iftttwall

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

All over the Western world ever since 9/11 there have been incremental steps towards what many liberty advocates would call a “police state”; a system in which governments are no longer restricted by the boundaries of civil liberties and are given the power to do just about anything they want in the name of public safety.

The use of “the law” as a tool for injecting tyranny into a culture is the first tactic of all totalitarians.

The idea is that by simply writing government criminality into the law books, that criminality somehow becomes justified by virtue of legal recognition. It’s all very circular. Whenever government abuse of the people is initiated, it’s always initiated in the name of what’s “best for society as a whole”. To save society, the individuals that make up a society must be sublimated or destroyed. This mentality is the complete opposite of what the Founding Fathers in America fought and died for, but as Thomas Jefferson once said:

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

In countries like Australia, which claim to value Western democratic principles of liberty and rule by the people, the perception is that civil rights are codified into the legal framework just as they are in the US. However, there are some glaring differences and issues; specifically, Australian citizens (like many European citizens) have absolutely no means to compel their government or the elites that influence their government to limit themselves. It is these nations, in which the populations have been mostly disarmed and pacified, that any agenda for tyranny will first be established. But we will get to that in a moment…

Make no mistake, there is a very OPEN and easily identifiable agenda on the part of globalists to establish a heavily centralized police state system in every country they are able. This is not “conspiracy theory”, this is conspiracy fact.

For many years now there have been numerous analysts, economists and geopolitical experts in the alternative media that have predicted and warned the public about the globalist strategy of “order out of chaos”. In other words, the ultra-wealthy power brokers that hold influence over most governments on Earth seek to “reshape” the existing social order through the creation of crisis and disaster. By engineering public desperation, they hope to lure us into accepting restrictions on our freedoms that we would have never considered otherwise.

The goal of a single global economy and government has been spoken of by elites time and time again, yet it is still to this day called “conspiracy theory” or “paranoid delusion”. I could quote these elites and their organizations all day long, but I’ll cite a few choice statements to make my point.

As former Deputy Secretary of State under Clinton and Council on Foreign Relations member Strobe Talbot wrote in an article for Time Magazine in 1992 titled ‘America Abroad: The Birth Of The Global Nation’:

“In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”

As elitist and Fabian Socialist HG Wells outlines in his non-fiction treatise titled ‘The New World Order’:

“…When the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people … will hate the new world order … and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.”

And how about one of my favorite revealing quotes from Trilateral Commission member Richard N. Gardner, former deputy assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations under Kennedy and Johnson? He wrote in the April, 1974 issue of the Council on Foreign Relation’s (CFR) journal Foreign Affairs (pg. 558) in an article titled ‘The Hard Road To World Order’:

“In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.”

Members of globalist foundations and think-tanks like the CFR have inhabited nearly every US government office and presidential cabinet for the past several decades. This includes the two dozen or so CFR members in Donald Trump’s cabinet.  Draining the swamp? Not going to happen.

As Harpers Magazine candidly revealed in a 1958 expose titled ‘School For Statesmen’:

“The most powerful clique in these (CFR) groups have one objective in common, they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the U.S. They want to end national boundaries and racial and ethnic loyalties supposedly to increase business and ensure world peace. What they strive for would inevitably lead to dictatorship and loss of freedoms by the people. The CFR was founded for “the purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all powerful one world government.”

The easiest method for the globalists to get what they openly say they want is to either conjure a crisis or exploit an existing crisis in order to “erode sovereignty”. The current pandemic fits this plan perfectly, but before sovereignty can be eliminated on a national level they need to undermine sovereignty on an individual level first.

Actions within the US and nations allied to the US suggest an accelerated attack on personal liberties is at hand.

There are sister foundations to the CFR in many other countries. For example, in Australia they have the highly embedded and influential Strategic Policy Institute, which has been consistently advocating for complete centralization of government power in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Their stated plan is to concentrate policy administration in the hands of a new “commission” or “department” made up of the “brightest minds”. This commission would not be tasked with getting Australia back to normal, but convincing the public to ACCEPT the “new normal” beyond the pandemic.

The ASPI enthusiastically heralds the idea in an article titled ‘Coronavirus Response A Chance To Reimagine Future For Australia’:

“The agenda of such a department now is not about getting Australia back to normal after the pandemic. It’s about re-imagining what Australia can be and how we can thrive and prosper in our future beyond the coronavirus and in light of drought, bushfires and climate change. Think about the kind of new economy we can have after the forced, rapid adoption of dispersed home working and schooling through digital means. We can be the leading digital economy the prime minister desired before the pandemic, not by 2030 but much earlier.”

This reminds me immediately of the post 9/11 push to rapidly remove constitutional protections while the public was blinded by fear and confusion.  As US globalist Rahm Emanuel would say:

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

The ASPI reveals the true agenda, which is the complete federalization and unilateral implementation of law without public approval. The plan is to do this by exploiting the pandemic event to its full potential and then applying the rapid societal changes in government structure. This will then be carried on long after the coronavirus disappears in the name of the economy, welfare programs and so-called “global warming”. The pandemic response is just a means to an end, and the end game is total dominance of the population.

I focus on Australia and the surrounding regions in particular because this seems to be the place where globalists are enforcing technocratic policies first. Or at the very least, they are test-running their strategy and using Australians as guinea pigs. When the ASPI says they plan to keep the pandemic changes in place well after the virus is gone, they aren’t just talking about shifting into a digital economy.

Right now, Australia and New Zealand are slamming citizens with perhaps the most draconian measures yet in the Western world. These are policies that the elites want to introduce everywhere, but they are going full bore in Australia, and it just keeps getting worse.

In various areas of Australia “Level 4” response measures have been enforced for at least the next six weeks, including curfews, strict mask policies including people being forced to wear masks OUTSIDE (contrary to everything science and virology has to say about low possibility of transmission in sunlight and open air), residents are not allowed to travel more than 3 miles from their homes and only one person from a household is allowed to leave at any given time. Citizens violating these rules are subject to $10,000 fines or arrest. And yes, people are being arrested simply for not wearing mask or being too far from home.

In New Zealand, the situation has become exceedingly grim and I think it should be treated as a warning to Americans specifically as to our potential future is we allow the narrative of “public health security” to be turned into a vehicle for tyranny.

While Australia has been using quarantine facilities to force people considered high risk to isolate, NZ quarantine camps are now fully under the control of the military, and ALL citizens that test positive or are suspected to have Covid can be separated from their families and placed in the camps, which are hotels converted into prisons.

It is the complete erasure if personal liberties all because of an increase in cases which has amounted to a mere 525 deaths in Australia and 22 deaths in New Zealand.

I believe the reason Australia and New Zealand have been targeted with this level of restrictions first is because they have been almost fully disarmed and have no means to defend themselves from government overstep. That said, I see signs that similar measures will be attempted in the US as well. In states like New York, there are low key programs to set up Covid checkpoints stopping and checking vehicles coming into the state. This is where heavier restrictions start.

First, checkpoints will be established in the name of keeping infected people out of a state or city. Then, those same checkpoints will be used to keep people from leaving a state or city. Then, checkpoints will be set up at random to test people for fever or symptoms of illness. If allowed to continue, the natural progression of checkpoints is to terrify the population into not traveling anywhere for any reason. Like in Australia and NZ, people will effectively be imprisoned in their homes. At this stage, bringing in laws or executive orders punishing people for leaving home will be easier; they will have already acclimated to being trapped at home anyway.

Furthermore, elites and globalists within the US are calling for hard lockdowns for at least six weeks, just like the Level 4 lockdowns in Australia. Federal Reserve member Neel Kashkari recently asserted that Americans are saving more, thus they should be subjected to hard lockdowns “because they can afford it”.

Virginia is planning mandatory Covid vaccinations, even though vaccines for SARS like viruses have proven impossible to develop in the past, and rushed vaccines have a history of harming or killing people rather than protecting them. Set aside the issue that giving government the power to force citizens to inject anything into their bodies is immoral.

What’s next? Covid camps? Well, yes, unless Americans make a hard stand. Mainstream media outlets have been suggesting this strategy for months. The Washington Post applauded the use of forced isolation camps in other nations and asks why the US has not yet used them beyond ports for foreign travelers? The reason is this: Many Americans will not go along with such measures, and will use force in-kind against anyone trying to lock them up because of a virus that is a moderate threat at most to a small percentage of the population.

That said, don’t assume that the establishment will not eventually try it here. They will. Be ready when they do so. Look to the actions in places like Australia and NZ and ask yourself, am I willing to go along with that? And if so, for how long? Because the globalists intend for these restrictions to become the “new normal”. They intend for this nightmare to last forever.

*  *  *

If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

In an event that is almost guaranteed to be called Russian meddling if President Trump wins re-election, an asteroid is expected to zoom “uncomfortably” close to the Earth the day before election day.

Celestial object 2018 VP1 is expected to fly past earth on November 2, 2020 according to the Center for Near Objects Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a new report from Fox. 

The asteroid is “very small” and has an orbit that crosses the orbit of Earth. So far, computer simulations predict that there will be no collision.

Hopefully, these aren’t the same computers that predicted Hillary Clinton having a 90% chance of winning the 2016 election. 

The asteroid orbits the sun every 731 days and is said to be roughly the “size of a school bus” or smaller. The Center for Near Objects Studies says there is just a 0.41% chance of it entering the Earth’s atmosphere “based on 21 observations spanning 12.968 days.”

Even if it does enter the atmosphere, it’ll burn up due to its small size, the group says. But hey, we can still hold out hope!

Asteroid 2018VP1 is very small, approx. 6.5 feet, and poses no threat to Earth! It currently has a 0.41% chance of entering our planet’s atmosphere, but if it did, it would disintegrate due to its extremely small size.

— NASA Asteroid Watch (@AsteroidWatch) August 23, 2020

Authored by Antonio Chaves via AmericanThinker.com,

Is Gilead, the maker of Remdesivir, waging war on HCQ (hydroxychloroquine)?

Attacks on the drug have been continuous ever since Dr. Didier Raoult used this quinine derivative to save the lives of COVID-19 patients last March.

The first attempt to discredit HCQ was a hastily compiled Veterans Administration hospital system study last April. Notably, one of the study’s authors had in the past received numerous grants from Gilead, with one grant in 2018 totaling nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

After deep flaws in the VA study were exposed, Surgisphere came to the rescue in May with a “15,000 patient” megastudy allegedly compiled from hospitals all over the world.

This strategy succeeded: Following its publication in the Lancet and the NEJM, all outpatient use of HCQ was severely restricted in the U.S., Australia, and most of Europe.

When the Surgisphere scam was exposed, both articles were quietly retracted and the editor-in-chief of the Lancet tried to wash his hands of this embarrassing incident by denouncing Surgisphere’s “monumental fraud.”

However only a few days earlier, Lancet editors played a major role in persuading WHO to suspend all trials for HCQ. Who put them up to it?

The study’s main author, Mandeep Mehra, also apologized for his reliance on a third party for the data.  He may not have known the data was fabricated, but the hospital he directed was conducting two trials for Remdesivir. Was he under pressure from his sponsors?

These are the stakes:

• A five-day treatment with Remdesivir costs around $3,000.

• A five-day supply of generic HCQ costs around $10.

Drug companies have every right to recoup their cost of research and development, but lobbying to suppress access to a lifesaving treatment that is both cheaper and more effective is a crime against humanity.

Progressives mistakenly believe that socialized medicine protects patients from the abuses of big pharma, but the first nation to severely restrict access to HCQ was France.

This policy compelled Dr. Raoult to testify against Gilead’s disproportionate leverage over the medical community during a meeting of the French National Assembly last June.

Notably in the U.S., a third of the FDA’s budget comes from pharmaceutical user fees, and according to the NIH’s website, eight out of 55 members of the panel responsible for COVID-19 treatment guidelines are currently affiliated with Gilead. These government ties to Gilead more than triple when you include panel members with past associations.

Paradoxically, most opposition to HCQ in the U.S. comes from the left, but conservatives who know the ways of crony capitalism regard this as par for the course. After all, big pharma has given more to Democrats ever since the passage of Obamacare and up to now, Gilead employees donated three times more to the Biden campaign.

Sooner or later there will be a reckoning for everyone who colluded in this disinformation campaign. If you are among the policymakers or physicians participating in this charade, you may want to dissociate yourself while you can credibly plead ignorance for tens of thousands of preventable deaths.

*  *  *

Access to HCQ varies by state. If you cannot get this drug from your doctor, America’s Frontline Doctors has kindly provided contact information for telemedicine physicians that are HCQ-knowledgeable. You can find these doctors by clicking on any state in their website and scrolling down to the bottom of the description.

Morgan Stanley’s Michael Wilson warned a “growth scare” for markets could be imminent, if that is in the “next several weeks/months.” If so, then all the instabilities of a slowing recovery, deteriorating labor market, waning consumer sentiment, and small business massacre will come out of the woodwork and shock investors.

On a micro-level, we want to share with readers a genuinely shocking, and deep economic scarring story developing in San Francisco.

BREAKING: Most San Francisco @Gap stores close permanently, including Market Street flagship.@Shwanika has the details here: https://t.co/DRHJtEsc3s

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) August 17, 2020

According to CBS San Francisco, citing a new survey via the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, “more than half of all storefronts in San Francisco are no longer in business due to COVID-19.” 

“The survey showed only 46 percent of storefront businesses in San Francisco that were open at the beginning of the pandemic are still operating,” said Jay Cheng, spokesman of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.

Cheng said 1,300 stores have closed in recent months, with about 1,200 still open. 

“There’s a lot of reasons for that. If you’re a fitness studio, you can’t open because of the pandemic. If you’re a retail space, you could open, but you might have decided that there isn’t enough foot traffic or enough customer base to make that worthwhile to reopen. So it’s become a very difficult situation,” he said.

Another San Francisco Covid causality, from my friend @markcerv

Richmond Dim Sum institution Tong Kiang to close. @lucchesi @hooleil @hknightsf pic.twitter.com/bjjk2OKiwJ

— Helmut the Schmidt (@sfhelmut) August 17, 2020

Cheng said business closures across the metro area have resulted in depressionary unemployment, with claims nearing 200,000, or four times then what was seen after the financial crash in 2008. 

“And what’s really unique is that during the Great Recession, we knew what we had to do to get people back to work. We had to fix the housing market, and we had to get consumer confidence back up. Get people rehiring. Now, most of these 193,000 unemployment claims are unemployed because of the pandemic, said Cheng. “Until we get the public health crisis under control, we can’t get these folks back to work.”

Video: More Than Half of San Fran Storefronts Closed Due To Pandemic

When the growth scare strikes, sending markets into a panic, or mainly a blowoff of technology stocks, investors will search for evidence of deep economic scarring that has morphed the economic recovery from a “V-shaped” to one that resembles a “Nike Swoosh.” They will stumble upon the depressing situation in San Francisco of a business massacre. 

Authored by Tom Luongo via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

You have to hand it to the sociopaths running U.S. foreign policy, they are very adept at creating no-win scenarios for their opponents. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was just handed a major defeat at the United Nations Security Council, who voted down a resolution to extend the arms embargo against Iran.

That embargo is set to expire in October as part of the U.S. unilaterally pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known colloquially as the Iran Nuclear Deal.

But Pompeo and President Trump only wanted that vote, in my opinion, to force out into the open their ability to impose the ‘snapback’ sanctions on Iran which is a major component of the JCPOA.

Pompeo and Trump, with this vote, are now, disingenuously clawing their way back into the JCPOA by saying they have the right to invoke those sanctions on all signatories. This tact is unlikely to succeed so what’s the game plan then?

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif cuts to the heart of the matter in a recent article:

The U.S. administration’s disinformation campaign — including false and forged claims regarding a regional consensus … is a ruse to disguise its real, more malevolent motivations: having failed to collapse Resolution 2231 after over two years of the most brutal “maximum pressure” ever imposed on a nation…the U.S. now hopes to abuse its mal-interpretation of the provisions of the same resolution it abandoned in 2018 to finally destroy it. This deeply malicious U.S. behavior is evident throughout the UN, where it seeks to use the UN itself to effectively destroy the world body.

Trump wants the JCPOA gone and he’s willing to blackmail most of the U.N. Security Council to get it. Because if the arms embargo is lifted then he and Pompeo will then use their expanded sanctions capability under CAATSA to cut even more of the world out of the U.S. financial system.

And I’m not talking about little things like cutting Iran and/or Russia out of SWIFT.

Those are already on the table and game-planned for by both countries. He’s not stupid enough to cut China out of SWIFT no matter how badly relations deteriorate short of open, kinetic war.

I’m talking about harsh sanctions on European persons and companies akin to what they’ve already done over something as miniscule as the Nordstream 2 pipeline to get the results in the U.N.S.C. they want.

This feeds into Trump’s growing distrust of the EU and a resurgent Angela Merkel in Germany, who he knows is actively working against his re-election. There is zero love lost between these two, since Trump has clearly targeted Merkel as his biggest enemy in Europe.

Now I’m no fan of the U.N. or most of the other post-WWII transnational institutions like the World Bank and the I.M.F. but this push by Trump and Pompeo to break the U.N. now that it no longer acts as a rubber stamp agency on U.S. foreign adventurism is the height of duplicity.

The strategy employed by Trump and Pompeo here is so absurd even the U.N.’s harshest critic, madman John Bolton, thinks they are nuts to go this route.

The reason for this push to extend the arms embargo on Iran is simple, both Russia and China are deep in negotiations with Iran to upgrade both its air and air defense capabilities. China is ready to deploy over $400 billion in Iran while Russia stands ready to ‘sell’ the Iranians new Suhkois and S-400 missile defense systems.

And there’s no way to pressure Iran to the negotiating table and create a new JCPOA to Trump’s liking if it can credibly defend itself from Israeli and U.S. aggression. But this feeds into Trump’s re-election strategy of brokering an historic peace deal between the UAE and Israel while making headlines with troop withdrawals in Afghanistan and Germany.

Now at the same time, Trump and Pompeo have been very active across Europe rewriting the U.S. troop deployment map there to pressure Russia into signing new INF and START treaties under threat of U.S. expanded deployments in Poland.

Is this just more aggressive posturing by Trump? We’ll see. I remain convinced that a lot of his foreign policy ‘blundering,’ as Philip Giraldi called it recently (which I don’t disagree with), is part of his purposefully blowing up the old order between the U.S. and Europe now that it’s clear to me the globalists’ goal of a Great Reset involves destroying the U.S. and moving the center of western power to the European Union.

The recent upheaval in Belarus fits into this thesis perfectly.

While I’m sure the re-election of President Alexander Lukashenko wasn’t as overwhelming as the official polls suggest, I don’t for a second believe he actually lost the election.

That said, what is happening in Minsk is similar to what happened in Kiev in 2014, Venezuela in 2019, and what’s happening in the U.S. against Trump himself, a manufactured color revolution that can only reach the levels we’ve seen if the government itself wasn’t fundamentally corrupt.

It’s a color revolution nonetheless and the hypocritical responses from the U.S., France and Germany over the ‘violence’ in Minsk verges on the cartoonish, especially given the level of civil unrest at home in all of those places.

Things have progressed to the point in Belarus where Russian President Vladimir Putin also has no good options in the near term. Opposition to Lukashenko is strong enough, because he is a terrible leader, that Putin can’t openly support him while at the same time he can’t wait too long to make a move lest Lukashenko be ousted from power, bringing a U.S. puppet, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, to power.

For his part, Lukashenko has finally seen the light. Caught trying, as The Saker so trenchantly put it, “to sit between two chairs.” Lukashenko has only himself to blame for this coup attempt.

He’s the one that courted the West, inviting Pompeo to reopen the U.S. embassy, thinking he could blackmail Putin into giving him more treasure from Russia’s coffers. And he has resisted for nearly two decades Putin’s offers of a Union State where Belarus and Russia would be far more integrated partners than they are now.

And now, after being set up by Pompeo, Lukashenko sees things clearly and is ready to cave to Putin immediately on everything because if he doesn’t Belarus will become another failed state just like Ukraine is today.

It’s touch and go right now as to whether Lukashenko can hold onto power long enough to get this done but he’s already offered to leave office and reform the constitution, which is the only path he has left. From a report at TASS:

Meanwhile the incumbent president vowed readiness to redistribute power through a constitutional process. “Of course, I will go away someday. In a year or two. But we can’t give up the constitution to some nobody. Because it will be a disaster. This is what I am afraid of the most,” Lukashenko pointed out, as cited by the BelTA news agency.

Reiterating readiness to “share” powers, the incumbent head of state was clear though that this would never happen under pressure. “We need a new constitution. I’ve been proposed two variants, but rejected both of them, because they barely differ from the current one. The work on the third variant is underway. Come, let’s sit and work on the constitution and put it to a referendum. And I will relegate my powers to you by the constitution. But not under pressure and not through the streets,” he said.

Trump will happily go along with this regime change operation in Belarus to get Russia to the bargaining table over energy, security and everything else. He won’t meet with Putin between now and the election because there is no upside to it for him politically.

Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron want the situation in Belarus because it feeds the narrative that NATO is still necessary to ‘contain Russian aggression’ and counter Trump’s criticisms. Poland and the Baltic whiners love this as well.

The EU would love to poach Belarus for the European Union.

NATO itself wants this conflict for the same reasons.

The problem is that Belarus is not Ukraine. There isn’t the same kind of ethnic division, there is a single language and long, historical ties to Russia. And this color revolution can be countered easily with swift negotiations of the Union State proposal and outlining a path for Lukashenko to leave office peacefully.

The longer he stays in power the more likely the situation will defuse itself. The same goes for Iran and the JCPOA. The longer Iran does nothing in the face of Israeli and U.S. aggression the more likely the outcome moves in their favor. Pushing Iran today carries no weight after the events surrounding the assassination of General Soleimani in January.

Everyone knows Trump is not going to war with Iran unless one of his rogue underlings, like Pompeo or a general, force his hand. This is not out of the question, especially if it looks like he’ll win re-election.

That’s why I see these moves in the U.N. as being more directed against the EU than Iran itself. Trump has a bigger problem on his hands, however. The chaos he’s unleashed in his quest to remake European and U.S. relations is something his State Dept. under Pompeo can’t control either. And he won’t be in any position to do anything more than what he’s doing now, win short-term victories and lose the long-term war while global capital abandons the U.S. and moves east.

Still haunted by the memory of SARS, contact tracers in Guangzhou, China, have worked diligently to monitor the outbreak in their community. So, when a group of researchers happened upon an unusual situation – a group of five family members who all tested positive living below an apartment that had been unoccupied for months.

Researchers decided to do some research, and have published their findings as a case study in Environmental International, which was picked up by Bloomberg.

In the latest research to support the notion that the virus coronavirus in the bathroom of an unoccupied apartment in Guangzhou, China, suggests the airborne pathogen may have wafted upwards through drain pipes, an echo of a large SARS outbreak in Hong Kong 17 years ago.

According to the research, traces of SARS-CoV-2 were detected on the sink, faucet and shower handle of a long-vacant apartment situated near the apartment of the family mentioned above. The contaminated bathroom was located directly above the home of five people confirmed a week earlier to have COVID-19. The study was carried out by researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The scientists conducted what they described as an “on-site tracer simulation experiment” to see whether the virus could be spread through waste pipes via tiny airborne particles created by the force of a toilet flushing.

They found evidence of these aerosols in bathrooms 10 and 12 levels above the infected family’s apartment. Two cases were confirmed on each of those floors in early February, raising concern that SARS-CoV-2-laden particles from the infected family’s stool had drifted into their homes via plumbing and managed to successfully infect others.

For those who don’t understand the physics behind aerosol particles, the study’s authors offered a visual guide.

Here’s an abstract from the report.

As public health teams respond to the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), containment and understanding of the modes of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission is of utmost importance for policy making. During this time, governmental agencies have been instructing the community on handwashing and physical distancing measures. However, there is no agreement on the role of aerosol transmission for SARS-CoV-2. To this end, we aimed to review the evidence of aerosol transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Several studies support that aerosol transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is plausible, and the plausibility score (weight of combined evidence) is 8 out of 9. Precautionary control strategies should consider aerosol transmission for effective mitigation of SARS-CoV-2.

It’s just the latest piece of evidence suggesting that the coronavirus is indeed “airborne” – that is, it spreads via tiny particles called “aerosols”. Like the abstract reflects, the data collected in this experiment suggest that the chances of aerosols being a significant means of infection are 8 in 9.

At one point in the paper, the Chinese researchers take a swipe at organizations like the WHO, which has been slow to recognize the risks surrounding aerosol transmission. This is a dangerous assumption, especially considering the fact that transmission via surface contact and large-droplet transmission (which inspired the mandatory mask orders) has almost no actual evidence to back it up, but rather are the results of early assumptions that have endured for various and sundry reasons.

Current evidence on SARS-CoV-2 has limitations, but is strongly indicative of aerosols as one of several routes of COVID-19 transmission. It should be noted that the equivalent evidence for contact and large droplet transmission is not available, but has been an unproven assumption from the outset. Epidemiologic and experimental data continues to be obtained at a rapid pace, and the role of aerosols in COVID-19 transmission should be revisited in light of the emerging evidence.

The study also attacks another alleged misconception: the notion that SARS-CoV-2 spreads mainly through respiratory droplets, spatters of saliva or discharge from the nose.

But since the first weeks of the pandemic, scientists in China have warned that virus in an infected person’s stool can help spread it. Studies in Guangdong province have found evidence of the virus in the stool of the infected.

This means that bathrooms could be a key breeding ground for coronavirus transmission, because they “may promote fecal-derived aerosol transmission if used improperly, particularly in hospitals,” the China CDC researchers said. They cited a fluid-dynamics simulation that showed a “massive upward transport of virus aerosol particles” during flushing. This creates a “fecal plume” that could be particularly infectious.

Though, to be sure, the extent to which people are infected by these plumes isn’t known. But readers can find the study in its entirety here.

1-s2.0-S0160412020319942-main (1).pdf by Zerohedge on Scribd

Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

No Lives Matter

The only way to control a substantial population is to murder enough that the rest are terrified into submission. But it isn’t really the control that’s the objective, it’s the murder. At root, murder stems from a grotesque hatred of one’s self, which animates a craven fear of anything and everything, particularly death, and paradoxically, a psychotic desire to kill one’s self and every other value. Only by understanding our enemies do we have any chance of defeating them.

The twentieth century and the two decades of this one offer ample material to study the psychology of evil.

In the nineteenth century, Fyodor Dostoyevsky masterfully plumbed those depths. In the barren desert that constitutes today’s intellectual life, the study of history has been discarded and great literature ignored or burned. They’re casualties in the war being waged on anything that helps us understand ourselves. In one sense Dostoyevsky couldn’t have anticipated the collectivist charnel houses of the century to follow, but in one sense he did. He knew charnel houses were the work of individual souls, and one couldn’t grasp the one without examining the other.

With many minority groups claiming historical injustices against them and demanding remedial recognition and reparation, with official endorsement by many institutions of those claims and demands, and with their propagation via all major channels of communication, no voices have been raised in support of the indisputably smallest and most persecuted minority group – the individual. “Individual” and “individual rights” are words that must not be spoken.

Any recognition of the individual draws attention to the fundamental and massive violation of individual rights stemming from coronavirus totalitarianism and governments’ encouragement of riots, vandalism, and violence. In a Peanuts cartoon, Linus exclaims, “I love mankind… it’s people I can’t stand.” The game is always the same. In the name of some collective greater good—safety, anti-racism, fill in the blank—the wealth, property, work, rights, freedom, and lives of individuals are stolen. Of course the alleged greater good is never realized, but that was never the point. The fountainhead of any collectivist ideology is the hatred these lovers of mankind have for people and their pursuit of happiness.

For coronavirus, the blueprint has been to test restrictive measures in one jurisdiction, see if they fly, and then move to universal implementation. China’s lockdown was the model for global lockdown.

Sweden was condemned and smeared for refusing to follow the crowd, but its condemners have no more concern for the Swedish population than they do for any other population.

Sweden has demonstrated that lockdowns are unnecessary. Its death rate is no higher than other European countries, and would have been substantially lower, perhaps cut by one-half to three-quarters, had it done a better job of protecting its elderly and nursing home patients. Unlike Andrew Cuomo and several other Democratic governors who made the same mistake, Swedish officials have admitted theirs.

Swedish openness is antithetical to coronavirus commissars bent on propagating propaganda and enforcing draconian dictates. However, the ultimate danger to their regime will come when a vaccine arrives. After almost five months of what were supposed to be two weeks of lockdowns ostensibly sold as necessary to “flatten the curve,” it’s obvious the lockdowns are meant to prevent herd immunity, keeping people away from sunlight and fresh air, both of which bolster the immune system, and enforcing isolation and loneliness, which impair it. In other words, they’re designed to make the outbreak worse. If you’re surprised—regular readers won’t be—welcome to reality.

When the vaccine arrives, the Swedish people will have achieved herd immunity (apparently they already have in urban centers), which traditionally has been the way humanity has dealt with viruses. An immune herd doesn’t need a vaccine and while the Swedish government probably won’t prevent anyone who wants one from getting one, it probably won’t be mandatory, unlike most of the rest of the world.

That will prompt unwelcome questions among the thinking remnant. If herd immunity works, why did we have to lockdown? Why can’t we just complete the herd immunization we’ve already started? Will a vaccine, like lockdowns, make the outbreak worse? Why are we running the risks and bearing the enormous expense of a vaccine that’s been rushed to market and inadequately tested, will be only partially effective, will be adulterated with unhealthy preservatives and adjuvants, and will undoubtedly have unanticipated side effects, some of which may be severe? What’s the rights-destructive, life-threatening agenda behind the vaccine?

While China was the beta test for lockdowns, apparently New Zealand and Australia serve as such for the next iteration of totalitarianism. China’s draconian measures were instituted in Wuhan, which actually had a serious coronavirus outbreak. New Zealand’s and Australia’s coronavirus death rates are infinitesimal: 4 per million in the former, 18 per million in the latter (Worldometers.info). Despite these scant numbers, New Zealand is under lockdown and has postponed an election (nobody has died of the coronavirus since May) and Melbourne has instituted, “the harshest lockdown conditions of all Western democracies” (“Letters From Melbourne, a ‘Ghost Town Police State’ Under Brutal Covid Lockdown,” Robert Bridge, strategic-culture.org). Here are Melbourne’s restrictions, the preview of coming attractions that will eventually be rolled out around the globe:

Despite the extremely low death rate, Melbourne residents – or shall we call them what they really are, prisoners – must adhere to the following rules:

– No traveling more than 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) from their homes;

– No traveling to other states inside of the country;

– Those under house arrest are permitted to leave home for just one hour each day for exercise;

– Only one person is permitted to go shopping per family each day; shopping is to be done within 5 kilometers from home;

– Unlike traditional prisons, visitations are not permitted to house arrestees;

– All school activities are to be conducted online;

– All businesses, services and construction cancelled;

– Organized sport, forget it;

– In the case of funerals, try and delay your demise if at all possible, otherwise, expect just 10 guests;

– Ditto for weddings;

– Curfew in effect between 8 pm and 5 am.

These restrictions will be in place for (at least) six weeks.

“Letters From Melbourne, a ‘Ghost Town Police State’ Under Brutal Covid Lockdown,” Bridge

So much for pompous invocations of the “traditional Anglo-American protection of freedom and individual rights.” It also gives the lie to the desperate delusion to which millions still cling: that these measures have something to do with health and safety. They are all about power and control, which is why their proponents are uninterested in research that demonstrates their measures are ineffective or counterproductive (or demonstrate that the cheap, readily available drug hydroxychloroquine, used with an antibiotic and zinc, is an effective prophylactic and treatment), and censor such research. In the US, that hypocritical indifference was made clear when coronavirus totalitarianism was relaxed for politically approved George Floyd protests and riots.

The often unstated objective of power and control is death. It’s easier to see when rioters are allowed to loot, destroy, and murder with impunity. Coronavirus killers hide behind doctors, scientists, and public health officials making scary predictions and pronouncements, “greater good” justifications for bankruptcy, unemployment, and misery, cloying propaganda that turns professionals charged with caring for the afflicted into “heroes” for caring for the afflicted, and sheep-like compliance with draconian, ineffective, freedom-destructive edicts to combat tiny risks. It’s the difference between a quick execution and slow but deadly poisoning.

You see it on the Internet videos of once great cities—New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, St. Louis—in their death throes. Coronavirus totalitarianism and the riots should be listed as causes of death, but there is common underlying comorbidity: statist collectivism. The productive tax base is fleeing, but it’s been milked and extorted for years by profligate, corrupt Democrat politicians (all of the above cited cities have been run by Democrats for decades) to line their pockets and buy votes. From each according to his ability to each according to his vote.

The heretofore insulated elites who prattle about social justice and defunding the police are now beset by “social justice warriors” destroying their neighborhoods, looting their shopping districts, and brutalizing innocents as pleas for protection go unanswered. The police-maintained barrier between the ghettos and the high-rent districts has been breached by thugs who drive, cell phones, instant messaging, flash riots, random destruction and violence, and plenty of cash and firearms. It won’t be restored and the elites know it. They can hire private security and hunker down or they can flee. A substantial percentage are fleeing.

The rest of us watch the urban detritus videos in horror: homeless encampments stretching for blocks, boarded up stores and restaurants, beggars, food lines, thieves, random violence, impoverished mothers and children, people urinating, defecating, masturbating, and shooting up in full view, discarded needles, broken windows, abandoned and burnt-out buildings, decimated neighborhoods, and the ubiquitous cockroaches and rats. Only if you understand that this is what the collectivists had in mind can you understand the chaos and unfathomable evil enveloping the world. Our dystopia is their utopia.

The carnage, chaos, and collapse in full bloom in American cities are the sum and substance of what the statist collectivists want. Is this the prelude to the imposition of a totalitarian order? By whom and with what? The cities are technically bankrupt, burdened with medical and pension promises they couldn’t pay when they had economies and tax bases, and now both are withering. They could turn to their respective states, but the states are in no better shape. That leaves the federal government—the world’s biggest debtor—and its magic central bank. They can create debt and exchange it between themselves but neither can create a dime’s worth of real production or employment. Anybody see the flaws in this arrangement?

That supposedly leaves only a totalitarian global superstate, headed by statist collectivists, to impose its brand of order, which is just another brand of death. A totalitarian global superstate and its cash-abolishing, cryptocurrency-issuing, transaction-monitoring central bank will still have the same old problem: neither one can create a dime’s worth of real production or employment. A fiat cryptocurrency is still a fiat currency and will go the way of all fiat currencies—debasement to worthlessness (see “Doubling Down On Failed Policies With Central Bank Digital Currencies,” Alasdair Macleod, goldmoney.com).

They’ll have what they call a demand management problem, that is, a lot of desperate, hungry people. One way to manage demand is to eliminate it, so expect them to take up the sport of tyrants—killing people—in earnest. They may clear homeless encampments with bulldozers without bothering to move the inhabitants out of their tents and boxes. Their vaccines might have side effects that wipe out a few million or billion—sacrifices must be made for the greater good (the tyrants will of course be exempt from such sacrifices). Perhaps a war or two. Records set by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao will be in jeopardy. They could Soylent Green their victims to feed the rest of the population; they’ll have to keep some of the drones alive.

Free, self-interested, productive people in a capitalist economy will always figure out ways to feed themselves and make their lives better. Collectivist statism brings only poverty, starvation, horror, and death. Beneath their rhetoric that’s what its proponents want. It’s better to realize this before the boarding calls for the socially distanced cattle cars and the socially distanced line for the gas chambers.

Power, as they like to remind us, grows out of a barrel of a gun, but moral legitimacy ends when that gun is aimed at the innocent. Nothing good has or ever will come from such evil. Dostoyevsky knew that it’s not history, or a socioeconomic system, or a political ideology from which evil flows, it’s the human soul. Recognize the homicidal-suicidal souls among us for what they are.