“The coronavirus pandemic is a public health emergency. But it is also an economic emergency…
This national effort will be underpinned by government interventions in the economy on a scale unimaginable only a few weeks ago. This is not a time for ideology and orthodoxy… We will support jobs, we will support incomes, we will support businesses, and we will help you protect your loved ones. We will do whatever it takes.”
– UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak 18/3/2020
Policy-makers are scared, and rightly so. The coronavirus pandemic has delivered a massive deflationary shock to the world economy, as evidenced by the collapse in the yield on US 10 year government bond to a momentary low of 0.31% on March 9th.
A severe decline in economic activity is an inevitable side-effect of applying the precautionary principle to the virus crisis, which is nonetheless the correct course of action. The same goes for economy policy; underestimating the risks is a far worse mistake than overestimating them. Economic crises kill people too. After Japan lurched into deflation in the late 1990s, suicides leapt by an annual 10,000 cases and stayed at an elevated level for a decade. That increase constitutes a worse toll every year than the global tally for the coronavirus to date.
As this is not a financial crisis – though a wave of bankruptcies and asset price collapses could turn it into one – protecting incomes and jobs has to be the main priority. Quite how this is done will differ from country to country, but ultimately the financial resources can only be provided by governments via bond issuance supported by central banks. A simultaneous reversion to quantitative easing, as has occurred in the United States, clears the way for outright monetization.
“Today, I am making available an initial £330 billion of guarantees – equivalent to 15% of our GDP.. That means any business who needs access to cash to pay their rent, the salaries, suppliers, or purchase stock, will be able to access a government-backed loan, on attractive terms.And if demand is greater than the initial £330 billion I’m making available today, I will go further and provide as much capacity as required. I said whatever it takes –and I meant it.”
– UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak 18/3/2020
“Loans” that are used to fund running costs like wages and rent are unlikely to be paid back. Probably they will end up being deep-sixed in government accounts, along with several other non-performing assets such as student loans and public-private investments. The scale, though, will be far larger.
In the US, President Donald Trump’s more straightforward approach includes cutting payroll taxes and mailing $1000 cheques to American citizens. Although the Trump package is enormous, equivalent to 6% of US GDP, it has been criticized for being insufficient in scale, given the risks of a deep downturn. If it doesn’t work, more will surely follow. This is, after all, a presidential election year.
The key point is that money is likely to flow directly to households, as it never did when monetary policy was the only game in town. How does this differ from “helicopter money”, Jeremy Corbyn’s “People’s QE”, or the proposals of believers in Modern Monetary Theory? In essence it doesn’t, except that the proponents are the leaders of nominally conservative administrations. If the crisis does not abate soon, governments could end up monetizing the wages and salaries of a very large number of people and owning significant slices of industry.
What does all this mean for investors? In all probability, an end to the monetary policy-dominated regime in place since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the investment landscape it created. A reckoning for hyped-up growth stocks on sky-high valuations. An avalanche of bond issuance. Growing risks of inflation. Currency turmoil if central banks attempt to hold yields down once normalization begins.
With a few brief blips, interest rates have been flat or declining for most of the careers of today’s government officials, investors and corporate managers. In recent years, there has been a growing belief that low rates are “structural”, driven by long-term deflationary factors such as demographics and the rise of the internet economy. If that is true, governments can borrow and spend as much as they want with no fear of the consequences.
Thanks to the coronavirus, that theory is about to be tested. And, as we have always suspected, ground zero for regime change will be not Japan or the United States, but the UK.
Kenyan Man Stoned To Death By Mob “For Having Coronavirus”
A man suspected of COVID-19 was stoned to death by locals in one African town, reported ZimEye News.
The incident occurred in Kibundani Village, Kwale County, a coastal region in Kenya, on Tuesday.
The man, George Kotini Hezron, was walking home from a local bar in the village of Msambweni when a mob of youths viciously attacked him.
…namely George Kotini Hezron while heading home from a drinking spree and on reaching Kibundani area about 3kms west of the station met a group of youth and an argument ensued as the youth took advantage of his drunkenness and started accusing him of suffering from Corona virus https://t.co/bcZsHwWHgU
Hezron was rushed to Msambweni Subcounty Hospital, where he later died of his injuries.
Msambweni Subcounty Hospital
Msambweni Sub-County Commander Nehemiah Bitok told Daily Nation Kenya that the youths stoned Hezron to death.
“While heading home, he met a group of youths who attacked him, accusing him of suffering from coronavirus,” Bitok said.
Bitok said police had launched an investigation into the possible coronavirus hate crime.
“No arrests have been made, but we have launched investigations,” he said.
Separately, we’ve reported on the first possible coronavirus hate crime in the US, an Asian man was recently stabbed to death by a man wearing a medical mask in NYC. Also, Asians in California are stockpiling weapons and ammunition out of fear that they might be attacked.
Bitok warned members in the community that taking the law into their own hands and killing suspected COVID-19 carriers is illegal.
Kenya’s health ministry has reported a total of seven confirmed cases, with no deaths. We noted earlier this week that, with the lack of test kits on the African continent, a virus crisis is “looming.”
A man suspected to have coronavirus has been beaten to death in Kenya.
“Reality is that which when we stop believing in it doesn’t go away.”
– Philip K. Dick
In March of 2003, we broke ground on the first real thing I ever built. The house I currently live in. Then I understood that there was only one way this economic and political system ended, badly.
And I knew then that I was woefully unprepared for the challenge. When I started building my house I could barely drive a nail straight. By the time the first part of it was finished I could lay a square of asphalt shingles with the best of them…. if only until about 10 am or so.
I could now solve logistical problems of much larger scale. I learned that building a house wasn’t one big task but a million little ones, some good and some, well, not so good.
My wife and I had a lot of help, to be sure. We leveraged the skills, labor and knowledge of family and friends.
My house became a kind of community project with some weekends having as many as eight or ten people milling about like semi-competent Amish men setting trusses, digging trenches and installing windows.
And I’m forever in the debt of those who gave up their Saturday to work in the singularly horrific heat of a north central Florida summer, a place I’m sure Dante had in mind when he wrote about the eighth circle of Hell.
I figured then we had about five to eight years before the system would break. During the 2008 crisis I was convinced that, ‘This was it.” It turned out to be bad but the world wasn’t quite ready to give up on the system it had built.
And we allowed the central banks to coordinate a global bailout. But that was granted with the explicit understanding that there would be no next time or there would be hell to pay on both sides of the traditional political aisles.
Welcome to the Coronapocalypse.
Regardless of what you may think about the origins of COVID-19, bio-weapon or not, ‘just the flu’ or the new plague, the reality is that it is here. The response to it is real and the damage it has had on the global economy is real.
It doesn’t matter at this point in time whether the response is the right one or the wrong one. Because in an age where perception is more important than reality and has been that way for so long, we have no real frame of reference to guide our conclusions.
Prices and costs have been distorted beyond all recognition to the saved capital they represent. The epic meltdown of markets speaks to just how insanely overvalued the world was once the layers of credit issued contracted.
In the end, all we have are our observations. And those observations are intensely personal. And most of the the time the conclusions we draw from them are wrong no matter how tightly we believe in them.
Be that as it may, we still have to make choices. We still have to act.
And, if this is truly now a survival-like situation, one that I personally tried to prepare for nearly a generation ago, that means we have to deal with reality.
We have to put away the childish things we’ve been fighting over for the past five years politically.
How ridiculous and insipid do the identitarian fights over gender, race, sex and color look now? How dangerous and stupid does all that capital, that time spent look now in hindsight when today people with skills, humility and high executive function are needed.
Do you really care today if the guy behind the meat counter at your local supermarket is a MAGApede or a Bernie Bro, hates gay people or is a closet tranny?
If you do then I suggest you stay home and reassess your priorities and your choices.
The reality is that now that the damage to the economy has been done we will need each other more than ever, regardless of what we thought about each other yesterday.
The reality is governments are grabbing for insane levels of power. Martial Law is here in Europe. The U.S. isn’t far behind if we look at how some governors and mayors have acted.
The reality is that the more power governments grab the less capable of protecting you, your family and your community it was before that. It will view you as a threat. It will treat you as less than human because your disobedience threatens their control.
If the Trump administration is smart it won’t go there. If Trump wants to ensure the U.S. is the destination for global capital in the near term, he won’t go to where Europe goes.
Because the way to restore confidence in both a currency, a people and a government is to not panic. Lead and show competence and trust.
Those that over-react, enforce one-size-fits-all mandates become incapable of solving problems, only maintaining the current misery.
So we have to be strong enough and brave enough for commerce to flow. If we aren’t then stay out of the way of healthy, low-risk people taking real risks necessary to keep the lights on, the sewers functioning and the food supply from collapsing.
Celebrate that guy behind the meat counter or restocking the shelves. Because the life he saves may be yours and vice versa.
Yes, some people will make the wrong choice, but most won’t. Stop using them as straw men to grind your political axe. Old habits die hard but guess what? You’re not an old dog.
We’re moving into that dangerous area of zero tolerance which implies maximum costs for marginal net benefits.
Striking the necessary balance to keep our communities alive is how we best fight back against this threat — the government overreach or the virus itself.
It means realizing that bad people will do good things and good people will do bad things. It means decisions made today may need to be reversed tomorrow.
Top down order separates us from our greatest strength, our ability to try new things, solve new problems and turn what is into what will be.
It means keeping your opinions tempered, your humility high and finding ways to solve real problems that alleviate current and potential suffering.
It means realizing you don’t have all the answers, and pretending like you do is literally a matter of life and death.
The economy isn’t some big aggregate thing. That’s the fundamental flaw of all dominant economic thinking, these concepts of aggregate demand and aggregate supply. They don’t exist. They aren’t real.
We talk about them like they are but they aren’t. They are pale and unfocused reflection of trillions of small decisions taken by billions of people everyday.
And no matter how much you try to model reality by looking at the big numbers, the reality is that you only see things through the densest of fog, near blind and full of hubris.
This is the central flaw in all forms of central planning, the lack of specific knowledge to come up with the right policy decisions.
That’s not ideology. That is fact.
Any guess at my behavior, no matter how educated, carries with it a measurable error which when multiplied by the number of decisions I make per day and the number of people whose actions you are trying to aggregate makes the entire exercise a futile and dangerous attempt to play god.
Even God doesn’t play dice with the Universe.
And the sooner we give up our grand ideas of top down control through the decisions of wise and insouciant verified smart people the sooner we can deal with the reality of the life in front of us.
Today the world is contracting, not ending. It’s a smaller, tighter world than it was yesterday. That means the closer your relationship to someone, the more valuable they are.
The people in charge now if they are competent, if they have a shred of decency and humility, will realize by getting out of our way we can thrive. And if they won’t, then we have to do the other thing humans are really good at, subverting crude attempts at control.
That’s not ideology folks, that’s who we are. And I love people for it.
It’s simply giving up control over what you cannot and staying focused on what you can. It’s the humility to know that I don’t have the answers to the problems of the world but maybe the problems don’t exist as I think I see them.
We’ve been giving a huge wake up call that what we’ve built is a house of cards. You’ll hear a lot of cries for people to ‘get local.’ Use the time you have in front of you to build skills you didn’t have yesterday. Find ways to be more valuable to those nearest you that may need you tomorrow.
Forge real relationships with people you never thought you could.
But most importantly, it’s time to stop denying that which is in front of us.
“We Can Sh*t For 10 Years” – Dutch PM Mocks Toilet-Paper Shortage Rumors
With concerns rising in the Western world that toilet paper shortages have developed due to panic hoarding among consumers amid the COVID-19 outbreak, the prime minister in the Netherlands has reassured a fellow citizen that the country has at least a decade worth of the fluffy stuff, reported RT News.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte was walking through a supermarket on Thursday when a shopper asked him if the country had enough toilet paper. Rutte’s response:
“There is also enough for the next 10 years throughout the Netherlands.”
“We have so much, we can sh*t for 10 years,” he added.
Premier Rutte op bezoek in een Albert Heijn in tijden van corona: ‘er is zo veel wc-papier, we kunnen tien jaar poepen!’ pic.twitter.com/z9puo3HK3r
Rutte was visiting a local supermarket to show his support for workers amid these challenging times. He said earlier in the week, in a televised address to the nation, most residents would get COVID-19.
“There’s no easy message to you this evening… The reality is that a large part of the Dutch population will be infected by the coronavirus. That is what the experts are telling us.”
He said a full lockdown of the country is unlikely as he wants to build “group immunity” while a vaccine could be 12-18 months away.
The Netherlands has confirmed 2,468 cases of the virus, including 77 deaths as of Friday morning.
Meanwhile, in America, Costco stores have run out of toilet paper.
‘Vague’ Legislation Gives British Police Powers To Detain “Suspected COVID-19 Carriers”
The Covid-19 outbreak is on the verge of hurling the UK into a nationwide lockdown, or maybe at least London for starters.
We warned on Monday that “the UK has missed the critical containment window to implement social distancing policies that would flatten the curve and slowdown infections, suggesting the country could see an exponential rise in Covid-19 cases over the next month.”
And wow, the epidemic curve is exponential (as of March 20, 0900ET, there are 3,269 confirmed cases and 144 deaths across the country):
With that being said, we noted on Friday morning that upwards of 10,000 troops stand ready to be deployed if social order deteriorates, mostly because supermarkets are running out of food and the healthcare system is “on the brink of collapse.”
As a direct response to the chaos unfolding, the British government is now giving police, public health and immigration officers the right to arrest any suspected COVID-19 carriers under a new emergency bill, reported RT News.
The 329-page emergency bill was published on Thursday and is part of the government’s efforts to enforce more draconian measures to flatten the curve to slowdown infections.
UK Coronavirus Bill
The bill reads, “public health officer, constables and (in some circumstances) immigration officers with the means to enforce sensible public health restrictions, including returning people to places that they have been required to stay. Where necessary and proportionate, constables and immigration officers will be able to direct individuals to attend, remove them to, or keep them at suitable locations for screening and assessment.”
The government also can limit social gatherings for the “purpose of preventing, protecting against, controlling” the virus outbreak.
These draconian measures come as a secret government document was leaked earlier this week that said 80% of Britons could be infected, and the virus would not clear out of the country until Spring 2021.
NATO’s massive military exercise ‘Defender Europe 2020’ has been effectively canceled over the covid-19 pandemic. Instead of hype about Russia, perhaps the alliance should address the actual danger to Europe, analysts tell RT.
The Pentagon had already deployed some 6,000 troops and 3,000 pieces of equipment to Europe by March 13, when the transfers were halted amid the rapid spread of the coronavirus. The decision to cancel the drills actually improved European security, since the risk of covid-19 transmission among the troops – and from them to civilians – was unacceptably high, former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and international security commentator Scott Ritter told RT.
Canceling the exercise was “the most prudent action possible” from the political standpoint, said Ritter, as the fallout from US troops infecting civilians with the coronavirus would have made future such exercises “problematic.”
“The exercise was more political than practical, a show of force designed to deter Russian ‘aggression’ in the Baltics,” Ritter added. Poland and the Baltic states have clamored for a bigger NATO – mainly US – presence in their territory since 2014, hyping the threat of “Russian aggression” by pointing to the conflict in Ukraine. The US has happily obliged, even under the Trump administration, while NATO maintained its increased deployments on the Russian border were entirely defensive in nature. Needless to say, Moscow is not buying it.
“There’s no actual military threat to Europe. Nobody is going to attack it,” Konstantin Sokolov, geopolitics expert and research fellow with Russia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, told RT.
Political relations within NATO have been fraying for months, with unilateral actions in Syria by the US and Turkey prompting French President Emmanuel Macron to describe the alliance as “brain dead.”
“The crisis of political relations between the US and its allies is getting worse in the current situation, which is aggravated by selfishness of all sides,” Sokolov told RT. The US and its European allies have been acting on their own to cope with the virus, shutting down borders and implementing strictly national policies. The main threat to Europe is the coronavirus, not Russia, says Vladimir Batyuk, a senior fellow at the Russian Institute for US and Canadian Studies.
“In Italy alone, the virus has killed several hundred people. Russian military action didn’t hurt a single person from European NATO member states in the last three decades,” Batyuk told RT. There were 2,500 recorded deaths from the coronavirus in Italy as of Tuesday.
Rick Rozoff, peace activist at StopNato International, thinks it’s incredibly ironic that a virus seems to have derailed, however temporarily, NATO’s strategic priority to expand to the Russian border.
“This is a tactical retreat, in the face of nature,” he told RT.
“I’m going to have to assume that, if and when the coronavirus is brought under control, that we’ll see the resumption of such military provocations, large-scale military exercises on Russia’s western border.”
Rozoff pointed out that the Atlantic Council – the alliance’s massive think-tank and lobbying arm – had just called for an increased US troop presence in Europe under the pretext of fighting the coronavirus, same as they’ve done with anything from terrorism to climate change and women’s rights over the years. Some of those US troops may be more urgently needed at home, he added, as over 1,000 National Guard personnel have already been called up to help with the pandemic.
‘Defender Europe 2020’ was supposed to be the largest NATO exercise in 25 years, encompassing smaller exercises that were scheduled to take place in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia starting in April and continuing into May.
America is in a haze right now. It seems like half the country is in denial of the danger while the other half is awaking from apathy and frantically trying to prepare. This is creating a fog of confusion as one side screams “it’s nothing but the flu, stop buying up the grocery store…!”, and the other side just keeps stocking goods, though in an inexperienced way that prioritizes comfort over practicality.
The other day I went by the grocery store to grab a few peripheral items while they still exist on sale, and this was the first time since the Covid-19 situation began that people in my area actually seemed…different. The usual carefree obliviousness was gone from their faces and they all had a deer-in-the-headlights look, their eyes wide as saucers as they nervously scrambled around the store. None of them were absorbed into their cell phones. All of them were alert as many people huddled over their cart, quickly snatching items from the shelves as if protecting themselves from potential thieves. It seems that reality is finally hitting the masses square in the face like a sucker punch.
Suddenly, the prepper movement doesn’t look so “crazy” after all, and average people are now turning to prepper forums and websites to ask us for information on how to plan more effectively. Instead of stacking piles of toilet paper for psychological comfort, they are now buying food supplies. The people who used to accuse us of being “chicken littles” and “doom mongers” are eerily silent. I almost miss them. At the very least, everyone is now concerned about the situation, if not for different reasons.
This is a far cry from the past two months, when governments around the world as well as the UN’s WHO continually downplayed the pandemic threat and offered the public nothing in terms of usable advice. The establishment consistently kept the public in the dark, not just on the virus and its capabilities but also on the vast weaknesses in the global economy. Abruptly in the past week they suggest that a threat is ahead and now millions of people are scrambling to prepare however they can.
As I have noted in previous articles, there is a reason why the establishment refused to inform the citizenry of the instabilities inherent in the pandemic scenario; the more unknowns there are for the public the more panic will set it, chaos ensues, and it is chaos that can be exploited to push forward numerous agendas. These agendas include global centralization as well as the erasure of constitutional liberties.
Now that a national collapse event is slowly being accepted by many as a legitimate possibility, there is a debate rising as to what measures the government should take, or should be allowed to take. Those of us in the prepper and liberty movements always knew this day was coming; a day when the public would start considering trading away an array of freedoms in exchange for promises of security.
Even now, government officials are still trying to tell people that this event will be “short lived”.
“Don’t worry”, they say, “It will only last a couple of weeks.” Oh, and “Don’t concern yourselves with food shortages, that’s not going to happen…” You can look at these lies in two different ways:
1) The government is trying to stave off a “panic” by slowly easing people into the reality that the system is breaking.
2) The government is trying to keep people passive to the danger so that when the system breaks completely they will be unprepared, desperate and easier to manipulate.
I believe the second option is the most likely given the evidence at hand, but in either case the government is crippling the public response time to the disaster. They did this for months and they are still trying to do it now.
So, my argument is, why should we suddenly take their advice or take orders from them when the manure hits the fan? They have FAILED in their responsibilities to inform and protect the citizenry, and they are about to violate their prime mandate, which is to protect the personal liberties that make our society worth living in. Without these freedoms, there is no point to keeping our system intact anyway.
The establishment and its defenders will claim that we all “have to make sacrifices” today in order to have freedoms tomorrow, but that’s not how the constitution was designed to work. Our rights are MORE important during times of distress and crisis, for it is in these times that we need to know what we are fighting for, and what we are struggling for. Survival is meaningless if we have to accept tyranny to achieve it.
Once governments see a chance to usurp freedoms from the people, they DO NOT tend to give those freedoms back later unless the people become a viable opponent that could bring the establishment down.
There are some who will say that a forced quarantine is necessary to protect the “greater good” of the greater number. It is true that the Covid-19 virus is a danger, and I think the people who claim it’s “no worse than the flu” are fighting a losing battle as the death rate is clearly much higher than the average flu virus. They will look extremely foolish a few months from now as the virus continues to cycle through the population and the dead continue to increase. That said, I think I understand why they cling to this crumbling argument.
They think that by arguing that the pandemic is “all hype” they can morally justify resistance to the inevitable totalitarian response from governments. They think it has to be one or the other: Either the virus is hyped and resistance is acceptable, or the virus is real and resistance is unacceptable. I ask – Why can’t it be both? The virus is dangerous to many, but a totalitarian response is still unacceptable.
The virus is in fact more destructive than any flu in recent memory – It’s not a plague on the level of the Black Death, but if it continues to kill at a rate of 3% to 5% as it has been then this puts a large number of human beings at risk. It is not something to be taken lightly, and those people that are actively trying to discourage others from preparing for it are truly narcissistic in their ideology. If you don’t think it’s a threat, then don’t prepare, but don’t scream at others for taking precautions just because you desperately want to be right, and don’t come around demanding food and supplies from those same people when the ceiling comes crashing down on your head.
Also, understand that Covid-19 is only part of the problem. The bigger crisis is in the economy itself; a collapse has been baked into this cake for years now, and the virus has little to do with it. Leftist kids are going around calling this pandemic the “boomer remover”, almost cheering the assumption that mostly older and conservative Americans will die from this. I have to break it to them that during the economic collapse that is inevitably coming they will have to wipe the snot from their noses and put on their big-boy diapers otherwise they aren’t going to survive either; most of them have no discernible skills and no preparations to speak of. They are essentially useless.
If Covid-19 is a “boomer remover”, then the economic crisis is a “snowflake bake”, and they are about to get roasted.
As I have noted time and time again over the past few years, the Everything Bubble only needed one major trigger event to fully implode, but the international banks and central banks created that precarious bubble in the first place, and they set up all the conditions which made it so dangerous. The virus is not the cause of the crash, it is just very good cover for the banks who are the real perpetrators.
Ignore the virus if you want, but the economic collapse is undeniable. Accept that the national and global emergency is real (even if it has been financially engineered), and let’s move on to a more meaningful debate: Should governments be allowed to implement martial law measures in response?
In my view there is no excuse for tyranny, even during a pandemic event. The majority of the public is more than capable of voluntary quarantine without government enforcement. Add government intervention into the mix and it will only make people want to do the opposite. And beyond that, Covid-19 has such a long incubation period that ultimately most people will probably contract it anyway. Total containment is not achievable (as we have just seen in South Korea). Quarantines might slow the spread, which is good, but do not expect to avoid this virus indefinitely. Why sacrifice your freedoms for safety that is an illusion?
Then there is the argument of “herd immunity”, which is utter nonsense and always has been. Either a person or group is immune, or they are not, and people who are not immune do not put immune people at risk. Period. The claim that the virus might “mutate” within non-vaccinated or non-immune people and put vaccinated people at risk is a propaganda argument that ignores science. Generally, when a virus does mutate, it mutates into a less deadly or infectious strain, not a more deadly strain. Viruses are programmed to survive, too. If they evolved to kill ALL potential hosts then that would be counter to their survival imperative, which is why they usually evolve in the other direction.
In terms of Covid-19, there is no “herd immunity” by the establishment definition anyway, because it is a brand new virus. There is no vaccine and the vast majority of people have no antibodies. No one can make the argument that people need to be forcefully locked down in order to maintain a herd immunity that doesn’t exist.
Finally, there is a question of agenda and motive behind the rising call for martial law-like measures over the pandemic. For example, Champaign, Illinois mayor Deborah Frank Feinen has given herself executive powers in response to the coronavirus infection that are outright dictatorial and Soviet in their violations. Among other things, she demands the power to enforce curfews, ban public gatherings, ban alcohol, ban or confiscate firearms, as well as confiscate supplies from any citizen if those supplies are “needed for emergency response”.
Is this really about protecting the public? How does it protect the public to confiscate their only means of defense, or confiscate their food and supplies? This type of thing is usually done in communist countries, and it is done to protect government power, not protect the people.
Understand also that the Champaign mayor is not the only official calling for these types of actions. From New York to LA and beyond, those of us who are paying attention have noticed a swift and quiet implementation of orders that are whittling down American freedoms. Do not expect Donald Trump to operate differently, either. Expect him to initiate martial law measures (though he may not call in “martial law”) in the next few months. Expect him to activate Executive Order 13603, which was created by Barack Obama in 2012 and allows the federal government to appropriate everything from land to food to firearms in the event of a national emergency. This is going to happen. Count on it.
The pandemic is not an excuse for tyranny, and I for one will not comply. I and many I know will self quarantine for a time with the expectation that we will eventually contract the virus, and hopefully our immune systems are strong enough to fight it. In the meantime, I will not be allowing any government officials to confiscate my supplies or my firearms “for my own safety” or “for the greater good”.
I will not be cooperating with census takers asking questions about how much supplies I have stocked and whether or not I am ill. I will not sit idle while checkpoints are set up in my county to enforce travel restrictions or demand people test for symptoms. I will not be signing up for government rations in exchange for my biometric data. I will not be visiting the local FEMA center for government aid. And, I will fight anyone that tries to assert martial law tactics in my area.
A message to the government: I know you won’t, but I suggest you leave people alone and let them self isolate in peace. Your brand of “help” is not the kind of help we need. You and the financial elites that reside over you created this mess, and we do not trust you to clean it up. At bottom, this disaster should result in your removal from power. You should be held accountable and replaced.
The system itself needs to be rebuilt from the ground up and principles of liberty need to return to the forefront of our society. Centralization and globalization have caused untold grief and terror to humanity; this collapse only reinforces the argument that we need to try something different. They will say that the world was “not centralized enough” and that a more global (totalitarian) framework is the solution. But, of course, who really benefits from that in the end? The common man, or the elites?
They can offer any rationalization they want in the name of public safety, but we know what the real play is here. If the line is crossed into martial law, I plan to fight. Not just for me, but for the next generation. Because if I do not, those children may grow up in the world never knowing what freedom truly is. There are fates worse than death, and a life of tyranny and slavery is one of them.
* * *
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.
China Auto Sales Continue Collapse, Plunging 50% And 44% In First And Second Week Of March, Respectively
The coronavirus has certainly wreaked havoc on an already dilapidated global auto industry – and it’s no more evident than in China, where the virus originated and home to the largest auto market in the world.
Continuing February’s trends, auto sales in March have continued to collapse: lower by 50% during the first week of March and down 44% the second week of March.
And that’s if you want to believe the numbers that are coming out of China, where the optics of a recovery may mean more to the government than an actual recovery.
China Auto Sales Through March 1, 2020
Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the China Passenger Car Association told Bloomberg that the “market is recovering” but that it is doing so at a “slower than expected pace”. He also called for the country to increase car purchase quota, lower purchasing taxes and continue to give subsidies to EV purchases, in an effort to create a tailwind for buyers.
The country is also reportedly considering the idea of relaxing emission curbs to help struggling automakers.
Recall, sales fell 79% in February, marking the biggest ever monthly plunge on record. We reported less than a week ago that automakers were asking the government for relief after the industry’s collapse, which occurred in the midst of an already-in-progress global recession for automakers. Specifically, they were asking at the time for cuts on the purchase tax for smaller vehicles and support for sales in rural markets, in addition to the easing of emission requirements.
It looks as though they may have gotten their wish.
China Auto Sales Y/Y Change Through March 1, 2020
Sales for February fell to just 310,000 vehicles from a year earlier, marking the 20th straight month of declines.
A twin shock has plagued the automobile industry in China, one where a supply shock has hit manufacturers, who can’t produce automobiles at full capacity because of labor shortages and lockdowns, along with a demand shock that has kept people away from dealerships. While supply woes could be resolved with near term factory restarts, demand woes are expected to linger through the first half of the year.
To illustrate the plunge in business activity, Caixin China Composite Output Index plunged to 27.5 in February from 51.9 in the previous month, one of the quickest drops on record. The virus outbreak has led to company closures and travel restrictions that have ground China’s economy to a halt.
China bought off the head of Harvard’s chemistry department, you don’t think they could buy off run-of-the-mill research scientists scrambling for tenure and funding and publication? It’s absolutely horrific that so many scientists and researchers are taking part in what’s really clearly a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, and willfully spreading a smokescreen about something that’s already killed thousands and is projected to kill millions more across the planet.
And while the mainstream corporate media mindlessly regurgitates claims from the Chinese government that are falsifiable with the simplest of google searches, allowing the public to be lulled into a false sense of security and complacency, and Reddit rapidly censors and moderates anything that might indicate that this virus leaked from a Chinese lab and so the Chinese government is to blame for this pandemic – sites like ZeroHedge, that have been at the forefront of keeping the lines of investigation open, have been banished from Twitter and marginalized.
Below is a takedown of that article, and the good news is a much more nuanced and honest look at the origins of COVID-19, the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus is just a click away.
Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.
As our report mentions right at the start, scientists passed the H5N1 Bird Flu through a series of ferret hosts until it gained ACE2 affinity and then became incredibly virulent, which is what’s seen with COVID-19 since its affinity to ACE2 is orders of magnitude higher than SARS. That process would leave a genome that appears “natural” and not purposeful as well since it wouldn’t leave a genomic smoking gun and would simply appear to be the result of “natural” selection. However the addition of artificial generations produced by this process of passing through ferrets in the lab would create a lot of genetic distance from any possible relatives – precisely what is seen in COVID-19: it forms its own clade and appears very distant from all other bat coronaviruses. So this is lazy research, they’re either unaware of the Bird Flu study or are willfully ignoring it.
Given the level of genetic variation in the spike, it is likely that SARS-CoV-2-like viruses with partial or full polybasic cleavage sites will be discovered in other species.
This seems like pretty intentional dissimulation. It’s “likely” that other viruses with this cleavage site will be found? What? How likely? 1 in 10? 1 in 10 million? Is it likely that if my aunt grew balls she’d become my uncle? Is it “likely” that a natural intermediate animal vector will be found? Well… likely or not, until it happens it seems incredibly disingenuous to state that “likely” means a damn thing here.
The functional consequence of the polybasic cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 is unknown, and it will be important to determine its impact on transmissibility and pathogenesis in animal models. Experiments with SARS-CoV have shown that insertion of a furin cleavage site at the S1–S2 junction enhances cell–cell fusion without affecting viral entry14.
This doesn’t seem to address the virus’s provenance at all, but just as an aside it seems like a lot of the viruses with furin cleavage sites engage in ADE, which COVID-19 appears to be doing from a clinical perspective: neurological damage, the second infection is worse, and areas like Wuhan with extended infections have much higher CFRs as infections overlap.
The acquisition of polybasic cleavage sites by HA has also been observed after repeated passage in cell culture or through animals17.
Exactly. Passage through a series of ferret hosts in a lab would have given COVID-19 this distinct cleavage site.
It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11.
Yes, again we aren’t arguing that this thing was built nucleotide-by-nucleotide as the perfect bespoke bio-weapon. This efficient solution is exactly the kind of thing that would be selected for after passage through ferrets in lab, which was already done to the Bird Flu that created a horrifically virulent strain. Isn’t it funny that no one’s mentioning that experiment? Or Baric’s work at UNC? How come every single public-facing virologist seems to be leaving these studies out? Are they really unaware of them? That seems exceedingly hard to believe when I was able to find them on the front page of a single google search. Seems a lot more likely everyone’s just covering each other’s asses since they realize the magnitude of what’s happening and how deep into the cover-up they already are.
Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19
This is an utterly vacuous statement. Probably doesn’t mean a damn thing in science. “Okay folks, we probably won’t get an earthquake anytime soon, so no reason to prepare for one or try and detect one coming!” Seriously?
Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.
As we’ve explained before, there was no trace of this virus before November 2019, and full zoonotic jumps don’t just magically happen, especially not of a virus that’s so incredibly adapted to humans and able to infect us undetected and spread undetected, and then kill us after more than enough time has passed to find multiple new hosts. It’s funny so many virologists are throwing out the book of how zoonotic jumps happen… all that money in gain-of-function research must be quite blinding. Kind of amazing they don’t matter how many thousands of people are dying. As far as the intermediate animal host goes: It might as well be a unicorn at this point. Until someone finds it, it’s just conjecture.
Malayan pangolins (Manis javanica) illegally imported into Guangdong province contain coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-221. Although the RaTG13 bat virus remains the closest to SARS-CoV-2 across the genome1, some pangolin coronaviruses exhibit strong similarity to SARS-CoV-2 in the RBD, including all six key RBD residues21 (Fig. 1). This clearly shows that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein optimized for binding to human-like ACE2 is the result of natural selection.
The most recent study, covered in our article, that examines the neutral sites that are assumed to best show heritage found that pangolins are “very unlikely” to have served as a host at all. Their assertion that natural natural selection is clearly shown is raw steamy bullshit. Serial passage through ferrets fits the overall big picture far better than this pangolin crap.
For a precursor virus to acquire both the polybasic cleavage site and mutations in the spike protein suitable for binding to human ACE2, an animal host would probably have to have a high population density (to allow natural selection to proceed efficiently) and an ACE2-encoding gene that is similar to the human ortholog.
WAIT WAIT WAIT!! You mean exactly like a bunch of ferrets, which have the same ACE2 receptor as humans, all jammed into a bunch of cages together and then infected over and over again in a lab?! That’s crazy talk!! Other than the fact it was exactly the process used to make the Bird Flu into something that “could make the 1918 pandemic look like a pesky cold.”
It is possible that a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 jumped into humans, acquiring the genomic features described above through adaptation during undetected human-to-human transmission. Once acquired, these adaptations would enable the pandemic to take off and produce a sufficiently large cluster of cases to trigger the surveillance system that detected it.
Hence, this scenario presumes a period of unrecognized transmission in humans between the initial zoonotic event and the acquisition of the polybasic cleavage site. Sufficient opportunity could have arisen if there had been many prior zoonotic events that produced short chains of human-to-human transmission over an extended period.
Sure this would be plausible… other than the fact that, as we cover in our report, that statistical analysis shows that this thing didn’t hit humans until November of 2019, which this article agrees with. But zoonotic jumps only occur after a genomic trial-and-error process where the virus jumps to one host, spreads to a few new hosts, and then fizzles out. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere of this occurring. Every single data points to this thing hitting humans in November and being immediately adapted and dangerous. There is no trace whatsoever of it creating small clusters of infections and dying out – stating there could have been doesn’t mean it’s been seen. It hasn’t. And as our report covers, this would require sustained interaction with the intermediate host – how does that happen in the middle of a massive modern urban metropolis the size of NYC? And where is this intermediate host anyways? If an intermediate host isn’t needed, is it some magical sleep-flying bat that decided not to hibernate and fight crime in Wuhan when it’s buddies were all hibernating, creating the sustained interactions with humans as it fought for Justice? Because that’s about as plausible as what’s being proposed here.
The presence in pangolins of an RBD very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2 means that we can infer this was also probably in the virus that jumped to humans.
Again, analysis of the neutral sites shows that pangolins were almost certainly not in play.
Furthermore, a hypothetical generation of SARS-CoV-2 by cell culture or animal passage would have required prior isolation of a progenitor virus with very high genetic similarity, which has not been described
This means nothing. There is no open-source shared database of viruses. No one has any idea what viruses are in China’s BSL-4 lab, where they’ve been collecting these viruses for years. As mentioned, one of our persons-of-interest was the very first person to isolate a coronavirus from a bat that uses the ACE2 receptor. He also worked at UNC in Baric’s lab making the hyper-virulent bat coronavirus in 2015.
Subsequent generation of a polybasic cleavage site would have then required repeated passage in cell culture or animals with ACE2 receptors similar to those of humans, but such work has also not previously been described.
The fuck it hasn’t.
Retrospective serological studies could also be informative, and a few such studies have been conducted showing low-level exposures to SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses in certain areas of China26. Further serological studies should be conducted to determine the extent of prior human exposure to SARS-CoV-2.
Beyond the statistical analysis that indicates it only hit humans in November in 2019, is the fact that the version of COVID-19 found in the first few dozen hosts was exactly the same – there aren’t any variants whatsoever, just one version. This is not what would be found with the genomic trial-and-error of a full zoonotic jump, which requires sustained human-to-human transmission as different variants of the virus try and fail to adapt to human biology. Here, only one variant was found in all the initial infected humans, instead of the multiple variants that would be expected. But does fit what would happen if a virus that already had high affinity to the ACE2 receptor, which is the same in human and ferrets, leaked out of a lab. But addressing this point in particular, oh weird, the study they cite from March of 2018 was done mostly on people who live in villages barely a kilometer away from bat caves. A far cry from a massive urban city bout the size of NYC.Oh, and how many of these villagers, who live about a kilometer or less from bat caves, had antibodies indicating exposure to bat coronaviruses? Two-point-seven percent. (There is hand-waving about how long antibodies persist in humans, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than long enough.) That study actually sampled people living in Wuhan too and found… no evidence whatsoever of exposure to “SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses.” So are these peer-reviewers just straight chugging lead paint, or are they on the take too?
The finding of SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses from pangolins with nearly identical RBDs, however, provides a much stronger and more parsimonious explanation of how SARS-CoV-2 acquired these via recombination or mutation1
Italian Doctor Implores Rest Of World: “Lock Your Nations Down Now… Or Face This!”
Judging by the following extremely disturbing news story from Sky News, hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman was on to something when he warned President Trump that “hell is coming.“
“America will end as we know it,” warned the infamous hedge fund manager, unless President Trump shuts down the country for 30 days to contain the fast-spreading coronavirus, calling it the only option to rescue the economy.
The crisis gripping the town at the centre of the global COVID-19 crisis in Italy has been witnessed by Sky News’ Chief Correspondent Stuart Ramsay., who exclaims: “they’re fighting a war here… and they’re losing.”
Italy has hit a grim milestone in its fight against the coronavirus pandemic… with deaths now soaring above China’s:
…and authorities there want to send a warning to the rest of the world:
