German scientist, Professor Hendrik Streeck has been studying groups of subjects in his country and has reached a number of compelling provisional findings regarding the viral behaviour of the new Coronavirus.
Streeck also explains why he thinks that draconian ‘lockdown’ measures were decided in haste, and may ultimately be deemed to have been completely unnecessary.
He also presented data which gives an indication of an “Infected Fatality Rate” (IFR), eg. the percentage of people infected who will end up dying. New findings show a COVID-19 infection fatality rate of between 0.24 – 0.36% (as opposed to Neil Ferguson who claims the IFR to be just under 1%, perhaps 0.8-0.9%). Previous interviews with UnHerd, with experts like Johan Giesecke who believes the IFR is closer to 0.1%, or one in a thousand.
The difference between IFR is important, not least of all because this statistic will be used by governments to determine he relative severity of the threat in question. After UK ‘experts’ like Prof. Ferguson had massively overestimated the IFR, Boris Johnson’s government then switched course – away from a more common sense, science-based approach like Sweden, and instead implemented an experimental Medieval-style quarantine, or “lockdown” method, to try and contain the coronavirus. In the end, the UK policy turned out to be a disaster, leading to an unprecedented economic catastrophe as well as the highest COVID death totals in Europe.
UnHerd says:
“This may sound like splitting hairs — they are both under one percent after all — but in reality, the difference between these estimates changes everything. At the lower end, a much more laissez-faire policy becomes possible, and at 30,000 deaths it starts to look like the UK has already been through the worst of it; at the higher end, a policy of continued ultra-caution is necessary because a more relaxed approach could mean hundreds of thousands of additional deaths.”
Streeck also gave some insightful analysis on the differences in contagious ability of SARS1 and the new SARS-CoV2, as well as what factors might determine immunity, and what sort of ‘social distancing’ might be useful going forward.
Host Freddie Sayers talks with Professor Streeck about what his team learned from their recent study. Watch:
The collective GDP of the EU-27 was expected to grow 1.2 percent this year but it is now forecast contract 7.4 percent due to the pandemic. By contrast, Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes thatthe Financial Crisis “only” led to a contraction of 4.5 percent for the EU-28 back in 2009.
The current crisis has now pushed the EU into the deepest recession since its foundation with unemployment rates set to rise drastically. Last year, unemployment across the bloc was 6.7 percent and it is now forecast to grow to 9 percent this year.
The data shows that no EU member state is going to emerge from the COVID-19 crisis unscathed with countries in southern Europe set to be worst impacted. Even though Greece has made progress since the Financial Crisis and has earned plaudits for limiting the spread of the coronavirus, it is expected to suffer the worst decline in GDP our of all EU member states at 9.7 percent. Italy and Spain who have both been badly impacted by the pandemic are also expected to suffer GDP contractions greater than 9 percent this year.
Even though Germany has suffered a far lower death toll than many of its neighbors and is slowly easing its lockdown, Europe’s economic powerhouse is still predicted to see its GDP shrink by 6.5 percent this year. While the situation remains serious in some parts of Europe, particularly the UK, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
After 7 weeks of strict confinement, Italians finally emerged from their homes at the start of the week while Germany’s schools and restaurants are set to open over the next couple of days. Even though the situation is improving, most EU leaders are remaining cautious due to the possibility of a second wave of infections. The European Commission has stated that fundamental uncertainty surrounds the forecast and that the danger of a deeper and more protracted recession is very real.
Australia and the United States are leading a campaign for an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. Senior officials in both countries are seeking to determine if the virus originated in nature or in a Chinese laboratory. They are also calling on the Chinese government to account for its handling of the initial outbreak in the city of Wuhan.
In Europe, where the pandemic has killed more than 100,000 people and caused economic devastation on a scale not seen since the Second World War, political leaders have been deafeningly silent on demanding accountability from China. While a handful of European officials have agreed in principle that there should be an investigation at some undetermined point in the future, most appear afraid to challenge China directly.
The equivocation of European leaders is a reflection not only of Europe’s geopolitical weakness and economic overdependence on China, but also of a moral vacuum in which they refuse to stand up for Western values.
A few days after European officials caved in to pressure from China and watered down an EU report on Chinese efforts to deflect blame for the coronavirus pandemic, the EU ambassador to China, Nicolas Chapuis, allowed the Chinese government to edit an op-ed article signed by him and the 27 Ambassadors of EU member states, to mark the 45th anniversary of diplomatic relations with China.
The EU authorized the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to remove references to the origins and the spread of the coronavirus from the article, published in China Daily, an English-language daily newspaper owned by the Communist Party of China.
An EU spokesperson said that the EU allowed China to revise the op-ed because Brussels “considered it important to communicate EU policy priorities, notably on climate change and sustainability…”
Meanwhile, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen backed calls for an investigation into the origin of the coronavirus, but she avoided mentioning China by name and was careful not to offer specifics, such as who should lead the probe or when it might be conducted.
In a May 1 interview with the American broadcaster CNBC, von der Leyen used meaningless “diplomatese” apparently not to offend China:
“You never know when the next virus is starting, so we all want for the next time, we have learned our lesson and we’ve established a system of early warning that really functions and the whole world has to contribute to that.”
In Sweden, Health Minister Lena Hallengren was slightly more forceful. In a reply to parliament on April 29, she called on the European Union to probe the origin of the pandemic:
“When the global situation of Covid-19 is under control, it is both reasonable and important that an international, independent investigation be conducted to gain knowledge about the origin and spread of the coronavirus.
“It is also important that the entire international community’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, including the World Health Organisation, is investigated. Sweden is happy to raise this issue within the framework of EU cooperation.”
In France, President Emmanuel Macron questioned China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak. “Given the choices made and what China is today, which I respect, let’s not be so naive as to say it’s been much better at handling this,” Macron told the Financial Times on April 16. “We don’t know. There are clearly things that have happened that we don’t know about.” He stopped short of calling for an investigation.
Meanwhile, the French government allowed the Chinese telecom company Huawei to supply parts for its 5G next-generational mobile network. The concession was made after China threatened to retaliate against European companies in the Chinese market.
In Britain, which now has the highest coronavirus death toll in Europe, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been strangely silent on China. He continues to resist pressure from parliament to reverse his controversial decision to allow Huawei to supply parts for the UK’s 5G mobile network.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab vowed to ask “hard questions” and threatened the end of “business as usual” with Beijing. He has not, however, announced any punitive measures against China.
Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, when asked by LBC radio if China should be held accountable, replied:
“I think it does. But I think the time for the post-mortem on this is after we’ve all got it under control and have come through it and our economies are back to normal. Only by being open and transparent will we learn about it, and China needs to be open and transparent about what it learned, and its shortcomings, but also its successes.”
Former Prime Minister Theresa May, in a May 6 op-ed published by The Times, called for moral equivalence when dealing with the United States and China. “A world in which a few ‘strong men’ square up to each other and expect everyone else to choose between them would be a dangerous one,” she said, apparently referring to U.S. President Donald J. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Writing for The Spectator, Scottish political commentator Stephen Daisley lamented the government’s dithering approach to China. In an essay, “Our Toothless Response to China is Embarrassing,” he listed a series of measures the British government could take:
“No country with a skerrick of self-respect can allow this behavior to go unpunished. I have already suggested some punitive measures designed to wound the regime’s pride without harming the Chinese people: cancel the Huawei deal; pass a Magnitsky-style Act targeting senior CPC figures; champion the Uyghurs at every opportunity (e.g. rename the London street that houses the Chinese embassy after a Uyghur political prisoner); and recognize Taiwan as an independent nation. All I would add, upon reflection, is this: grant British citizenship to Hong Kongers born before 1 July 1997, their children and grandchildren. Even if just a fraction of Hong Kong’s residents took up the opportunity, every one would be a small humiliation for the dictatorship. Given the government’s softly-softly approach, we probably shouldn’t get our hopes up for anything beyond Huawei cancellation, and even that’s far from guaranteed. Even absent the ministerial gumption to impose sanctions on Beijing, there will have to be a strategic rethink of our relationship with the People’s Republic. If this is how it behaves in a US-led world order, it is unlikely to be any more benevolent as a rival (or replacement) superpower.
“While abandoning global free trade and economic interdependence would prove a costly mistake, it would be just as foolish to remain in hock to a regime that, in the most generous reading of events, caused thousands of avoidable British deaths to save face. However, reshoring and rebuilding key manufacturing sectors is only a partial solution. We need to trade but our trading priorities are subject to political and security considerations. China is our second-largest trading partner while India is our sixth. It would be in the UK’s interests to reverse that ordering. Of course, to make a change like that you need a government with a bit of backbone and it’s not at all clear that we have one.”
In Germany, Development Minister Gerd Müller said that the Chinese government “had to show complete openness in this world crisis, especially with regard to the origin of the virus.” The statement was the most forceful of any German cabinet member to date. Chancellor Angela Merkel distanced herself from the remark, saying that it had not been discussed in the cabinet:
“I believe that the more transparent China is about the history of this virus, the better it is for all of us around the world who want to learn from it. But we didn’t have this specific discussion.”
German commentator Constantin Eckner noted that the coronavirus has exposed Germany’s dependency on its trade relations with China, which Germany needs to overcome the current crisis:
“For years now, Germany has been leaning on China for cheap supply and as a market for its exports. Following the 2008 financial crisis, when most of Europe was suffering, Germany kept itself rather unscathed thanks to a strong export-orientated economy and partly thanks to China. Germany was not concerned about any geo-economic advances Beijing was making. It cared little about the 16+1 forum with Central and Eastern European countries launched in 2012 or the Belt and Road Initiative unveiled in 2013, and the ‘Made in China 2025’ strategy intended to establish Chinese dominance in emerging technologies….
“Publicly Berlin has positioned itself against Xi Jinping’s ‘mask diplomacy’ since the coronavirus outbreak in Europe, condemning attempts to exploit the crisis politically or economically. But behind closed doors, senior officials acknowledge that the domestic economy needs China just like it did in the aftermath of 2008, or possibly even more. Germany has the highest export ratio among the G20 — about 47 per cent of its GDP. A demand shock of global proportion puts a lot of manufacturers in a tough spot. As China is recovering from the pandemic faster than the rest of the world, Germany might end up tying itself closer to the economic giant than before the crisis….
“These desperate times could make Merkel forge a new alliance with Xi, accepting that Germany cannot survive without the Chinese market and financial firepower, but also knowing that Beijing will not be shy to exploit such a dependency to further its geoeconomic goals. For its future prosperity, Germany may be forced to look east.”
Europe’s most forceful action against China has been taken by the Netherlands, which recently renamed its de facto embassy in Taiwan. The Netherlands Trade and Investment Office is now called “Netherlands Office Taipei.” China responded by threatening to halt shipments of medical supplies, a threat that could ring hollow: the Netherlands recently recalled 600,000 substandard medical masks that had been imported from China.
While Europeans cower in the face of Communist China, they have found time to issue threats against the only democracy in the Middle East. On April 30, eleven European ambassadors to Israel warned Jerusalem of “severe consequences” if it goes ahead with plans to annex parts of the West Bank.
In a lengthy essay published by Die Welt, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, Europe’s largest publishing company, argued that the time has come for Europe to choose between the United States and China:
“Once a treatment for the virus has been found, the debates about shutdown and easing restrictions have passed, and the recession has reared its ugly head, nothing less than the world order itself must be clarified. Or to be more specific: the matter of alliance. Where does Europe stand? On the side of the US or China?…
“America has clearly decided to pursue a policy of ‘decoupling’ from China. If Europe does not want to see its freedom subverted by Beijing, it must decide which of the two countries to ally with, and it must do so soon.
“We are told time and again that it is not a case of either-or, that it’s about having the best of both worlds. The opposite is true. There is no need for finely crafted rhetoric here, we need to make a fundamental political decision. China or the US. It is no longer possible to go with both….
“Europe has been avoiding the alliance question for a long time, but it is now time to make that decision. This does not directly have to do with the coronavirus crisis. And it certainly has nothing to do with the question of where the virus originated.
“The crisis focuses the way we look at long-standing dependencies, even those in so-called vital supply chains, how we see fundamental differences in communication and crisis management, and our regard for what is ultimately a completely different concept of humanity….
“Europe has failed so far to clearly state where it stands, preferring to play piggy in the middle, able to tip the scales either way. Even believing its opportunism to be a sign of independence and courage. However, Europe will never be able to hold onto its position as everybody’s darling. When it comes to questions of world order, you cannot have your cake and eat it….
“Europe’s economy likes making deals with China and does not want to be interrupted in those pursuits. Politicians are dithering. The Italians have even been willing to subjugate themselves to China’s ridiculous euphemism of the ‘New Silk Road.’
“We increasingly hear words of admiration in Europe about the speed and efficiency of the Chinese market economy, the rigorous nature of its crisis management. All the time gladly ignoring the fact that China’s successes rest on a highly perfected system of digital surveillance that translates the perversions of the KGB and Stasi into the 21st century….
“Economic relations with China might seem harmless to many Europeans today, but they could soon lead to political dependence and ultimately to the end of a free and liberal Europe. The European Union has the choice. But above all Germany, Europe’s economic motor, has the choice.
“Should we make a pact with an authoritarian regime or should we work to strengthen a community of free, constitutionally governed market economies with liberal societies? It is remarkable that German politics, with its love of moralizing, seems to throw its values out the window when dealing with China. What is at stake here is nothing less than what kind of society we want to live in and our concept of humanity….
“If current European and, above all, German policy on China continues, this will lead to a gradual decoupling from America and a step-by-step infiltration and subjugation by China. Economic dependence will only be the first step. Political influence will follow.
“In the end, it is quite simple. What kind of future do we want for Europe? An alliance with an imperfect democracy or with a perfect dictatorship? It should be an easy decision for us to make. It is about more than just money. It is about our freedom, about Article 1 of Germany’s Basic Law, the greatest legal term that ever existed: human dignity.”
“Keep Them In A Bubble”: Army Unit Deploys To War Zone During COVID “New Normal”
On Monday Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said that for the Pentagon and armed services a “new normal” should be expected for “an extended period of time”. This after the Pentagon has now for many weeks been down to what’s essentially a skeleton crew of reduced personnel working on site.
“The long-term view is: What do we do over the next 6, 12, 18 months?” Esper said in a virtual conference for a D.C. think tank event . “There will be a new normal that we will have to adapt to for an extended period of time at least until we have a vaccine that we’re confident in.”
Meanwhile this “new normal” is already greatly impacting regular ranks throughout the United States Army and other branches. A new Wall Street Journalarticle explores how mission protocols have shifted dramatically, in a way “where warfighting and coronavirus collide”.
Image source: US Marine Corps/Stars & Stripes
The Army has reportedly now been able to reorient itself away from a domestic emergency response (of doing things like set up emergency make-shift hospitals) to deploying on foreign missions once again.
“Approximately 900 troops from the Fourth Security Force Assistance Brigade, which is based in Fort Carson, Colo., are scheduled to go to Afghanistan in the fall and will be the first large group to undergo Army training for overseas deployment since the onset of the pandemic,” WSJ reports.
“In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, military resources were largely devoted to building makeshift medical facilities and providing supplies to hard-hit areas in the U.S. But as demand for military medical help has receded, the military has shifted back to security operations.“
File image, US Army
But even deployed to Afghanistan and other places, the “new normal” will be immediately felt, given that to remain effective, soldiers have to first attempt to stay health, and prevent themselves from getting infected.
A barracks that normally bunks 44 soldiers instead will hold only 12, in cots spaced 6 feet apart. When waiting in line at an assembly building, troops must stand in prespaced squares, painted red. Masks, gloves and eye protection will be required. So will temperature checks, quarantines and social distancing.
“The idea is to keep them in a bubble,” Gen. James McConville, chief of staff of the Army, said. He underscored that, “We’re looking at the long game. We’re not waiting for Covid-19 to go away.”
Barracks configuration with cots some distance apart from others. Image source: WSJ
Like much of the rest of the US and the world, the Army has been in short supply of both coronavirus tests and personal protective equipment. It’s already taken drastic steps which many generals fear could damage US defense readiness, such as temporary pauses to sending new recruits to boot camp.
And with nearly 5,000 COVID-19 cases across the military, including two deaths, also with an entire aircraft carrier crew, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, knocked out of commission by the virus, deployed personnel will have to face the difficult task of some level of ‘social distancing’ while carrying on already challenging foreign missions.
But we have a novel idea that would make all of the above incredibly easy: How about just ending all regime change ops and ‘wars of choice’, foreign occupations, and trillion dollar ‘nation-building’ deployments altogether? As we recently underscored: America, we have to end the wars now.
“Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices—taking advantage of our freedom of speech—who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.”
– Nat Hentoff
We are fast becoming a nation – nay, a world – of book burners.
While on paper, we are technically free to speak – at least according to the U.S. Constitution – in reality, however, we are only as free to speak as the government and its corporate partners such as Facebook, Google or YouTube may allow.
That’s not a whole lot of freedom. Especially if you’re inclined to voice opinions that may be construed as conspiratorial or dangerous.
Take David Icke, for example.
Icke, a popular commentator and author often labeled a conspiracy theorist by his detractors, recently had his Facebook page and YouTube channel (owned by Google) deleted for violating site policies by “spreading coronavirus disinformation.”
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which has been vocal about calling for Icke’s de-platforming, is also pushing for the removal of all other sites and individuals who promote Icke’s content in an effort to supposedly “save lives.”
Translation: the CCDH evidently believes the public is too dumb to think for itself and must be protected from dangerous ideas.
This is the goosestepping Nanny State trying to protect us from ourselves.
In the long run, this “safety” control (the censorship and shadowbanning of anyone who challenges a mainstream narrative) will be far worse than merely allowing people to think for themselves.
These internet censors are not acting in our best interests to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns about COVID-19, a virus whose source and behavior continue to elude medical officials. They’re laying the groundwork now, with Icke as an easy target, to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
This is how freedom dies.
It doesn’t matter what disinformation Icke may or may not have been spreading about COVID-19. That’s not the issue.
As commentator Caitlin Johnstone recognizes, the censorship of David Icke by these internet media giants has nothing to do with Icke: “What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory.”
The internet, hailed as a super-information highway, is increasingly becoming the police state’s secret weapon. This “policing of the mind: is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of hat will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”
It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.
Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.
We’re almost at that point now.
What you are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.
Today, the forces of political correctness, working in conjunction with corporate and government agencies, have managed to replace actual book burning with intellectual book burning.
This is about much more than free speech, however. This is about repression and control.
With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”
The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”
The upshot of all of this editing, parsing, banning and silencing is the emergence of a new language, what George Orwell referred to as Newspeak, which places the power to control language in the hands of the totalitarian state.
Under such a system, language becomes a weapon to change the way people think by changing the words they use.
The end result is control.
In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.
In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind lest they find themselves ostracized or placed under surveillance.
Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination and infantilism.
It’s political correctness disguised as tolerance, civility and love, but what it really amounts to is the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.
The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship, spying and policing: this is how you turn a nation of free people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other.
1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.
Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”
And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.
What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.
We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.
What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot.
The government requires an accomplice.
Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.
In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide.
The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.
Money, power, control.
There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price?
“We the people,” of course. Not just we Americans, but people the world over.
We have entered into a global state of tyranny.
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final link in the police state chain.
Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights. In fact, the addiction to screen devices—especially cell phones—has created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea of a total surveillance state tracking one’s every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11 attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, “Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”
Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.
We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.
In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us—the proverbial “needle in a haystack,” as one official termed it—the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity and credit card transactions. This data is being fed through fusion centers across the country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children.
Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint.
When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.
The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.
Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely. And if any “threatening” words are detected—no matter how inane or silly—the record can be flagged and assigned to a government agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content. Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.
In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent.
Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted.
We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.
Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA has designed an artificial intelligence system that can anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA feeds vast amounts of the information it collects to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer then uses to detect patterns and predict behavior.
No information is sacred or spared.
Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents.
Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
Clearly, the age of privacy is at an end.
So where does that leave us?
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.
It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.
Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.
So how do you survive this global surveillance state?
We’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.
Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited:
“Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”
Which brings me back to this technofascist tyranny being meted out on David Icke and all those like him who dare to voice ideas that diverge from what the government and its corporate controllers deem to be acceptable.
The problem as I see it is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us. And we’ve allowed ourselves to become so timid in the face of offensive words and ideas that we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean.
The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.
In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.
In this way, we have become our worst enemy.
You want to reclaim some of the ground we’re fast losing to the techno-tyrants?
Start by thinking for yourself. If that means reading the “dangerous” ideas being floated out there by the David Ickes of the world—or the John Whiteheads for that matter—and then deciding for yourself what is true, so be it.
As Orwell concluded, “Freedom is the right to say two plus two make four.”
Visualizing America’s Energy Use, in One Giant Chart
Have you ever wondered where the country’s energy comes from, and how exactly it gets used?
Well now, thanks to Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins, we have the answer as The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) crunches the numbers every year, outputting an incredible flow diagram that covers the broad spectrum of U.S. energy use.
The 2019 version of this comprehensive diagram gives us an in-depth picture of the U.S. energy ecosystem, showing not only where energy originates by fuel source (i.e. wind, oil, natural gas, etc.) but also how it’s ultimately consumed by sector.
In Perspective: 2019 Energy Use
Below, we’ll use the unit of quads, with each quad worth 1 quadrillion BTUs, to compare data for the last five years of energy use in the United States. Each quad has roughly the same amount of energy as contained in 185 million barrels of crude oil.
Interestingly, overall energy use in the U.S. actually decreased to 100.2 quads in 2019, similar to a decrease last seen in 2015.
It’s also worth noting that the percentage of fossil fuels used in the 2019 energy mix decreased by 0.2% from last year to make up 80.0% of the total. This effectively negates the small rise of fossil fuel usage that occurred in 2018.
Energy Use by Source
Which sources of energy are seeing more use, as a percentage of the total energy mix?
Since 2015, natural gas has grown from 29% to 32% of the U.S. energy mix — while coal’s role in the mix has dropped by 4.7%.
In these terms, it can be hard to see growth in renewables, but looking at the data in more absolute terms can tell a different story. For example, in 2015 solar added 0.532 quads of energy to the mix, while in 2019 it accounted for 1.04 quads — a 95% increase.
Energy Consumption
Finally, let’s take a look at where energy goes by end consumption, and whether or not this is evolving over time.
Residential, commercial, and industrial sectors are all increasing their use of energy, while the transportation sector is seeing a drop in energy use — likely thanks to more fuel efficient cars, EVs, public transport, and other factors.
The COVID-19 Effect on Energy Use
The energy mix is incredibly difficult to change overnight, so over the years these flow diagrams created by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have not changed much.
One exception to this will be in 2020, which has seen an unprecedented shutdown of the global economy. As a result, imagining the next iteration of this energy flow diagram is basically anybody’s guess.
We can likely all agree that it’ll include increased levels of energy consumption in households and shortfalls everywhere else, especially in the transportation sector. However, the total amount of energy used — and where it comes from — might be a significant deviation from past years.
In response to my piece on Masks in Sweden, I received the following fascinating note, by James Cooper, reproduced with his permission, which compares the attitude in Sweden with that in the United States. I think readers will find this very interesting.
[emphasis ours]
Dr. Klein,
Thank you for your recent article on Sweden’s response to COVID-19. I would just like to add my thoughts to the ongoing public discussion. I am an American living in Stockholm. I have been living here for 17 years and am fluent in Swedish. I am from Northern Virginia.
Regarding this article, I will just point out that the American people have been buffalo’d into a very binary way of thinking – there are only two possibilities when dealing with COVID-19 – complete lockdown or nothing at all. This is also referred to as TINA (There Is No Alternative).
For many of my American family and friends, they find it difficult to understand that there are many possibilities in between the two extremes. In fact, a more nuanced approach not only makes more sense, but is more sustainable. That is precisely what the Swedish approach is all about.
If you look at the numbers, you will see that there is negligible risk to those aged 4-50 years old. This group also happens to represent the most economically productive group in society as well as the group that spends the most money. So why shut them down?
The response I get from my family and friends is that they must be shut down because otherwise people will die. This is an emotion based argument.
The reality is that in Sweden all at-risk people have been asked to self quarantine. If they do that, how will their lives be threatened by allowing the under-50 crowd to go out, with some social distancing guidelines?
Keep in mind that if you live with an at risk person, or you are a primary caregiver for an at risk person, then (in Sweden), you are expected to self quarantine; or at least go to extreme social distancing.
I myself had some concerns about whether I was in the risk group, and I took the precaution of keeping my kids home from school until such time as I could get a more definitive answer from my doctor. My kids’ school fully supported me in this approach.
So, I go back to my American family and friends and ask, how can allowing the under-50 crowd out with social distancing put the at risk population in danger? Yes, it requires people to take personal responsibility and to actively work to protect those at risk. And, assuming this is followed, then those at risk can be expected to be reasonably protected.
Why did they have a complete lockdown in the U.S. in the first place? We were told that it was meant to flatten the curve so that the hospitals have a chance to deal with the patient loads. Mass lockdown simply pushes the problem out in time, to be dealt with later. Yes, over the next 18 months, at risk people will get the virus and there will be many that die. This is in large part unavoidable. I suspect that in the end we will see similar numbers within a range across all Western countries. This will play out over 12+ months.
If we can accept that statement, then we would need to admire Sweden for taking an approach that does not further burden its economy, does not destroy people’s God given right to freedom, while also working to protect those at risk, and augmenting immunity.
Americans have been Buffalo’d into TINA (“There Is No Alternative”). The reality is that there are a wide range of responses and one size does not fit all. There are sophisticated approaches that can be deployed which do not necessitate the destruction of our economy and the financial decimation of people and their families.
What NYC does should not necessarily be followed in Iowa. Iowa might look more like Sweden and NYC more like Helsinki.
All of the criticism and “hate” directed at Sweden is emotional and not following evidence based science. One wonders why people are reacting the way they are.
And now we see the partisan politics exposed between #LockdownDeniers and the #HealthBeforeWealth fantasists.
For Albert Edwards This Is The One Chart Proving Just How Insane The Market Has Become
By now everyone has seen some version of this chart which we first presented a month ago and updated yesterday, demonstrating just how disconnected stocks are from reality.
SocGen’s resident permabear (… for stocks, and permabull for bonds) Albert Edwards has seen it too, and he too is stunned by the ludicrous gap between reality and expectation, which he has been tracking for decades but never has it gotten as wide as it is now, because as he writes in his latest global strategy weekly:
We are in the midst of a monetary and fiscal ideological revolution. Nose-bleed equity valuations are being supported by nothing more than a belief that a new ideology can deliver. Meanwhile the gap between the reality on the ground and expectations grows wider.
While Edwards admits that there are many ways to show “how ludicrous current equity valuations have become and by implication how vulnerable equities are to a collapse”, the SocGen strategist avoids focusing on the “ubiquitous chart” shown above which shows the rise in the S&P500 12m forward PE above 20x driven by the ongoing profits collapse – after all we did that just yesterday highlighting the “Idiotic Disconnect Between Markets And Reality” – to Edwards the real show-stopper is a different chart, one which shows on one hand the continued Ice Age slump in analysts collective expectations for long-term eps growth, and on the other the soaring PE ratio. The combination of the two is what is also known as the PEG, or Price to Earnings Growth, ratio.
Looking at the first component, long-term, EPS growth, Edwards notes that it “has now slid below 10%, a trend only likely to accelerate during the current profits slump.” This is shown in the chart below.
Looking at the chart above, Edwards urges readers to compare the current LT EPS situation with the late 1990s tech bubble, when – like now – “the S&P forward PE rose above 20x, but at least back then the cycle was still intact, and as technology stocks increasingly dominated the index, the markets LT eps was also surging higher in tandem with the rising PE.” As he further explains, at least back in the tech bubble, the market had a LT eps leg to stand on “albeit a wooden leg, riddled with woodworm.” By contrast, this time around, despite technology stocks once again dominating the index, something Goldman warned two weeks ago always ends in pain, “the 20x PE is based on nothing more than an ideological dream.” The dream he is referring to, is one spawned by the destructive ideology of MMT (i.e., the Magic Money Tree), where the merger of the Treasury and Fed, and the joint issuance and monetization of debt, magically creates an economic perpetual engine and social utopia… for at least a short while before the currency collapse. No wonder this ideological dream is that anchor pillar of socialists who wish to pass off as financial gurus.
In any event, going back to the chart above, when one combines the two data sets, one gets a snapshot of the so-called PEG ratio (the ratio of the P/E to Long-Term eps growth) which as Edwards notes, has risen above 2x for the first time ever, which prompts the stunned strategist to exclaim that “this is even more shocking than a 20x PE!“
While not nearly as dramatic, Edwards also highlights a few charts from the far more rational world of bonds – at least until the Fed locks it down too, when it launches BOJ-style Yield Curve Control in a few months. The first one is of 5Y yields which as Edwards points out, have not bought into the latest risk rally and yields remain close to rock bottom. “Watch the 5y yield particularly closely as a break below the recent 0.3% floor would likely see an attempt to attack zero.”
And speaking of zero rates, Edwards concludes with a quick take on the dollar, which as we first showed two months ago exploded to an all time high due to an ongoing and systemic $12 trillion US dollar margin call as countless offshore issuers of dollar-denominated debt suddenly find themselves cut off from cashflows as a result of the global economic stop, which in turn means that there is a shortage of up to $12 trillion in synthetically created dollars, which is precisely what the Fed has been struggling to flood the entire globe with thanks to its expanded FX swaps.
So far it is failing, however, and as Edwards concludes, “the dollar is already too strong in an environment where fighting deflation is becoming the number one priority. The recent surge in the broad dollar index is already sufficient to import another dose of unwanted deflation.”
Which brings us to Edwards conclusion:
That is why I still believe we will see negative Fed Funds soon a topic now debated hotly on Twitter and elsewhere (see here for Ken Rogoff arguing the case for deeply negative interest rates).
Considering that Albert wrote this just hours before we got the first ever fed funds futures pricing above par, implying a negative interest rate as soon as Nov 2020…
… means the SocGen strategist is entitled to a victory lap. In fact, he will be making many of those in the coming months as the entire system, which central banks have kept alive with duct tape and superglue, finally starts to fall apart.
It was an Imperial College computer model that forecasted 500K deaths in the UK (and 2.5 million in the US) should policymakers pursue a “herd immunity” approach (a la Sweden), that influenced them to reverse course and go full lockdown instead. The model was produced by a team headed by Neil Ferguson, (who recently resigned his post advising the UK government when it surfaced that he was himself violating lockdown directives by breaking self-isolation for dalliances with a married woman).
The source code behind the model was to be made available to the public, and after numerous delays and excuses in doing so, has finally been posted to GitHub
A code review has been undertaken by an anonymous ex-Google software engineer here, who tells us the GitHub repository code has been heavily massaged by Microsoft engineers, and others, in an effort to whip the code into shape to safely expose it to the pubic. Alas, they seem to have failed and numerous flaws and bugs from the original software persist in the released version. Requests for the unedited version of the original code behind the model have gone unanswered.
The most worrisome outcome of the review is that the code produces “non-deterministic outputs”
Non-deterministic outputs. Due to bugs, the code can produce very different results given identical inputs. They routinely act as if this is unimportant.
This problem makes the code unusable for scientific purposes, given that a key part of the scientific method is the ability to replicate results. Without replication, the findings might not be real at all – as the field of psychology has been finding out to its cost. Even if their original code was released, it’s apparent that the same numbers as in Report 9 might not come out of it.
The documentation proffers the rationalization that iterations of the model should be run and then differing results averaged together to produce a resultant model. However, any decent piece of software, especially one that is creating a model, should produce the same result if it is fed the same initial data, or “seed”. This code doesn’t.
“The documentation says:
The model is stochastic. Multiple runs with different seeds should be undertaken to see average behaviour.
“Stochastic” is just a scientific-sounding word for “random”. That’s not a problem if the randomness is intentional pseudo-randomness, i.e. the randomness is derived from a starting “seed” which is iterated to produce the random numbers. Such randomness is often used in Monte Carlo techniques. It’s safe because the seed can be recorded and the same (pseudo-)random numbers produced from it in future. Any kid who’s played Minecraft is familiar with pseudo-randomness because Minecraft gives you the seeds it uses to generate the random worlds, so by sharing seeds you can share worlds.
Clearly, the documentation wants us to think that, given a starting seed, the model will always produce the same results.
Investigation reveals the truth: the code produces critically different results, even for identical starting seeds and parameters.
In one instance, a team at the Edinburgh University attempted to modify the code so that they could store the data in tables that would make it more efficient to load and run. Performance issues aside, simply moving or optimizing where the input data comes from should have no effect on the output of processing, given the same input data. What the Edinburgh team found however, was this optimization produced a variation in the output, “the resulting predictions varied by around 80,000 deaths after 80 days”which is nearly 3X the total number of UK deaths to date.
Edinburgh reported the bug to Imperial, who dismissed it as “a small non-determinism” and told them the problem goes away if you run the code on a single CPU (which the reviewer notes “is as far away from supercomputing as one can get”).
Alas, the Edinburgh team found that software still produced different results if it was run on a single CPU. It shouldn’t, provided it is coded properly. Whether the software is run on a single CPU or multi-threaded, the only difference should be the speed at which the output is produced. Given the same input conditions, the outputs should be the same. It isn’t, and Imperial knew this.
Nonetheless, that’s how Imperial use the code: they know it breaks when they try to run it faster. It’s clear from reading the code that in 2014 Imperial tried to make the code use multiple CPUs to speed it up, but never made it work reliably. This sort of programming is known to be difficult and usually requires senior, experienced engineers to get good results. Results that randomly change from run to run are a common consequence of thread-safety bugs. More colloquially, these are known as “Heisenbugs“.
Another team even found that the output varied depending on what type of computer it was run on.
In issue #30, someone reports that the model produces different outputs depending on what kind of computer it’s run on (regardless of the number of CPUs). Again, the explanation is that although this new problem “will just add to the issues” … “This isn’t a problem running the model in full as it is stochastic anyway”.
The response illustrates the burning question: Why didn’t the Imperial College team realize their software was so flawed?
Because their code is so deeply riddled with similar bugs and they struggled so much to fix them that they got into the habit of simply averaging the results of multiple runs to cover it up… and eventually this behaviour became normalised within the team.
Most of us are familiar with the computing adage, “Garbage In/Garbage Out” and the untrained reader may think that’s what being asserted in this code review. It isn’t. What’s being asserted is that output is garbage, regardless of the input.
In this case, the output we’re experiencing as a result is a worldwide lockdown and shutdown of the global economy, and we don’t really know if this was necessary or not because we have no actual data (aside from Sweden) and severely flawed models.
US B-1B Bombers Again Fly Near Chinese Airspace Amid ‘New Cold War’ Threat
It goes without saying that US-China relations have reached their lowest point in decades, with a former Trump administration trade official warning the spike in tensions brought on by the coronacrisis on the heels of the trade war has marked “the start of a new Cold War”.
Former top White House trade negotiator Clete Willems told CNBC’s Squawk Box Asia on Tuesday: “The reality is that tensions between the United States and China are rising considerably at the moment.”
“I know people get uncomfortable with the terminology, but I do think we have to be honest and call this what it is and this is the start of a new Cold War and if we’re not careful, things could get much, much worse,” Willems added.
B-1B Lancer over East China Sea this week. Image source: US Air Force
Which is what makes the uptick in American long-range bomber activity over the East China Sea — right on the Communist country’s doorstep — all the more dangerous.
In what appears at least an indirect warning reasserting US defense readiness in the wake of the military being severely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, the US Air Force on Thursday published a series of photos showing a B-1B strategic bomber mission over the East China Sea this week, involving aerial refueling as well.
Aviation monitoring sites tracked two US B-1B supersonic bombers which took off from Guam toward the East China Sea, nearing Taiwan’s northeastern maritime border along the way.
Crucially, it’s the 15th such US military flight approaching Taiwan’s contested borders since the beginning of April, and the third bomber approach since the start of this month.
Marking the 15th U.S. military flight to approach Taiwan’s borders since the start of April, according to Taiwan’s CNA news, the flight path showed that the two bombers departed from Anderson Air Force Base in Guam toward the East China Sea and near Taiwan.
Prior flights over or near Taiwan-claimed waters have included reconnaissance flights as well, said to be carefully monitoring developments in China amid the pandemic.
USAF B-1Bs LANDO01 & 02 departed Andersen AFB, Guam and conducted a mission over the East China Sea.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs meanwhile warned that while it respects international airspace rights, it condemns any violations of its territorial integrity.
And as a reminder, Beijing of course views Taiwan and the waters around it as precisely this.
