There is so much focus on the COVID-19 pandemic right now that Americans can’t be blamed if they’re not spending much time studying other developments.
That’s understandable, but inattention may be as dangerous as the virus itself. That’s because America’s adversaries are taking advantage of the situation by challenging U.S. interests in a set of geopolitical hot spots.
They believe we’re too distracted by the virus containment effort to mount a firm response.
At the same time, geopolitical confrontation is a classic way to rally a population against an outside threat, especially when they’re still hurting from the pandemic and the economic consequences. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the books to get the people behind the government.
This appears to be the case with China and Iran right now.
China in particular is trying to divert attention away from its own cover-up of the pandemic, which allowed it to spin out of control. So it’s engaging in a global propaganda campaign to try to blame the U.S. for the spread of the virus.
Both China and Iran have lied about the damage caused by the virus in their own countries. China officially reported about 4,600 fatalities and Iran officially reported about 6,200. But reliable sources suggest that the actual count of fatalities may be at least 10 times greater in both countries.
This could put actual fatalities in China and Iran about equal to the U.S. (over 70,000 dead).
Meanwhile, the U.S. has been reeling economically, and there’s no reason to believe that China and Iran are feeling any less pain. Let’s first consider China…
Not surprisingly, China has tried to take advantage of the situation by acting aggressively in the South China Sea and threatening Taiwan.
The South China Sea is a large arm of the Pacific Ocean surrounded by China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia.
All six countries have claims to exclusive economic zones that extend several hundred miles from their coastlines.
Parts of the sea are international waters governed by the Law of the Sea Convention and other treaties. All of the other nations around the South China Sea have rejected China’s claims. But they’ve been pushed back to fairly narrow boundaries close to their coastlines.
China has ignored all of those claims and treaties and insists that it is in control of the entire body of water including islands, reefs and underwater natural resources such as oil, natural gas, undersea minerals and fisheries.
China has also become even more aggressive by designating the South China Sea reefs as city-level administrative units to be administered by mainland China.
And China has pumped sand onto reefs to build artificial islands that have then been fortified with airstrips, harbors, troops and missiles.
China has said it will never seek hegemony, but that’s clearly not true. It most certainly seeks hegemony in the region.
And it’s willing to enforce it. Several encounters have happened lately where Chinese coast guard vessels have rammed and sunk fishing boats from Vietnam and the Philippines.
But China’s aggression in the South China Sea can also jeopardize U.S. naval vessels.
The U.S. operates “freedom of navigation” cruises with U.S. Navy ships to demonstrate that the U.S. also rejects China’s claims. It’s not difficult to envision an incident that could rapidly escalate into something serious.
It’s also fair to assume that a weakened U.S. Navy has emboldened Chinese actions recently.
The two aircraft carriers the Navy has in the western Pacific, the Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, were both taken out of action due to outbreaks of the coronavirus among their crews. That’s been a dramatic reduction in power projection in the region.
But neither side will back down, as neither wants to appear weak. This makes warfare a highly realistic scenario. It’s probably just a matter of time.
Meanwhile, Iran has harassed U.S. naval vessels in the Persian Gulf, launched new missiles and continued its support of terrorism in Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon.
These actions are more signs of weakness than strength, but they are dangerous nonetheless.
In the past 10 years, we’ve been through currency wars, trade wars and now pandemic.
Are shooting wars next?
Pay attention to China, Iran and, yes, North Korea. They haven’t gone away either.
The world is a dangerous place — and the virus has only made it more dangerous.
Distraction? Obama Smack-Talks Trump’s “Chaotic Disaster” Virus Response As Russia Hoax Exposed
Having refused to publicly criticize President Trump by name over his handling of the coronavirus outbreak, President Obama reportedly slammed Trump during a private call, the details of which were “leaked” to the press (though we suspect the Obama camp had a hand in their dissemination), just days after his administration was exposed for colluding to entrap Flynn with a Russia collusion hoax to ouster President Trump.
Former President Barack Obama delivered a blistering attack on Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, calling it “an absolute chaotic disaster” as well as “anemic.”
Obama’s remarks, first reported by Yahoo News, came in a leaked call as the former president exhorted members of his administration to rally behind presumptive 2020 Democratic nominee Joe Biden. The comments were perhaps the most scathing criticism Obama has yet delivered of his successor in the White House.
Critics have said the U.S. government wasted precious time in February by failing to ramp up testing and stockpile supplies as the coronavirus spread in Europe. The U.S. now leads the world in confirmed Covid-19 infections, with nearly 1.3 million as of Saturday. More than 78,000 have died in the U.S. from the virus.
However, Trump has defended his handling of the pandemic, repeatedly highlighting his Jan. 31 decision to impose travel restrictions barring most non-U.S. citizens from entering the U.S. after recent visits to China.
“President Trump’s coronavirus response has been unprecedented and saved American lives,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement on Saturday.
“While Democrats were pursuing a sham witch hunt against President Trump, President Trump was shutting down travel from China. While Democrats encouraged mass gatherings, President Trump was deploying PPE, ventilators, and testing across the country.”
Obama, in Friday’s remarks, cast the U.S. response to the virus as an outgrowth of tribalism as he sought to emphasize the urgency of the November election.
Those are some big words from a president whose strategy of appeasement toward China helped pave the way for President Trump’s historic electoral upset.
The Obama leak makes us wonder: Is this how Joe Biden’s campaign strategists are planning to proceed? just let everybody else speak for Biden, since when he tries to speak for himself…
His campaign has been mocked for holding a $50,000 “virtual dinner” with Hillary Clinton to try and raise money, as Biden scrambles to catch up with the Trump war chest. Unlike last cycle, President Trump is expected to far outspend his Democratic competitor, who has said he will only serve one term if elected, meaning that no matter what, 2024 is going to be a wide-open contest.
Polls should always be taken with a grain of salt, but a growing body of data is showing Trump with a slight edge over Biden in the swing states that will probably decide the election (the Wisconsins and the Michigans, where Trump’s margin of victory over Clinton was razor-thin).
WOW. According to this @civiqs/@dailykos poll, Biden has a lower favorability rating than Hillary Clinton did at this point in 2016. Her favorability dipped below Trump’s in the last week leading up the election. pic.twitter.com/kJZ1FvF7b5
Which means Biden, despite being a relatively “likeable” white male grandfather figure, might actually do worse than Hillary Clinton, especially as yesterday’s jobs report showed these same swing states have been most badly battered by the lockdowns, and will almost certainly blame Democrats for any economic woes caused by the coming economic downturn.
And who can forget Biden’s glitch-plagued Zoom “virtual rally”. When the tech problems weren’t flaring up, a loud bird managed to drown Biden out, winning his campaign staff comparisons to ‘senior citizens trying to figure out how to use Zoom for the first time’. Though at least that’s a relatable feeling for many voters, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in Biden’s ability to run the country.
In less than three decades, a mere blink of the eye in historical terms, the United States has gone from the world’s sole superpower to a massive foundering wreck that is helpless before the coronavirus and intent on blaming the rest of the world for its own shortcomings. As the journalist Fintan O’Toole noted recently in the Irish Times:
“Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.”
Quite right. But how and why did this pitiable condition come about? Is it all Donald Trump’s fault as so many now assume? Or did the process begin earlier?
The answer for any serious student of imperial politics is the latter. Indeed, a fascinating email suggests that the tipping point occurred in early to mid-2014, long before Trump set foot in the Oval Office.
Sent from U.S. General Wesley Clark to Philip Breedlove, Clark’s successor as NATO commander in Europe, the email is dated Apr. 12, 2014, and concerns events in the Ukraine that had recently begun spinning out of control. A few weeks earlier, the Obama administration had been on top of the world thanks to a nationalist insurrection in Kiev that had chased out a mildly pro-Russian president named Viktor Yanukovych. Champagne glasses were no doubt clinking in Washington now that the Ukraine was solidly in the western camp. But then everything went awry. First, Vladimir Putin seized control of the Crimean Peninsula, site of an all-important Russian naval base at Sevastopol. Then a pro-Russian insurgency took off in Donetsk and Luhansk, two Russian-speaking provinces in the Ukraine’s far east. Suddenly, the country was coming apart at the seams, and the U.S. didn’t know what to do.
It was at that moment that Clark dashed off his note. Already, he informed Breedlove, “Putin has read U.S. inaction in Georgia and Syria as U.S. ‘weakness.’” But now, thanks to the alarming turn of events in the Ukraine, others were doing the same. As he put it:
“China is watching closely. China will have four aircraft carriers and airspace dominance in the Western Pacific, within 5 years, if current trends continue. And if we let Ukraine slide away, it definitely raises the risks of conflict in the Pacific. For, China will ask would the U.S. then assert itself for Japan, Korea, Taiwan the Philippines the South China Sea?
…[I]f Russia takes Ukraine, Belarus will join the Eurasian Union, and, presto, the Soviet Union (in another name) will be back…
…Neither the Baltics nor the Balkans will easily resist the political disruptions empowered by a resurgent Russia and what good is a NATO ‘security guarantee’ against internal subversion?
…And then the U.S. will find a much stronger Russia, a crumbling NATO and [a] major challenge in the Western Pacific. Far easier to [hold] the line now in Ukraine than elsewhere later” [emphasis in the original].
The email speaks volumes about the mentality of those in charge. Conceivably, the Obama administration still had time to turn things around – if, that is, it had shown a bit of flexibility, a willingness to compromise, and a willingness as well to stand up to the ultra-nationalists who had led the anti-Yanukovych upsurge and opposed anything smacking of an even-handed settlement.
But instead it did the opposite. Back in the 1960s, cold warriors had argued that if Vietnam “fell” to the Communists, then Thailand, Burma, and even India would follow suit. But the proposition that Clark now advanced was even more extreme, a super-Domino Theory holding that a minor ethnic uprising in a part of the world that few people in Washington could find on the map was intolerable because it could cause the entire international structure to unravel. NATO, U.S. control of the western Pacific, victory over the Soviets – all would be lost because a few thousand people insisted on speaking their native Russian.
Why such rigidity? The real problem was not so much a confrontation mindset as a phenomenon that the historian Paul Kennedy had identified in the late 1980s: “imperial overstretch.” Like other empires before it, the U.S. had allowed itself to become so over-extended after twenty-five years of “unipolarity” that strategists had their hands full keeping an increasingly rickety structure together. Nerves were on edge, which is why an ethnic uprising that might have been accommodated at an earlier stage of U.S. imperial development was no longer tolerable. Because the rebels had run afoul of U.S. imperial priorities, they constituted a fundamental threat and therefore had to be bulldozed out of the way.
Except for one thing: the structure was so weak that each new bulldoze operation only made matters worse. Insurgents continued to hold their ground in Donetsk and Luhansk thanks to Russian backing while the government grew more and more corrupt and unstable back in Kiev. In the Middle East, the situation was so confused that U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar were channeling money and arms to ISIS as it rampaged through eastern Syria and northern Iraq and advanced on Baghdad. Thanks to the turmoil that U.S. policies were unleashing, millions of desperate refugees would soon make their way to Europe where they would spark a powerful nativist reaction that continues to this day. U.S. hegemony was turning into a nightmare.
It was no different in an America shaken by Wahhabist terrorism and dismayed by wars in the Middle East that went nowhere yet never seemed to end. Donald Trump rode a wave of discontent into the White House by promising to “drain the swamp” and bring the troops home. Conceivably, he could have done just that once he was in office – if, that is, he had been serious about downsizing U.S. imperialism and was capable of standing up to the CIA. But the “intelligence community” struck back by launching a classic destabilization campaign based on the theme of Russian collusion while Trump’s foreign-policy ideas turned out be even more of a mess than Obama’s.
So the collapse intensified, which is why America is now such a helpless giant. A crazy man is at the helm, yet the best Democrats can do is put up a candidate suffering from the early stages of senile dementia, who may be a rapist to boot. No one knows how things will play out from this point on.
But two things are clear. One is that the process did not start under Trump, and the other is that it will undoubtedly continue regardless of who wins in November. Once collapse sets in, it’s impossible to stop.
Pressed to justify his potential third party presidential bid, Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) told HBO’s Bill Maher on Friday that he wants to offer voters something they won’t get from the two major-party nominees.
“If you spend time with me over the course of this campaign, I think you’ll find that I’m the normal guy, the regular guy,” Amash told the Real Time host. “These other two guys are the buffoons.”
If Amash wins the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination, the well-spoken 40-year-old son of Middle Eastern immigrants will have no trouble standing out against President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden—a pair of septuagenarian white dudes who seem to be showing signs of cognitive decline and have each been accused of sexual assault.
But Maher wanted to know if Amash’s campaign could “be the Ralph Nader of 2020,” and potentially spoil Biden’s chances to unseat Trump. Amash responded that he wants to take votes away from both Biden and Trump, and hopes to draw support from Americans who feel alienated from politics. About 45 percent of the country didn’t vote in 2016, he pointed out.
“There’s a big pool of people out there,” Amash said, “and I’m going to reach out to all of them.”
Once the “spoiler” argument was dispensed with, Maher and Amash got into a far more interesting debate about the American health care system and the correct governmental response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Amash criticized the $3 trillion in stimulus spending approved by Congress so far—the congressman was one of the few “nay” votes against the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act—saying that the aid has not gone to the people who really need it.
“You had the government spend $3 trillion and they still couldn’t help the people who need the most help,” Amash said. “Libertarianism would say, ‘Let’s help the people who need the help, not the people who are connected and feel entitled to it.'”
When it comes to fixing the American health care system, Amash redirected a Maher barb that criticized libertarians for not having any ideas by arguing that government is often the reason why health care is too expensive. He pointed to certificate of need laws that make it difficult for hospitals and other health care providers to adapt to changing circumstances without approval from state governments. As president, Amash said he would work to remove health care regulations and give states more authority to build “backstops” to provide care for the truly needy.
Whether Amash will earn the opportunity to go head-to-head-to-head with Biden and Trump is still an open question. Libertarian Party officials were meeting Saturday afternoon to discuss plans for their nominating convention, which was originally supposed to begin on May 21 in Austin, Texas, but may have to be rescheduled or moved online in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
However the L.P.’s nominating process plays out, Amash figures to be a strong contender for the ticket—and the spot on the ballot in all 50 states that comes with it.
If nothing else, Friday’s interview with Maher demonstrated why the Michigan congressman’s presence makes the 2020 presidential election more palatable. It’s difficult to imagine either Trump or Biden doing a better job of discussing specific policies—do either of them know what a “certificate of need” is?—while also outlining in broad strokes the principles that would guide their decision-making in office.
“I want people to make as many decisions for their own lives as possible,” Amash said, “and get the government out.”
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“This is the largest interference with personal liberty in our history”
– Lord Sumption
Virtually overnight our world has turned into a wasteland of closed towns, deserted streets and a few people scuttling along with masks and stricken faces. It’s a place bereft of imagination, the light sucked out; a padded cell in Psych Ward B.
The so-called new normal is anything but normal. On March 23rd, when Boris Johnson declared a lockdown in the UK, it was a beyond surreal moment for me. With no debate, our freedoms, social life and jobs were gone.
The reasons given for the lockdown were to try and save lives, slow the spread of this virus and limit the impact on the NHS. It sounds good until you start to pose searching questions. Confining people to their homes and a complete loss of social life comes with its own set of serious problems. Focusing on Covid-19 means other people needing operations are postponed for months.
We had heard about other so-called Pandemics that had turned out to be nothing of the sort, Swine flu being one example. What was different about Covid-19? Johnson had seemed to be going the way of putting in some mitigation recommendations, like social distancing, hand washing and isolating of the elderly. Then he changed his mind.
The reason were the numbers of possible deaths that could occur if a full lockdown was not implemented. The numbers came from a Prof Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London.
Ferguson had told the government that according to his computer model, over 500,000 people would die in the UK if they did nothing, 250,000 people would die if he continued with lesser mitigation in place, but allowing businesses to stay open as usual. With a full lockdown, deaths would be 20,000 or less, and the impact to the NHS would be kept to a minimum.
What immediately struck me was that Ferguson’s computer model is just that, it’s an estimate based on certain data. His projections could be totally wrong, we’ve all heard the expression, garbage in, garbage out. Why on earth would Johnson decide to implement such drastic measures based on a theoretical computer model?
It was also disturbing to find out that Ferguson has a lot of form for making highly exaggerated claims with his computer models.
In the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic millions of cows and other livestock were killed and burned based on his models. But Professor Michael Thrusfield, an expert in animal diseases, said Ferguson’s models were ‘not fit for purpose’ (2006) and ‘seriously flawed’ (2012).
The 2009 Swine Flu outbreak turned out to be one of the most overhyped non pandemics in the history of medicine. Ferguson got that one wrong as well, saying it would probably kill 65,000 people in the UK, but in fact 457 people died.
I looked for other expert opinions. One of the world’s top Epidemiologists is Sweden’s Dr. [Professor] Johan Giesecke. Sweden is one of a few countries who went with a different approach to the virus.
Giesecke and his medical team recommended that the elderly and sick should isolate themselves. They recommended social distancing. But restaurants, coffee shops and most businesses would be open as usual.
In an interview on April 16th with Freddie Sayers of Unherd TV, Giesecke explained the reasoning behind Sweden’s approach:
Q. Is it correct to call it herd immunity and is that the Swedish strategy?
Giesecke: It’s not the strategy, but it’s a by-product of the strategy. The strategy is to protect the old and the frail, try to minimize their risk of becoming infected and taking care of them if they get infected. If you do that the way we’re doing it, you would probably get herd immunity in the end, but that’s a by-product, its not the main reason to do it.
Q. What was your impression of that (Ferguson’s) paper?
Giesecke: I think it’s not very good… it rests on the assumptions, and the assumptions in that article have been heavily criticised… The paper was never published scientifically, it’s not peer reviewed, which a scientific paper should be. It’s just an internal departmental report from Imperial.
Q. It’s your impression that it was overly pessimistic?
Giesecke:Yes, oh yes, very much so.
Sweden has also helped us in another unforeseen way, by putting Ferguson’s computer model to a real-world test. Ferguson had predicted that with lighter mitigation measures in place, the same as Sweden, the UK would see 250,000 dead. Sweden has a population of just over 10 million, 1/6th that of the UK.
So according to Ferguson, Sweden’s death rate should be going through the roof right now, at around 35,000+, but its 3,175 as of May 8th. The one thing you can say about Ferguson is this, he stays true to his form.
[A Swedish research group from the University of Upsalla actually applied the Imperial Model to Sweden, and found it predicted 40,000 deaths “shortly after May 1st, you can read about that here. – Ed.]
DO WE ACTUALLY KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE DYING OF COVID-19?
Every day the media blasts us with the numbers of people who have died from Covid-19, but it’s very misleading. Journalist Peter Hitchens was one of the first professionals to pose serious questions about whether the lockdown was the right path, and also to question how COVID-19 deaths were being recorded.
Both in the UK and the USA, it has been openly admitted by health officials that anyone dying *with* COVID-19, is being categorized as having died *of* it. Its crucially important that we understand the difference. The fact is that at least 90% of the deaths from COVID-19 are for patients who were already suffering with other serious illnesses. So, if someone dies of a heart attack and they test positive for Covid-19, that is counted as a Covid-19 death.
Let’s look at this in another way. Every year in the UK people die from Flu. The 2014/15 was one of the worst flu years, killing 44,000 people in the UK. Once again though, the vast majority of them had other serious health issues. We had another bad flu year in 2018 with a different strain, named ‘Aussie’ Flu.
This raises other important questions about the accuracy of the reported COVID-19 deaths. Did anyone die of regular Flu during March/April 2020? Or is everyone who had flu like symptoms and died, being counted as dying with COVID-19? Pneumonia is more serious than flu; once again, are all pneumonia related deaths being lumped in with COVID-19 deaths?
This puts the Covid-19 deaths, and how dangerous it is, into a much clearer perspective. It looks like Covid-19 is no deadlier than a bad flu year. This is an opinion shared by several top epidemiologists and other experts, like Dr Sucharit Bhakdi, a specialist in microbiology, who used to work at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, Dr John Ioannidis Professor of Medicine, of Health Research and Policy and of Biomedical Data Science, at Stanford University School. (see OffGuardian here and here)
Doctors in the US are also seeing this skewing of Covid related deaths.
What’s interesting to me to is, when someone dies in this country right now they’re not talking about the high blood pressure, the diabetes, the stroke. They say did they die from COVID. We’ve been to hundreds of autopsies. You don’t talk about one thing, you talk about co-morbidities… COVID was part of it, it’s not the reason they died folks.
Also, Dr. John A Lee, a retired professor of pathology and NHS consultant pathologist, has written some excellent articles for The Spectator. Dr. Lee has raised similar concerns about how we are defining the amount of people actually dying
of Covid-19.
He also questions the lack of science behind the Lockdown, saying in an interview for Spiked on April 17,
It is only an assumption that the lockdown is having a big effect on the virus spread, but this is not a known scientific fact. As far as I can see, Sweden, despite not having anywhere near as severe a lockdown as we have had, actually has a very similar curve to ours. And Sweden’s death rate per hundred thousand people is roughly half of ours at the moment.”
We cannot even trust that the number of Covid19 deaths that are reported daily as actually having died in the previous 24-hrs. There could be a lag of several weeks in the reporting.
A recent OffGuardian article covers this. In one example for April 10th, it was reported that 980 people had died from Covid19.
But in reality, there had been just 117 “Covid19 related deaths”, with about 90 additional deaths in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, for a total of 204. The other 776 had died sometime between March 5th and April 8th.
DEATHS AND SERIOUS SOCIAL ISSUES BECAUSE OF THE LOCKDOWN
An article in the Telegraph on April 9th by Fraser Nelson said that ministers were becoming concerned about the number of people who would die because of the Lockdown, early estimates put it around 150,000. Another article referred to the massive drop in A&E patients, quote, a 29 per cent year-on-year drop in A&E use, including a 50 per cent drop in heart attack attendances.
People who are having heart attacks are either too afraid to go to A&E because they think they might catch Covid-19, or think it’s overloaded with Covid-19 patients. The list is long for seriously ill people who have been side-lined by the total focus of the NHS on Covid-19.
All surgeries, except life-threatening, have been postponed. Most cancer treatments have been postponed, dialysis disrupted or put off. Domestic abuse is up 30% to 50%, suicides, divorces, bankruptcies, the list is very long.
There are 100’s of NHS medical centres around the UK. Most of them are not seeing patients. Where do the sick people go to see a doctor?
I think the psychological damage to millions of people, forced into isolation for weeks and months, will only be fully understood in the next 12 to 18 months.
FREEDOMS STRIPPED AND UNPRECEDENTED POLICE POWERS: WE NOW HAVE A POLICE STATE LIGHT
Literally overnight our freedoms have been removed. You are only allowed to go out for one form of exercise a day or to buy food or prescriptions. You are encouraged not to go to work, supposedly only key workers (identified by the government) are supposed to work.
For the first time in our history, every person can be randomly stopped by Police to see if their journey is considered necessary.
Sunbathing, sitting on a park bench, groups of 3 or more can be questioned and possibly fined. Car trips longer than a few miles to go for exercise can be considered unnecessary, after all, you can simply get exercise walking around your block of flats, right?
On Twitter there are many videos showing Police overreach. In one video, a family with some children were sitting in a communal grass area by their block of flats. The Police came to fine them for sitting in that area.
The damage the Police have done to their own reputation within their communities will be felt in the coming months and years.
ABSURD RULES THAT MAKE NO SENSE
We are all supposed to be social distancing, staying 2 metres apart, but people can cram onto packed subway trains. Plumbers, electricians and other contractors can come to your home and make repairs, but we cannot visit family or friends who are not in our household. It’s not only blatant stupidity, it also affects us emotionally, being distant from loved ones for months.
Now we are forced to stand in queues to pick up the most menial of items at supermarkets. Walking around a supermarket is like trying to work an obstacle course, as you dodge people to try to keep the social distancing rule. People treat you as if you may have the Bubonic Plague and often cross the street to avoid you.
Park benches have red tape around them to stop people from sitting on them. It’s virtually impossible for a virus to be spread from a park bench with sunlight and rain on it daily. Viruses do not survive outside in warmer weather, but still the madness continues.
YELLOW JOURNALISM
Yellow Journalism is a label for newspapers that print cheap sensationalized headlines to get more sales, instead of well researched investigative pieces, that is the hallmark of real journalism.
Leading up to the occurrence of Covid-19 and onwards, the press in the UK have strived to make Yellow Journalism their raison d’etre. They have stoked up the public’s hysteria to manic levels with the worst gutter non-journalism I have ever seen.
It was a race to the bottom of tabloid trash, each paper trying to outdo the other with hyped up headlines, while whipping the public into a frenzy. All of them predicting a virtual armageddon, a new Black Death that will kill untold millions.
With a few exceptions, there has been no serious questioning of the governments continued path with the lockdown. The BBC has been the absolute worst, a servile and obedient government servant that simply re-writes press releases.
If there is one small positive to come out of this appalling lockdown, at least the public now recognizes just how pitiful the mainstream media have become.
FINAL THOUGHTS
We are being manipulated with emotional blackmail. Stay home, save lives and protect the NHS. It’s an insidious mind game repeated ad nauseum to keep people quiet, compliant and unquestioning.
We started lockdown because it was an unknown virus, now we know it’s nothing more serious than other viruses we have endured over 100’s of years; it’s time to end it.
Sweden’s epidemiologist Prof Giesecke made an interesting statement during his interview. When discussing the number of deaths each country will have from Covid-19, he said, paraphrasing, let’s talk in a year from now and see where we are.
I’m pretty certain he is referring to not only the deaths from Covid-19, but deaths from the Lockdown. Sweden will not suffer at all in this respect.
It’s a tragedy when anyone dies, whether it be from (most often with) Covid-19, the flu, a heart attack and many other reasons. We need to get back to seeing our loved ones, get back to work so we can feed our family and many aspects of our lives.
The NHS needs to start performing much-needed surgeries and helping others who have been side-lined in the last 2 months. Remember, the lockdown is costing lives, how many, we don’t know yet. The lockdown needs to be lifted in stages, as experts have stated, but it should be started immediately and should never return.
Pressed to justify his potential third party presidential bid, Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) told HBO’s Bill Maher on Friday that he wants to offer voters something they won’t get from the two major-party nominees.
“If you spend time with me over the course of this campaign, I think you’ll find that I’m the normal guy, the regular guy,” Amash told the Real Time host. “These other two guys are the buffoons.”
If Amash wins the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination, the well-spoken 40-year-old son of Middle Eastern immigrants will have no trouble standing out against President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden—a pair of septuagenarian white dudes who seem to be showing signs of cognitive decline and have each been accused of sexual assault.
But Maher wanted to know if Amash’s campaign could “be the Ralph Nader of 2020,” and potentially spoil Biden’s chances to unseat Trump. Amash responded that he wants to take votes away from both Biden and Trump, and hopes to draw support from Americans who feel alienated from politics. About 45 percent of the country didn’t vote in 2016, he pointed out.
“There’s a big pool of people out there,” Amash said, “and I’m going to reach out to all of them.”
Once the “spoiler” argument was dispensed with, Maher and Amash got into a far more interesting debate about the American health care system and the correct governmental response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Amash criticized the $3 trillion in stimulus spending approved by Congress so far—the congressman was one of the few “nay” votes against the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act—saying that the aid has not gone to the people who really need it.
“You had the government spend $3 trillion and they still couldn’t help the people who need the most help,” Amash said. “Libertarianism would say, ‘Let’s help the people who need the help, not the people who are connected and feel entitled to it.'”
When it comes to fixing the American health care system, Amash redirected a Maher barb that criticized libertarians for not having any ideas by arguing that government is often the reason why health care is too expensive. He pointed to certificate of need laws that make it difficult for hospitals and other health care providers to adapt to changing circumstances without approval from state governments. As president, Amash said he would work to remove health care regulations and give states more authority to build “backstops” to provide care for the truly needy.
Whether Amash will earn the opportunity to go head-to-head-to-head with Biden and Trump is still an open question. Libertarian Party officials were meeting Saturday afternoon to discuss plans for their nominating convention, which was originally supposed to begin on May 21 in Austin, Texas, but may have to be rescheduled or moved online in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
However the L.P.’s nominating process plays out, Amash figures to be a strong contender for the ticket—and the spot on the ballot in all 50 states that comes with it.
If nothing else, Friday’s interview with Maher demonstrated why the Michigan congressman’s presence makes the 2020 presidential election more palatable. It’s difficult to imagine either Trump or Biden doing a better job of discussing specific policies—do either of them know what a “certificate of need” is?—while also outlining in broad strokes the principles that would guide their decision-making in office.
“I want people to make as many decisions for their own lives as possible,” Amash said, “and get the government out.”
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China Asked WHO To Delay Pandemic Announcement, Deny Human-To-Human Transmission: German Intelligence
German intelligence has revealed that Chinese President Xi Jinping asked World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Thebreyesus to cover up the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in January, according to Der Spiegel.
During a January 21 conversation – one week after the WHO assured the world there was ‘no clear evidenceof human-to-human transmission’ – Xi reportedly asked Tedros not to reveal that the virus was in fact transmissible between humans, and to delay declaring that the coronavirus had become a pandemic – despite the virus qualifying as one by the WHO’s own former guidelines.
And while the WHO announced on the 22nd that data collected through their own investigation “suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan,” which they said more analysis was required “to understand the full extent,” they waited all the way until March 11 to declare the virus a pandemic.
It is now widely recognized that China’s political culture of secrecy helped to turn a local viral outbreak into the greatest global disaster of our time. Far from sounding the alarm when the new coronavirus was detected in Wuhan, the Communist Party of China (CPC) concealed the outbreak, allowing it to spread far and wide. Months later, China continues to sow doubt about the pandemic’s origins and withhold potentially life-saving data.
In mid-January, the body tweeted that investigations by Chinese authorities had found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus. Taiwan’s December 31 warning that such transmission was likely happening in Wuhan was ignored by the WHO, even though the information had been enough to convince the Taiwanese authorities – which may have better intelligence on China than anyone else – to institute preventive measures at home before any other country, including China.
The WHO’s persistent publicizing of China’s narrative lulled other countries into a dangerous complacency, delaying their responses by weeks. In fact, the WHO actively discouraged action. On January 10, with Wuhan gripped by the outbreak, the WHO said that it did “not recommend any specific health measures for travelers to and from Wuhan,” adding that “entry screening offers little benefit.” It also advised “against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on China.”
Even after China’s most famous pulmonologist, Zhong Nanshan, confirmed human-to-human transmission on January 20, the WHO continued to undermine effective responses by downplaying the risks of asymptomatic transmission and discouraging widespread testing. Meanwhile, China was hoarding personal protective equipment – scaling back exports of Chinese-made PPE and other medical gear and importing the rest of the world’s supply. In the final week of January, the country imported 56 million respirators and masks, according to official data.
* * *
It’s no secret that China engaged in a massive cover-up as the Wuhan coronavirus spiraled out of control. At the same time, the CCP allowed tens of thousands of people to travel for the Chinese Lunar New Year.
As the situation continues to evolve and narratives are shaped, take a close look and remember who’s defending who.
Former President Barack Obama is being quoted from a private call that the “rule of law is at risk” after the Justice Department moved to dismiss the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Obama reportedly told members of the Obama Alumni Association that “There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free.”
Without doubting the exhaustive search referenced by President Obama, he might have tried calling one “alum”: former Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder moved to dismiss such a case based on prosecutorial errors in front of the very same judge, Judge Emmet Sullivan. [Notably, CNN covered the statements this morning without noting the clearly false claim over the lack of any precedent for the Flynn motion]
The Obama statement is curious on various levels.
First, the exhaustive search may have been hampered by the fact that Flynn was never charged with perjury. He was charged with a single count of false statements to a federal investigator under 18 U.S.C. 1001. I have previously wrote that the Justice Department should move to dismiss the case due to recently disclosed evidence and thus I was supportive of the decision of Attorney General Bill Barr.
Third, there is also case law. In Rinaldi v. United States, 434 U.S. 22 (1977) which addressed precedent under Petite v. United States, 361 U.S. 529 (1960) dealing with the dangers of multiple prosecutions. There are also related cases in Bartkus v. Illinois,359 U. S. 121 (1959), and Abbate v. United States,359 U. S. 187 (1959). The Rinaldi decision involved a petitioner convicted of state offenses arising out of a robbery, who believed that the government should have moved to dismiss a federal offense arising out of the same robbery under the Department’s Petite policy. The Court laid out the standard for such motions. The thrust of that controversy concerned double jeopardy and dual jurisdictions. However, the point was that the rule is key in protecting such constitutional principles and that courts should be deferential in such moves by the Department: “In light of the parallel purposes of the Government’s Petite policy and the fundamental constitutional guarantee against double jeopardy, the federal courts should be receptive, not circumspect, when the Government seeks leave to implement that policy.”
There are also lower court decisions on this inherent authority. For example, in the D.C. Circuit (where the Flynn case was brought), the ruling in United States v. Fokker Servs. B.V., No. 15-3016 (D.C. Cir. 2016) reaffirms the deference to prosecutors on such questions. The Court noted that this deference extends to core constitutional principles:
“The Executive’s primacy in criminal charging decisions is long settled. That authority stems from the Constitution’s delegation of “take Care” duties, U.S. Const. art. II, § 3, and the pardon power, id. § 2, to the Executive Branch. See United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456, 464 (1996); In re Aiken Cnty., 725 F.3d 255, 262-63 (D.C. Cir. 2013). Decisions to initiate charges, or to dismiss charges once brought, “lie[] at the core of the Executive’s duty to see to the faithful execution of the laws.” Cmty. for Creative Non-Violence v. Pierce, 786 F.2d 1199, 1201 (D.C. Cir. 1986). The Supreme Court thus has repeatedly emphasized that“[w]hether to prosecute and what charge to file or bring before a grand jury are decisions that generally rest in the prosecutor’s discretion.” United States v. Batchelder, 442 U.S. 114, 124 (1979); see Bordenkircher v. Hayes, 434 U.S. 357, 364 (1978).
Correspondingly, “judicial authority is . . . at its most limited” when reviewing the Executive’s exercise of discretion over charging determinations. . . . The Executive routinely undertakes those assessments and is well equipped to do so.”
Fourth, there are cases where the Department has moved to dismiss cases on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct or other grounds touching on due process, ethical requirements or other concerns. One that comes to mind is United States v. Stevens where President Obama’s own Attorney General, Eric Holder, asked the same judge in the Flynn case to dismiss that case. That was just roughly ten years ago. As with Flynn, there was an allegation of withheld evidence by prosecutors.
At the time of the motion Holder declared “The Department of Justice must always ensure that any case in which it is involved is handled fairly and consistent with its commitment to justice. Under oftentimes trying conditions, the attorneys who serve in this Department live up to those principles on a daily basis.” What is obvious is the new guidelines issued at the time were honored in the breach during the Flynn prosecution.
While people of good faith can certainly disagree on the wisdom or basis for the Flynn motion, it is simply untrue if President Obama is claiming that there is no precedent or legal authority for the motion.
The rare statement by President Obama is also interesting in light of the new evidence. As I discussed in a column this morning in the Hill newspaper, the new material shows that Obama was following the investigation of Flynn who he previously dismissed from a high-level position and personally intervened with President Donald Trump to seek to block his appointment as National Security Adviser. Obama reportedly discussed the use of the Logan Act against Flynn. For a person concerned with precedent, that was also a curious focus. The Logan Act is widely viewed as unconstitutional and has never been used to successfully convicted a single person since the early days of the Republic. Now that is dubious precedent.
Civilian Airliner & Fuel Depot Burst Into Flames As Libyan Airport Comes Under Attack
We reported earlier how the long-running Libyan proxy war 2.0 just got hotter given now the United States is directly blaming Russia for inflaming the conflict which has seen pro-Haftar forces lay siege to the capital of Tripoli for over the past year. Both Turkey and Russia have recently come under fire for transferring thousands of mercenaries to opposing sides of the war.
On Saturday massive explosions rocked Tripoli’s only functioning international airport after Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) fired “dozens of rockets” on the sprawling complex, reports Al Jazeera.
Fuel tanks on fire following Saturday’s rocket volley on Mitiga International Airport.
Images of the attack showed huge fireballs at Mitiga International Airport reaching into the sky, also as jet fuel tanks at the airport were also directly hit, according to a statement from Libya’s National Oil Corp (NOC).
At least one civilian airliner belonging to Libya Airlines was also reportedly destroyed, though surprisingly and thankfully no civilians were reported killed or injured.
Over the past years of internecine war fighting has on multiple occasions approached the airport, in some recent cases sending panicked civilians fleeing and abandoning their bags, and having to disembark aircraft.
Some sources reported that during Saturday’s attack up to 80 rockets were fired by the LNA.
“Haftar’s forces say that there is a drone launcher in that airport… Turkish drones to target Haftar forces’ locations in the south and many other locations,” an Al Jazeera correspondent said.
The aviation fuel depot at Mitiga Airport was destroyed and a Libyan Airlines plane was damaged in warlord Haftar’s systematic rocket attacks on Saturday pic.twitter.com/pTnxR3soPT
Haftar’s LNA has alleged that the Turkish Armed Forces inside Libya are using the civilian airport has a major headquarters, also from which to launch drone attacks.
Turkey has been the biggest military backer of Tripoli’s UN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), while the UAE has been Haftar’s single largest supplier of weaponry.
