there are different genotypes. The theory is interested in how the different genotypes increase in frequency, or not, within the virus population as a function of the genotypes’ rates of reproduction.
However, and crucially, there are two levels at which a virus populations exists. The wider level is all the individual viruses out for delivery, so to speak. The narrow level is the population of viruses replicating in each host individual, let’s just say in Lance Welton for purposes of explication. Put simply, there is competition among viral genotypes within a single host. Some genotypes replicate faster than others. Genotypes Joe, Bill and Frank are easygoing, but Jamal is a stud. So when viral particles leave old Lance Welton to go out for delivery, there will be proportionally more baby Jamals than baby Joes, Bills and Franks compared with the genotypes that infected Lance originally.
Now probably all those extra viruses due to Jamal’s studliness make Lance feel worse than if Jamal hadn’t been in him. But that doesn’t matter as long as transmission to another host is easy. In fact it doesn’t even matter if all the little Jamals kill Lance as long as he has infected at least one new host before he goes belly up.
What we have here is a tradeoff between rapid viral reproduction within a host and the requirement of allowing the host to live long enough to pass on the infection. Virulence is not an asset. It is a evolutionary byproduct of the ecology of the virus-host interaction, specifically of very easy transmission. Cholera, while not viral of course, is considered an example of a virulent pathogen that is very easily transmitted in the absence of sewage systems. There is a lot more involved in the theory of the evolution of virulence, like incubation period, asymptomatic transmission (both capable of evolving), but the key idea is the tradeoff of rapid reproduction within a single host (competition among different viral genotpes) and the transmission probability stemming from the array of genotypes in that host.
Evolutionary theory expects that stable long-term host-pathogen relationships will settle into something relatively benign, like the common cold you cite. However, the cholera-style situation does evolve if the host-pathogen ecology makes it possible. Human beings crowded together in cities is a very promising ecology for fast reproducing variants of a new virus transmitted by droplets, fomites, aerosol, and body fluids. In the absence of quarantines and lockdowns, Covid-19 could probably evolve to be more like Jamal than it is now.
Just thought I’d share this with everyone. (I’m NOT trying to sell anything.) Since the last century (if not earlier) many have found that HYDROGEN PEROXIDE possesses powerful medicinal properties when ingested; it works against a very wide variety of medical conditions, including contagious diseases. For all we know, this chemical might therefore be the individual’s best weapon and source of protection against the coronavirus.
https://educate-yourself.org/cn/The-Truth-about-Food-Grade-Hydrogen-Peroxide-2009-James-Paul-Roguski.pdf
https://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Cure-Healing-Virtually-Diseases/dp/0977075141/ref=sr_1_1?crid=6JES4H0Z0UW4&keywords=one+minute+cure&qid=1582650604&sprefix=one+minute+%2Caps%2C421&sr=8-1
I want to stress again that I’m not trying to sell anything. Nor am I asking anyone to believe it all without examining the facts. I’m just asking all who read this to take a look, do their own research and see for themselves if it’s all true. If you reckon it’s true, please share it with as many people as you can. Who knows, you could be saving many lives, including your own.
I would bet that there are zero people who bought gold because of anything you had to say. People have been buying gold for a very long time now.
There is a downside: when Japanese chicks wear skirts, you can see that too many have bowlegs.
The Chicoms screwed the pooch all on their own. And if the Chinese want war, they will have their psychopathic communist asses handed to them.
Just posting this to help meet everyone’s love for Corona-chan:
https://www.reddit.com/r/coronachan/
I LOVE YOU CORONA-CHAN!
Early reports suggested that the subject virus has high rates of mutagenisis. Sorry, but I didn’t save the reference.
This could make the virus particularly lethal as a hight rate of mutagenisis will likely allow it to adapt to control measures / medications and even vaccines. It’s possible that a vaccine developed after perhaps many months will lose its efficacy over time due the high rate of mutagenisis on the part of the virus.
So, I’m afraid that there may well be a world-wide pandemic.
David W. Walters, Ph.D. from Baylor College of Medicine, Biochemistry with work experience in genetic engineering and clinical chemistry…now retired.
Hope that you have gotten your affairs in order!
Yellow fever was an African disease. That is why Africans had better immunity. In the other hand, they are more susceptible to respiratory infections and more likely to die of them.
This makes no sense at all. It proves Dunning-Krueger. One has to have a certain amount of knowledge and intelligence to realise how dumb and ignorant you are. Don’t ingest hydrogen peroxide. It is idiotic.
US advantages:
Physical geography: Suburbia is not much of a thing in most of the world outside the Anglosphere.
Wealth. More Americans can afford to stockpile/prep meaningfully.
US disadvantages:
The US has more elderly and diabetics than China. (But the difference is now minor).
Medical systems – many Americans will be afraid of going to get their flu symptoms checked out out of fear of getting slammed with massive bills.
Which of these factors are stronger? IMO, overall, US holds the advantage (most quarantining is self-quarantining, anyway).
Incidentally, if it’s indeed true the US is better able able to withstand Corona, it would sooner support your theory that they released it as a biowar attack.
Doing such an operation with official military (invited to participate as athletes) strikes me as extremely inefficient, unless perhaps the intention was to send an explicit FU to China. Also extremely risky, and far, far more illegal than the Soleimani assassination, outrageous as it was – Soleimani, at least, was a single uniformed general in an organization the US had defined as a terrorist one; this would be indiscriminate bioterrorism against the entire Mongoloid race (if Lance is correct) or all of humanity.
But here’s another coincidence.
There are wet markets all over China (population: 1.4B). Whereas Wuhan (population: ~1% of China’s) hosts both China’s only BSL-4 lab (opened in 2017) and China’s Center for Disease Prevention and Control.
Now studying COVID-19 in a lab (e.g. to foresee how it might evolve; to develop defenses against it) is a perfectly legitimate, if risky, enterprise. Especially risky in a country known for slipshod construction standards and lax attention to safety regulations, and for that matters academic fraud, as Lance Welton himself has written about: https://www.unz.com/article/some-countries-are-just-prone-to-scientific-fraud-so-are-their-immigrants-to-the-west/ (what are the respective likelihoods of a Swiss or a Chinese researcher promptly reporting a security breach?)
Regardless, I wouldn’t go so far as to insist that it must have been a “bioerror” incident. Still, amongst the “hierarchy of conspiracies”, I’d put that way higher than this being a crazy US bioterrorist attack. (Hanlon’s Razor).
Russia hasn’t been hit yet, at least on paper.
(OK, not quite, there were two Chinese confirmed cases in Siberia earlier this month, but apparently there’s been no spread since).
Also Venezuela, North Korea, perhaps some others. Though one might make the argument they’re not serious threats to American power.
Well, supposedly something like 25,000 Chinese live and work in Italy, so a secondary outbreak there is hardly so surprising.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how many Chinese are Shia Muslim pilgrims to Qom, Iran.
By contrast, if someone wanted to deliberately spread a bioweapon within the pro-Iran Shia Muslim community, as a leading pilgrimage Qom would be an ideal release target location.
None of this proves anything, but it seems highly suspicious…
https://www.unz.com/wwebb/bats-gene-editing-and-bioweapons-recent-darpa-experiments-raise-concerns-amid-coronavirus-outbreak/
Well, I’m obviously not suggesting that most of the 300 military personnel visiting Wuhan just prior to the outbreak were involved. But suppose just 2-3 US “ringers” were included to release the virus during their spare time, perhaps during their visits to the local “wet market.” Again, the timing seems extremely suspicious.
An accidental “bioerrror” release is exceptionally implausible based upon the timing. The release occurred at the absolute worst possible time for China, just before hundreds of millions would be traveling for Lunar New Year. Only the largest lock-down in world history prevented it from becoming a gigantic, endemic Chinese disease, potentially infecting the entire country. Obviously, a “bioerror” release would tend to be random in timing.
Look, all of this would be totally absurd and ridiculous unless we had a crazy government. But we do have a crazy government…
There is a reasonable amount of evidence that it is more an effect of sunlight than temperature.
Vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin.
Wouldn’t it be about 100 times easier to do so in Najaf and Karbala, which get millions of Iranian pilgrims and are places American agents can easily access?
Regular Mainland Chinese uniforms are basically just tracksuits with short-sleeve shirt underneath, usually rather colourful too (though there are formal uniforms as well for more serious events).
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/images/attachement/jpg/site1/20150920/b083fe955fd617686d9547.jpg
I personally think this would be more proper:
http://images.china.cn/attachement/jpg/site1007/20150529/0019b91ecaeb16d218f005.jpg
At my school formal uniforms are worn for Monday formalities and girls can wear either skirts or trousers (the factor tends to be the season).
Although they are a minority, I have been noticing more young bourgeois-looking girls wear Japanese-style seifuku in their free time.
Traditional Japanese school uniforms are basically just an adaptation of 19th century European military uniforms (army/gakuran for boys and navy/serafuku for girls) adopted as part of the “Civilisation and Enlightenment” (文明開化) reforms.
Well, Japanese don’t seem so different in this regard:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/06/21/national/social-issues/school-uniforms-go-unisex-japanese-schools-seek-better-fit-lgbt-students/
Hey! What gives?
The BBC obviously stole Wah Chang’s ‘Gorn’ of Star Trek fame for it’s Ravenous Bugblatter!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a0/StarTrek-Gorn.jpg
A simpler hypothesis:
Believing this is totally absurd and ridiculous, but then you could be crazy…
It’s a trade-off. If the outbreak had started in Najaf or Karbala, all the world headlines would have said “Huge New Coronavirus Outbreak in Iraq,” which wouldn’t have been as potentially damaging to Iranian society, nor infected as many Iranians.
Obviously, if you’re using a bioweapon to attack Iran, you would release it in Iran. And if you’re releasing it in Iran, Qom would be a pretty reasonable target location.
Offhand, I can’t can’t see why the Shia Iranian Holy City of Qom would be the logical world-epicenter of an accidental non-Chinese secondary outbreak, in sharp contrast to Italy (which has a maybe 25K Chinese workers) or nearby countries like S. Korea or Japan.
I’m no expert, but I think Shia Muslims are just a tiny fraction of 1% of China’s population.
In fact, Hollywood comparison would lead one to overrate any movie. Hollywood ran out of steam 15-20 years ago. Now it makes virtually exclusively shit, where when someone walks, slips, and falls passes for humor. What’s even worse, Hollywood ran out of creativity. When I see an ad for a new movie on TV, with presumably hottest scenes, I always have a feeling that I have seen this already, likely more than once. Deep down they know that, hence their obsession with remakes of old movies.
In contrast, Soviet comedies like The Diamond Arm, Ivan Vasilievich is Changing Profession, or The Fall Marathon are truly funny and inventive.
Can’t judge the current scene, haven’t lived in Russia since 1991. Saw TV series Liquidation recently. It’s not bad, and it is purely Soviet in every way.
Jennifer Zeng is Falun Gong operator.
Why would I need to? Let the God (whichever comes) take care of that.
Absolute nonsense ! When the public is sufficiently panicked, some slick drug company will pop their vaccine on the market at big bucks a pop. Lots of suckers will get reeled in before we hear “the pandemic is under control”.
Given the deaths in China vs the 1.5B population I would have to get a new calculator to do the percentage.
So when I read this drivel I yawn but I become irritated seeing daily photos of everyone on the internet news sites wearing masks. Time for another drama to replace this one !
This virus thing is becoming boring !
Yes, even the demonstrations (and on at least a couple of occasions riots) riots by Chinese settlers in Italy in previous years have received little international coverage. Interesting though looking at comments both here and elsewhere just how many Americans with White Nationalist leanings are quick to come to the defence of the Chinese no matter what they do. Could it be that the Chinese have now overtaken the Japanese as the favourite people of colour of the American wignat? Stay tuned.
At least in Europe, bookshops seem to attract left of centre people more than right of centre. The books on sale also tend in the same direction. Whereas the “throw Communists from helicopters” crowd rarely come across as bookish and may actually have some trouble with reading.
A Greek arrested by police during the 1967 military coup period noted that the police looked at his bookshelves and paid special attention to some of his books, on the principle that every big book must be Communist. 🙂
You have lost that bet.
The Chinese authorities could have shut down Wuhan/Hubei earlier, in December, and while the Lunar New Year meant increased travel it also meant that there was a temporary relief for the economic consequences of the shut-down as few people were expected to work in this period anyway.
Absolutely true, especially in Venice. My wife and I took Italian lessons before we went to Venice and basically never needed it as most of the shops and restaurant workers were Chinese or S Asian. Very disappointing.
This past year we were in Stresa (N Italy) and Sicily. Still mostly Italians and few Asians.
Chinese contractors are building the Qom to Tehran high speed railway. Due to sanctions, I don’t think there are many projects undertaken by Chinese companies in Iran.
Steven Mosher claims that employees at the Chinese Bioweapons labs actually sell test animals that survive at the local meat markets.
https://nypost.com/2020/02/22/dont-buy-chinas-story-the-coronavirus-may-have-leaked-from-a-lab/
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/iranian-deputy-health-minister-infected-coronavirus-seen-looking-feverish-during
There is a video embedded in the article, count how many times the minister wipes his brow in this minute-and-half clip.
(And considering that one of them has an actual confirmed and visible infection shouldn’t they at least be wearing masks?)
Yes.
That sounds like neocons. Vogons might be disgusting, but not nearly as much as neocons. The only good thing one can say about neocons as compared to vogons, neocons don’t write poetry.
Bullshit. Only 15 million people were born in China in 2018.
If China keeps doing what it’s doing, its economy suffers. Eventually, people have to be allowed to leave their room again.
Personally I think its too soon to call for the end of the world…
Rush Limbaugh said on his show yesterday that the coronavirus is a Chinese conspiracy to bring down Trump.
So far we’ve had prominent mainstream conservative and Republican figures, from GOP senators and politicians to media figures like Limbaugh, explicitly or implicitly suggest that the coronavirus is some sort of Chinese conspiracy.
From all the evidence I’ve seen so far, I have no reason to believe that this outbreak being a US conspiracy against China is any less plausible than it being a Chinese conspiracy against Trump. And since the Chinese conspiracy idea is mainstream now and has been suggested publicly by prominent mainstream figures, I don’t think there’s any grounds to claim that theorizing about a possible US conspiracy is somehow out of line or absurd on its face.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/484506-limbaugh-claims-coronavirus-is-being-weaponized-to-bring-down-trump
What does consistent with a normal flu outbreak mean? Anything between hundreds to millions of cases?
Iranians love their hookah. Sharing hookah is a major way to spread disease, including influenza. There are a lot of Chinese workers in Iran, helping to build their infrastructure, paid for by China’s loan/money paid to Iran to buy their oil. I read somewhere that there are Chinese migrant workers near Qom, the center of the outbreak. What are the chances an infected worker visited one of these hookah bars? Probably pretty high. Chinese men also love to smoke, esp. among the less educated.
Steven Mosher doesn’t have insightful commentary to offer on corona. Reading through his opinion piece, there isn’t evidence offered that the virus is a bio weapon from the Wuhan lab. He points to the weakest of coincidences (e.g. Wuhan lab is 22 kilometers away from wet market, stricter regulations for bio research labs announced shortly after outbreak became public, etc.) The evidence for his claims are even weaker than what Unz offers as evidence for his hypothesis (e.g. coincidence of US military participation in the World Military Games held in Wuhan before first case in Wuhan).
Steven Mosher is a religious zealot who has found a ready audience during crisis because anxiety over the virus has made people not reason normally. I think Unz’s own stubbornness about the corona being an American manufactured bioweapon shows a similar breakdown in normal reasoning.
Agree…..I was promised zombies…..where the hell are my zombies?
if rednecks in Appalachia had caused this by eating possums, we’d never hear the end of it.
but since it was due to the Chinese, after western scientists develop a vaccine or cure for Covid-19, a year later we’ll go back to Unz posts about how the technologically superior Chinese are going to take over the world.
well, they might, but not because they’re smarter. they are so very clearly technologically inferior and societally backwards. they’re smart enough to be dangerous. that’s about it.
Britain still has enormous soft power around the world, esp. in their former colonies. British lit from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to modern day Harry Potter continue to be popular and well read in the US and the world.
British movies like Harry Potter, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, King’s Speech, British TV shows like Downton Abbey, Masterpiece Theater, British pop stars like Adele, Coldplay, actors like Emma Watson, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, Jude Law, Keira Knightly, Colin Firth, Michael Caine, Ian McKellen, Jeremy Irons, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig, Daniel Day Lewis, Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren and many others are household names in the US and popular the world over. Even in the world of sports, David Beckham and Lewis Hamilton are well known the world over.
The Royal Family continues to be very popular in the US and the world. Both Prince William and Prince Harry’s weddings were widely watched in the US and the world. The BBC accent continues to be regarded as the most proper form of English by most people in the world.
Forgot to add that they still might be using “poetry appreciation chair” at Guantanamo.
If the Queen’s Consort Prince Philip were deceased we’d have a ready answer for the source of this Corona virus.
He’s on record that if he were dead he’d like to return as a ‘killer virus’ as a sort of parting shot..err..gift, to humanity.
https://media.breitbart.com/media/2017/12/GettyImages-185200977-640×480.jpeg
Prince Philip
‘If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.’
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162685-if-i-were-reincarnated-i-would-wish-to-be-returned
Schizophrenia. Within 5 years. Mark my words.
China has already demonstrated a much better response than most governments in its ability to contain the virus, so your rambles are quite misplaced. The US response, for example, is for the CDC is stumble around in confusion.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/02/25/cdc-coronavirus-test/
In the end, China might end up demonstrating if anything, that it has that is fully capable of acting decisively and effectively in a disaster in comparison to rivals.
Sounds just as plausible as that the Holocaust was a Jewish conspiracy to bring down Hitler. /s
Seriously, would China respond to Trump’s trade war against them by wrecking themselves in the hope of eventually bringing down the US economy with themselves by possibly causing the worst global recession in some 100 years eventually?
All large powers who don’t get on with the US will end up dealing with China instead, thereby catching a cold whenever Beijing sneezes.
But it does seem exceptionally unlucky that even the deputy health minister has caught CV. Just as it was unlucky that Iran shot down a Ukrainian airliner. CV is undermining China AND Iran in suspiciously convenient ways for Trump and his ilk. Even the Italian outbreak is helping Salvini.
I half expect to watch a documentary in 30 years with people interviewed in silhouette taking about how they engineered the virus to take down America’s enemies.
One of the great things about this new reality is that you get to choose any facts you wish to believe in, I’ve noticed.
It is kinda fun.
Okay, that’s certainly a possible disease vector for Qom. But how many Chinese workers are in that vicinity, compared to e.g. the vast number of Chinese workers on huge numbers of projects elsewhere in the world?
I’m certainly not claiming that the epicenter of an top outbreak being in Qom, Iran proves anything. It just seems awfully suspicious to me…
Lao Tzu and Taoism.
Geez. This agent anon loves spamming retarded YouTube links from all sorts of hacks.
It almost feels like he is an anon working for the letter agencies. Wait………..
Lack of exotic meats plus curry powder/fresh chillies kills germs and boots the immune system.
It is more likely due to higher vitamin D status. By the same argument, I predict that there will be no outbreak in Venezuela.
Black people are much more affected by respirotory diseases.
Excuse me for butting in . . .
anything is possible. It is possible that the virus will beciome unmanageable However, to date:
Coronavirus Cases:
80,423
Deaths:
2,711
Recovered:
27,913
Active Cases \Currently
49,799
Infected Patients
40,588 (82%)
49,799
Currently Infected Patients
40,588 (82%)
in Mild Condition
9,211 (18%)
Serious or Critical
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
It appears managed at the moment.
Anatoly, how are ya? Great work, as always. Seems like it’s been awhile,
So, you figure they’re paying folks off, prisoners, maybe, trying to develop a vaccine of some sort? Not a forced thing, more like a Dirty Dozen scenario, voluntary-like? How WOULD they build a vaccination without rapid, exhaustive research on people? And that’s to leave out the question of racial characteristics-sensitive to the death.
Safe to say China’s on that track one way or the ‘other’?
From a cui bono perspective, the US conspiracy theory is more plausible than Limbaugh’s China conspiracy theory.
Slowing down China’s economic growth and reducing its international trade is in the US geopolitical interest. That is the whole point of the tariffs, trade war, sanctions on Huawei, and push to move supply chains out of China.
This is about my perception of the mainland. I don’t know but tracksuits seem odd to me. I don’t understand specifically why they are used. Maybe, it is easy and cheap to make them in different colors? Although, I can see how skirts might not be as practical in winter, for Northern climes. Or maybe they are easier to clean?
I have heard that there is a slight but noticeable trend away from skirts in Japan, on the street level, for women done with school, but it still seems like a really big difference, when compared to the West. I don’t think it is a trend of convergence with the West, just a bit of more freedom for the bull dykes, or local Japanese equivalent.
One thing that I think is true of Japan is that young men seem to have what in the West would be considered more feminine hair. It tends to be a bit longer, more styled, often dyed. I don’t know whether this is an organic thing, or whether it comes from the influence of TV, etc. How they try to differentiate male characters by their hairstyle, since they don’t have the natural color differentiation of Europeans. But I’m not sure if this would be permitted in school.
I can’t claim any great knowledge of Japanese entertainment, but I think the general tendency for fanservice in anime, paired with the common trope of the dirty-minded male, who admires the female form is also a much healthier cultural attitude than the West, where almost all the sexual references (quite frequent) seem to be about trivializing sex.
A pity, this. Still, I wonder what the stats are on a comparative basis. The divorce rate in Japan is still quite low, as I understand it.
Back when I went to school, the only guy who wore anything like a dress, was a guy wore a kilt because he had Scottish blood. He was definitely non-conformist, but not a queer.
Lots of Chinese port-construction folks are building a deep water dock in Haifa and nearly to Tel Aviv, are they not, Ron? Reading a couple of the locals like JP, not much of a local peep about it inside Israel. Bet they’re on it though.
Ron, any squawking about Bernie giving the finger to AIPAC and his severe criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians? It seems to have gone down the memory hole. The next debate should be precious. Someone is going to get on Bernie for that. How dare he?
I am turning-up the thermostats and humidifying the house, creating my own little tropical-climate sub-zone, my own little extreme-global-warming zone. (Studies seem to show that heat might deactivate viruses). On the outside, the theory I have is cold air can cause ciliary dyskinesia, leading to adhesion and colonization of pathogens. Thus the value of wearing a mask…warming the inhaled air. Of course, the anti- drill baby drill crowd will never say turn up the thermostat.
Certainly in the UK, the immediate cause of death goes on the certificate.
I call BS Corona is going to kill a few thousands at most . Every time someone catches a cold the media says the sky is falling . SARS OMG a catastrophe and what ? A thousand deaths . And what if Corona does kill millions ? With 7,000,000,000 people what are millions ? 10,000,000 <1% . Corona is clickbait that the Americans will use to advance their program of advancing chaos to make it dangerous to disobey . Personally I hope Corona kills A billion+ . Shit I'll volunteer to be one .
We should wait and observe what will happen with outbursts in third-world countries to reach your conclusion.
2020: A new era begins by Charles November 17, 2014
We had just such a mutation in 1980, marking the start of the new era. And then in 2000 the conjunction occurred back in an Earth sign. So until 2020, we’re still under the influence of the Earth sign conjunction. But that 2000 conjunction is the last Earth sign conjunction for many years. Because from 2020, conjunctions will be in Air signs. Until 2159!
https://astrologyschool.net/2020-a-new-era-begins/
“Triple conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn are rare enough to be regarded as indicators of major cultural change, much like the Trigonalis. It was just such a triple conjunction in Pisces – anciently regarded as the sign of the Jews – that led the Magi to search for “The King of the Jews” in 7 BCE. (Magi translates as ‘astrologers’.) There have been only two triple conjunctions in the current earth sign series, that being the 1940-41 and 1980-81 trios – the latter being the ‘interruptor’ alignment in Libra that broke the all-earth sign series begun in 1842. There won’t be another triple conjunction until the 2238-39 series in Cancer.”
http://www.astropro.com/features/tables/geo/ju-sa/ju000sa.html
I hope that you remain and provide a great deal more ancient wisdom; Unz has long needed a soothsayer of the stars to round out our collection of characters, now you have come finally to fufill that gap.
Yes, as we all know, Iranians are the only people who smoke and use hookah and have relations with China.
Just forget about the rest of the Muslim world, India, Central Asia, and significant chunks of Africa and Europe, and this makes perfect sense.
I present to you the 15 best hookah lounges in Malaysia:
https://theculturetrip.com/asia/malaysia/articles/the-15-best-shisha-bars-in-kuala-lumpur-malaysia/
“Because from 2020, conjunctions will be in Air signs. Until 2159!
A brighter future for some
” . . . a nightmare to others.”
. . . Oy!
Are you that fat faggot that has a crush on AK?
Agree, but don’t you think astrology is too mundane for Unz?
What I would prefer is a practitioner of one of the African arts. Nggàm, which uses the perturbances of crabs and spiders in a bowl, or Ifá, which uses nuts on a divination tray.
The Coronavirus Sign of Moshiach
Every village in the UK has a Chinese takeaway. I cook stir fry and we eat it with chopsticks.
A rough estimation of the ethnic susceptibility to COVID19 can be obtained from Piffer’s repat data from Wuhan where the Chinese policy is that dual citizenship ethnic Chinese are not allowed to leave (Taiwanese seem to be the exception). Italian seems to be naturally COVID19 susceptible.
Rank | NInfectedPerKCapita | NInfected | N | Country
1 24.27 | 5 | 206 | Japan
2 18.52 | 1 | 54 | Italy <—
3 16.13 | 2 | 124 | Germany
4 5.13 | 1 | 195 | USA
5 5.0 | 3 | 600 | USA 2
6 4.05 | 1 | 247 | Taiwan <—
7 3.94 | 1 | 254 | France 2
8 2.86 | 2 | 700 | S.Korea
9 0.0 | 0 | 179 | France
10 0.0 | 0 | 174 | Canada
Whoa! Dude. It really is the Age of Aquarius. Far out.
Of course we in the West cannot gauge the extent of China’s “soft power,” since virtually no one here speaks Chinese and very few people are actually interested in Chinese culture, either ancient or modern. We are in a sense in a different universe.
‘
For thousands of years, when Europeans were still hunkered down in stone hovels etc. China has had vast “soft power” throughout Asia. Throughout history virtually all Asian cultures that aspired to statehood have looked to and borrowed from China in one way or another. Westerners must grasp the fact that their definition of “soft power” is not universal but actually is quite provincial. It is kind of pathetic that so many equate “soft cultural power” with crap like video games and sports stars. The very concept of sophistication is a product of Chinese culture, most notably, 13th-century cities of the Southern Song such as Hangzhou. Marco Polo could not believe his eyes when he visited this city. Compared to it Venice was a rat trap. “Hangzhou is one of China’s seven ancient capitals and has been designated a “Historic and Cultural City” by the government. Its history can be traced back over 2,200 years to the Qin dynasty (221-206 BC). It flourished after being linked with the north via the Grand Canal, which starts in Beijing and ends in Hangzhou.”
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)
China is still the cultural leader of Asia.
Soft power shmoft power.
@Ron Unz
You missed some of the most suspicious actions.
1) Just a month before the outbreak, the PirBright Institute (backed by Bill Gates) ran a simulation based on a Corona Virus pandemic and they did not invite China. What are the odds? Watch all five videos, it is uncanny how they were able to predict what is actually happening. This event was needed to coordinate the world against China in the aftermath.
2) Whitney Webb straight from Unz links Corona Virus to Darpa. Some of the most salient points:
Pentagons ties to using bats as bioweapons:
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/us-military-is-interested-in-bats-as-possible-defenders-against-bioweapons-1.542849
Darpa funding virus research on bats:
https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/montana_state_university/msu-project-to-prevent-bat-borne-diseases-wins-million-grant/article_805eb8ec-763c-53ff-87da-3d9c2466cd61.html
https://source.colostate.edu/wuhan-coronavirus-once-again-on-the-brink-of-a-global-health-crisis-csu-researchers-respond/
Get this, the US lifted a moratorium on Gain of function Viral Testing. Gain of function is making viruses more deadly and more contagious.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d34vyj/the-us-will-fund-research-to-make-pathogens-deadlier-again
Darpa announced in 2018 a program to focus on animal reservoirs of disease, specifically Bats.
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2018-01-04
Pentagons research into SARA and MERS.
https://www.grease-network.org/content/download/5407/40323/version/1/file/2017+CBEP+SPR+Program+Book_Final.pdf
https://www.unz.com/wwebb/bats-gene-editing-and-bioweapons-recent-darpa-experiments-raise-concerns-amid-coronavirus-outbreak/
3) The US has a prior history of using bioweapons.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/26/the-dirty-secret-of-the-korean-war/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/pentagon-ticks-insects-biological-weapons-congress-bill-chris-smith-a9006701.html
PNAC calling race based weapons a politically useful tool.
https://archive.org/details/RebuildingAmericasDefenses/page/n5/mode/2up
Regardless of all your twisting and turning, it is a fact that all the old and successful viruses are (as you put it) relatively benign. Virulence remains a feature of new viruses or new strains of older ones. I am also still to be convinced that there is a necessary correlation between infectiousness and virulence, which you appear to be implying.
As you have admitted yourself……
I reckon you need something a little more substantial to argue the opposite.
Now is the perfect time to implement Corona Virus if you are Trump.
The stock market needed to crash anyways, now he can blame it on China. The Corona Virus was preceded by a viral attack on China’s pork and chicken industry, so when China starts to buy more American farm products Trump can say he delivered to his base. Plus Wilbur Ross is on record as saying this wil lead to more companies building in America.
As far as using US soldiers, it makes perfect sense to do so. Civilians flying in would be monitored, and you can’t have someone get caught with a vial full of super virus as that would really be tracable to the source.
Using US soldiers makes perfect sense because they can fly in with their equipment and they won’t be inspected with the same scrutiny as a civilian would.
Who, Matt Forney? He’s a refugee in Armenia, Ayatollah Smith prefers China.
My interest in learning Chinese language was born thanks to Chinese soft power, once I became addicted to the tv drama “Yanxi Palace” I felt a growing interest and support for China, so yes, Chinese have made progress in soft power, though they still don’t have as much as South Korea nor Japan, ceirtanly China have these last years more visits achieved from international tourists than most countries in the world, being in the top 10 tourist destinations.
“If you look at successful examples like the US, Korea or Japan, it’s much broader than using traditional culture or education as a medium,” said Lee, an assistant professor at Korea’s Inha University, noting that success stories, whether it is rap music, K-pop or manga, as well as online Chinese novels, are based on “international outlook or common stories” that people from around the world can make their own.
The past year has seen China make some major inroads into international popular culture, like the rise of Chinese-developed app TikTok to become a global teenage phenomenon, or growing popularity of Chinese dramas, which saw The Story of Yanxi Palace – a tale of intrigue among feuding imperial concubines – topping last year’s Google search list for television programmes.
What will happen to CoViD.19? Just like what WHO asserted, it will blend in with other flu viruses/viruii with reduce fatality as the vaccines should have been developed by then. US has specifically tracked some flu variants, e.g. A (H3), A (2009 H1N1), A (Subtyping not Performed), B, H3N2v, BVic, BYam. It seems that for US SARS is not important enough, while the H1N1.09 swine flu is still lingering on 10 years later.
https://i.ibb.co/FxBSLW9/h1n1recur.png
Mobile phones. The brand names may have been Scandinavian, Japanese and American but the technology inside was British. There is a cluster of technology consultants around Cambridge that do the work. Basestations, +ARM +Transputers +LCD basic patents + billing software. A recent court case over patents revealed that the iPhone was designed by a consultancy near Hertford (comutting distance from Cambridge).
Composite aircraft wings, notably Airbus.
Lots of pharmaceuticals.
Very few consumer brands. The high price of oil wiped them out starting in the 1980’s.
Globalism is mostly confined to White countries. Increased tourism however is worldwide thanks to more affordable air travel. Things like coronavirus are going to spread faster and wider as a result of that.
by Tyler Durden
Mon, 12/16/2019 – 05:11
It’s D-Day For The Repo Market: On Monday $100 Billion In Liquidity Will Be Drained – What Happens Next?
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/its-d-day-repo-market-monday-100-billion-liquidity-will-be-drained-what-happens-next
Yes, they would have no problem deliberately introducing the virus into Italy as a red herring. Those who perpetrated the disgusting Operation Gladio on the Italian public, the brave CIA, would be willing to do anything if it served their dark purposes. While I hope there’s another explanation, there’s a weirdness about the Italian coronavirus that I don’t believe can be explained merely by person to person contact, just like in Wuhan, just like in Iran. It doesn’t appear to spread this fast everywhere.
Because the Kardishians and Trump are the sum total of American existence.
Your logic is unassailable.
Silly Sinophiles of Unz World, Unite!
The idea that Europe was the ass-end of the world in the Middle Ages is somewhat undermined by all the soaring cathedrals, like St. Mark’s in Venice. Can you point to anything similar in Hangzhou?
In reality however, China is vilified in “the West.”
Yeah, I bet the CIA would have a really hard time secreting the virus into China, therefore, 300 U.S. soldiers were used instead!
Looks like you’ve got it all figured out, like all the other geniuses here at Unz World.
The way the “secret steps” would work is that the US would come out with a vaccine just in the nick of time to save the US. As a result of US ingenuity, donchaknow. No silliness about the water supply necessary. The lizard people in DC don’t care if a few thousand Americans die.
Consider a particularly ironic outcome of this situation, not particularly likely but certainly possible…
Everyone knows that America’s ruling elites are criminal, crazy, and also extremely incompetent.
So perhaps the coronavirus outbreak was indeed a deliberate biowarfare attack against China, hitting that nation just before Lunar New Year, the worst possible time to produce a permanent nationwide pandemic. However, the PRC responded with remarkable speed and efficiency, implementing by far the largest quarantine in human history, and the deadly disease now seems to be in decline there.
Meanwhile, the disease naturally leaks back into the US, and despite all the advance warning, our totally incompetent government mismanages the situation, producing a huge national health disaster, and the collapse of our economy and decrepit political system.
As I said, not particularly likely, but certainly a very fitting end to the American Empire…
And a song to ICE the CAKE 🙂
Another exhibit for the Amero-pessimism case.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1232443837777244160
I noticed that too that there has not been “Isis” events in Italy at all. Meanwhile in the rest of western Europe, in the past few years, there has been numerous Isis jigs going on.
Italians are too savvy for that since Judge Felice Casson discovered in 1990 that US/NATO was doing many “terrorist” events for decades in Italy as Operation Gladio.
This Corona virus strike at Italy could be for Italy not allowing Isis -like “events” to go on like in the rest of western Europe.
BONUS CONTENT
https://www.bitchute.com/video/i3BBSGy3zUvs/
Yes!
One senses a palpable feeling of deep frustration amongst the American – and other – China-bashers that this has been such a formidable and breathtaking response by the Government and People of China.
They twist and they spin every statement and every action, in order to score propaganda points.
They say that in Mandarin the character for ‘opportunity’ is the same as the character for ‘crisis’. I don’t know if that’s true, but it could well turn out that the one of the most lasting impressions of this crisis for the watching world will be how well China’s system dealt with it. Should this virus spread through Europe and America in the coming months, then we shall all come to a better appreciation of that.
Let’s see how the West copes with Covid-19.
“We should wait and observe what will happen with outbursts in third-world countries to reach your conclusion.”
Well,
I think that is my point. There are roughly 7.3 billion people on the planet. What represents a pandemic: here’s one answer
https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/features/what-is-pandemic#1
https://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/frequently_asked_questions/pandemic/en/
In examining the core cases here, the number of recoveries thus far are high. Thus far the current status according to WHO – this is not yet a pandemic . . . pandemic on waiting — well maybe. The economic response is based on suspicions that it will be a severe global crisis — again maybe.
At the moment – not so much.
I am taken to view the matter this way. Because I don’t sleep around , people think I must be in the closet as a someone who engages in same sex relations . . . all I can say is , I don’t, haven’t won’t . . ,
Laugh . . . at least not yet.
“It beggars belief that there aren’t similar or bigger clusters all over Europe, North America, and much of the world even outside East Asia.
To which one might rejoinder, why haven’t they been detected yet? ”
Well, at least between Myanmar and Laos, both which have no recorded cases, Mynanmar has taken action to make sure no one knows what to do in case of an infection. In the past when students protested as in 1962, the military blew up the student union building. When students protested in 1988, they moved universities far outside of Rangoon and shortened the length of a yearly course of studies to three months.
Now, the military dictatorship, sorry, the newly reformed government, passed a law that bans COVID-19 information from reaching the public via media.
https://www.mmtimes.com/news/bill-seeks-control-news-outbreaks.html
Of course, these two highly suspect American expats in Yangon didn’t get the memo and live streamed their own version of Wuhan Virus information over Facebook. Either they’re informative to three veiwers who know nothing at all or they bored the viewers to death, so they needn’t fear contracting the deadly virus anyway.
I particularly like the point (5:20) at which the teacher switched from speaking English to ME SPEAK BASIC English for veiwers who can’t speak English. Wow. (click on blue link for video)
https://www.facebook.com/AmericanInstituteYangon/videos/603274477160274/
Of course, two experts are better than one, so in the next video, these guys made things easier for their viewers. I can’t stress enough how much these guys are a throwback to the long gone days of expats burrowed into someplace in South East Asia and started a school, cuz, hey, speaking English is the same as teaching English, ain’t it?
https://www.facebook.com/AmericanInstituteYangon/videos/485563432071515/
China has zero soft power. Most people around the world don’t much like the Chinese, even in Asia. They are known for their bad manners, bad English and dishonesty the world over. By refusing to ground all outbound flights back in January and continuing to export this virus everywhere, if the coronavirus gets worse in lawless places like India, Mideast or Africa, ethnic Chinese (or even all East or Southeast Asians) can quickly become targets of violence. They are already targets of racism in Europe with people covering their faces when they’re near Asian people on trains etc. It doesn’t matter how much soft power Japan and Korea has, most people can’t tell the difference so China is making all Asians look bad.
The only good thing that could come out of this pandemic is the end of globalism, and hopefully, cutting international travels by at least 50%, esp. to/from Asia.
You have a very closed mind.
That’s all I have to say.
This is entirely predictable based on who largely runs the Hollywood and the media.
If strong-ethnocentric Chinese ran Hollywood and the US media, it’d be different.
As china-russia-all-the-way says above,
This is basically a “Bernie Sanders 2020” ad.
So,the long and short of it it that corona virus is not more lethal that other types of flue type viruses. After all, approximately 10,000 people per year die in the U.S because of flue related complications, and no one is getting bent way out of shape over this.
Howdy,
How did it get the name, CORONA, and why was it named that
Hundreds of millions are going to die directly from The Wrath Of GOD;
O, so why not start, now………….
AYE………….
Don’t forget the polar ice caps melting. Any day now, just wait!
If you view China as a Han ethnic construct, antipathy to it (in the West) is very low compared to most other ethnic constructs: such as core-Americans, European nationalists, or worse still, Russia.
I’ve heard people evoke Russia in conspiracies, in real life. Not just on the internet.
The only large, noteworthy, homogeneous country with lessor antipathy in the West is Japan. But it is something of a double-edged sword, as Japan is nowhere near as praised as China because it doesn’t have the same power and has been stagnating.
Belgium: 1 out of 9.
https://twitter.com/aledeniz/status/1226103425508790275
Definitely.
Iranian too.
Related to trade war/sanctions I feel.
The bottom line, everybody on top wins, in this game.Say….up to 20 %.
The rest are designated losers. Lower in the pyramid worse it is.
The elderly underclass in particular.
Good gig…for some. So far works like charm.
What we know so far suggests more the World War Z narrative (hitting wealthy, jet-set countries hard) than your proposed narrative of China’s BRI buddies getting hit hard. At least in terms of the virology, not the soft-power hit, on which I would more agree.
But, then, we do not have perfect information. There may be many cases in certain countries we have heard nothing of. As Anatoly says:
The latest I have seen is that South Korea’s testing situation was as follows (this is about as of 24 hours ago):
37,000 persons tested, mainly cases stemming from the Shinchonji cult
– 22,550 found not infected
– 13,250 results pending
– 900 confirmed infected , of which 9 dead.
Among the current pool of testees, it will presumably to rise to 25 to 35 deaths, if the S.Korea deaths follow the same death rate as observed elsewhere and including the likely infected among the results-pending group.
Of those with results known (22,550 negative + 900 positive = 23,450), the infection rate of contactees was therefore 3.5% to 4%. They only use the limited testing resources on people who came into contact with a known infected person, so this suggests that if you had at-least-moderate close-quarter dealings with a COVID19-infectee, your odds (actually an East Asian’s odds) of getting it could well be less than 1 in 30. Obviously this would rise with very close-quarter-, long-term contact.
The odds of death, in turn, are known to be less than 1 in 200 (<0.5%) for most people without preexisting health problems, and as low as 1 in 500 (0.2%) for healthy, core-working-age people. The chance of dying from a single case of close contact with a COVID19-infectee are therefore no higher for most of us than 1-in-1500, at least the way I read the data.
Except smallpox, measles, and a bunch of others, each of which was at least as virulent as COVID-19, and wasn’t harmed by the virulence until we developed a vaccine against them.
It’s a remarkably ignorant theory that virulence must be harmful to the bug. I know lots of supposed experts believe that, but they are wrong. The bug doesn’t care if it kills you or you get cured: either way, it has to stop replicating in your body.
Korean drama TV shows and movies are quite different from US Hollywood productions in content and style. They originally became very popular along with K-pop in other Asian countries because of culturally similarity.
Nowadays, in most Asian countries and many other countries, they have their own domestic media entertainment or are into other Asian media such as Korean shows and music.
American pop music and films don’t dominate like they used to. The biggest Hollywood blockbusters like superhero movies are popular, but the more regular movies and pop music are most popular in the Anglosphere and European countries with good English speakers.
Popularist cinema of that time was wonderful, soulful and witty. I mean, everyone enjoys films by Gaidai, Chulyukin, Ryazanov. Moreover, they are still popular in America today.
And then the arthouse Soviet cinema, was one of the best in the world, along with American and Japanese.
This is not some idiosyncratic view – the greatest international artists like Akira Kurasawa, Ingmar Bergman, loved Soviet cinema.
Golden Age of Shit. I don’t think even that would accurate, because “Golden age of shit” would imply something that people notice or care about. But I find it difficult that even the producers and directors can watch most of this shit.
Well, to be fair, Zvyagantsev and maybe Yuri Bykov, have some kind of talent, even if you disliked their films there is some talent there, so it’s not completely at the bottom, and Russian film can be ranked (if you ignore all the shit) better than some countries as a result of them.
I think (although I did not watch perhaps enough films) Hollywood has improved in the last few years, but it’s also declined undoubtedly* since the 1980s. The lowest level was about 10 years ago.
But even if last year there were some quite good films, there it is still net decline – if you think about how wonderful actually just mainstream popularist “trashy” Hollywood films could be in the 1980s: e.g. Aliens, Bladerunner, Terminator, Last of Mohicans, etc.
Please don’t go around singing China’s praises when you know the sorry state to which this country has descended. If the Chinese government were any good it would have nipped the coronavirus in the bud at the very outset by heeding the initial warning signs and alerting everyone. But what did it do instead? It tried (typically) to hush-hush everything, resulting in the sorry mess we now see before us. It’s the same sorry story as with the SARS outbreak. Quite evidently some people simply never learn. As for its ‘effectiveness’ in containing the virus, well, if that means slowly starving entire areas of people by cutting off all supply lines to them for fear of contracting and spreading the disease, or stuffing people who are still alive into body bags and sending them straight to crematoria, or refusing help from other countries, then I suppose I’d agree…
I’m not trying to defend the US, by the way. The US has caused untold human suffering all over the world, as has been shown by people like the late William Blum. But pointing out others’ wrongs doesn’t absolve you of your own. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
China used to be a land of high culture but ever since the communist takeover everything there has basically gone south. Hopefully the coronavirus will finally herald the end of the communist era and China can start anew. But then again, looking at the bloody mess to which modern industrial ‘civilization’ is leading us all…
Largely agree.
I’ve seen reports that air pollution is down 50-80% in China and that 730 million people are under some sort of lock-down ( the latter by the NYT so probably wrong)
This site, administered by Johns Hopkins seems to be the official go-to site.
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
What’s interesting are the two columns on the right: “Deaths” and “Recovered”
The number of cases “resolved: either dead or cured is about 30,000 – 2,700 of those died.
That’s a 9% death rate, not the 2-3 % currently promulgated.
The Rhetoric of the PRC Government is not consonant with the facts.
It’s intriguing that Patient Zero showed up on Dec 1st in text below.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8016077/First-coronavirus-patient-NO-connection-Wuhan-seafood-market.html
But:
Johns Hopkins and Bill Gates knew it was coming 6 weeks before Dec1
http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/
Funnt Dat, No?
British pop culture is biggest in Ireland and Australia and New Zealand. Elsewhere, it’s mostly known by piggybacking on Hollywood and the US market. Most British pop culture and figures are known in the US and elsewhere because they appear in Hollywood productions. Most Americans and people around the world would have no idea who Daniel Craig was if he wasn’t in Hollywood’s James Bond movies.
American English is the form of English that’s generally taught and studied around the world. That’s generally the accent that’s in demand among English teachers.
Hollywood was in the worst about 10 years ago (or maybe 15 years ago?).
To be fair, nowadays there is some improvement in Hollywood films in the last 5 (?) years, so they are now at a more mediocre level.
For example, the most Hollywood famous films of this/last year: Joker, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Ford against Ferrari, 1917, etc.
^ These are 6/10 or perhaps even 7/10 films. They’re not great films at all, they are not great art. But they are also not very bad, unentertaining, unwatchable, etc.
If you mean China since the communist takeover, then I’ll fully agree with all you said. But before then China has actually come up with plenty of things that were very much worth coming up with. The Koreans, Japanese and Vietnamese all adopted heaps of them.
What you say about negative attitudes towards China is not wrong, but also remember that life is never static; I think China made real soft-power gains in the 2010s. Low-hanging fruit, considering where their image was at in earlier decades, true, but still.
Imagine a giant, cosmic Soft-Power Scoreboard, observed by gods or by extra-terrestrials, observing Earth affairs from afar as we might look on the entities in a computer game. Imagine each country is assigned a soft power score, pegged to a decade, updating at the start of each 5 or 10 year to reflect fluctuations of the previous years. There is just no way for me to imagine that China’s final score in the 2010s did NOT end up higher than it had been in the 2000s, which in turn was higher than the 1990s.
English culture is very popular in many many different countries. Harry Potter dominates children of all developed countries, and anything like Pink Floyd or Beatles or even is still popular with millions of adults in all kinds of countries. For example, in Japan, not only Beatles is still the most fashionable thing, but even Beatrix Potter.
I don’t know that they’re more hated than Americans are. In much of the world, if you’re identified as an American, you’ll be targeted with violence. This is why Americans are told to say they’re Canadian instead in much of the world.
Even in Europe, there’s a strong undercurrent of anti-Americanism, despite cultural similarity. And as America becomes less European, cultural similarity with Europe will decline, and Europeans will dislike Americans even more.
“Except smallpox, measles, and a bunch of others, each of which was at least as virulent as COVID-19, and wasn’t harmed by the virulence until we developed a vaccine against them. ”
Er, how many people actually died of measles before the development of the vaccine?
If they got the infection as a child?
When they are “supposed” to get it?
Smallpox was more virulent than measles.
Milkmaids who were xposed to cow pox had immunity against measles.
We cannot keep trashing our immune systems to avoid a few deaths.
No one likes death, but a few are better than a lot.
I should think the best defense against any virus would be a robust immune system.
You are funny. You make my point for me about the provincialism of Westerners when they start to blather on about soft power.
So if there isn’t a cathedral in Hangzhou, there was no cultural accomplishment!
It has to be a Western cathedral. How convenient.
The cathedrals are indeed beautiful and impressive. But they are not the singular benchmarks for cutlural or artistic achievement. In fact, I find the morterless masonry of the Incas more impressive and mysterious in its peculiar genius than even the cathedrals of Europe.
There was nothing like the culture of Hangzhou in Europe.
There was nothing like the Beijing-Hangzhou Canal
There was nothing like the prowess and artistry of the Southern Song ceramics.
There was nothing like the sophistication of Chinese administration and finances.
I am not going to play this childish “prove it to me” with know-nothings who cannot be bothered to educate themselves and sit in their corners yammering about Western cultural and intellectual superiority.
When in panic it is best to remember this: Wars are won best with disinformation. Bombing of civilian targets with napalm, like e.g. Dresden in 1945, or Vietnam, were spectacular displays of fireworks, but strategically achieved nothing.
With billions coiling in fear in front of their evening news TV the “corona” doodah is definitely a masterpiece of disinfo. Billions!
I wonder, if Mr. Sun Tzu, the founder of disinfo warfare, would be impressed that his lessons were so spectacularly effective here, or would he be rather pissed off that it was his enemy who outwitted him using his own weapons (and thus getting him ready to commit a nice hara-kiri)?
When the “multipolar” SJWs, China and Russia in particular, finally cave in and beg for mercy, then, and only then will the “boys” announce a break-through antidote – and available only from, you guessed it, the US. It will be aptly called the “kippah” ( as in the opposite of “crown”, in case you missed the irony).
Ask yourself this question: how is it possible that the Chief Indian, in his rudimentary white long-johns and his sleeveless jacket, was embracing Mr. Trump with so much affection this week, after he hugged with no less affection Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi just a year ago, and then promising them an eternal love, and plenty of S400 to procure? Did Mr. Trump slip hime some early samples of the kippah antidote? Or perhaps this whole multipolar crusade was just that, only a Richard the Lion-Heart, crusade?
What are the two questions?
I think the whole thing is somewhat overstated
I think all the empirical evidence showcases that the Wuhan government bungled the response immensely, hiding information of the Coronavirus until it was too late.
But virtually all the other local and the national Chinese governments did an exceptional job with containing the virus, especially Xi Jinping’s leadership. I think college students are going to study the rapid response of the National Government in future textbooks on crisis mamagement. Therefore the non-Wuhan areas had low levels of coronavirus.
In addition, outside of Iran, which isn’t really that competent, the only areas to have a substantial number of coronavirus cases are areas with a massive legal/illegal Chinese population.
America has some 50 cases, but has the largest Chinese
diaspora of 6 million Chinese and the largest in overall travel with China. Now maybe the real number of cases is substantially higher, but I really doubt that. Given the absolute hammering South Korea, Italy, and Japan are having, America seems pretty good, given its demographics.
I can’t predict what is going to happen next, but I think countries like India and Bangladesh are going to be annihilated by this virus.
Also, the bioweapon meme seems kinda dumb to me. America’s East Asian population is vastly overrepresented in our Technology and Bureaucracy fields, and are very responsible for even our Deep State. They hold a huge chunk of America on our shoulders, including the federal gov. If such a thing was deliberate by America, wouldn’t that destroy the Federal Government as well? Wouldn’t some Chinese/Korean/Japanese/Vietnamese in the higher up know what was going on and spill the truth? Even our bioweapons industry is probably disproportionately East Asian, wouldn’t some East Asian realize their work is being used to kill someone? If America was releasing a bioweapon to kill your Chinese grandmother, you would probably speak up.
Then again, the Military Games coincidence is absolutely fascinating, and it is amazing the media does not pick up on that. Did someone check if any of the other country participants got infected as well? If so, then I think it settles it…
One more thing,
I think the bioweapon theory, that America sent it out, would be likely if it weren’t for the fact that the Chinese were extremely highly overrepresented in Technology, Finance, Law, Academia, etc. Releasing something that can kill the Chinese just seems like a completely suicidal move to me, since America’s relies far more on its 5-6 million Chinese, then China relies on an equal amount of Chinese. Sure, I can see punishing the Iraqi people, but China and even Iranian seems like a stretch, since the Iranians are also important to America as well.
For example, if the Coronavirus is a bioweapon and kills 100,000 Chinese in China, then it is horrible, but not the end of the world for that country, and I suspect that country can and will make a full recovery.
But for America, 100,000 Chinese dead, depending on location of impact, can mean the complete collapse of our Technology industry, a huge chunk of our highly skilled labor in our urban cities, a massive chunk of our Science research, a massive chunk of Wall Street, the list goes on and on…
The Deep State would have to be borderline mentally retarded to do this, and even the Deep State Federal Government is disproporationally Chinese! They would have to be suicidal and mentally retarded, beyond anything that we have seen before. For sure, this is plasuable, but is this really the case this time?
If it is true that this is a bioweapon, than America’s government and its leaders should be shoved down a meat grinder…
Yes, Harry Potter is popular around the world. But that’s mainly because of the Hollywood movies made by Warner Bros.
The Beatles et al are mainly popular because of the British Invasion i.e. because they became popular in the US first.
Very few Japanese are likely to have heard of Beatrix Potter.
I don’t think anyone in this thread has addressed the economic hit that various countries may take from the COVID19 panic.
Take it for what you think it’s worth, but the White House National Economic Council & Council of Economic Advisers released a COVID19 report on Feb. 2 quantifying the expected economic hit:
Head of the White House National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow (b.1947), is being attacked in the media today for saying the US has contained COVID19, while the CDC is signalling that its spread is now inevitable and San Francisco declaring an emergency.
(Not that it’s a bad idea to be/get prepared, but would you be that surprised if it turned out San Francisco’s decision-making process in declaring this COVID19 emergency now was more to spite Kudlow and Trump than for legitimate, immediate reasons?)
Sure. But the question of whether the coronavirus is especially lethal for Chinese is somewhat independent of whether it was a bioweapon attack. Earlier on, the former case looked more likely, but now it looks somewhat less likely. We’ll probably know better in another week or so.
Keep in mind that as of now, the coronavirus doesn’t seem especially lethal, having maybe 2% fatalities or something like that. So even if it had successfully spread throughout China, the primary impact would have been economic and social/political. And relatively few Chinese in the US would have been killed.
Still, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife is Chinese as was one of Rupert Murdoch’s, and their children would presumably be rather susceptible. Neither of those individuals might appreciate that sort of bioweapon.
Anyway, right now it seems less likely to be racially-targeted. But that doesn’t really settle whether it or not it was a bioweapon attack.
One major disadvantage of being a totally crazy government is that lots of people start suspecting you of doing things even if you actually didn’t…
@Kim
“Re ‘yes boomer’
Do you not think it strange how willingly younger people have decided to replace their critical faculties with memes?
It must be very convenient. Instead of forming and then expressing an opinion, you can just blurt out a meme.
Intellectually, it is an achievement that we would normally applaud in a parrot, but not so much in a human.”
It would appear that Kim completely nailed it and your comment confirms that.
“The Beatles et al are mainly popular because of the British Invasion i.e. because they became popular in the US first.” – Exactly. Just like pizza: S. Italy —> the US —> the World including N. Italy.
Here are three mortality charts courtesy of Brian Wang at Next Big Future:
https://i.imgur.com/uT3XrpS.png
https://i.imgur.com/OaebHRN.png
https://i.imgur.com/ND6B1f8.png
The most important meme that is being created is that the Chinese spread the plague, that they are responsible for it….
The meme seems to be pretty spontaneous. Media and governments can even warn against the prejudice. Nobody needs to to drive and push the meme explicitly as Germans did in the occupied Poland in WWII:
https://cdn1.imggmi.com/uploads/2020/2/26/c8188416ec62e969bfa68b6671cb3ab3-full.jpg
German propaganda poster that was plastered on the streets of German-occupied Poland: Jews – Lice – Typhus
https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/typhus-and-lice-in-jewish-ghettos-nazi-doctors-perverse-groupthink.html
It occurs to me that all references to soft power that I have read on this thread might usefully have added a distinction between (say) influence (including random influence) and power. No doubt Hollywood has done much to change sexual mores round the world but it doesn’t follow that the US can deliberately extract much benefit from its soft power.
IPTV 5 bucks a month derp all languages even films included.
Well, ain’t it just awesome that we have such a wonderful healthcare system (racket) in the land of the free? Millions of people here will avoid or delay going to a doctor or ER simply because they can’t afford to. Along with the fact that millions already have weak immune systems because of poor preventative care, poor health, poor diets, etc…
Add in the large homeless populations in every large and even small cities and towns now, lots of unsanitary practices, disease will spread like fire..
Add in incompetent, greedy, corrupt govt, who I honestly wouldn’t doubt started this. The greedy mfers would probably let the virus spread a little just to make the medical industry rich. Haha
Sounds like a SHTF scenario to me Bob. Times like this, I’m glad I live in the middle of nowhere.
Not good!
Theres still fewer people that have actually died from this Coronavirus than die in the US every year of the flu. So I don’t know whether to panic yet or not.
I’m sick of the CDC telling us an outbreak is “imminent”. Why can’t we just shut down all international flights for 30 days? The only thing that’s holding us back is money. Because the airlines are afraid they’d go bankrupt. Too damn bad! If this results in a mass outbreak, our economy is going to take a much bigger hit than the losses incurred by the airlines. This is stupidity times ten.
Thanks! However, I did not watch any TV for the last 10+ years and it feels so good that I don’t want to start again.
This is not stupidity as such, this is severe myopia caused by insatiable greed. For most for-profit corporations long-term planning means thinking about their the next quarter share price. For-profit entities are like prostitutes for whom overnight stay is a long-term relationship. Remember Merck blunder with Vioxx? Or more recent Boeing blunder with 737MAX? It’s exactly the same thing caused by the same kind of thinking.
I recall many years ago getting an admission from the Director of our Anti Cancer Council that the legislation intended to curb tobacco use would be bad for the national and state budget because those killed were typically just beyond pensionable and medically expensive retirement age – and tobacco taxes were high. Surely someone can work that sort of reasoning into analysis of the effects of the Coronavirus outbreak. Not comforting for the many retired and other elderly folk on UR perhaps 🙂
Relevant points is exactly what statistics are supposed to be. We moderns believe in them like.., like nothing else…
So some of the boys here have a fetish for statistics, they have caught the statistics virus so to speak, it is a non lethal virus, though often not so good for the organs of digestion, which might get upset if the statistics are bad news. I don’t know whether there are statistics to prove that, yet.
Statistics makes a man and authorities look bigger, on track with reality and capable of prophetizing the future, like authorities they will look, even the owner of this site has the data counting virus, no wonder, we are all food for statistic, all websites do it, social media do it, governments do it, institutions do it, we all do it. Technically as a human you do not exist, except for these statistics, which are good for selling the sheep something or leading the sheep somewhere. Now donate some on the bottom of the page, as statistics are worth money. And be glad that the shepherds keep up with counting the sheep.
Sorry but people do have reason to think the disease was brought into their country by someone from China. In the story you linked, the first 2 cases in Italy were 2 elderly Chinese tourists who were traveling with a group of 100 near Milan. And now Milan is near the center of the outbreak. The first death in Italy was in Padua, just outside Venice, and that same tourist group most likely also visited Venice since that’s where most tourists go.
This ties to what I’ve been saying. Chinese tourists were never popular to begin with due to their bad manners, bad English and they are everywhere, now they are positively loathed and despised since China continues to allow them to leave the country and spread the virus everywhere. If China had done the responsible thing and shut down all outbound air travels the day they shut down Wuhan, the world would not be looking at a Pandemic right now. China brought this upon the world, now they need to bear the consequence of the world’s fear and loathing of their people. The unfortunate part is, all Asians are now looked upon negatively because most non-Asians can’t tell them apart, so now they probably hate the mainland Chinese even more.
So, let me see if I am getting this; it is an “astonishing” coincidence that the US sent some soldiers to an Olympic-style military event weeks before the coronavirus, but mere statististical noise, that the epicenter of the virus was 200 yards from China’s most advanced bioweapon’s lab?
Update on South Korea cases:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/coronavirus-prepping/#comment-3737157
As of today:
Plus one US soldier infected, who was stationed near the biggest superspreading event by the Shinchonji doomsday cult; unclear how he was infected.
This growing data suggests that if you come into reasonably close but non-prolonged contact with a COVID19-infected person, you are at a 4% of getting it yourself. What are the same odds for regular flu?
This could favour many. Confining citizens to quarantine in their flats and houses, or large hospital facilities, sure will kill off any large gatherings of anti-government protesters. In the future such viral epidemics and pandemics could be hoaxed when needed to stifle some protest movement.
Banning cash money because it transmits viruses could be something favoured by banks.
Greater control of the population through medical/health authorities and greater profits for the pharmaceutical industry.
Off course it can also turn people against foreigners as these could be carriers of communicable diseases. At the moment this seems directed only at the Chinese and those who have been in contact with them.
Thank you. Sorry I cannot provide a reference, but I believe some of that happened in 1918 when I lost my grandfather.
Probably not, but if we’re lucky, it could be a solution to your bill problems.
Thank you. Sorry, I cannot provide a reference, but I believe some of that happened in 1918 when I lost my grandfather.
Perfectly true. Tragic for the old and ill and a tiny minority of young and healthy and those who love them. Economic recovery in no time worth mentioning. In Australia, 1% of the population dies every year. That’s normal for most of the rich world and nobody notices except their families.
The Chinese success will not be duplicated in most countries. Note that the US CDC website states the CDC has carried out a total of 426 tests for coronavirus since the beginning. Compare that with Iran’s testing of 1,750 in the week to last Monday. The USA will have to be willing to spend a lot more money if they want to avoid suffering much worse than Iran. That will happen at the latest when many people start dying so I’ll be surprised if the number of dead Yanks exceeds 5 million and happy if it can be kept to thousands. Nobody but a fool wants a United States of Disease spreading death through the world. [email protected]
Paid Chinese troll detected.
BTW; those appear to be four boys in the second picture.
I think you are allowing the fun of brilliant deployment of cost free debating points to overshadow the supreme numeracy one associates with your scientific background and achievements.
It is hard to accept your bolded “exceptionallys” and “extremelys” without noticing that the timing coincidence isn’t all that strange. Ruling out completely as absurd (though there might be a 1 in 100,000 chance of anti Xi sabotage) a deliberate virus release by the Chinese government, what can one make of the chance of timing? Very little. Supposing a
the virus is introduced to the wet market as suitable cover. What is the period that is/would be suspicious – maybe 6 weeks out of 52. And then one has to take account of the possibility (maybe small until you zero in on a hypothetical culprit) that the likely flow on effect on the American economy actually made it less likely that the Lunar New Year dispersion would be targeted. It is also at least arguable that the presence of 300 US military would have made it a time to avoid. And there might be a place for factoring in “some critical or important fact neither Ron Unz nor anyone else has yet become aware of” but I leave that to someone with much more sophisticated understanding of probability theory than I. But I got set off by the “extremely” and “exceptionally” which surely give too much credibility to potential anti-American propaganda – which the CCP seems to have withheld and maybe even censored.
Since it was in Singapore which sports a tropical climate. Temperature may not be sufficient to stop it.
“Middle Ages” is a broad time frame stetching from 400s to early 1000s. St. Mark’s is on the tail end of that era, and architecturally that period was separate from the truly decrepit period that was the middle ages. Besides, the St. Mark’s basilica is just a ripoff of Turkic and Iranian architecture, which the west kept imitating with its reflecting pools (Taj Mahal, Chehel Sotoun) and its gazebos. Christian Europe was truly impoverished, both in mind, body and soul. Only by rejecting that disastrous religion, crushing the skulls of anyone who defended it, and opening our minds did we make it out of the abyss. Where modern Europe really excelled was never beauty or originality of art, but physical science and weapons creation.
Cases confirmed in Singapore, a picture of its spread in a tropical climate.
Feb. 25 WHO situation report:
Singapore at COVID19 90 cases,
– of which, 24 cases were infected in China,
– of which, 66 cases were infected in Singapore, pres. by the above.
Feb. 11 WHO situation report:
Singapore at COVID19 45 cases,
– of which, 22 cases were infected in China,
– of which, 23 cases were infected in Singapore, pres. by the above.
This data appears to mean Singapore has contained the virus, with only a net addition of 45 new cases in two weeks, 2 of which are arrivals from China.
So the pool of 22 infected arrivals as of Feb. 11 has spread to 66 cases by today, and no longer increasing, two weeks later. This looks like a much, much lower spread rate than that seen in cold S.Korea (mainly caused by a doomsday cult) and relatively-cold northern Italy.
The spread in Malaysia is even lower (18 cases arrived from China; only 2 cases confirmed infected while in Malaysia itself), but it is perhaps true that Malaysia’s data is less reliable than Singapore’s .
Call me small brain if you like but I’m sticking to its not worse than a bad cold or flu. Both cold and flu also affect the elderly and chronically ill hardest.
Like flu and pre-vaccine measles, confirmed cases only 1-10% of actual cases. Thats because mild cases are not tested or reported. In fact most never see a Doctor. This is probably exacerbated by those who fear being quarantined with really sick people. So that brings the fatality rate to 0.03-0.3% because the dead and seriously ill probably do get tested.
Then there is a issue of test validity. The tests have been rushed to market. Sensitivity and specificity not well established. A better indicator is hospitals admissions due to pneumonia and comparison to other winters. A socialized country like China should have no problem providing that data. According to WHO there are 200 million pneumonia cases worldwide each year. If half occur in winter China would have 14 million pneumonia cases in a typical winter. So far only 80,000 covid-2019 cases (not all are pneumonia, only 20%). Drop in the bucket.
Anyways, there is a clear agenda. Vaccine profits, more government control, etc. China is a member of the club. They have other reasons for going along as well. A distraction for the people growing increasingly unhappy over wealth inequality, pollution and censorship. As a one party state they cant blame the other party. Blaming the US for their virus helps deflect the anger. Meanwhile HK protests all ended.
Why do people keep assuming that if this virus is a bioweapon, it had to be made by a government? Biohackers have been using CRISPR to alter genetics in their basement for years. It’s just as likely that an unethical biohacker created this virus and released it through China’s unregulated food markets, as it is for China to have punked itself. No government like the USA or China would sabotage their own economies and wreak havoc that makes them look incompetent for no good reason.
Agent76 stated a fact.
Why the ad hominem?
Do you deny it?
Heard the same hyperbole during SARS. “Experts” like you were touting 100M deaths globally. It turned out we had 1750 cases and 286 deaths in Hong Kong. But after more than a month of COVID-19, we have only 2 deaths in Hong Kong and 85 confirmed cases.
You are full of it.
The Chinese authorities could have shut down Wuhan/Hubei earlier
Do you really think that running a country of 1,400 million people is that straightforward?
Why is Trump not shutting down the USA at this very moment?
Despite CDC Warning, Trump Doesn’t Sound Too Concerned About Coronavirus
I think that politicians in the USA have had far longer to prepare then their Chinese counterparts.
“The Island”(Острово) by Pavel Lungin is a movie that may shine a light for the west to save itself from abyss of materialistic degradation and decadence or like the main character in the movie, sit down in a coffin and burry it self in oblivion. But I am afraid too little too late. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
P.S.
Of course if nuclear waste, pandemics and everything else don’t do the job prior to the dumbification. But then again, three horsemen ride hand in hand together, right?
Pizza is very good in Northern Italy, but it’s like shit in the USA. How could it be adopted in Northern Italy from the USA, if North Italian pizza is more similar to South Italian pizza than to the American version?
Ron, regardless of how who looks at you, the major problem persists in the way the top reacts to crisis situations. Just look at New York, Houston, Puerto Rico, Gulf of Mexico, not to mention Catrina. Pure incompetence.
Small correction/clarification , the main character did not went to oblivion in the movie.
Harry Potter books had a wide readership in Hungary before the movies already.
“Less likely to be racially targeted”? Do you mean to say (also) that it is unlikely to be – by chance of nature – more likely to infect East Asians?
Obstinate on purpose or dense? There would be no that much interest in pizza in Northern Italy if it was not first validated by America.
Why not? Regional foods tend to spread within countries. I think paella spread in Catalonia before it spread anywhere else, and it didn’t really spread anywhere else anyway.
This idea reflects the trend in technology which could be called the democritization of catastrophic power, illustrated by the thought-experiment where-in grumpy old John Doe, upon returning from a bad vacation in Miami, decides to nuke the city, and has the means to construct said nuke in his basement. This is the best argument for an authoritarian police state I’ve ever heard — of course I can think of better options that are just as safe, I just can’t think of any option that obviates the imperative for panoptical surveillance — I’d rather just that the surveillance itself be democratized, so that everyone has purview, and no clique can monopolize the competitive advantage conferred by control of the panopticon. We’re not so far off from mind-reading/writing technology, to the extent it isn’t already here — kept under wraps. Same thing, if you don’t want society to turn into a two-tiered control-clique vs slave bifurcation, with eventual specieation differentiation, it would seem prudent to move towards a very open-source, full transparency kind of situation where that power is democratized. (Not sure if “democratized” is the best term/neologism for this, suggestions for alternatives welcome)
The most intriguing (I’m in no position to call any of these credible — I simply don’t have the expertise or data) theories I’ve heard come from Robert David Steele, and a bit more outlandishly from Benjamin Fulford, both of whom claim there was some element of bio-attack but that the attackers were not USA properly speaking but rather some kind of transnational mafia… which of course do have the resources of superpowers — as they’ve captured the deep-state and intelligence apparati in the West. Nevertheless, you are right not to discount smaller players, like that nerve gas attack in Japan by that cult so many years ago.
Huge amount of chaff being thrown around about this Covid thing. I’m no expert and even if I was I don’t have access to the relevant data.
Simply on the basis of logic though, I’ll reiterate for the third time: If this was a racially specific bio-attack, there is no reason to assume we’re dealing with the same agent in all cases. The one in Wuhan would be tailored differently than the one in Qom. Indeed, if symmetric retaliation was desired, a non-accusatory stance would facilitate plausible deniability for a retaliatory racially-specific variation to be employed in such a way as to appear an organic part of a unified pandemic.
Incidentally I would be surprised if they would go for symmetric retaliation except in catastrophic circumstances. For awhile, some of the (disinfo?) coming out of Wuhan made it seem like fatalities were in the tens of thousands creeping up towards millions (crematoriums burned out, millions of body bags, etc).
To be fair, as long as we’re casting aspersions on the USA deep-state (justified aspersions given revelations post 9/11) on its potential for highly malicious and destructive activities, we can postulate scenarios where the CCP might go in for some rather devious actions themselves. Logically, for example, they might decide to release a pandemic knowing that they could survive it better overall; they aren’t low on folks, have some experience chewing through millions to achieve certain aims, perhaps it would be calculated as worth the cost given the proportionally higher damage it would be calculated to do to certain adversaries. I’m not proposing this as anything more than a thought-experiment. Just keep an open mind and consider all of the scenarios (many more) fitting the pauce data you have.
Robert David Steele suggested there is a big 5G element to this. Another interesting coincidence is the recent rollout of the 5G grid in Wuhan. This whole EM dimension opens up a myriad of other possibilities, too many to enumerate even the fraction I myself can think of.
Let me unpack that for NPC boomers: since boomers are NPC’s, it is not worth the time or effort to speak to them as if they’re real people. Canned keywords suffice.
Wow, you’re truly nuts.
“The most intriguing (I’m in no position to call any of these credible — I simply don’t have the expertise or data) theories I’ve heard come from Robert David Steele, and a bit more outlandishly from Benjamin Fulford” No expertise needed. Just a common sense. Stay away from Robert David Steele and Benjamin Fulford. BTW, Benjamin Fulford is the original Qanon concocting the 3D message of hope for the gullible.
Mr. Unz,
I translated the attached Article from Sputnik News, so you guys are aware of what the Spanish Language News Sources are reporting. I first read this on a Mexican News site “El Excelsior” and when I tried to search the same info in English, I received no hits. So I translated what I found on Spanish Sputnik. I’m not saying that the Cubans found a solution, because there is no way any Third World country can have the capacity to find a cure, before the Western countries.
HAVANA (Sputnik) – The Chinese Health Commission selected the Interferon alpha 2B recombinant (IFNrec), an antiviral produced in the biotechnology industry of Cuba, to be used in the treatment of the coronavirus, a disease that so has so far affected more of 28,000 people and has killed 563 infected.
“The Chinese-Cuban plant Changheber in Jilin began production on the first day of the Lunar New Year, using Cuban technology and assistance. “The Chinese Health Commission has selected our product among those used in the fight against coronavirus “, confirmed the Presidency of Cuba in his Twitter account.
According to the Cuban ambassador to China, Carlos Miguel Pereira, the Changheber mixed plant began the preparation of the Cuban drug since January 25, taking into account “its potential to cure the respiratory condition.”
According to specialists, IFNrec is applied against viral infections caused by HIV, recurrent respiratory papillomatosis caused by the human papilloma virus, accumulated condyloma and hepatitis types B and C, in addition to being effective in therapies against different types of cancer.
In the past day the National Health Commission received from 31 provinces reports on 28,018 confirmed cases of pneumonia caused by the new type of coronavirus.
Of this total, 3,859 people are in serious condition, 563 died and 1,153 were discharged, says the statement from the National Health Commission of China.
At the end of 2019, China announced having detected a new strain of coronavirus, listed as 2019-nCoV, in Wuhan City. The disease can be transmitted from person to person and is contagious without symptoms during the incubation phase, up to 14 days.
On January 30, the World Health Organization (WHO) decreed an international emergency for the spread of the new coronavirus.
Let’s see if someone finds a cure for this thing…
The cancer has migrated to his brain
First “pizzeria” in Milan
And btw, you wrote “it’s like shit in the USA”. Is that strong opinion based on your personal experience? Where, how many different places did you try?
I respectfully disagree on Robert David Steele, though I’m not sure, and am to some degree withholding judgement on just about everyone. Fulford does seem like a fantasy purveyor, however there may be more to it than that.
To say that QAnon is an information-operation doesn’t amount to much — QAnon admits to being an information-operation. The question is: what sort of information operation? Is it the sort that dives into the pudgy proletarian mass and strives to wake them from their passive slumber into an active investigatory progenitor to a re-engaged American public? If this is the case then these false-hope charges are missing the point. If QAnon gets people weaned from the MSM and actively investigating things, then I would say it’s a beneficial information operation.
Robert David Steele is just one dude, therefore flawed like everyone. However, he produces some truly excellent work which has significant value towards the project of a restoration of an honorable American republic. I would not suggest anyone stay away from him, quite the contrary.
Incidentally, this is still one of the better conversations/articles on the Wuhan event I’ve seen:
https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/445094/Interview-A-Counterintelligence-Perspective-on-the-Wuhan-Virus
He could have been more circumspect in conclusions, but toying with scenarios is what intel is all about. Provisional assumptions, operating assumptions and so forth.
Common Flu kills 153 Americans every day. Yet no 24/7 fear porn regarding this fact by the Deep Fake Propaganda outlets, which tells you that their 24/7 fear porn regarding Coronavirus has nothing to do with public health.
And there is still no hard evidence that Coronavirus is more deadly than the common flu to persons of non-East Asian genetic extraction. And, no, we don’t have to “wait a little longer” to have a grasp of the situation; we have all the data we need right now, and the data indicates that Coronavirus is indeed a manufactured, genome-biased virus. The only question that needs answering now is whether it originated in a Chinese lab or Neocon bioweapon lab.
People who use meaningless and pompous phrases like “a restoration of an honorable American republic” get what they deserve which is the la-la land of Qanon, Steele and Fulford.
What you refer to as twisting and turning is natural selection, a process recognized by one Charles Darwin in the mid-1830’s. I guess you are a creationist who enjoys all the benefits artificial selection has provided to agricultural production, but who can’t admit that a similar process works without human intervention whenever different species interact intensively.
No, utu is correct. What we call pizza today originates in Southern Italy, I believe specifically Naples. Southern Italian immigrants brought it to the US, where it developed into its modern form and became popular. It then became popular throughout the world through US influence.
A lot of what’s known and popular as “Italian food” throughout the world is actually Italian American food originating in southern Italian cuisine. Besides pizza, there are dishes like spaghetti and meatballs that native Italians in Italy don’t eat but that are popular as Italian food in places like Latin America and Asia because of American influence.
How hard would it be to imagine an MSM headline of “COVID19 reveals East Europeans’ xenophobia”?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERsDahMXsAAMYOq.png
The link provides data on deaths from measles and the reduction thereof by vaccines. Useful for arguing with fools if you want keep doing that.
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/downloads/measlesdataandstatsslideset.pdf
Wow, this 8th century European church looks like the wreckage of the Titanic:
https://s0.geograph.org.uk/photos/93/35/933521_3aa5f7de.jpg
https://static3.thetravelimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/titanic1-e1542497861799.jpg
China’s soft power is sort of a mixed bag. On one hand, they’ve endeared themselves to many African and Asian countries by building infrastructure. Not invading countries like the US is also a big plus. Some Chinese dramas are becoming popular, but they are still overshadowed by Korea and Japan.
China has also squandered a lot of opportunities. They’ve alienated many south east Asians by enforcing the nine-dash line in the south China sea, and its been done in a very ham-handed manner. Overreacting to every single perceived slight that a foreign country makes is not going to make China popular in the long term, nor will it help China forge alliances.
“..whether it originated in a Chinese lab or Neocon bioweapon lab…” – Obviously I can’t say that I know but I would look after people who synthesized SARS, and MERS viruses with novel functions. I would also consider the fact that Americans are much more advanced in this research.
Ralph Baric conducted his research despite of the 2013 Moratorium on Gain-of-Function Research
In Ralph Baric CV:
https://media-speakerfile-pre.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/cc4e5e5d442320c20c7f76a0c3cadce51445358867.pdf
You can find that he was invited speaker at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA):
and two grants from Southeast Regional Center of Excellence for Emerging Infections and Biodefense (SERCEB):
and one grant form Pacific Northwest Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases Research (PNWRCE)
The same Ralph Baric in late January this year issued the following never-mind-don’t-worry statement:
So prime demographic cohort of Trump voters are most likely to die from SARS 2.0 in US, at least initially at the start of inevitable outbreak. USA currently is faring among absolutely the worst countries in the world regarding detection of infected people, so in a matter of few weeks it will blow up spectacularly, as hospital staff together with patients in US are being infected left and right now.
My prediction is that at some point stock market(s) will be closed in US like it was closed in 1914, election rallies will be stopped too. US elections might probably be postponed indefinetely too, but it will be clear at the end of the summer.
211.Agent76 says:
“Feb 24, 2020 Coronavirus Crisis in China: What To Believe? Brave Journalist Lifts Veil of Secrecy.
Jennifer Zeng, born and raised in China has been a key figure in the information war surrounding the ongoing crisis in China as the Chinese Government continues to suppress and control information.”
239.utu says:
@Agent76
“Jennifer Zeng is Falun Gong operator.”
This from from the author of an outrageous article at Harvardtothebighouse: “the only entities to acknowledge my [rubbish] research and journalism have been Zero Hedge, which received a permanent ban from Twitter for opening the door to this obvious possibility, and Jennifer Zeng of the Epoch Times.”
Our “Tyler Durden” at Zero Hedge has in the past published some good articles on financial matters, but recently has gotten in over his head and has published many speculative, inflammatory, and undocumented claims that qualify as deranged conspiratorial stupidity, sufficiently that I no longer refer to that website for information on any subject. Zero Hedge was not banned from Twitter for “opening the door” to a Chinese release of a pathogen, but for doxxing a reputable scientist and publishing his photo and personal information in a slanderous and undocumented article based entirely on imagination.
Jennifer Zeng is not a “key figure in the information war” nor in anything else. She’s a brain-scrambled air-head producing inflammatory and undocumented rubbish for the Epoch Times. The Epoch Times in turn, is a Jewish-owned, CIA-financed China-bashing rag in California that specialises in inflammatory innuendo on China, and is generally viewed as the NYT’s garbage pail. Two years ago, the Epoch Times paid a huge amount of money to settle a lawsuit by Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi after claiming she had been passed around the Chinese Politburo for sex. Immediately prior, she had just broken up with her Jewish boyfriend who had both CIA and Epoch Times connections. In their defense, the Epoch Times said they received an anonymous letter containing the information about Zhang and “We thought it was true but we didn’t check. We made an innocent mistake.”
249.Dutch Boy says:
@Ron Unz
“Steven Mosher claims that employees at the Chinese Bioweapons labs actually sell test animals that survive at the local meat markets.” His reference: https://nypost.com/2020/02/22/dont-buy-chinas-story-the-coronavirus-may-have-leaked-from-a-lab/
(1) Steven Mosher is an ideologue whose biased and uninformed comments are unworthy of repetition.
(2) Who, in their right mind, working in a Level-4 lab containing lethal pathogens, will “smuggle” potentially infected research animals out of the lab and sell them “on the street”? And why would they do that? Lunch money for underpaid Ph.Ds? What is the street selling price of a Bubonic plague-infected rat these days? Who would be so stupid as to buy them? And for what reason? Two-for-one specials?
It is not possible to “smuggle” anything out of a BS-4 lab. One of the exit conditions for such a facility is stripping naked for a shower and decontamination prior to exit. Do you take the infected bats into the shower with you? And hope they remain quiet as you pass through the exit guard-houses?
This is just rubbish. For God’s sake, doesn’t anyone know how to think anymore?
229.Anatoly Karlin says: • Website
US advantages [in combating a virus outbreak]:
“Smoking is a large risk factor.” This is idle speculation irresponsibly presented as fact. There are no proven links, positive or negative, between smoking and the coronavirus.
“Wealth. More Americans can afford to stockpile/prep meaningfully”. Wealthy Americans can stockpile what? There are no medications to combat this virus, so what do Americans stockpile? Canned salmon? AA batteries? And how do advantaged Americans “prep meaningfully” for a virus they can neither prevent nor cure? Clean the garage? Fluff the pillows?
It might be better if Karlin would ‘prep meaningfully’ before writing articles and making comments.
Consider this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339070128_The_possible_origins_of_2019-nCoV_coronavirus
So it is more than possible that some lab worker after once again being peed/bloodied on by some collected cave bat in the field with this SARS 2.0 virus, quarantined himself for 14 days in October/November, felt nothing, then happily returned to work, went to the market after workday and the rest is modern disaster history devoloping right before our eyes now.
Jennifer Zeng
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Zeng
“mainland Chinese-born human rights activist and author, best known for her practice of Falun Gong”
Jennifer Zeng Wants Israelis to Know What Happens in China
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-jennifer-zeng-wants-israelis-to-know-about-human-rights-violations-in-china-1.6936958
There is no doubt that Falun Gong is perceived by the Chinese Government as the destabilization tool used by CIA. One can find articles about support of Department Of State (DoS), National Endowment For Democracy (NED) for Falun Gong. The Epoch Times is Falun Gong outfit.
European church
England is no longer in Europe. Check it out!
You are linking to the web.archive.org because the article that allegedly was posted as a preprint at ResearchGate was very quickly removed and is no longer available and there is no official record of it at ResearchGate. There was no trace of it already when Zerohedge published an article about it. So Zerohedge decided to upload the preprint to SCRIBD to prolong its life on the web. Zerohedge and all the British tabloid rags like Daily Mail, The Sun, Mirror, Express and Daily Telegraph reported on it within hours from each other.
You can have two interpretations:
(1) Brave Chinese researchers Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao tried to tell us the truth but the evil Chinese communist government removed their paper and probably sent them to a gulag. But fortunately because of our courageous and truth loving media and reporters at Zerohedge and at all the British tabloid rags we were able to learn the truth
or
(2) This is just a psyop by one of American or British intelligence agencies. One can always count on the British tabloids to forward the CIA/MI6 psyop narratives (Look at Litvinenko or Skripal affairs). And apparently Zerohedge played a prominent role in this operation. The purpose of the psyop was to create the Chinese-did-it meme.
Now ask yourself what was the profound truth the article was telling us? Is it about the distance between the wet market and the lab? Is that all?
Why don’t you google the distance to the wet market from the following address: Trade Tower I, No. 568, Jianshe Avenue, Jianghan District, Wuhan 430022 which happens to be U.S. Consulate General Wuhan. Do you think you could get Zerohedge interested in an article titled: U.S. Consulate General suspiciously close to the wet market in Wuhan.
Looks very much like a typical English church to me. I find the idea of an English church being called “European” quite odd, not factually incorrect, but doesn’t sound quite right either.
I think it’s because the Church of England is seen as being distinct from churches on the continent, so if the C of E is anything, it’s NOT “European”.
Proximity alone indeed is not sufficient proof for anything, but proximity coupled with past contamination incidents when collecting/handling live bats is noteworthy, to say the least.
So you’re saying that the nasty British-American elites who have masterminded this anti-Chinese conspiracy (in your opinion) don’t have any control over ResearchGate, a site based in the EU, in Germany of all places? I suppose you’re one of those who thinks it’s a American bioweapon, despite the fact that neither the Chinese government or any media outlet in China has suggested that being the case. So China is just letting the US attack their country and not saying a word about it, and in fact even making themselves look guilty by covering it up as much as they can?
All the evidence so far points towards it being a Chinese engineered bioweapon for use against unrest within China, such as the Uyghurs in Xinjiang or maybe in Hong Kong.
The Beatles were so long ago that they are hardly a reflection of modern British soft power, same with the popularity of Monty Python in many countries.
British soft power seems to be based on the past, it doesn’t seem to be being renewed.
“…neither the Chinese government or any media outlet in China has suggested that being the case…”– Are you taking them for idiots?
Still waiting for you to answer to my comment nr.18 on the article “Chadian Breeders”…
St Mark’s was inspired by Byzantium; and specifically, the Church of the Holy Apostles.
Some people have the low threshold astonishment gene.
Won’t it be in Chinese interests to promote the NCOV is an American bioweapon to sabotage the rise of China line in the media or on sites like these to get the heat of them? Or on sites like these, not that I’m accusing Ron Unz, metallicman, Pepe Escobar, and Godfree Robert of being witting or unwitting wumao of course…..
The fact that a few non east asians have been affected by the coronavirus does not preclude the possibility that it was a directed bioweapon. It is possible that a few non east asians may share a genomic segment, that is more prevalent in east asians, andis a pathway to infection. This will not be known until and unless genomic testing is completed.
Considering the vastly different interest in the headline
and
I think the commenters from the rest of UR might just show a slight propensity to be attracted to clickbait.
The issue doesn’t seem to be cigarette smoking per-se: rather mechanisms that cause repeated lung injury/inflammation that result in higher ACE2 gene expression. For example this study ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25981293/)
from 2015 (in a rat model) states:
This study indicated that inflammation pulmonary edema and histological changes resulted from smoke inhalation induced lung injury were possibly attributed to abnormal expression of ACE and ACE2 related pathway.
So the key issue appears to be repeated lung injury which can presumably occur in multiple ways. So if people have “weak lungs” and susceptible to persistent coughs – for example taking a month to heal their coughing rather than a week from a cough-inducing cold/flu – they may be more likely to have COVID-19 take hold.
Keep in mind that ACE2 is just one part of the bigger puzzle: if you have a robust immune system (including getting enough sleep which is key to the immune system being healthy), have healthy organs etc it would mitigate the risk. Cigarette smokers on average tend to have a lifestyle that generally is less than optimal for overall health and the immune system. Eg https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/50th-anniversary/pdfs/fs_smoking_overall_health_508.pdf
Corona spreading in northern Italy is supported by the local air pollution.
https://twitter.com/arpitrage/status/1232401672024010753
Paul Ewald, head of the program in evolutionary medicine at U. of Louisville, orginated a verbal theory of how virulence is affected by transmission ecology. Others subsequently elaborated Ewald’s ideas mathematically , as reviewed in a paper I linked to earlier. The link here provides an interview with Ewald where he summarizes his verbal theory.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/6/text_pop/l_016_06.html
The estimate of a 4% risk of becoming infected by each instance of close proximity to a person already infected by Covid-19 means that walking slowly through a crowd where some are infected would provide a substantial probability of getting infected. If infection is that easy for the virus when urban populations are behaving as they wish, then there seems to be a lot of room for the virus to evolve a shorter incubation a period and more rapid within-host reproduction (= greater virulence) without much reducing the transmission probability.
As a south american I wouldn’t in any way be pleased or indifferent in case those concerns and predictions of the author actually materialize in the world.
But still as such, we wouldn’t bath in tears if the deep MIC and banksters state collapses by the virus and an economic devastation. Then hopefully the northern beast would turn their attention to China and their own bleeding and infectious wounds.
Best explanation for the 100% Iranian death rate I’ve seen so far.
Prince Philip, aka Boca Negra
413.sudden death says:
“So it is more than possible that some lab worker after once again being peed/bloodied on by some collected cave bat in the field with this SARS 2.0 virus, quarantined himself for 14 days in October/November, felt nothing, then happily returned to work, went to the market after workday and the rest is modern disaster history devoloping right before our eyes now.”
Your imagination is working overtime. Has it occurred to you that your USA is much worse but that your media never report it?
Between 2005 and 2012, the US CDC got 1,059 “release reports” — an average of an incident every few days involving “theft, loss, release causing an occupational exposure, or release outside of primary biocontainment barriers” of agents.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cdc-botched-handling-of-deadly-flu-virus/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285575/
http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2842494-CDC-2008-Autoclave-Potential-Exposure-Incident.html
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2014/p0711-lab-safety.html
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/06/02/newly-disclosed-cdc-lab-incidents-fuel-concerns-safety-transparency/84978860/
http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2842405-CDC-Email-13May2011-Re-Tech-Leaving-Lab-Without.html
That’s about 1,050 more than China had during the same period. Get off your high horse.
You can’t get more substantial than an actual real life demonstration of the theory’s predictions, as described by the person who had the original insights into the relationship between transmission effectiveness and virulence.
The words of Paul Ewald, professor of evolutionary medicine, U. of Louisville:
Here is a documented case of a US lab carrying Ebola and Corona Virus having to shut down due to poor controls. This in addition to Lyme Disease which is expected to be a US bioware agent that was accidentally released.
It is also important to point out the fact that the U.S. military’s key laboratories involving the study of deadly pathogens, including coronaviruses, Ebola and others, was suddenly shut down last July after the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified major “biosafety lapses” at the facility.
The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland — the U.S. military’s lead laboratory for “biological defense” research since the late 1960s — was forced to halt all research it was conducting with a series of deadly pathogens after the CDC found that it lacked “sufficient systems in place to decontaminate wastewater” from its highest-security labs and failure of staff to follow safety procedures, among other lapses. The facility contains both level 3 and level 4 biosafety labs.
https://www.unz.com/wwebb/bats-gene-editing-and-bioweapons-recent-darpa-experiments-raise-concerns-amid-coronavirus-outbreak/
Trump has only to announce that all healthcare would be free in case of Pandemia in the USA.
Governemnt would foot the bill and prices could be fixed) and nobody would want to risk a Sanders system when the actual one can give good care for free without any resistance …
Thats an easy parade against Sanders advantage in case of Wuhan flu pandemia.
It is more than possible that it is a bioweapon too since Americas own PNAC already advocated for using race based bioweapons.
“…combat likely will 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.”
https://archive.org/details/RebuildingAmericasDefenses/page/n5/mode/2up
The whole Corona thing is a massive jerk off and when all the hoopla is over the public will once again come to realize they have had smoke blown up their arse. The sad part of it is that this situation will come around again and again most people will go into a frenzy again.
We have been through this before with SARS and West Nile and this and that flu.
The education system today teaches people to regurgitate what they read in a text book. It does not teach them to THINK ! That is why the media and the “experts” lead the general population by the nose !
The ignorant majority today must be the dumbest bunch of f###ers ever.
If that were in fact the case, I would think that the scenario that would give cover to the US, is to arrange to have China “steal” the technology, and in the process of stealing it, have the bio-weapon escape.
What seems so odd to me is China’s reaction to this epidemic. It is almost like China was afraid they were going to be caught red-handed releasing something that could be very dangerous to humanity as a whole, and went over-board trying to contain the problem. And of course if it was stolen technology, then they would likely not know just how virulent or infectious it actually was.
If it was a bio-weapon of China’s creation, China’s reputation is screwed. If it was the US’ bio-weapon and China “stole” it, they are also screwed because they stole it and can’t really admit they were stealing technology. China is screwed either way.
I find it strange how the US and other Western countries seem to believe everything China says and all stats they produce without questioning it, yet are immediately accusing Iran of lying and covering up the truth.
I don’t see why China would be inherently any more believable than Iran, if anything the rapid spread of the virus and death rate so far in Iran implies that it’s Iran telling the truth and China who is lying.
Strange speculations aside – going overboard is the typical authoritarian solution to anything and everything.
Just don’t get how USA biosafety screwups negate the possibility of Chinese biosafety screwups? It just proves that humans in general tend to screwup sooner or later, thus Murphy’s laws were born not from pure fantasy at all, but practice 🙂
New York City has already started protective measures. Our Urgent Care Clinics, which were created to take some of the stress off hospital Emergency Rooms where people w/o health coverage were popping in regularly for routine care, have now created the Virtual Urgent Care Clinic.
When you have flu-like symptoms instead of going to see a doctor or going to an Emergency Room for diagnosis and treatment you can now go online to the virtual care clinic and be diagnosed. They then call in any prescriptions to the nearest pharmacy which will deliver the medicine to your home (probably rings the doorbell, drops a package and then quickly runs away).
Who knew medical care would be so simple in the 21st century…
“Zerohedge”?
I always thought it was Ziohedge……. 🙂
Most pasta dishes in general seem to be an Italian-American invention. In my experience it’s difficult to find pasta as a main meal in a non-touristy restaurant in Italy.
“1) Just a month before the outbreak, the PirBright Institute (backed by Bill Gates) ran a simulation based on a Corona Virus pandemic and they did not invite China.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. An otherwise fine post gets marred by repeating the same misinformation about China not being invited to this oh-so-suspicious forum.
As I posted previously multiple times here on Unz, China was not only invited, the head of China’s CDC, Dr George F Gao, was openly listed as one of the 15 “stars” who were headlined to be at the event: http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/players/index.html
And here’s his bio on the website: http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/players/gao.html
Fact checking is always a good idea, no matter how much you trust the source, or ‘want to believe’.
Otherwise, a nice, concise list of good links for those unfamiliar with this issue.
Cheers!
MM
Once again they’re proving that there’s only one real KKK in the world today.
The Kvetching Kosher Khazars.
Moral Panic much? Yawn Snore.
Oh, speaking of which, you’ll all be happy to know that as of yet, ZERO deaths in Israel.
Just search
Guess they’ll have to get around to making up some imaginary number.
That should be no problem for them.
Fix’t it for you. Same goes for “Chinese”, “Japanese”, “Mexican”, etc., food.
I think (but I’m not sure) that the only kind of food that doesn’t ultimately originate as American fast food is Vietnamese.
That doesn’t make Vietnam into some sort of “soft power” heavyweight, of course.
“Power” is controlled violence by another name; making money by selling fast food franchises, children’s books and celebrity photos isn’t “power”.
Not necessarily. That is a truly dumb notion.
How about the US’ reaction to 9/11? If you want to argue that we are an authoritarian nation, then what does it take not to be one?
Your English is excellent — better than my proficiency in any foreign language. I know German reasonably well, yet I’d be glad to write in German as well as you write in English.
Agreed.
But a more appropriate, more accurate name for it than “American” would be
The Empire of Jewish Supremacy Inc.
I’ve said it before and will say it again, because it’s worth repeating,
Well, taste is subjective, but I strongly disagree, and it’s highly doubtful you’ve been to as many pizza places in the USA as I have (for the sake of your health, I hope not 😉
There are hundreds of outstanding pizza places in New Jersey and New York (suburbs even more than City now) as well as a lesser number in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. I can walk into a random pizza place I’ve never seen before and often get a great pie.
Some very tasty pizza is also found in parts of Florida which have attracted northwestern retirees for decades now, including many many NJ-NY-CT and some RI-MA Italians. One of the better pizzas I had was at a place owned by Italian-Americans who moved down to Tampa from Boston area.
One of the first things I do when I go home to North Jersey is make a beeline for a pizza place near Mom’s house. The quality of pizza in North Jersey is unmatched anywhere else I’ve been in the USA and Canada, and I’ve been to almost every State and most provinces (though I need to do field research in Montreal, which has a big italian community, e.g. retired star NHL goalie Roberto Luongo).
FWIW, my parents visited Italy twice and preferred our Italian-American pizza to what was called pizza over there. Unfortunately I haven’t visited Italy yet (better do it soon, I guess, while there are still actual italians there).
The US reaction to 9/11 – while significant in its distance from US norms of privacy, etc, had measurably less impact on day to day life except for travellers. It did not crater the economy through mass quarantine. The 9/11 actions were more corrosive than dramatic, as in the long run, they led to a vast expansion of the NSA, etc, but that’s another story entirely.
On the other hand, Chinese efforts at overreaction from areas as broad as censorship of Winnie the Pooh, local overconstruction which led to the so-called “ghost cities”, attempting to wall off the entire world through the GFW and yes, shutting down the entire country are all pretty typical examples of Party management.
It has its upsides and its downsides. At the moment, I believe it actually may have been for the best but there’s no doubt that the Party is can be fond of sledgehammers for flies. And sometimes, too, sledgehammers can be answer. It is rarely the best answer.
But much better than doing nothing.
Excellent paella among the big Portuguese and Galician diaspora in the area of Newark, New Jersey. Some in Massachusetts (e.g. Taunton, if I recall) and Rhode Island for the same reason.
And while I don’t know, I’d imagine there is plenty of paella in Brazil, quite a populous country.
No, of course you’re not.
One other thing though, if the virus came from outside China, wouldn’t it be in the interests of the real perpetrators to maliciously spread the story that the virus had leaked out from a facility in Wuhan?
All international travels all over the world need to shut down now for 30 days. It’s incredibly irresponsible for the government of every country to not do this, for fear of “damaging” their economy. All Trump cares about is the stock market. If this outbreak worsens, the economic damage to the US and the world will be far greater than the temporary shut down of airlines and the travel industry for the next 30 days. Our world is run by idiots with zero courage and leadership.
WSJ reported that China is now putting restrictions on foreigners from entering if they are from highly affected countries — this after they asked the world not to restrict Chinese travelers. Now that their travelers have spread this virus far and wide, they want to impose restrictions on others. Can China people suck more? Seriously the best thing that could come out of this is a total, complete decoupling of US economy from China. In fact, from Asia altogether.
Have to disagree: American pizza is way better than Italian, largely because you can have combination toppings. Say, meat lover’s pizza is really good (at least for meat lovers, like me).
Agree that Northern Italy likely got their pizza from Southern Italy, not from the US. Pizza in Milano is the same as in Napoli. They are sticking to their one topping rule. When I asked for two toppings, they topped one half of it with the first, and the second half with another.
You are wrong. You can get paella all over Spain, even though in Valencia they make chicken paella, not seafood one. There are very similar dishes made of rice and mixed seafood in Northern Italy and Slovenia.
No, it was imitation of Turkic architecture just like the Byzantine shit.
https://www.approachguides.com/blog/venice-architecture-byzantine-islamic-influences/
Well this is a 7th century church so obviousoy not as Church of England wouldn’t exist for almost 1000 years later.
Besides, it’s not even different from churches elsewhere in Europe, which also resembled sunken ceuiseliners.
Serbia:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9f/a0/b0/9fa0b049c6e691bccd54b7c249a585e2.jpg
France:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/26/aa/8c/26aa8cde9accd2711c93d76671e2a49a.jpg
Somewhere in Southern Europe… 10th century (xD)
https://live.staticflickr.com/1795/42275705020_db2c004211_b.jpg
It is no better than Steve Sailer’s hated brutalism….
So China is just letting the US attack their country and not saying a word about it, and in fact even making themselves look guilty by covering it up as much as they can?
Let’s not forget the leader of the world’s “exceptional nation” claimed that the Iranian rockets had not injured any US military. Over time, it seems that over 100 soldiers developed headaches.
Powerful countries don’t willingly admit that they have been injured by their enemies unless they are prepared to immediately go to war against them.
You are delusional. There many times more Han people in Xinjiang than Uyghurs. Culturally, Uyghurs are a few centuries behind Han and most do their best to blend in by adopting Han culture (pretty much like wild Mongols after conquering China simply adopted Chinese culture and got assimilated). Many Uyghurs even go so far as to surgically remove their armpit sweat glands, to be like Han, who don’t have them.
As far as Hong Kong goes, my impression is that Chinese government in Beijing watches with glee and schadenfreude Hong Kong committing economic suicide, courtesy of its deluded youth. Hong Kong was slowly losing to Shanghai and other mainland cities its maritime, retail, and financial business. After the protests started, the pace of the loss accelerated. Another year of protests, and the victory of mainland would become complete and irreversible, with Hong Kong fading into insignificance. Apparently, the residents of Macao are smart enough not to kill what they have, but Hong Kongers so far act as stupidly as Ukrainians.
As I predicted…try here in the US, but of course you can predict the race of the attacker:
https://nypost.com/2020/02/05/woman-wearing-face-mask-attacked-in-possible-coronavirus-hate-crime/
Traditional Irish culture is more primitive than English culture, so does that mean by rights Britain should rule Ireland as their cultural superiors? It was the English who brought modern civilisation to Ireland which is why Ireland and its culture looks so similar to England.
I don’t get why people have the attitude that it’s simply natural that the Han Chinese rule over the minorities in their country and convert them to Han Chinese culture, yet when the English have done the same to the Irish and Scots that’s considered oppression and people believe that those countries should be totally independent. I find the double standards bizarre.
Nihilistic faggots have your own karma.
Litrrally everything written in this quite is false. I find it remarkable how Southerners consistently manage to say four or five different things per paragraph, all of them almost always factually incorrect. Like an autistic spaz with Tourette syndrome.
None of those churches look like traditional English churches to me, the only similarities is they’re all built out of stone and are religious buildings but I wouldn’t mistake any of those for an English church. English churches are very distinctive architecturally in my opinion.
A common feature of an English church is the tall bell tower, which none of those have.
“By deception ye shall do war.” You can have false flags and you can have other kinds of deceits.
If this was indeed a US or one of our allies who did this on our behalf (there were war games quite reminiscent of 9/11 military exercises) the imp[act on China, as you say is huge. It has cratered their economy and concerns that the virus may reinfect people will keep this hanging over China’s head for a long time. This is the ultimate economic hit job, if the west was behind it.
In the case of 9/11, it was just cover for a New Pearl Harbor to start the endless wars the neocons and others wanted.
Yes, it does.
https://twitter.com/CitizenAnalyst/status/1232633934862835714
Now, given who Trump is and who his big-money supporters are, the probability of this is as close to zero as makes no difference.
Did I ever say that Han have a divine right to rule their minorities? However, considering the composition of the population in Xinjiang and Tibet, the minorities can claim cultural autonomy, but hardly a territorial one. This is also true for the Northern Ireland and much of Scotland (majority Scottish areas are places where very few people live).
I am neutral on the English rule of Northern Ireland or Scotland. The only “native” thing I saw in Scotland were drunks in the street. The language is effectively dead, they all speak English (with their local accents, but that’s true for every English county: Brits can tell who comes from where by the way they speak).
Have you by any chance noticed that Ireland in effect lost its language and speaks English instead? They retained their music and dance, and I applaud them for it.
Things like that happen regardless of cultural superiority: after centuries of Turkish rule, Greeks preserved their language, but what they call “Greek music” is decidedly Turkish. Sometimes their hatred of Turks becomes comic: the drink that the whole world calls “Turkish coffee” is called “Greek coffee” in Greece. In their defense I must say that their linguistic silliness is not unique: the desert that the whole world calls by its French name “crème brûlée” is called “crema Catalana” in Barcelona and “crema Castillana” in Madrid.
Hey, Iffs? Remember the fakie age of Aquarius back in the late 60s, early 70’s? If got so bad that at parties with starry ones, the legend has it a man would introduce himself to a woman:
He: “Fred, Cancer!”
She: “Hi! Julie, bladder infection!”.
Ba-da-boom.
May Europeans embrace their provincialism. Amen.
Great point, Al. A lot of those kids are concussed (fractured skulls, brain damaged far from the surgery they needed yet received too late) beyond recovery. Quite a shock for our Generals who only profit from, yet never win, these wars they start and prolong. They’re all festooned from their shoulders to their waists with the ribbons they award each other. Except this time it isn’t a shithole like Saddam’s. This time it’s a power, Iran, who anytime they want, can blow up carriers, attack land installations with missiles they can drop on a dime from afar and oh, by the way, shoot down your airplanes. And it’s a slam-dunk they can immolate Israel’s major cities with missiles just as Nork-Kim can immolate Seoul, South Korea if we ever attack. Sobering stuff, this.
We’re not so powerful after all. And for that, considering our force structure and procurement in every service, our entire Defense Establishment should be hung for treason and corruption of every sort..
Peace. I hope.
Does soft power ever precede hard power? It seems to me that it almost always comes with hard power and remains its legacy for decades, even centuries, afterwards. The realist school goes way too far in dismissing the importance, even existence of soft power, but clearly it’s secondary to hard power.
I’m going to guess – and he can correct me if I’m wrong – that reinerTor’s dismissal of American pizza is based on corporate chains like Pizza Hut and Domino’s (though, personally, I’ve liked the 2 0r 3 Domino’s pizzas I’ve tried over the years). It is quite common for Europeans to judge America by it’s most ubiquitous exports without realising that in the US itself there is far more variety – from the best to the worst in quality – than what most Europeans are aware of.
Sounds like received wisdom from NYT, CNN, and/or other liars of their ilk. Have you ever visited Xinjiang? Or any place in China, for that matter?
Could you please enumerate statements that are factually incorrect? I am all ears.
No, Harry Potter is popular because of books written by J.K. Rowling, while in London. It’s not popular because of America.
For example, in Russia, millenials (and even Generation Z) love Harry Potter books, while the films are also very popular, but not to the same amount as the books.
Beatrix Potter is most popular in Japan, especially with young Japanese women.
Beatles are not popular because of America – they are popular because of the melodies. And all kinds of other English pop music similarly. For example, often its more popular in Japan than in America.
As for the best American culture, sometimes it’s more popular outside America, than inside America (for example, note how many great Jazz albums are produced and released only in Japan, and then American jazz fans have to order them from Japan). It’s not spread by advertising, but rather by its intrinsic value.
Yea, Europeans are right when they despise and hate the Empire, but they tend to badmouth everything American just because it’s American. Funny thing is, being originally from Russia (as a matter of fact, when I left in 1991 it was still the USSR), I often find myself defending American things they badmouth wrongly. Pizza is not the only one.
Exactly every single sentence in the quote.
Yeah and as you may have noticed I clearly said these churches are from Serbia, France, etc.
You feel it that way because you are ignorant of Chinese culture. On the contrary, China has tremendous soft power. Consider the following partial list of 10 categories:
Chinese history is an important source of stories/backdrop for movies, computer games, and books in Asian countries. Chinese historical record is important source of reference for historians and students studying history in other countries like Japan, Korean, Vietnam, India, Russia, Mongolia, central Asia, etc. Chinese archives of historical events and archaeological knowledge are indispensable for scientists and scholars studying ancient and modern astronomy, natural disasters, diseases, evolution, geology, weather changes and others.
China has tremendous influence in international and multilateral organizations like UN, UNESCO, WHO, WTO and various scientific and technical committees and standard setting. China is the largest contributor of UN peace keeping force. China has more UNESCO World Heritage sites than US.
Chinese customs, tradition, believes and habits have great impact in East and South East Asia, including but not restricted to: festivals (eg. Chinese New Year), painting, musical instrument, tea drinking ritual, paper arts (paper cutting, origami), etc. The ancient Chinese board game of weiqi (called “Go” in Japan and “baduk” in Korean) is very popular in East Asia. It has its own sub-culture and followings. It is also a source of intense research for artificial intelligence community because it is considerable more complicated than chess.
Chinese medicine and medical practices (acupuncture, herbal medicine) emphasizing long term maintenance and body balance, is a core part of alternative medicine used as supplement, complement or alternative of western medicine by millions of people in the world. Chinese medicine derived artemisinin by Tu Youyou (2015 Nobel Prize) is the most popular cure, especially in Africa and other developing countries, for Malaria (one of the most deadly killers, sorry Covid-19, you are a loser) because of its low cost and ease of manufacturing.
Some forms of Chinese arts like martial arts (TaiChi, Shaolin, etc), cuisine, calligraphy, ancient philosophies, thoughts, wisdom, quotes (Taoism, theory of ying/yang, I-Ching, qi/”chi”, fengshui, SunTze Arts of War) are popular in western world.
Chinese language is the second most popular foreign language (after French) that people study in the world (30 millions). Chinese languages have great influence or are part of Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese languages.
Ancient Chinese invention of silk is being used and studied for its strength and smoothness. It is used to make parachutes, tires, medical device, prosthetic arteries, protective suits. Ancient Chinese artifacts are coveted by museums and collectors.
Ancient and modern Chinese governing styles, social management, organizational skills and large scale systemic and project methods are being studied, researched, duplicated, and debated in many, especially the developing countries. They include wide-ranging and diverse fields and topics like: meritocracy, bureaucracy, social credits, green policies, land management, desertification fighting, re-forestation, natural resources management etc.
Of course, Chinese-bashing and Chinese-boosting are two of the most lucrative industries that provide jobs for many. Not to mention Chinese-gazing, Chinese-guessing and Chinese-bickering, etc. They are also the most favorite hobbies of netizens worldwide. They are important source of information (fake or otherwise), knowledge and soft power for China. We don’t hear Congo-bashing or Zimbabwe-boosting for no reason.
Many western analysts mistakenly take it that economic power, military power and soft power are three independent sources of powers. They are not. They all come from economic power. As the Chinese economy continues to grow, I am confident that Chinese soft power will keep increasing in the coming decades.
How can somebody be so ass backwards? Soft “power” never precedes hard power, it’s the other way around.
You respond to this user Reiner Tor. He is actually Southern or Central European and his country had as Austro-Hungary border with Italy until 1918, and the Italians conquered some of their cities.
Of course, most Italian food, ingredients and products, in his country (and still now) will arrive there directly from Italian states, which had always been very influential and exporting in that region of Europe. In addition, the national cuisines of his country seems to have many parallel recipes to Italian ones – but you can ask him about it.
The idea that Italian cuisine he eats, is something to do with some immigrants from Italy that lived in America, is rather silly.
As for the pizza which is popular in Northern Italy – it’s the one from Napoli, which is different than what is most popular in America. So it’s just an indigenous Italian pizza, and there is a limit to American jingoism in this area.
The place where your argument would be more sensible is in relation to Spain. In Spain, they are mainly eating American style pizza (including good ones in restaurants, but also unfortunately – Domino’s Pizza).
https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/1232677719625916416
So in other words, pizza was mentioned in such books, and he infers from lack of emphasis that it is not “important or classic” at that time.
I would add that Italian pizza is impossible to cook in your apartment (as it requires a very high temperature oven which is only in specialist restaurants), so that’s a possible reason it would not be emphasised in such recipe books, where the main market or sales to be made from publication people who buy those books are for home cooking.
Recipes which require specialist equipment, are not usually emphasized in recipe books – I mean you could conclude that chocolate is not important in Belgium from this method.
I disagree with him on this – as I have personal experience eating various good pizza in American restaurants, but they were not the same style as pizza of Italy.
Your country have one of the best cuisines in the world, but clearly the pizza changed has changed its style while on vacation in America, and that is the style we eat in some countries, but not the most common one in Italy.
As for American validation – so why is the coffee in Spain today in the Italian style (made with Bialetti or with expresso machine), and not one popular in America (most commonly with filter paper)?
And Italy has been exporting all kinds of fashions and foods to Europe (and America, North and South) for centuries before America was important. Isn’t the common narrative that French cooking was transformed in Early Modern era by Italians – Medicis in particular. Why would America suddenly become a necessary intermediary for Italian cuisine exports, when such exports were common for centuries before it was not.
Countries that are ascendant in economic power are always despised — everybody hates the nouveau riche. It is only after they have been supplanted by the next arriviste that their soft power begins, like Japan, England, Europe, and to a lesser extent, SK.
All things English became cool after America supplanted them as the new superpower in the 1970s. In the 80s when Japan was the new kid on the block, there was much fear and loathing of the Japs, esp. when they started buying up prized real estate in the US like Rockefeller Center. In the 90s when I was working in France, everyone hated the “ugly Americans”, we were seen as loud, rude, badly dressed, unsophisticated drunken louses too broke ass to appreciate French cuisine/luxury goods, you name it.
Now it’s the “ugly Chinese” that everyone hates. When India gets to where China is today, maybe in 30 or 40 years, it’ll be the “ugly Indians” and all things Chinese may be as appreciated as all things Japanese or European today.
That’s just how it goes. What can you do?
Many have commented on how Harry Potter is a sign of the decline of civilization. If one subscribes to the idea that it was America that caused this decline of the West, then it might be natural to say it is the fault of America.
Though I personally don’t subscribe to this. IMO, in a political sense, America may have moved Europe 10 years closer to a natural progression of destruction, at most, in a cultural sense. Though, in a technological and economic sense, it is possible that it could be as much as 20-30 years total. Or possibly way more, depending on, if Europe would have developed nuclear weapons, without America, giving them nuclear-facilitated peace.
“it’s like shit in the USA” – “I disagree with him on this.” – Is it because you are a говноед who knows how a real говно tastes?
Most galaxy-brain idea I have heard is that it is a factional CCP coup against Xi, to remove from him the mandate of heaven, while also being a test-run for a new line of Chinese-developed race-specific weapons, to be used shortly.
The Chinese have targeted their own people first, to give them plausible deniability and because they have a few to spare.
Hilarious! From where do you think the Muslims took their architectural forms from? The original Muslims were desert tribes that did not live in large settlements so they knew nothing of architecture. The Dome of Rock which is considered one of the earliest Islamic structures was designed on Byzantine patterns.
Greek music is not decidedly Turkish. The scales (dromoi) used in Greek urban folk music like Rembetika and later Laika are primarily Byzantine (and before that ancient Greece) and Persian in origin although the names are mostly non-Greek in etymology. Note, they also use regular major and minor scales. Ottoman music was primarily based on the melodic structures of Byzantium and Persia. The rhythms like zeimbekiko or hasapiko are just rhythms found in the region. Greek rural folk music uses these scales and rhythms but with an emphasis on 7/8 time and also use Pentatonic scales. Certain regions like the Ionian Islands do not use these rhythms at all but rather more 2/4 time and rely almost exclusively on major and sometimes minor scales. The music might sound more European to some people.
When the Turkish nomads first entered Anatolia they adopted many forms of culture of the neighboring settled societies like the Persians, Byzantines and Arabs. This also included music.
Amazing.
Let’s compare notes.
Xinjiang population ~22 million, including ~10 million Uyghurs, some other Turkish-speaking minorities, and over 10 million Han.
Uyghur city dwellers speak Chinese and have adopted most Chinese customs, except religion – they remain Muslims. A few million village Uyghurs do not speak Chinese.
Sweat glands: Uyghurs, like most humans, have sweat glands in their armpits. Han Chinese don’t. Armpit sweat gland removal is popular among city Uyghurs. It is medically used in other countries to treat hyperhidrosis (excessive sweating). This operation costs ~ $3,000 in the US.
Mongols conquered Chinese Empire in the thirteenth century. In 1271 Kublai Khan proclaimed Yuan dynasty in traditional Chinese style. Yuan defeated Southern Song (previous Chinese dynasty) in 1279. Kublai Khan followed Chinese traditions, had numerous Confucian and Buddhist advisors, built schools for Confucian scholars, even adopted Chinese name Zhongtong. Non-Han subjects of Mongol empire saw Yuan as too Chinese, as they adopted practically all Chinese customs and state structure. In the fourteenth century Ming dynasty (1368-1644), led by one of the field commanders of pro-Song Chinese rebels, replaced Yuan. Yuan was the shortest-lived dynasty in Chinese history.
Assimilation. Genetic studies show that tens of millions of Northern Chinese have some Mongolian genes, one study even claimed that ~1 million Chinese males have Y chromosome of Genghis Khan (Kublai Khan was Genghis’ grandson). Yet the population of Mongolia is only about 3 million. If that’s not assimilation, tell me what is.
Now, according to you, what exactly is wrong in the above?
You seem to know about music a lot more than I do, so you might be right. However, Greek music I’ve heard in Athens, Pilio, Santorini, and Milos sounded unmistakably Eastern, very different from European folk and classical music. I’ve heard similar music in Turkey, but it might have all come from Byzantium and/or Persia, both of which existed long before Turks came to what now is Turkey, and long before camel-riders got out of Arabian peninsula (although Byzantium was just an Eastern part of the Roman Empire before Rome fell).
Yep.
I wouldn’t put all the blame on the “Bad West”, though. The rulers of Chine don’t much mind all that either.
And of Iran, looks like it. I mean, FFS, the minister of health!?
Dumb, but works.
Great………
Some of the Greek music you heard in the capital and regional areas sounds decidedly “Eastern” because the ancestors of millions of Greeks are from Asia Minor and Anatolia. Some estimates are that as much as 40% of the present day population was from Asia Minor. It was only after the Christian Genocide and the later Population Exchange in 1923, did those Greeks find themselves in what is today the Greek state. Of course, they also brought their music with them. Historically, Greeks straddle both sides of the Aegean basin and even further inland in Anatolia like Cappadocia and Pontos. So, Greeks are both “Eastern” and “Western” people if you want to use those terms.
Note, the more traditional music of Milos and Santorini comes under the umbrella term, Nissiotika and use rhythms like syrto, ballos, sousta and instruments like lyre and laouto. These elements can be traced back into Antiquity. The music from the Cycladic region tends to be more uptempo and the lyrical content is more cheerful.
Yep, I saw many Christian churches in Cappadocia. All in caves, so Christians there were hiding from someone. I want to visit antiquities in what now is Western Turkish coast, where lots of Greek cities were. But it’s hard to plan now: both Sultan and coronavirus are going crazy, hard to tell which is worse.
Old Chinese saying ” We’ll see” China has these epidemics every few years. 12,000 years ago migratory birds spread them to central Asia middle east and Europe 5,000 years ago trade routes spread them. Trade and travel routes still spread them all over the world.
We’ll see if it turns into a disaster.
Maybe the health minister was doing his job and not sitting in his office.
Aside from having nothing to do with anything I quoted in your post — this is factually incorrect. The Uythurs have an Indo-European paternal lineage and a Turkic/Mongolic katernal lineage, and are the descendents of the Ashina clan Turks who controlled not only central Asia, but large swaths of China.
This again has nothing to do with anything I quoted. Try going back and reading my post before you break your knuckles typing much ado about nothing.
Uighurs speak multiple languages and have a variety of customs.
No, Chinese have more sweat glands than most people on Earth, you fucking idiot.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729055-200-sweat-mutation-may-have-helped-us-colonise-asia/
https://slate.com/technology/2013/02/debunking-sexual-selection-theories-the-edar-gene-in-east-asians.html
Like many people online you seem to have confused the reduced androgenic chemical production in the apocrine sweat glands of East Asians associated with ABBCC11 (resulting in lower armpit odor) with East Asians have no or fewer sweat glands, misconception that has apparently made its way to Wikipedia.
There is no evidence here for “assimilation of wild Mongols by Chinese”; the Mongols were a religiously tolerant multicultural empire like the USA. Kublai Khan may have been half Chinese as its pretty clear from this paper that he was mixed:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0161622
No one knows what Genghis Khan’s genetic marker was; there’s a contested debate in science about this. The best case so far was presented in the above paper, which suggests that Genghis Khan’s genetic marker doesn’t even exist in Mongolia anymore. Its based on actual fossil DNA from elite Golden Family graves dated to within Genghis Khan’s lifetime.
I don’t think you can find me a single study saying 1 million Han Chinese males carry a supposed “Genghis Khan Y chromosome”.
But let’s just assume ~1 million Chinese are descendants of Mongols on their paternal side, which is a tiny amount (0.15% to be precise) of the Chinese male population. In what alternate universe does this equal assimilation? It could simply be a legacy of rape.
The Chinese formed the lowest caste in China under Mongol rule, lose even than non-Han foreigners.
https://www.travelchinaguide.com/intro/history/yuan/four-class-system.htm
Bullshit. “Desert people” had superior architecture and civilization always. Civilization usually came out of arid regions. Iranian and Turkic architecture was the basis for all things Greek, the entire Greek civilization is a ripoff of the ancient Iranians.
The Dome of Rock today is based off of Turkic architecture, its most distinctive features today (such as the golden dome) are typically central Asian Turkic (which is also heavily influenced by Iranian). So it’s a hybrid building that was originally Byzantine but was improved by Turks.
Which means you got nothing, you’re a nobody. Why am I always having to peel these nobodies off my shoulders like an obsessive house cat that won’t stop climbing on the back of my recliner? You fools need to listen to what big daddy is telling you and coming at me like you’re some kind of villain in a Batman movie. I wouldn’t speak authoritatively on things I know I couldn’t beat somebodies’ monkey ass up over in an argument. Afford me the same kind of courtesy.
Italy is a very nepotistic country with even professionals such as lawyers and doctors occupying positions beyond their qualifications. I think the death there are due to incompetence that you would not find in Germany.
For the record, “AnonFromTN” (probably a government troll collecting food stamps) made up the claim about Uygurs getting their sweat glands removed. That’s fake and never happened. However, lots of Chinese do get plastic surgery to look more Uygur, which is the ideal in that country. Time for another brutal black pill to fall on the Chinese paid government trolls here:
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/09/27/553703866/for-some-chinese-uighurs-modeling-is-a-path-to-success
LMFAO. ^ Imagine actually being that fucked as a people, when you’re denigrated and stomped upon by minorities and run over by a car that backs up on top of you and burns you to a crisp in an inferno of molten Goodyear rubber and asphalt, like a raccoon in the parking lot/kitchen of a Tennessee diner. That’s life for the Han Chinese in their own country. I sure am glad I’m not one of those punk MFers.
I agree it was a hate crime but it wasn’t related to Corona. This sort of attack on Asians by Blacks is just par for the course in NYC. That’s why there is such an uproar over changing the admissions criteria for our elite Math and Science schools to let in more Black students. Most of the students in these schools right now are Asians and this is the sort of crap they have to put up with on a regular basis. So you can imagine what those schools will be like for them if the ratio changes…
Also you notice no one helped her. They just stood around and watched and took cell phone videos but no one came to her assistance.
I thought the Turks were a nomadic people originally…they invaded from the steppes of what is now Russia I believe…
I think they had a lot of interesting and unique customs; but, I don’t believe architecture was one of them. Nomads generally aren’t big on permanent buildings…that’s why they are known as nomads.
The fact that those Cappadocian churches are carved in rock does not necessarily mean they were constructed to hide from anyone. They were originally carved by Greek (Romaioi) monks during a relatively peaceful time in Anatolia. One of the main tenets of monasticism is to retire from the world so they often lived in caves and in the desert away from the rest of humanity. More than likely they were later used as places of refuge during the Byzantine-Arab wars.
You might be interested to know there are many associations of Greek Cappadocians in Greece (Thrace, Kavala, Thessaloniki) and around the world that preserve the unique Helleno-Byzantine customs of that region.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EROxqXdWsAAi5Rf.jpg
Q writers, whoewer they are, exactly know their target audience – US boomers – and tell them exactly what they want to hear. The storm is not coming, all Q deadlines passed unnoticed, none of the promised mass arrests happened.
Regardless, the Q fans are trusting the plan and following the white wabbit like mice hypnotized by snake.
Qanon is professional psyop. Whose psyop? This is the question.
It seems like you have completely lost your mind. Remember to take your medication.
Agreed, I find the way people talk as if all European nations are on the same level of competence and transparency quite odd and very unrealistic.
Italy has more in common with corrupt Middle Eastern countries culturally than it does with meritocracies like Germany and the Anglo countries. Italy used to be well known for corruption and incompetence, it’s only in recent years that it has become politically incorrect to see Italy and the Med generally as not being equal with countries like Germany.
Turks were, in the middle ages, the most advanced civilization ruling the Earth and included both nomadic civilizations and sedentary populations. The most impresive architecture of this time period was produced in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and India, by various Turkic administrators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_architecture
The nomads were just as sophisticated, and all Turks everywhere were at a higher civilizational state than people seem to be aware. The Uygur Khagan was said to be living in a gold tent that could hold over 100 men, this enormous gold-impregnated silk tent (the inspiration for the golden domes in Turkic architecture) was caputured by the Yenisei Kyrgyz and may have been the most valuable object in the world at the time.
Situation in Italy: 400 confirmed cases, 12 deaths (3% mortality rate)
Should have read both middle ages and mid-modern period.
Such an epic amount of nonsense.
Here is another secret (((they))) do not want you to know. Pass it on!
https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1232782475153362944
Thanks! I did not know that. I was in Greece four times. The first time was four days on Santorini (that’s the closest place to a paradise I’ve ever seen), and then the tourist musts: Parthenon, other places in Athens, Delphi, Agamemnon tomb, Athens museums, etc. The second time was Pilio and then ten days on Crete (archeology plus the beach). The third time was Meteora and more Athens. Last time was mostly Milos. The first time Greece had drachma, the other times it was already euro. I saw first-hand how euro made everything more expensive, thereby undermining tourism. Anyway, there are so many more places I would like to visit. But I can’t leave my lab for more than three weeks per year: when I am not there, things slow down. In the US you can’t afford serious slowing, as we live mostly on grant money, and your productivity matters a lot when your proposals are reviewed. Anyway, I’ll try.
If it’s nonsense, address something I wrote which you think is nonsense. Aside from a few harmless typos, I assure you my post is 100% factual and verifiable. And I guarantee you I’ll send you out of this comment section with your tail between your legs, following AnonFromTN’s lead.
I don’t read QAnon, occasionally I follow links there from articles. Yeah the tea-party lumpenproles, boomers but also the alt-right millenials, are the target demographic.
Nevertheless, part of the operation’s effect (by design I infer) seems simply to be getting people out of the MSM box, researching, ‘thinking logically’, getting off the rez, figuring out puzzles etc.
There is a related phenomenon with the flat-earthers. I don’t know if any really believe the earth is flat, but I know some are consciously playing the agonist role, simply to stimulate independent thinking. Everyone ‘knows’ the earth is a spheroid, because that’s what Ms McMuffin told them in third grade, it was right there in the science book. Try getting them to prove it, without resorting to other authority sources, and you start to see the pedagogical value of playing the agonist flat-earther game on people.
The television as a medium facilitated the down-breeding of the American masses into blobs of utterly passive media consumers, the internet has reversed this trend. The dopamine fix requires continuous input, search, research… stimulates an active mind.
This is why censoring and controlling e.g. Wikipedia content won’t work. People aren’t just passively consuming Wiki articles in isolation, they’ve adopted a discursive habit of acquiring knowledge holistically, jumping from one topic to the other. The lies can be painstakingly maintained on the critical articles, but lies will in general not be consistent with the background information — all of the non-political stuff, which is 95+% of the content. The cognitive habits matter, and the population has been transitioning from passive to active through the migration from TV to internet.
I’m guessing QAnon is a prototype info-op, some DIA faction associated with Flynn and supportive of the Trump/TeaParty/MAGA programs seems plausible. I’m too much of a snob to be an actual fan (I do find QAnon silly even for 12yolds), but I’m supportive generally of what I think they are trying to accomplish.
The only truth is that you’re a mental case with access to a keyboard.
I looked over at my post and have decided to correct a few spelling mistakes and misplaced words in my quickly-written post.
This quote:
Should have read:
This quote:
Was the most jarbled. I can see how you could get confused reading it. It should have read:
And finally, this quote:
Should have read:
OK, so I’ve cleared up the major typos and jarbled communications. You cannot disagree with a single thing written here. You can sniffle in the corner of room and cry about what a big bad man JohnnyPlywood is, but you can’t actually come up with a source or an argument to refute this stuff. Inalready posted multiple links for you.
Akarlin,
I made a reply to Daniel Chieh correcting some of the typos in my post (501.), which was apparently detected as spam for its multiple quotes and deleted. Could you repost it for me?
The good Iman probably owns a violet oil processing factory.
Of course I meant such events, real or faked, could serve the globalist agenda east or west.
The Chinese seem well on the way to abolishing cash money with even mendicants receiving donations from passersby by electronic means to their mobile phones.
Pasta is hardly ever served as a main meal (secondi). Pasta is usually served before that course as a primi or primo.
It sounds like you have covered some decent ground anyway. Milos is very hip now, as a sort of more quiet alternative to Santorini. It is a very enjoyable island. A lot quiet coves for swimming. Before modernity, it was a very famous pirate’s lair because as ships rounded Cape Malea and then towards Constantinople, Milos was often the first island they would pass. Pirates, usually Greek but sometimes Maltese or Sicilian would lurk around the island. When they had captured their booty they would then hide in the many coves of the island. Later rare earth mining became the mainstay of the island. Today, tourism dominates.
Yes.
Not necessarily globalist only, though; ANY top layer of the power structure.
This China thing is clear, from both The Empire and Beijing perspective. They both like all this, well, at least at the moment. The later will be liking it less and less in time. Interesting article on Zerohedge about “three months”. A bit over the top, as normal for that site, but still.
Iranian thing is interesting.
My take: Tehran is feeling the regime is getting vulnerable. The common people feel, hard, the results of sanctions and overall pressure. They must be pacified.
Enter the “virus”. It’s so terrible that even the minister of health got it. It must be acted upon. Decisively.
Perfect.
I broadly agree with this assessment, the overall mortality rate taking into account undetected cases is probably around 1%, even if only 10% of the worlds population catches it, we’re still looking at around 8 million deaths, I recently travelled through Singapore and all the locals at the airport had masks. It’s possible though the virus could mutate and have a mortality rate of 2% and infect 40% of the worlds population at which point 62 million excess deaths would occur, it would slow down the rate of global population ageing though.
In a similar vein, note that Ron Unz’s recent decision to recognize and encourage certain commenters fits into his overall strategy.
He recognized six commenters, of which two are Muslims but none are WNs. This is another important m0ve in his game of chess, and comprises of Step 5.
Step 1 : Make a website that WNs use (since they can never build anything on their own). Let any and all anti-Semitic slurs stand on the website to make WN wiggers complacent and even keyboard-courageous.
Step 2 : Recruit the 2-3 intelligent authors that WNs read (Sailer, Derbyshire, etc.) who happen to bad at making money, so that they write for very little payment.
Step 3 : After a few years, start pushing for normalization of Hispanics (even if illegal; especially if illegal).
Step 4 : Deploy columnists like Fred Reed and Chanda Chisala to generate even more confusion.
Step 5 : Elevate six commenters, of which two are Muslims, but none are White Trashionalists, in order to generate friction between the two in true Hasbara style.
This is another step in RUnzie Baby’s campaign to boil the frog, and the temperature has now risen from 160 degrees F to 170 degrees F.
I am strongly in support of RUnzie Baby’s objectives. If only he knew how to work in teams….
Trump says “STILL coronavirus risk to the American people remains very low, but CNN’s Sanjay Gupta won’t admit it.”
I don’t think it’s going to age well.
deleted
peterAUS,
I haven’t heard much about the Hong Kong protests since the demolition of some hospital soon after the Coronavirus was announced. Are they still on the streets? Is Paul Joseph Watson still there fomenting them? Or some Ukranians of the Azov battalion that were once seen among them? Apparently they’re all having a rest:
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2020/02/25/not-done-yet-virus-delivers-blow-hong-kong-protests-rage-remains/
Surprisingly coronavirus hasn’t reached Montenegro yet.
As with most everybody else, I certainly hope there’s nothing to that idea.
Gotta say, it’s remarkably like the plot of an old 1968 episode of Star Trek. On a parallel Earth, a biological war between the United States and Red China leaves the Chinese dominating the world, while a completely devolved United States is reduced to being just a couple of notches above being a nation of cave dwellers.
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qgVQW3AxwU4/VnKhgXQa7pI/AAAAAAAAKgg/6sIOjMKuJgk/s1600/tos-223-the-omega-glory%2B%252828%2529.png
The Yangs
‘That which is ours, is ours again.’
http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/54.htm
Andrew Anglin has a very popular website. But he has had some problems keeping it up.
Chateau Heartiste also had a popular site with WN leanings. But it is no longer published (((for some reason))).
I guess I must be mistaken.
I thought the Moghuls were several ethic groupings who moved to India. I did not know that they spoke a Turkic language. Are the Parsees also Turkish? And the Taj Mahal as well? 🙂
Please stop this comedy.
Persians in the Mughal Empire
I think you are definitely jumping the guns this time, Karlin.
This virus is definitely worse than SARS, objectively, but signs are showing it’s slowling down, worldwide. And it will be weaker as the weather gets warmer.
The economic damage will kill millions (of dollars), but I doubt it will get to Spanish flu level of casualties.
That’s possible, but so far, outside China, it seems to be picking up pace: ever newer countries, ever more infections, several local outbreaks in countries and regions far away from China, including in Europe and North America.
I certainly hope so. I would very much like this shitty epidemic just going away. Let’s hope we’ll remember it like SARS, an overhyped epidemic which ultimately only caused limited damage and was quickly contained.
My thoughts exactly:
https://twitter.com/MaxAbrahms/status/1232857254640209920
The first novel #coronavirus pneumonia case was first reported in #China, but its source may not be in the country, said Zhong Nanshan at a press conference.
https://twitter.com/ChinaDaily/status/1232874165352353792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1232874165352353792&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwiadomosci.gazeta.pl%2Fwiadomosci%2F7%2C114881%2C25735722%2Cchinski-ekspert-zrodlem-koronawirusa-nie-sa-chiny-opanujemy.html
Zhong Nanshan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhong_Nanshan
Zhōng Nánshān; born 20 October 1936 is a Chinese epidemiologist and pulmonologist who discovered the SARS coronavirus in 2003.[2] He was president of the Chinese Medical Association from 2005 to 2009 and is currently the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Thoracic Disease
More surprising news.
The top Chinese respiratory specialist Zhong Nanshan said on January 27, that the new coronavirus originated outside China and was brought into the country.
His actual words were more mild: “Though the COVID-19 was first discovered in China, it does not mean that it originated from China.” But that is Chinese for “it originated someplace else, in another country”. I was astonished to see this stated so boldly (for China). It may be that Japan’s conclusion that it came from the US was correct.
When the highest-level medical person in China makes such a statement, that means the government already knows where it originated, and probably how it was introduced to China. I doubt they will say much more, but now the public are free, if not encouraged, to speculate without worrying about spreading false rumors.
Until now, all statements as to origin were quite muted. This one is not. And, in typical Chinese fashion, Zhong left blank the tick boxes of ‘natural’ or ‘man-made’.
Contrary to Karlin’s effusing about the US, having democracy and freedom of religion and all that, and thus will be much more effective than China in meeting the challenge of a virus epidemic, a great many influential Americans seem to disagree, especially about the “prepping meaningfully” part.
During the past two days, multiple articles have appeared in the US media, by Senators, Congressmen, top National health specialists and others, claiming the US is woefully unprepared for a virus attack, having only 10% of the mask supply necessary for health care workers alone, forgetting the general public, a severe inadequacy of appropriate hospital beds, no adequate quarantine facilities, a single virus test so faulty it has been discarded, leaving health care officials with no easy way to test for infections, and so on.
Several top-level health care officials today were decrying what they term not only a lack of preparation but an inability to prepare, for lack of organization and leadership. They further slammed Trump and Pompeo for claims that the virus is “going to go away”, and that the nation was “totally prepared” for whatever comes.
A coronavirus outbreak in the United States appears inevitable, and the only question is when and how many people will experience severe illnesses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.
Dr Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said “We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad,” she said. “It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen in this country anymore but a question of when this will happen.” “Disruption to everyday life may be severe,” she warned at a news conference.
If this proves true, and since medical quarantines in China are a violation of human rights (at least according to the NYT and WSJ, let’s see how democracies do it.
A full blown coronavirus outbreak is already happening at the moment in USA hospitals (and many other countries,tbf) as nurses/doctors/ patients are crossinfecting each other at breakneck speeds, while having no detection possibility. The same happened in China, mostly at Wuhan, where many medical staff infections occured in the early Jan because no one realized then this virus is so contagious and also they didn’t realize so many patient had been infected. That’s why they had to send in military medics as significant part of civil ones simply became unable to work after catching disease themselves without propper protections.
I do not see Western media reporting it. Zhōng Nánshān is in the news but because he was hired by Foxconn as an adviser.
Did he provide any context, examples or ongoing investigation details or preliminary results? Because without all that, it equals just blowing warm air out of the mouth and nothing else – aliens could have sent the virus to Earth as a prepatory stage of their invasion and it will fit such statement as “the first novel coronavirus pneumonia case was first reported in China, but its source may not be in the country.”
More lies Coronaviorus is a hoax no evidence of anything happening more jew marxist communist zionist psycho babble 201 event ignorance
btw, remember our recent conversations that deaths may be quite rare in the West and will pick up only in March? Well, at least Italy (which banned flights from China!) is way ahead of schedule and it might be the result of previous sightseeing of those two initial hospitalised Chinese tourists finally coming to forefront when 3-4 weeks course of incubation/symptoms/full blown illness passed through without any detection till later stages.
The same should be going on in France too, just at the moment seem they to be lagging in detection when compared to Italy.
He did not have to give details. His statement was political. He is a very important guy. However seven days ago there was a paper published by Wen-Bin Yu et al. (google DOI: 10.12074/202002.00033) which stated that
This clearly suggests that Chinese are hinting a foreign source of the virus and that betty have an evidence for it.
You are the same yahoo who was very excited by the ephemeral preprint of the alleged paper allegedly authored by not well know Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao which took media (Zero Hedge and British tabloid rags) by storm but now you’d would rather dismiss the statement of the most prominent Chinese epidemiologist that is backed up by a paper of Wen-Bin Yu et al., a paper that actually does exist.
SARS 2.0 is capable of seriously destroying not only lungs, but whole nervous system too:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.22.20026500v1.full.pdf
Appealling to authority alone is completely wrong, as the statements of that “non-existant” paper were sourced and backed by open data evidence, while the “great authority” did not provide absolutely anything except one vague sentence without any data.
That another Chinese paper you cited is legitimate, but it only confirmed the notion that specific wet market was not the initial source and unless I’m absolutely mistaken, they did not say at all that those foreign haplotypes were earlier in origin than Chinese ones.
From the CDC website it appears the USA is testing for COVID-19 only those patients with reported China connections.
After I heard there was only one site in Africa capable of testing for this virus, I wondered how many sites in the US can test? Anybody got any answers?
The concept of pasta with meat as a main seems to be an Italian-American invention and not authentically Italian.
What mind ? Plywood head writes stuff that is either utter dog doo or else irrelevant.
“Pardner der aint nuffin but wood between dem dar ears ! “
463.★AnonFromTN says:
“As far as Hong Kong goes, my impression is that Chinese government in Beijing watches with glee and schadenfreude Hong Kong committing economic suicide, courtesy of its deluded youth. Hong Kong was slowly losing to Shanghai and other mainland cities its maritime, retail, and financial business. After the protests started, the pace of the loss accelerated. Another year of protests, and the victory of mainland would become complete and irreversible, with Hong Kong fading into insignificance. Apparently, the residents of Macao are smart enough not to kill what they have, but Hong Kongers so far act as stupidly as Ukrainians.”
Full marks. You pretty much got it all correct. When HK reverted to the Mainland it comprised about 27% of China’s GDP. Today it is below 3% and falling fast. Hong Kong could dry up and blow away and nobody would notice. HK needed a good slap, for many reasons. That used to be one of my favorite cities but today I feel no sympathy for them.
465.Europe Europa says:
“I don’t get why people have the attitude that it’s simply natural that the Han Chinese rule over the minorities in their country and convert them to Han Chinese culture, yet when the English have done the same to the Irish and Scots that’s considered oppression and people believe that those countries should be totally independent. I find the double standards bizarre.”
You got part of it right, but you need to clarify your thinking. The media propagandists tell you that those situations are ‘oppression’, but the deeds and the words are not the same. The puppet-masters aren’t about to change anything because the Western world has thrived on oppression of every kind for centuries. What has the US done to little Cuba for the past 70 years? Everyone knows, everyone has a word for it, but in the end nobody cares because it is a contest between ‘them’ and ‘us’, and the oppressed are always ‘them’.
China may rule over its minority areas but there is no conversion taking place.
China jealously guards its minority groups and takes great pains to protect and maintain them, and to prevent their disappearance or their cultural assimilation. That’s why the provinces with significant ethnic minorities are all classed as Autonomous Regions with some special rights exceeding those of other provinces – Guangxi Zhuang, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Tibet and Xinjiang. Those people are not being converted to Han culture but are encouraged and even ordered to maintain their own way of life. It is true people in Tibet and Xinjiang are being taught to speak Mandarin, but that is not to replace their language but simply to make it easier for them to communicate with the rest of the country in which they live. It is the same with their religions and all other local customs. One of the prettiest sights in China is to see gatherings of all the 56 ethnic groups with all their different costumes, dances, songs, embroidery styles, food . . .
One example is a language called Nushu, which means ‘womens’ writing’, a language that developed over 1,000 years ago, a full language with more than 65,000 words, and the most beautiful artistic script you have ever seen. I would post a photo for you, but I don’t know how. It is the only language in the world that was created by women, for women, and which no man was able to understand. It almost died out but was discovered only about 30 years ago in Hunan, with not many people alive who knew it well. The government has spent zillions of dollars to record and preserve it, and teach it in the local schools.
The strange thing about this language, aside from the fact that it was truly women-only, is that it was created by uneducated peasant women in small villages who had never been to school and many of whom couldn’t even write Chinese. Yet the language has as much grammar as any Western language. Many years ago, the UN tried to create Esperanto to be a universal language for the world. It was a failure, but they needed thousands of experts and 20 or more years to try. How did peasant women so long ago, unschooled, uneducated, manage such a feat?
The thing that keeps me coming back to the bio-war theory was summed up by Ron Unz. Why is that that countries on America’s shit list always have such bad luck and more so recently?
The (((system))) has been trying to start a nuclear war with Russia since nuclear weapons were invented, so no – I wouldn’t be surprised if Yankee-Judea was behind this outbreak in Wuhan. It’s not suicidal if that order is coming from Tel Aviv.
When WWII ended it was 1 down, 2 to go and those two are the US and Russia. Now it appears that China has made the list as well. Good luck my yellow friends.
Plywood brain, you need to immediately stop taking Preparation H and liquid carpet cleaner. These were never intended to be used orally !
Maybe you should read it again.
Is it that (1) India is protected by being heavily vegetarian? In India, unlike in
China, people don’t consume bats, dogs, cats, and such delicacies as the bulls’
and horses’ penises; (2) The flu viruses cannot survive long in a tropical
climate.
Hindus are prohibited from beef eating.
Muslims [India has many] are to not eat pork.
China and Chinese horrify me..ask any Tibetan.
More from the aforementioned 1968 Star Trek episode mentioned upthread (entry #534) and it’s plotline of a parallel Earth which had experienced a devastating biological war between the United States and Red China.
Now, if Gene Roddenberry had simply had one of the cast say ‘They hate us for our freedom’, we’d really know he’d been on to something then. 😉
http://img.trekmovie.com/wp-content/uploads/yangkhom.jpg
Yang vs Kohm (Yank vs Commie)
‘The virus still exists.’
http://www.letswatchstartrek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Picture-123.png
Yangs confront Kirk
‘Freedom? Freedom?’
http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/54.htm
India is even more “protected” by a total lack of diagnosis.
Yeah, Yeah, Alfred!
And who could forget the one that really brought us all together? This one:
https://youtu.be/1VM2eLhvsSM
You are right, discussions with lunatics are fruitless. Let psychiatrists talk to them, at least they are paid a lot for that bother.
That would be the American way. He might actually believe in his BS.
Yep, Italians consider pasta as primi, like soup. When my wife in Rome ordered pasta and soup, the waiter was surprised, asked her again to make sure he understood it right. Then he brought what was ordered (likely thinking – Americans are crazy, but they tip well).
That ad’s a classic with it’s warm message.
I suppose from the Coca-Cola Corp perspective, it’s a case of so many potential wage slaves (cheap labor) in that group to exploit, and so little time.
2018 is not last year.
The Mughals were Turco-Mongols from Uzbekistan, you dipshit. The name “Mughal” means Mongol.
What is step 6?
Life insurance funds will be paying out more.
Pension funds will be going into surplus. Room for increased management fees.
Bond rates will stay low, perhaps go lower!
Rationally, big infrastructure projects should follow. Money is dirt cheap. Trump, Johnson and Putin are fans of construction. Macron? The Germans? Build in Africa for the highest returns?
Compliments.
I am sure that a lot of guys here realized what you are saying but, for some reason, don’t want to spell it out.
Care to, maybe, take on what that reason might be?
“Since January, street protests have been almost completely halted to avoid the concentration of large crowds under the coronavirus crisis.” and “de-escalated”.
Ah, well, you see, there is the problem of, say, an “AK” there. Not the owner of this blog; the famous Russian who invented the thing.
It’s one thing to pull the “virus” thing on an unarmed population; quite another in country/culture armed to the teeth. Hard to operate “antivirus” teams under mortar fire in the Balkan mountains in winter.
Jose: the Chinese have owned Thailand since well before the Americans used the NE of the country as a staging ground for genocide missions into the rest of Indo China during the Vietnam war. Apart from a lucky few of the brown locals, all major investment and political decisions are made by the rich Thai Chinese- usually bespectacled and whiter in skin colour. The elite of this elite are usually educated in the US and have strong links to the military and they pretty much ARE the business community.. The only thing new in Thailand is the take up of new and accessible internet and phone technologies by the poor- Tik tok etc sure…. these all just feed into making the Thai Cinese elite richer and more powerful. The poor Thai locals continue to buy new pick-ups and 35 000 baht mobile phones thinking that such access to stuff has pushed them into the lower middle class…it never will and never has… Culturally and economically China has always pretty much been there in the modern era and always will….What’s most disturbing is tour bus loads of mainland Chinese accessing cheap air asia flights and and touring the thai islands and cities – spitting and yelling and pushing kids out of the way to get into the noodle shops. They are disgusting. The beautiful Thai people rarely speak up cos they need the tourist dollars from these baboons…
Hey, whatever happened to Stryker?
I figured he’d be all over these threads, insisting that all Asians are going to leave America and go home. Hope he didn’t catch the virus.
In Iran, it’s apparently not just octogenarians who are dying of this:
Meanwhile, it has been disclosed that a 22-year-old member of Iranian women’s futsal national team, Elham Sheikhi, has died of Covid-19, or coronavirus. Ms. Sheikhi was from the province of Qom that has been described as the epicenter of the deadly outbreak.
https://en.radiofarda.com/a/football-games-to-continue-in-iran-as-female-player-dies-of-coronavirus/30458514.html
(I’ve written the above for another thread, but then decided might be of interest to those who are only reading here.)
Pretty interesting that a young female just died. I mean, young. Also, female. It was supposed to mostly kill old males, wasn’t it?
I find it bizarre how Indians rationalise the idea that rule by muslim Turk-Mongols = good and counts as authentically Indian, rule by christian British = bad and a colonial invasion.
They consider the Taj Mahal to be the ultimate symbol of India and Indian culture, and yet in reality it is every bit as much a colonial building as anything the British built in India. I find it odd how a nation can rationalise such blatant hypocrisy, but it’s so rationalised in the Indian psyche that they don’t even see it as hypocrisy.
Corona Will Kill Millions & Crater the World Economy.
Good.
For a full explanation, see here :
https://www.unz.com/anepigone/there-be-reelection/#comment-3339592
I have actually been pointing this out for over two years.
Just like Andrew Yang was going to become POTUS, right Karlin?
I doubt that many Indians know much of their own history.
I had an Indian telling me that Indian cooking is based in ancient Vedic tradition. He was a bit shocked (and in fact disbelieving) when I pointed out that tomatoes – a prominent ingredient in Indian cooking – came from South America via Europe just a few hundred years ago.
As for hypocrisy, listen to American (Indians) complain about being dispossessed from their land by war. Yet there isn’t an Indian tribe on the continent that didn’t obtain its tribal lands but by by taking them from another tribe.
I think people would in general think much more clearly if they recognized that war is the natural way of humanity and that we are all of us always at war. It would certainly help whites if they would grow up and recognize that they are currently also the objects of a war of replacement and dispossession.
Absolutely. The Chinese are baboons.
Don’t worry. Israeli scientists will have a vaccine out in a matter of weeks.
The Jews have developed a new kind of vaccine technology that has been in development for sometime already. Luckily, when they were testing to see if the vaccine would work they choose Corona Virus as a proof of concept.
What a Wonderful Coincidence! God bless the Jews for coming to the rescue once again!
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/israeli-scientists-say-they-will-have-coronavirus-vaccine-few-weeks
…It was then, that his love ones recognized his cry for help…
Yep….remember noticing that very post (with a comment on it).
So, the angle is that WNs simply aren’t smart enough to get the game here.
The majority, sure.
Some got it, though.
Overall, it’s good to see all that.
WHO already said the virus in Iran has NOTHING to do with the Covid-19 from Wuhan!! They are Different!!
Plus, Wu Han is ONLY the first place that this Covid-19 exploded, but NOT the the city of origin for this Covid-19. Most likely, the U.S. is the Source nation of this Covid-19!
http://www.ecns.cn/news/sci-tech/2020-02-23/detail-ifztvsqr0576579.shtml
“A recent study conducted by a group of Chinese scientists has found further genome evidence to prove that the seafood market in Wuhan is not the source of the novel coronavirus – a claim first made in a paper published on The Lancet.
The study, led by researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of Chinese Academy of Sciences, South China Agricultural University and Chinese Institute for Brain Research, was published on ChinaXiv on Saturday in a pre-print version without peer review.
Per the study, genetic data suggests the virus was introduced from elsewhere and had already circulated widely among humans in Wuhan before December 2019, probably beginning in mid to late November.”
We have the neocon reaction to Zhōng Nánshān statement:
New study further proves Wuhan seafood market not the source of COVID-19
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-02-23/New-study-shows-Wuhan-seafood-market-not-the-source-of-COVID-19-OjhaHnwdnG/index.html
this chart shows, the U.S. has ALL five groups of virus, while China ONLY has 3 groups
https://news.cgtn.com/news/3159444e30556a4e3359544f306b544d3049444f31457a6333566d54/img/228028b8d8c24cf7a98b724dc7c50c7f/228028b8d8c24cf7a98b724dc7c50c7f.png
you dipshit
I see you lost it. Shame. I thought you were smarter than that. 🙂
545.utu says:
“I do not see Western media reporting it. Zhōng Nánshān is in the news but because he was hired by Foxconn as an adviser.”
What is the source of this assertion? I can find no evidence of Zhong working for Foxconn. Further, if Zhong is “in the news” that is because he is the nation’s most prominent virologist, not from a meaningless association with a company.
Please provide your source. I want you to tell me you didn’t fabricate that claim.
549.utu says:
“Phyloepidemiologic analyses indicated the SARS-CoV-2 source at the Hua Nan market should be imported from other places.”
If your above quote is accurate, this is meaningful because in China the word “should” (when used in English) has a different meaning than ours; the word is used to mean “must”. If your boss tells you that you ‘should’ be in the office by 9:00 AM, that means you must be there. In the above quote, that means the man is saying the virus “must have been” imported into China from another country.
552.Miss Laura says:
“From the CDC website it appears the USA is testing for COVID-19 only those patients with reported China connections. After I heard there was only one site in Africa capable of testing for this virus, I wondered how many sites in the US can test? Anybody got any answers?”
The CDC has done only around 450 tests because the US has no workable test mechanisms. They produced a test kit which proved so flawed that it produced random results (high or low) that were meaningless, and issued instructions to dispose of all test equipment. They also shipped that test equipment all over the world, but no word on whether they informed the other nations that the equipment was useless and should be discarded.
Report in the media today that the first US infection from unknown sources wasn’t tested for five days after hospitalisation and having been put on a ventilator in the ICU. They claimed they “were unable to get her tested for five days because she had not traveled to outbreak-hit regions”. The failure to test was not because the woman hadn’t traveled somewhere, but because no testing was possible. One source said California had only 200 proper testing kits in the entire state, and very few anywhere in the country.
https://www.shine.cn/news/world/2002283012/
It now appears almost a certainty that the Japanese Asahi Shimbun was right in claiming the coronavirus originated in the US. Chinese medical authorities and intelligence agencies have completed their review of the analysis of nearly 100 infections from 12 countries on 4 continents and have discovered that of the five different haplotypes of this virus, the US is the only country with all five varieties. Most of China has only one type, with Guangdong having a few cases of two others.
589.thetruth uploaded the map: See above.
At first glance, this would seem to constitute proof that the virus originated in the US, with a range of mutations, then two of those were transplanted to China. If China had been the original source, the five varieties would first appear in China, not in the US, especially since the US has had only a relative handful of identified cases.
Korea and Taiwan have a different haplotype of the virus than China, perhaps more infective but much less deadly, which would account for a death rate only 1/3 that of China. Iran was not included in these tests, nor was Italy, which is a shame because I would very much like to see which variety is proving so deadly to Iran with a death rate of at least 10% (and previously demonstrated at about 25%).
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-01-28/Conflicting-studies-on-source-of-coronavirus-divides-scientists-NCHp2p2d4k/index.html
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-02-23/New-study-shows-Wuhan-seafood-market-not-the-source-of-COVID-19-OjhaHnwdnG/index.html
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820%2930183-5
The other claim made by the Asahi Shimbun was that of the 40,000 ‘influenza deaths’ so far this year in the US, a great many of those may have been not the flu but the coronavirus, but the Americans didn’t test for the coronavirus and are so far apparently “unable” to manufacture reliable test kits.
On this latter point, it might be amusing or schadenfreudian to mock the US for being unable to produce a test kit that works, but the US is not that incompetent, which raises the question of “why” no tests are being done. This may be too cynical on my part, but is it possible they don’t want to test because they don’t want the results to be known?
“I can find no evidence of Zhong working for Foxconn. ” – You don’t know how to use google? And, btw, why don’t you use the reply buttons here?
” I want you to tell me you didn’t fabricate that claim. ” – I just did tell you. Now you tell me about your parents as I want to know what went wrong in the ‘fabrication’ process of you.
“Further, if Zhong is “in the news” that is because he is the nation’s most prominent virologist, not from a meaningless association with a company.” – My point is, you idiot, that Zhong is not in the news after what he said about the source of virus during the press conference.
And see also the comment #587.
“Qanon is professional psyop. Whose psyop? This is the question.” – Who benefits? Clearly this is Zionist operation to keep stringing along the patriots who voted for Trump so Trump have more opportunity to do more good things for Israel.
527.peterAUS says:
China and Iran want to kill their own people.
I know of only one Peter in Australia with a heart sufficiently blinded by stubbornness and a mind sufficiently twisted by a kind of witch-hunting ideology, to hold such ridiculous convictions.
So, according to you, the “Teheran Regime” is feeling threatened, and their solution is to either buy or manufacture and release a virus that kills their own people. I can see how that would solve everything. Good thinking.
And, according to you, “the Chinese Government using the Corona outbreak as a cover for some other purpose. Definitely. Iranian too. Related to trade war/sanctions I feel.” It isn’t immediately clear how killing off my human and animal populations (including the chickens and pigs) would end a trade war or relieve me from US sanctions.
For other readers, from my personal experience, if you don’t mind a bit of impartial advice, I suggest you consider any ‘Peter’ from Australia as infected with a bizarre mental plague, and look to more rational sources. From this person you will obtain no facts of consequence but only a kind of grotesque fanaticism testifying to the general mental health level in Australia. But, do what you want.
Primitive insinuations about Ron Unz coming from trolls like Thomm. I have no doubts that Ron Unz operates on good faith principle and his vision is broader than that of any contributors he permits on his site. He sometimes gets burnt and disappointed by pettiness, egos and narrow mindedness of some of them, see cases of Jayman, Razib Khan, Peter Frost or Gregory Cochran. He tolerates the reductionist HBDers like Karlin, Sailer and Derbyshire but I doubt he is enthused with them. Just like he tolerates countless monothematic single idée fixe commentators. He needs numbers to create the ecosystem where he can publish his American Pravda articles in which he is intellectually and emotionally invested. The Unz Review is not about you, people of small hearts and weak faith but about Ron Unz. He pays for it and he will pay consequences, if any, for it not you, the small minded snipers hiding in the bushes. Don’t be afraid cowards. There is no hidden agenda. Even AaronB, the most talented and creative troll here, when it comes to creating depressing and paralyzing insinuations could not explain Ron Unz thus had to fall back on cheap insanity innuendo: “Schizophrenia. Within 5 years. Mark my words.”
see: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/corona-will-kill-millions-crater-the-world-economy/#comment-3736252
Did not find a single sentence in your source about the timing of origin in those different virus haplogroups.
Existing drugs may offer a first-line treatment for coronavirus outbreak
https://partner.sciencenorway.no/antibiotics-health-medication/existing-drugs-may-offer-a-first-line-treatment-for-coronavirus-outbreak/1646247
“For example, teicoplanin, oritavancin, dalbavancin and monensin are approved antibiotics that have been shown to inhibit corona- and other viruses in the laboratory.”
Discovery and development of safe-in-man broad-spectrum antiviral agents
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122030076X?via%3Dihub
That’s probably fake news. There won’t be a Phase 1 human trial yet, so it’s more than a year.
We might revisit some 3 week old “rumours” at this point also:
A
https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/latest-coronavirus-showing-resistance-to-earlier-antivirals,-seems-to-be-evolving
So far almost everything was confirmed to be truthful, except resistance to drugs, which might actually be ADE after reinfections, but that yet is to be decided.
And looking at the list of known Chinese medical stuff casualties, there were 26 and 29 yo female nurses too, so Iran might not be some extreme outlier with case of young female death, but that means the disease started to circulate in Iran quite early, maybe even from December already, which would not be very surprising considering quite close ties with China.
Well, taste is subjective, but I strongly disagree, and it’s highly doubtful you’ve been to as many pizza places in Chicago as I have (for the sake of your health, I hope not) but Chicago tavern-style thin-crust pizza is amazing and widely available in the Windy City. You can’t fold it in half like that NY crap, and you wouldn’t want to.
Wut, no Balestine?
Indian history doesn’t seem very well recorded or understood, Indians seem to just make it up as they go along with Hindu supremacist rhetoric as its basis. I think the reality is modern Indians’ connection to ancient, Vedic India is superficial at best, I think really it belonged to a completely different civilisation and people (Aryans) that the modern Indians have only inherited the remnants of.
The truth is modern Indian culture, especially that of North India (which is seen as the centre of Indian culture), is much more Persian and Turko-Mongol in origin than it is Vedic/Aryan.
It’s not too cynical. There were so many leaks in an American lab that handles level 3 and 4 biohazard pathogens they had to shut it down. Corona virus could have come from an American lab just as Lyme disease has.
It is also important to point out the fact that the U.S. military’s key laboratories involving the study of deadly pathogens, including coronaviruses, Ebola and others, was suddenly shut down last July after the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified major “biosafety lapses” at the facility.
https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/health/fort-detrick-lab-shut-down-after-failed-safety-inspection-all/article_767f3459-59c2-510f-9067-bb215db4396d.html
For those few persons interested in the evolutionary potential of Covid-19, here is a link to a review of the important factors affecting pathogen evolution. The article is from Scientific American so it requires no specialized knowledge from the reader.
http://eebweb.arizona.edu/Courses/Ecol409_509/ewald.pdf
this corona virus is 1 half of the package with the 2nd half to follow..
My take: Tehran is feeling the regime is getting vulnerable
If you are brought up on a Fairfax/ABC/New International diet of lies, I am not surprised you are so lacking in understanding of Iran. You have never been there. You don’t speak their language. I do and I have lived for 10 years in Melbourne so I understand your mental state.
Take it from me mate, the government in Iran is a heck of a lot more popular than any government Australia has had since the 1960’s. They will be around for a long long time. Well past the dissolution of the USA into its constituent parts. Australia will continue being a source of raw materials to China in the interim. That is if West Australia does not leave the Federation.
It looks like the stock market correction is happening; it was hoped for Trump’s sake that this would occur after the election. The advantage for him, is that the virus and China might get blamed for it.
Have you tried pizza in New Haven CT?
Have you had good deep dish in Chicago?
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022418v1
The novel coronavirus leaves its male victims infertile.
The virus can be sexually transmitted.
A dog in HK has proven positive to the virus.
Most mammals can be its host.
Asymptomatic victims are likely to sexually transmit virus.
Over 50% of Chinese men smoke.
70% of cases are men.
Only 2~% of mortalities are smokers.
Google: corona virus start smoking sott.net and find the Chinese report quantifying such yourself. It will be the first search result on the page.
Smoking is something the “fire ape” does.
Has been smoking for over a million years.
The virus causes male infertility.!
Hubei is home to the Chinese revered White Horse Mountain named in honour if the White Horse of Buddhism.
A corona is a crown.
The first horse of the apocalypse rides a white horse and a crown is given him so that he may rule the world.
Doesn’t seem to me as if it will take this first horsrman long to subdue and rule this world.
I preferred astrology tbh
And also what happened to “Zenster” and “Bogolyubski”. I guess social media is a poor replacement for real personal contact.
This scientific preprint from China estimates a very high R (number of new hosts infected by the average current host) prior to the imposition of stringent lockdowns. Without a marked seasonal reduction in transmissibility, the U.S. will also have to close down normal life to a great extent, or alternatively risk the evolution of increased virulence and a collapse of the health care system from the 20% of cases that are severe.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022434v1
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052495/coronavirus-far-more-likely-sars-bond-human-cells-scientists-say
It looks like the Indian researchers who published a paper on HIV insertions in the coronavirus grnome were at least partially right…at least according to The South China Morning Post.
People who think China is under attack by “the West” are delusional. China has the full support of the UN/the West in everything it does. The UN recently inspected the concentration camps China is interning Uyghurs in and gave their full support to the Chinese government. No doubt because China and its security/authoritarian grid is the blueprint for what is going to be rolled out world wide. It’s obvious that China released this virus to further their own authoritarian ends, almost certainly in conjunction with the UN/”the West”.
China, Russia, USA, EU, etc, are all in it together. People still stuck in this Hegelian dialectic of China = good, USA = bad are very narrow minded and brainwashed. They’re all equally bad and all run by psychopaths!
“The first horse of the apocalypse rides a white horse and a crown is given him so that he may rule the world.”
The first horse, white, is ambiguous – its rider, the conqueror given a crown is sometimes even said to be Christ.
After the red horse (war), and the black horse (famine) comes the most feared –
The Book of Revelation (apocalypse means uncovering) has a most peculiar hold on Western consciousness, and it is a most peculiar book indeed. Many a Christian reads it and becomes strangely convinced it really does describe the end-of-the-world – which is invariably Real Soon Now, and usually involves the Mark of the Beast.
BTW – ‘pale’ is Greek chloros meaning pale green, which gives us both chlorophyll (green) and girl’s name Chloe (pale, but not green.) That’s why various translations give pale, pale green, or even green there.
I am sure there is a website where discussing the culinary qualities of regional American pizzas is a hot topic. But I am not so sure that this is the right one. 🙂
Here is the abstract of the paper. and you can download the entire paper from the following link too:
http://www.chinaxiv.org/abs/202002.00033
” Abstracts
Background. The outbreak of COVID-19 started in mid-December 2019 in Wuhan, Central China. Up to February 18, 2020, SARS-CoV-2 has infected more than 70,000 people in China, and another 25 countries across five continents. In this study, we used 93 complete genomes of SARS-CoV-2 from the GISAID EpiFluTM database to decode the evolution and human-to-human transmissions of SARS-CoV-2 in the recent two months. Methods. Alignment of coding-regions was conducted haplotype analyses using DnaSP. Substitution sites were analyzed in codon. Evolutionary analysis of haplotypes used NETWORK. Population size changes were estimated using both DnaSP and Arlequin. Expansion date of population size was calculated based on the expansion parameter tau (τ) using the formula t=τ/2u. Findings. Eight coding-regions have 120 substitution sites, including 79 non-synonymous and 40 synonymous substitutions. Forty-two non-synonymous substitutions changed the biochemical property of amino acids. No evident combination was found. Fifty-eight haplotypes were classified as five groups, and 31 haplotypes were found in samples from both China and other countries, respectively. The rooted network suggested H13 and H35 to be ancestral haplotypes, and H1 (and its descendent haplotypes including all samples from the Hua Nan market) was derived H3 haplotype. Population size of SARS-CoV-2 were estimated to have a recent expansion on 6 January 2020, and an early expansion on 8 December 2019. Interpretation. Genomic variations of SARS-CoV-2 are still low in comparisons with published genomes of SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. Phyloepidemiologic analyses indicated the SARS-CoV-2 source at the Hua Nan market should be imported from other places. The crowded market boosted SARS-CoV-2 rapid circulations in the market and spread it to the whole city in early December 2019. Furthermore, phyloepidemiologic approaches have recovered specific direction of human-to-human transmissions, and the import sources of international infectious cases. “
here is a poster from Reddit said:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Prepare_For_Worst/comments/f7kzrv/chinaxiv_decoding_evolution_and_transmissions_of/
“GtheBig
1 point ·
1 day ago
It seems from this paper H13 and H38 are not originated in Wuhan, and the virus was imported somewhere else.
H38, one of the oldest case in the evolutionary sense, coming from Seattle, U.S., is only being detected due to the infected person had visited WuHan. He/She must bring in the virus to Wuhan from elsewhere, which is likely from Seattle. Considering, there are large population dead in flu season this year, it could be the case that COVID-19 had spread in the state since fall 2019.
The current genomes for the COVID-19 is very limited. More genomes analysis must be done in a large scale in Seattle and even in United State, to conclude if the virus is originated in the U.S..”
Actually, I am beginning to agree with you. I used to think Ron had an ulterior agenda, but I am beginning to think he is quite sincere. He hates the current elites and wants to oppose them in every way he can.
That does not mean I think he’s honest or conscientious – just sincere and without ulterior motive. His Pravda articles about Judaism failed at elementary conscientious research. And he does suppress speech he disagrees with, while criticizing the same behavior among the MSM.
And I do think he has, if not quite incipient schizophrenia, very marked schizoid traits. I don’t think the man has seen a conspiracy theory he doesn’t believe in. Whether this develops into full schizophrenia time will tell.
Still, there are times when being a little nutty makes you just the right man for the job – and I don’t think anyone not nutty could host a site like this. You have to be a bit crazy. And sincerity, for what it’s worth, is a moral quality.
Btw, utu, I too am quite sincere in my own way.
Thanx for the direct link but that is perfect example that you must read whole paper carefully, but not some BS comments from BS commenters, as the paper itself clearly states absolutely opposite findings:
Both Persian and Turko-Mongol culture are Aryan in origin.
First case in Wales. 25 miles from me. Returned from Italy.
Nice while it lasted. Bye guys.
Yes, it absolutely does. Same with American entertainment. And not in small numbers, either.
The CCP doesn’t know what soft power is. Frankly, mostly of Chinese society doesn’t either. People just think it’s throwing money around or something. Almost everything the CCP does to present itself to the outside world is wrong in some way, especially if “Face” is involved. I could list endless examples but nobody ever listens, then they wonder why most of the developed world hates China.
Right now China has no credible media platform outside of China, while the west has dozens to blast China 24/7. State media like CGTN will never be able to compete because foreigners don’t watch or trust it. The geriatrics in Beijing need to put together a think tank of young, socially adept people with experience overseas to change its image, and I doubt they’re gonna do that.
Not sure if troll or boomer
Side note: Corona-chan may bring about the long-awaited boomer genocide. Silver lining indeed
Those were the times. Up, Up and Away was quintessential 5th Dimension as well. Melody and harmony was king.
btw, if anybody still is keen on USA artificial virus origin theory this is way better food for thought from official papers, but that extreme shit was done already in 2015 together in cooperation with…well, you guessed it…Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/pdf/nihms766724.pdf
So let the blame games begin as everybody now can happily point fingers at each other while coughing furiously… lol, but sad one actually 🙁
Blame games? I have already pointed a finger at Ralph Baric at comment #408
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/corona-will-kill-millions-crater-the-world-economy/#comment-3737492
who wrote the paper (main author) and conducted the research violating the existing moratorium against the producing novel functions in viruses.
While you basically repeat innuendoes first floated by the sex-offender Harvard to the Big House about the co-author Zhengli-Li Shi.
I’m not Italian, but so far as I know, pasta — maybe with the odd exception — is always thought of as a primo there (just like risotto). And they certainly don’t lack for pasta dishes with meat. Spaghetti Carbonara and Bolognese are two obvious counterexamples.
Found a nice interactive map of the spread of the Coronavirus at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Systems Science and Engineering:
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
He should’ve used it to talk about how it shows that globalization needs to be rolled back (decoupling from China, vulnerability of global supply chains, another danger of immigration with immigrants visiting their home countries and bringing back pathogens, etc.), meanwhile, he should’ve deflected any blame for any possible negative outcome (including a recession) by emphasizing the gravity of the situation, and how the country needed his personal leadership to overcome this horrible natural disaster. Thereby maybe tapping into a kind of rally around the flag effect, too.
Instead, he downplayed the danger, and made promises which he is not in a position to deliver, even if they happen (would be almost a miracle at this point), he just cannot be sure.
Yesterday I placed a small bet on President Sanders. I’m not sure if I’d be unhappy if Sanders won, but at least that way I’ll have something good in it.
Overall an insightful comment. But you write, understatedly:
I would argue that the coronavirus was intended to attack the Chinese both physically and psychologically. In addition to literally killing the Chinese, the coronavirus supercharges the old meme of the Chinese as Yellow Peril.
Today the Chinese are regarded as a pandemic virus!
And the timing is not coincidental. Nothing that is reported 24/7 nonstop in the Jewish MSM is coincidental.
The coronavirus is an orchestrated event and planned to occur when it did. Even the name change from “novel coronavirus” to “Coivd-19” is in-your-face Jewish Gematria.
Note the numbers “9” and “1” in “Covid-19.” The Jews love their 9s and 1s (as in 9/11) as much as the Freemasons love their 3s (as in “33”).
APOCALYPSE NOW Bill Gates ‘predicted’ how coronavirus-like pandemic could spread saying 33 MILLION may die in first six months, reports the (((Sun)))
Mazel Tov!
Russia Today has hugely improved the image of Russia among Westerners and has become a fairly well respected news outlet.
China has nothing comparable, even Iran’s Press TV has more influence and is more respected in Western countries than anything China produces. It’s quite something when even Iran of all countries arguably has more soft power than China does.
Bingo
No problem at all from me.
Just so long as they’re all Jews, Moslems and Africans.
Wow. Did I say that out loud ? My bad.
You mean that third country is a tiny shithole that is at war with all of its neighbors and constantly prods the US to fight its wars for it?
Tell you what, China makes the same mistake that the USSR made throughout its history. It is very bad at propaganda, even when it does not need to lie, as the truth is on its side. Russia got a lot better at propaganda than the USSR ever was. The only thing missing is complete shamelessness characteristic for Western propaganda. It’s a learning curve, I guess.
Correction of typo:
The name of the virus, as part of the Masonic ceremony, was officially changed from “novel coronavirus” to “Covid-19.”
PS
This is from yesterday’s CNBC:
California is monitoring at least 8,400 people for the coronavirus
The gematria of 33 is (3+3) = 6… as in never let the dumb goyim forget that (((SIX))) million poor and innocent Jews were gassed by evil Nazis at Auschwitz. LOL
While pointing a finger at Ralph Baric you either don’t know or very conveniently seem to forget/omit the fact that Zhengli-Li Shi together with other Chinese scientists was making chimeric SARS like viruses even 7 years before that joint USA-China exercise in virus building:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/
“There is no human to human transmission evidence in the United States from the 11 cases.” so this is what you use to deny the U.S. could be the source of this Covid-19 Virus?
The funny thing is there is ONLY no US official admission of ” human to human transmission evidence in the United States “. but In real life, there could be a lot already! here is a whistle blower talks about it. From what I can tell, at least from January, could be from last October, the U.S. already has human to human transmission!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZyk2NYx6wGnpoJ7ApTxWKg
Another way to put it, the poster from Reddit said it very well, NOT untill the U.S. and Seattle go back to last October’s flu cases for some genome research, they CANNOT fully deny the U.S. could be the source of this Covid-19 source.
Plus, person I knew who live on East coast went to LA and got back with Covid-19 like symptom in January. The local hospital did ONLY flu test, and said he did not get flu, but some kind of virus infection, LOL. Yeah right. And then he infected his family member too. Both Asians. Luckily, both came out alive from this Covid-19 like symptom. After all, even if in Wu Han, there are a lot confirmed cases recovered.
When hospitals do NOT use CT scan and RNA test kit to test Covid-19, Of course they can claim there are no confirmed cases. Keep in mind, These are essentially the ONLY two effective tools for testing Covid-19! My insurance will Definitely NOT cover this kind of CT Scan test! I doubt yours will. Can I afford $3000-4000 out of pocket for such a test, of course NOT.
As for RNA test kit, CDC has a rule so far, ONLY those who came back from Wu Han, and those who returned from that Japan Cruise ship can be tested with those kits. The following case in CA has been repeatedly rejected by CDC for such a RNA test until it is TOO late. Now this person is critical condition.
https://californiacitynews.org/2020/02/california-sees-first-possible-case-homegrown-coronavirus.html
And this student is most likely dead of Covid-19 too! Even though the official claims they did an autopsy and it is flu not Covid-19. But Everyone who read some news lately should know, Autopsy cannot tell between Flu or Covid-19. Only when a person was alive, the RNA test and CT scan can confirm whether it is Covid-19! The reason for Wu Han finally starts to use CT Scan as the Standard for diagnosis of Covid-19 is due to too many cases are false negative by RNA test.
“Student Called 911, Died From Flu Hours Later After Cops Couldn’t Find Him”
https://www.iheart.com/content/2020-02-22-student-called-911-died-from-flu-hours-later-after-cops-couldnt-find-him/
China’s coronavirus
Two Big new developments.
(1) Long article today in Chinese on Weibo claiming the reason the US CDC recently shut down Fort Detrick was because the coronavirus escaped and infected many staff, including military staff who later attended the military games in Wuhan. The article states the training base for the military games was very near Fort Detrick, and that the reason the US did so poorly ( China – 133 gold, 64 silver, 42 bronze; US – 0, 5, and 8; 35th out of 56 countries) in the games was that many were infected with the coronavirus.
Chinese authorities have voiced no objection to this article, no suggestion of spreading false rumours.
The article stated that the US has had several thousand deaths already, but that these have been mixed with flu deaths and thus buried without identification.
It named one young reporter ( Edward Aschoff, ESPN) who recently died from what was described as a ”strange, virulent flu”, and it quoted the prominent Chinese website Huanqiu who related another case where a woman’s relative was told by physicians that he died of the flu (January 8), but where the death certificate listed the coronavirus as the cause of death. Huanqiu is a highly-respected news site in China, and has never to my knowledge made even small undocumented claims about anything.
The article further stated that Japan, Germany, France, Russia, India, the UK,and other named countries have now all openly stated the coronavirus originated in the US. So the initial claims in Japan’s Asahi Shimbun about the virus starting in the US, would appear to be gaining international consensus.
(2) Taiwan ran a news program yesterday that presented diagrams and flow charts proving the coronavirus originated in the US.
625.Jason Liu says:
“Corona-chan may bring about the long-awaited boomer genocide. Silver lining indeed”
Your comment is unforgivably ignorant and racist. You and Anatoly Karlin should be stripped naked in a public square and whipped for your despicably-cute “corona-chan”.
Maybe we can spread the virus around the world and have “gook-chan”, “raghead-chan”, “spic-chan”, “kike-chan”, “mick-chan” and, with luck, “American freedom-chan”. And for you and Karlin, a new category called “dick-chan”.
The world has no need for such sociopaths, especially those masquerading as intellectuals.
Are there any Chinese speakers that could explain this video clip for us? Apparently it’s from a Taiwanese TV program that aired recently where they discuss how the coronavirus may have originated in the US:
https://m.weibo.cn/status/4477008216030027
Apparently there was also a Japanese TV program recently that discussed the same thing, although I haven’t been able to locate any clips of it.
China’s top epidemiologist, Zhong Nanshan, who discovered the SARS outbreak, gave a press conference the other day where he said the virus may not have originated in China.
“Chinese authorities have voiced no objection to this article, no suggestion of spreading false rumours.” – They are playing with fire.
Could MERS Coronavirus be bioterrorism? New study shows why this could be one of the explanations for the paradoxes of this virus
https://sphcm.med.unsw.edu.au/news/could-mers-coronavirus-be-bioterrorism-new-study-shows-why-could-be-one-explanations-paradoxes
644.Anonymous11 says:
“Are there any Chinese speakers that could explain this video clip for us? Apparently it’s from a Taiwanese TV program that aired recently where they discuss how the coronavirus may have originated in the US:”
The man in the video is a top virologist who took part in the intelligence search for the source of the virus. He spends the first part of the video explaining the various haplotypes (varieties, if you will), and explains how they are related to each other, how one must have come before another, and how one type derived from another. He explains this is merely elementary science and nothing to do with conspiracies; [merely describing how, just as with numbers in order, 3 must always follow 2].
One of his main points is that the type infecting Taiwan exists only in Australia and the US and, since Taiwan was not infected by Australians, the infection could have come only from the US.
He further stated that the US has recently had more than 200 of what were termed “pulmonary fibrosis” cases that resulted in death due to the patients’ inability to breathe, but which conditions could not be explained by pulmonary fibrosis. He said he wrote articles in Taiwanese and US magazines and newspapers, informing them of this fact, and telling the US health authorities they needed to take the deaths from the coronavirus more seriously. But he said they responded by blaming the deaths on e-cigarettes, and then silenced discussion of them. He said he told them, and that they already knew, that there was no way e-cigarettes could cause the lung changes in either mice or humans. But they ignored him.
He said he thoroughly examined the possibility of e-cigarettes but could find no link, that they could not possibly have caused the lung failures in the victims, and that e-cigarettes were irrelevant to the issue. He then stated essentially what the Japanese Asahi Shimbun said in its articles and newcasts, that the 40,000 deaths in the US that were reported to be from “the flu”, were very likely mostly from the coronavirus – [which would explain why the US isn’t testing for the new virus].
He said this began earlier than assumed, saying, “We must look to September of 2019” – which is just after the CDC suddenly and totally shut down the Fort Detrick bio-weapons lab claiming the facilities were insufficient to prevent loss of pathogens.
He stated the case in September of 2019 where some Japanese went to Hawaii and returned home infected, people who had never been to China, and where the coronavirus infection was not discovered until much later. He said he personally investigated those cases very carefully (as did the Japanese virologists who came to the same conclusion). [This would indicate the coronavirus had already spread through much of the US but where the symptoms were being officially claimed as caused by other diseases, and thus hidden from the public.]
His argument is that America has more strains of the virus than China, and the place with the greatest diversity of strains must be the origin, because a single strain cannot emerge out of nothing, it must emerge from a pool of “parental” candidates.
This is the same argument used in linguistics: The origin of a language group is usually the place with the most varieties of languages in that group.
Whether or not that logic applies to viruses, I dunno.
This new Chinese story-theory is that the US has had coronavirus epidemic since September 2019 and there were 40,000 deaths and apparently nobody has really noticed. Life was going normal as 40,000 deaths was within expectation for a flu season. So everything would be great except that the CCP began panicking and instead of riding the epidemic as Americans did they decided to stop it with extraordinary measures by going medieval on it. (see NYT: To Take On the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It). And now everybody believes that the epidemic originated in China. Why did the CCP cried wolf? Just to save 100,000 lives? They lose 100,000 lives every year to various flu like diseases. They could have pretended that everything was normal just like Americans.
The story-theory does not seem to work too well for China unless it is reinforced with a crucial element that the virus was much more harmful to Chinese and thus the CCP had no choice but to go medieval on it.
So now you know what to do, Ayatollah Smith. Rewrite your story and republish it on Weibo. You will get a better traction. And also stop creating sock puppets like Anonymous11. Why is it that you Chinese trolls always are short on finesse?
And… now… it… begins!
CAGE MATCH of two great geniuses of our age!
Anatoly Karlin: Virus will kill millions
Donald Trump: Virus is just another liberal hoax
https://twitter.com/MikeBloomberg/status/1233577143864561664
Who will be proven right?
Who will prevail?
Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen!
Thank you. Do you have any links to the Japanese articles?
The US government’s response has been strangely complacent. The CDC has been quite reluctant about testing and has not been promoting testing, and there are now reports that the CDC’s tests don’t even work.
https://twitter.com/elizabeth_joh/status/1232876312915636225
https://twitter.com/Fahrenthold/status/1232735993712840713
Thank you. I believe similar reasoning is used in for example the “Out of Africa” theory, with Africa having more genetic diversity and thus being the origin.
1400 dead in Iran according to this source. This lends credence to the biowar angle. It would be easy to first spread the agent in Wuhan, and then to spread secondary infections in Iran as well.
https://twitter.com/hectorology/status/1233094993398550528?s=20
Biggest international tourism fair was cancelled
https://www.itb-berlin.com/Extrapages/HealthInfo/
In the scientific report linked below, the authors carried out numerical simulations using a range of parameterizations that collectively bracket the possible quantitative features of Covid-19 spread and quarantine against its spread. Whether contact tracing and quarantine can eliminate the virus depends on the parameter values, which in real terms are only partly known and which will surely vary from one country to another depending upon local competence and citizen compliance.
If we had rational and trustworthy individuals in power in the U.S., these simulations would guide their decision making as to forcing citizens to interrupt their normal behavior for the greater good.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(20)30074-7/fulltext
“Nushu characters that in Chinese would mean “favorable climatic, geographical and human conditions”. https://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2017-09/01/content_31577726.htm
https://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/images/attachement/jpg/site241/20170905/f04da2db11221b1849e443.jpg
Bloomberg held NYC for three terms. It never happened before. It was supposedly to “help” us deal with Israel’s nine eleven.
Yes, Bloomberg made sure investigations about Israel’s input in nine eleven never happenned.
If the corona virus gets bad, Bloomberg as president will do the same, cover up any US/Israel connections to the corona virus.
Perhaps, he will magically get a third term for his “great” covering up the tracks of US/Israel in the corona virus epidemic.
Enough about virus, here is something else for conspirologists to ponder.
It is also medical mystery, so it can be on topic here 😉
Man who suddenly, out of nowhere, became world famous, whose lectures and books were everywhere, who was promoted worldwide as greatest living thinker, is missing under very strange circumstances and no one seems to care.
And Russia is involved.
Nothing to see here, nothing at all…
https://twitter.com/jilliancyork/status/1233156954438041600
Is Jordan Peterson alive?
Is Jordan Peterson dead?
Had Jordan Peterson ever existed?
Fasten your tinfoil hats and share your takes!
656.annamaria says:
“Nushu characters that in Chinese would mean “favorable climatic, geographical and human conditions”.
Thank you for taking the time to do that. 🙂
You make a valid point.
It should be presumed, whether the site owners are aware of the fact or not, that sites such as these are closely monitored and mined for any potential identifying information regarding posters.
For decades there has been talk by the powers that be that the world population should in reality be a ‘sustainable’ 500 million rather than the multi billions (seven billion plus now) that it is.
They have multiple ‘tools’, which are readily available, were they to attempt to bring this about by the hand of man, ie ‘NBC’ (Nucleur, biological, chemical), weather modification, etc.
A hypothetical artificially constructed deadly virus, (deliberately?) incompetently dealt with upon it’s release, would certainly fit right in with such a ‘global population reduction’ endeavor.
If what Bill Gates was doing was foreshadowing (sometimes called ‘predictive programming’), then Gene Rodenberry may well have beat him out by over a half century.
Rodenberry wrote a 1968 Star Trek episode which centered upon a parallel Earth. In the distant past a devastating global biological war had been fought between Red China and the United States. The Chinese are victorious and over run the planet, while the shattered remnants of what had been the United States is reduced to living a stone age existence.
The episode was called The Omega Glory. ‘Omega’ in the title is of course a reference to the ‘Alpha and Omega’ of the biblical Book of Revelation.
And, yes, Gene Rodenberry was Jewish.
[For more on the subject, see the two linked upthread comments below.]
http://www.treksinscifi.com/trekdaily/pictures/2011-05-30_Omega_Glory.jpg
The Yangs (The Yanks)
‘Living like the Indians’
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/corona-will-kill-millions-crater-the-world-economy/#comment-3739535
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/corona-will-kill-millions-crater-the-world-economy/#comment-3739964
You may think that. I, of course, couldn’t possibly comment.
His argument would only apply to the origin of all coronaviruses. It says nothing about the origin of a new strain. That something originated in one place does not mean its descendants must have as well, obviously. Since we know coronaviruses can spread in China, because it has happened before, there is no reason to assume a new strain could have originated there.
Also, the place with the most diversity need not be the origin. Extinctions, drift, migration/spread, all sorts of phenomenon can make places other than origin have more diversity. Rather than an air-tight logical argument, the idea of searching in the place with the most diversity is more of a methodological best practice. This applies to biology or linguistics.
All of this is also assuming we know about all the strains of coronavirus out there, which is unlikely.
Pigshit. Sources or retract.
Not just pigshit. Neurotic, paranoid, terrified, hypocritical Jew pigshit. That’s the best.
That is not the logic for inferring a place of origin. The logic is that when diversity arises through a process of descendant entities branching off from ancestral entities, the place with the most entities (= diversity) is probably where branching has been going on the longest, and therefore the likely place where the original entity of the ensemble arose.
If indeed the SARS-Cov-2 has its greatest diversity in the U.S., an alternative mechanism might be that the U.S. is more connected to the entire world by direct air routes. High lineage diversity in the U.S. certainly does not fit with the small number of known community-acquired infections, which of course imply a short history of the virus in the U.S.
European settlers were not another Native American tribe, were they? The Native Americans did not try to put each other into reservations with appalling conditions. European settlers even tried to hunt down bisons to starve the Native people. According to your logic, even Holocaust is justified because I’m sure there were tribal warfare and killings among Jews in their history.
Thanks for the links. The numbers “1990s” jumped out immediately:
As I’ve said before, the Jews love their 9s and 1s. The name change of the virus from “novel coronavirus” to “Covid-19” is part and parcel of their occult ceremony hiding in plain sight.
Is “Covid-19” another version or variation of their “9/11” ceremony?
In the past, I have argued that “9/11” = Tisha B’av.
But if “Covid-19” does indeed kill tens of millions of goys, then I would change my previous argument by saying “9/11” = the Jews’ Holy Grail.
As for “predictive programming”… the battle between the Omegas and Alphas of this Star Trek episode is preceded by Brave New World, the dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley, written in 1931.
I would like to comment more on Brave New World but I just got up and need to drink some coffee… in the meantime, beware of Jews bearing vaccines in a hypodermic needle, lest you want to end up as the Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon workers and retards in their (((Brave New World))).
While I agree Chinese need to improve their PR skills and be more cognizant about political correctness, and master the art of hypocrisy as Westerners do, you should realize the West is still fighting a cold war against China, including relentless media attack against it like what they did to to former Soviet Union.
When even Trump is starting to do quite coherent pressers, then you know that shit has already hit the fan in USA…
That’s because the West is not fully engaged in a propaganda war against Russia and Iran, which they consider less threatening than China. The propaganda war against China, however, is full-blown, which includes discredit and twist as much Chinese media reports as possible, just like how they treated the former Soviet Union.
As a potentially related aside, the same year Gene Rodenberry produced The Omega Glory, 1968, was also a year of Marxist cultural revolution and upheaval in both the United States and Western Europe.
1968 was the same year the hugely popular Planet of the Apes was produced as well.
Much like the aforementioned Rodenberry production, it shows the future citizens of the United States (by and large Euro, ie ‘White’) after a future cataclysm (not biological in this instance, but nucleur) reduced to living a stone age illiterate existence, under subjugation by a very foreign bunch, who have defeated the Euro-Americans in war.
In the case of this movie, of course, the dominating group is apes. [Years back, it was a Black guy I knew as an acquaintance who pointed out how the apes in these movies with their hierarchal color coding (light skinned yellow simians dominating the darker black skinned ones) corresponded exactly with color code hierarchy within Black society in the United States. Almost certainly the ideological persuasion of the movie’s producer was ‘progressive’. So, this is how so called progressives, whose political and spiritual forebears as slave dealers ran the Trans-Atlantic slave trade from England and New England, in reality see Blacks, ie as brute beasts?]
The original Apes series of movies included the ‘Alpha-Omega bomb’ which ultimately blows up the entire world.
The executive producer of the first five Apes movies, Arthur P Jacobs, was like Rodenberry, Jewish.
It would seem with these two apocalyptic productions that US Euros are being conditioned to accept a broken, defeated, greatly dumbed down, and under subjugation future.
More broadly, with the probable dozens, if not hundreds of apocalyptic movies that have been made the last seventy-five years post WWII, it would seem that people in general are being conditioned by the powers that be to simply accept that, whether one is a peacenik, warmonger, or, something inbetween, WWIII is unavoidable and inescapable.
And, that it is best to just stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.
It has been foretold.
https://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/planet-of-the-apes-1.jpg?w=720&h=480&crop=1
He reportedly died from something else:
https://www.today.com/health/espn-reporter-edward-aschoff-s-fiancee-reveals-new-details-about-t170690
Doctors also diagnosed him with hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), a rare autoimmune disorder.
::::::::
Or did he?
Well, I am semi-retired, in my seventies, and I am not worried about the CV. I haven’t ever had a flu shot. I have not been sick for over two years. Three years ago I had a very bad case of something that put me out of action for three weeks. A whole slew of symptoms, including total loss of appetite I normally eat quite a lot), headache, sore throat, congestion, etc. But it never occurred to me to go to the doctor. I just stayed home and slept and read books. Couldn’t eat. Lost 5 lbs in about a week. Could only eat 2 boiled eggs and some crackers every day. It took me an additional two weeks to start to recover normal energy, etc. So, I figure my immune system got a workout. I haven’t been sick since then, despite quite a lot of stress. Touch wood.
If CV takes me out, so be it.
WHO said Virus in Iran has nothing to do with the Virus in Wu Han China. So it is Customized specially for Iran by someone
Uh, what are NPCs?
Signed, a boomer
I’m not a sock puppet or Chinese. I saw a link to that video on Twitter and wanted to know what it was about.
I managed to find it at ResearchGate for a few hours, though only the abstract, and I had to request the actual article, which I didn’t do.
Do you have a link?
If true that is incredible.
Huh, 21.1 million deaths from measles prevented by the vaccine?
I don’t follow that.
If there were 400 to 500 deaths per year from measles.
For me the most startling info in the link is that it cost some hospital in Arizona or somewhere $800,000 to treat 7 measles cases. That is the real shocker here. $100,000 plus per case???
The true economic burden is the burden of administering measles vaccines worldwide, IMHO.
One has to prep meaningfully in order to self-quarantine, if that is called for.
It would include laying in supplies of food, vitamins, any needed medications, and for me, some good books.
I do not spend my time glotzing at a screen.which probably impairs health even more.
When?
As I wrote, for several hours after the Zero Hedge article was published. I visited the page more than once.
Looks like the are all more or less in the Romanesque style.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regional_characteristics_of_Romanesque_churches
“Many Uyghurs even go so far as to surgically remove their armpit sweat glands, to be like Han, who don’t have them. ”
According to the paper discussed here
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/science/studying-recent-human-evolution-at-the-genetic-level.html
Han Chinese and other East Asians have more sweat glands, not less. If I understand the story correctly.
Post your evidence that Roddenberry was Jewish.
Red pilled Whites really go overboard labelling everyone Jewish. It’s like the reverse of Blacks claiming prominent White people.
Makes you look ridiculous.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/193639/why-are-there-no-jews-in-the-star-trek-universe
“Many Uyghurs even go so far as to surgically remove their armpit sweat glands, to be like Han, who don’t have them. ”
According to the paper discussed here
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/science/studying-recent-human-evolution-at-the-genetic-level.html
Han Chinese and other East Asians have more sweat glands, not less. If I understand the story correctly.
Hmm, am getting an odd response from the UR electronic PTB . . .
Accurate…or…honest?
That’s because the West is not fully engaged in a propaganda war against Russia and Iran
Surely you are not serious?
Don’t Litvenenko, Maidan, Crimea, Donbass, Skripals, MH-17 and Douma mean anything to you?
How about the interminable nonsense about the “Mad Mullahs” and “Iranian terrorism”?
Does the ongoing gloating about the deaths of Iranians from coronavirus seem to you normal behaviour of a civilised society?
All of this is going on while the country is sanctioned and people are dying from lack of medications.
Screaming Mary goes down with C-virus: Iran’s vice president – who ranted nightly during 1979 US embassy hostage – is diagnosed a day after sitting with President Rouhani, as virus kills top diplomat
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/02/27/15/25275452-8051765-Iranian_Vice_President_for_Women_and_Family_Affairs_Masoumeh_Ebt-a-54_1582815874388.jpg
You’re talking to the wrong person at this site in regards to your comments.
As a matter of principle, if my own people (European, non-Jewish) are significantly involved in something I post on, even if their part is not the majority portion, I mention them first, and then the Jewish part.
Even then, I make a point of saying ‘powerful elements of’, or ‘elements of’ to make it clear it’s not all, as rarely anything ever is.
I do that because I don’t think it’s healthy to blame, or condemn, an entire group for something, Jewish or European. By being careful to delineate it allows for that section of the said group who realizes there are problems to have space to work on them.
Having said that, for the most part I don’t even talk about the Jewish people at all in most of my posts.
Had you done even the most cursory check of my archives you would have found that out. And if you are of good will, I’d suspect you would have dropped the subject right there.
As for Gene Roddenberry, many years ago (much to my surprise) I found out how Jewish Star Trek was, both in front of the camera and behind it. From what I recall, there was some uncertainty regarding Roddenberry’s origins, however, after a lot of online digging, it appeared that he was very likely Jewish.
Out of curiosity, I did a very brief check just now and found a source that fits what I recall finding many years back. It’s a Jewish World Review article by the author Jonathan Tobin. Tobin is editor in chief of the Jewish News Syndicate.
Tobin in the article flat out declares Roddenberry was indeed Jewish.
If you’d done a little bit of checking, you would have found this article yourself. You would also have found other articles that, though they may disagree with Tobin’s overall conclusion, acknowlede a degree of uncertainty on their part regarding the matter.
Failing to have done these most basic of things, in addition to presuming a hell of a lot, being far to quick to judge and condemn others, in addition to simple plain arrogance, makes you look ridiculous.
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/tobin051399.asp
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_S._Tobin
The 21 million deaths from measles prevented by vaccination were in the Third World.
The 400-500 deaths annually were in the U.S. prior to the vaccine. 500,000 cases annually in the U.S. in those days with 10% requiring hospitalization. Without hospitalization as a fallback in the U.S. pre-vaccine days, there would have been a mortality rate closer to the Third World rate before vaccination began there.
And if viral evolution proceeded as expected in the Third World since vaccination began, then measles virulence is probably lower now.
The question of whether Western medicine being applied worldwide was strategically mistaken is another matter.
For a moment leaving aside unpractical quarelling about the origins of the SARS 2.0 virus, cause people are increasingly starting to get infected, sick and dying almost everywhere, even if in relatively low numbers initially (that will change drastically in about a month), so even getting the truth about origins will not change anything in practice.
Being myself converted to hazmat Chad routines for about three weeks when going out, wanted to share the most useful thing I have found regarding personal protection procedures, especially double gloving is essential cause there were many instances for me when just one pair of surgical gloves were damaged, when I was driving, packing or carrying things:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/images/08-0085-F1.jpg
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/14/8/08-0085_article
Of course, all it is almost useless for those with regular jobs, but for people who work from home or don’t work at all since this shit began, this might be lifesaving solutions, unless you have some spare space costumes in the backyard 🙂
https://i.redd.it/t682ljymcdj41.jpg
If smokers are at higher risk, then countries with bad air quality are also at higher risk. Iran, if I’m not mistaken, doesn’t exactly have superb air quality, so it would be no surprise that things are getting worse there.
The e cigarette angle is interesting.
If you don’t test, there will be no cases; the USA proved this during the American H1N1 swine flu epidemic in 2009. I don’t think the Indian government is capable of widespread testing.
In the Wikipedia article on Roddenberry, his mother was Caroline “Glen” (née Golemon).
According to ancestry.com “Golemon” is a variant of the German “Gollmann.”
Similar surnames include: Goleman, Goldman, Rosemond, Foreman, Goeden, Goldmann, Zolman, Kilmon–very Jewish names, indeed.
It’s not conclusive proof, but at this late stage in the game, whether Roddenberry was a “Jew” or not is a minor point and not all that interesting.
Insofar as Hollywood is 100% Jewish owned and controlled and nobody gets ahead and becomes famous without being carefully vetted and Kosher certified, Roddenberry is guilty by association.
In any event, I would argue that the very concept of Star Trek and space travel, if not the entire genre of science fiction itself, is very much a Jewish construct and Predictive Programming for the dumb goyim.
It appears that the Elite Jews who lord over us are obsessed with Saturn and stars and all things extraterrestrial– even their patented deadly viruses attest to this. I am, of course, referring to the newest and latest pandemic outbreak of “novel coronavirus” aka “Covid-19.”
In my earlier post from yesterday, I stated that “Covid-19” could be another “9/11” ceremony, but I just came across this video which makes me think that “Covid-19” could very be another Portal Ritual and Ceremony.
Cf. CERN PORTAL RITUAL! // Baku 2015 EuroGames Ceremony
In the above video, you will see images of the corona, especially at the end of the ceremony. Why? What does it have to do with sports?
According to the person who made this video, the corona represents “the ring of fire, the black sun, which is the gate to Hell, Hell’s Gate….
Here’s the extended quotation from the 12.27 minute mark of the video:
Incidentally, some have argued that “9/11” is a Portal Ceremony, and I an inclined to think it may be a valid if not entirely correct interpretation of their esoterica.
Huxley’s Brave New World with it’s ‘year of our Ford’ is intriguing. IIRC it too is ‘post apocalyptic’. The idea of world war as a catalyst (cover?) for major social revolution would seem to have been around quite awhile then. Would be glad to hear any further thoughts you have on BNW.
A contemporary of Huxley’s was the Englishman H G Wells who wrote and published in 1933 The Shape of Things to Come. The plot of the book is that a second world war would be sparked in January, 1940 when Germany and Poland enter into combat against each other over the matter of Danzig. The United States and Japan fight each other too in this book. The world war ultimately ends in stalemate and exhaustion after ten years of fighting (1950) and a global super-state is ultimately introduced as a result of that and associated economic collapse/plague.
A movie entitled Things to Come broadly based on Well’s book was released in 1936. The English Wells wrote the script while a Jewish executive producer, Alexander Korda, financed it’s production.
The movie has the world war start in 1940 and lasting over two decades. The barely disguised Germans (Boo! Hiss!) are naturally shown to be the baddies over all others as they launch the aerial bombing of London (‘Everytown’), thus starting the war, and German planes use poison gas later on against British villages. Biological warfare (‘the wandering sickness’), also unleashed (apparently) by the Germans, kills over half of the world’s population, whereupon humanity devolves into a new dark age with localized warlords running the show. A new global super-state then arises and sweeps away the warlords.
In 1940, the movie was re-released in Britain to huge crowds as Wells was seen by the public to have ‘prophecied’ WWII.
Just an odd combination of well thought out ‘dumb luck’ on Well’s part in 1933, or, rather, ‘a suggestion’ being placed in the public’s mind in regards to a world war that had already been planned and decided upon?
Below are some stills from the 1936 movie and a pic of very crowded theatre.
https://outlandinstitute.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/things2.jpg
Biological warfare kills half of humanity.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_CdocFnegjE0/TOr6bvncCbI/AAAAAAAAB2w/Rhf112kO_Ek/s1600/thingstocome_massey_boss.jpg
The new order’s Mr Cabal offers a piece of the action to ‘the Boss’ and his enterouge.
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