Month: March 2020

New Rochelle, NY is offering the rest of America a glimpse into what happens once Covid-19 has arrived in your home town.

New York Times reporter Sarah Maslin Nir visited New Rochelle yesterday and started reporting. She wandered around the mostly deserted down town, talking to restaurant workers and a handful of patrons brave enough to defy the rumors.

By Wednesday evening, it had become clear that the virus was spreading in the community: Gov. Andrew Cuomo had confirmed that the man’s wife son and daughter had all tested positive for the virus, as did a neighbor who drove him to the hospital last week. And just a few minutes ago, Cuomo confirmed the number of cases in the state had risen to 11, with ten of those 11 cases in Westchester.

But even before Cuomo’s first press conference on Tuesday, word had already gotten out: A local had been infected with the dangerous new flu-like virus from China. Nowhere outside would be safe.

By the time Cuomo held his first press conference yesterday, word had already gotten out.

Even before the latest news, worry had already seeped across New Rochelle. At Mikey Dubb’s Frozen Custard shop, the custard machines whirred idle, and at Eden Wok, a kosher Chinese restaurant, workers stood in a doorway, anxiously peering around for customers.

One diner customer who spoke with Nir said she would wash her hands carefully once she returned home. She added that she felt “terribly sorry” for the victim and his family.

“I recognize that the gentleman who is now in the hospital with coronavirus in New York was walking up and down this street,” said Vicky Sturner, 62, a landscape designer and one of the few customers dining at Maestro’s Italian restaurant on North Avenue on Tuesday evening.

“I’m going to wash my hands, I’m going to try never to ever touch my face, and I feel terribly sorry for the family that has coronavirus – it affects everybody, the entire community,” Ms. Sturner added. “But I can’t stop it and I can’t change it, and I’m going to live my life.”

Some congregants at a local temple were surprised to find it closed Tuesday afternoon. In fact, congregants who had attended certain events were asked to self-quarantine.

Shortly before dusk on Tuesday, Nathan Lindenbaum, an accountant, had walked up to the temple doors of Young Israel of New Rochelle for evening prayers. He was perplexed to find them locked, and the synagogue empty. The man with coronavirus had attended services there.

Hours before, the Westchester County health commissioner had ordered all services at the synagogue to halt, and the congregants who attended a funeral and a bat mitzvah there on Feb. 23 to self-quarantine in their homes. Over 100 families are under the order, according to the New Rochelle mayor, Noam Bramson.

The mayor of New Rochelle said the fact that a local family had caught the virus was “deeply concerning.”

“It is deeply concerning and distressing to see one’s own community, one’s own neighbors, dealing with a challenge of this scale and this intensity,” Mayor Bramson said after leaving City Hall at 8 p.m. Tuesday, where he said he spent the day huddling with faith leaders, officials and city staff to make sure that information like the town’s messaging was accurate.

The mayor told the NYT he has only just started planning with other local leaders for potentially ugly contingencies, like if the Police Department had to intervene to enforce mandatory self quarantines.

“It is deeply concerning and distressing to see one’s own community, one’s own neighbors, dealing with a challenge of this scale and this intensity,” Mayor Bramson said after leaving City Hall at 8 p.m. Tuesday, where he said he spent the day huddling with faith leaders, officials and city staff to make sure that information like the town’s messaging was accurate.

The mayor also hashed out thornier contingencies – including whether the New Rochelle Police Department would have to intercede if the self-quarantine had to be enforced. “The hope and expectation is that those subject to the quarantine will abide by its terms voluntarily,” Mr. Bramson said.

Meanwhile, one restaurant owner said he had already hired a PR team and started offering steep discounts. He also told the NYT that he had heard some…uh…interesting stories from fellow restaurant owners.

The same day as the man’s diagnosis on Tuesday, Josh Berkowitz, the owner of Eden Wok in New Rochelle, hired a public relations specialist and started offering 15-percent-off coupons to stem an anticipated drop in diners.

Tending to his single table of customers during what is usually the dinner rush, Mr. Berkowitz answered the phone. A fellow caterer was calling to express shock at an order he had just received.

“The customer wanted sushi, but told him…” Mr. Berkowitz said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “He didn’t want any Asians to touch it.”

Mr. Berkowitz shook his head. “People have just gone nuts,” he

Informed by the reporter that a local man and his family had caught the virus, a local delivery driver told the Times that he would probably start avoiding the man’s neighborhood.

“I can’t afford to get sick,” he said.

Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckonig,

Is gold a commodity, an investment, or money?

The answer is…

Gold is a chameleon. It changes in response to the environment. At times, gold behaves like a commodity. The gold price tracks the ups and downs of commodity indices. At other times, gold is viewed as a safe haven investment. It competes with stocks and bonds for investor attention. And on occasion, gold assumes its role as the most stable long-term form of money the world has ever known.

A real chameleon changes color based on the background on which it rests. When sitting on a dark green leaf, the chameleon appears dark green to hide from predators. When the chameleon hops from the leaf to a tree trunk, it will change from green to brown to maintain its defenses.

Gold also changes its nature depending on the background.

Let’s first look at gold a commodity…

Gold does trade on commodity exchanges, and it tends to be included in commodity industries. The common understanding here is that gold is a commodity. But I don’t think that’s correct.

The reason is that because a commodity is a generic substance. It could be agricultural or a mineral or come from various sources, but it’s a substance that’s input into something else. Copper is a commodity, we use it for pipes. Lumber is a commodity, we use it for construction. Iron ore is a commodity, we use it for making steel.

Gold actually isn’t good for anything except money. People don’t dig up gold because they want to coat space helmets on astronauts or make ultra-thin wires. Gold is used for those purposes, but that’s a very small portion of its application.

So I don’t really think of gold as a commodity. But nevertheless we have to understand that it does sometimes trade like a commodity.

As far as being an investment, that’s probably gold’s most common usage.

People say, “I’m investing in gold,” or, “I’m putting part of my investment toward bullion gold.”

But I don’t really think of gold as an investment either. I understand that it’s priced in dollars, and its dollar value can go up. That will give you some return, but to me that’s more a function of the dollar than it is a function of gold.

In other words, if the dollar gets weaker, sure the dollar price of gold is going to go up. If the dollar gets stronger, then the dollar price of gold may go down.

So if you’re using the dollar as the measure of all things, then it looks like gold is going up or down. But I think of gold by weight. An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold. If I have an ounce of gold today, and I put it in a drawer, and I come back a year from now and take it out, I still have an ounce of gold. In other words it didn’t go up or down.

The dollar price may have changed, but to me that’s the function of the dollar, not a function of gold. So again, I don’t really think of it as an investment.

One of the criticisms of gold is that it has no yield. You hear it from Warren Buffet, you hear it from others, and that’s true. But gold is not supposed to have a yield because it’s money. Just reach into your wallet or your purse and pull out a dollar bill and hold it up in front of you, and ask yourself what’s the yield? There is no yield. The dollar bill doesn’t have any yield. It’s just a dollar bill, the way a gold coin is a gold coin.

If you want yield, you have to take some risks. You can put that dollar in the bank, and the bank might pay you a little bit of interest, but now it’s not money anymore. People think of their money in a bank deposit as money, but it really isn’t money. It’s an unsecured liability of an occasionally insolvent financial institution. The risk may be low, but there’s some risk, and that’s why you get a return.

Of course, you can take more risk in the stock market or the bonds market and get higher returns (or losses, as the stock market is currently proving). The point is, to get a return you have to take risk. Gold doesn’t have any risk. It’s just gold, and it doesn’t have any return. But again, it’s not supposed to.

Gold’s role as money is difficult for investors to grasp because gold hasn’t been used as money for decades. But gold in recent years has been behaving more like money than a commodity or investment. It is competing with central bank fiat money for asset allocations by global investors.

That’s a big deal because it shows that citizens around the world are starting to lose confidence in other forms of money such as dollars, yuan, yen, euros and sterling.

When you understand that gold is money, and competes with other forms of money in a jumble of cross-rates with no anchor, you’ll know why the monetary system is going wobbly.

It’s important to take off your dollar blinders to see that the dollar is just one form of money. And not necessarily the best for all investors in all circumstances. Gold is a strong competitor in the horse race among various forms of money.

Despite the recent price action, which is far more a function of the stock market rather than gold itself, this is great news for those with price exposure to gold. The price of gold in many currencies has been going up as confidence in those other currencies goes down. Confidence in currencies is dropping because investors are losing confidence in the central banks that print them.

For the first time since 2008, it looks like central banks are losing control of the global financial system. Gold does not have a central bank. Gold always inspires confidence because it is scarce, tested by time and has no cre‌dit risk.

Lost confidence in fiat money starts slowly then builds rapidly to a crescendo. The end result is panic buying of gold and a price super-spike.

We saw this behavior in the late 1970s. Gold moved from $35 per ounce in August 1971 to $800 per ounce in January 1980.

That’s a 2,200% gain in less than nine years.

We’re in the early stages of a similar super-spike that could take gold to $10,000 per ounce or higher. When that happens there will be one important difference between the new super-spike and what happened in 1980.

Back then, you could buy gold at $100, $200, or $500 per ounce and enjoy the ride. In the new super-spike, you may not be able to get any gold at all. You’ll be watching the price go up on TV, but unable to buy any for yourself.

Gold will be in such short supply that only the central banks, giant hedge funds and billionaires will be able to get their hands on any. The mint and your local dealer will be sold out. That physical scarcity will make the price super-spike even more extreme than in 1980.

The time to buy gold is now, before the price spikes and before supplies dry up. The current price decline gives you an ideal opportunity to buy gold at a bargain basement price. It won’t last long.

It appears the official death of the so-called ‘historic’ peace deal between the United States and the Taliban, as the US military has bombed Taliban positions Wednesday in the first such strike after the truce deal, and the first attack in nearly two weeks.

As we noted when it began unraveling Monday while the ink was barely dry after US State Department and Taliban representatives signed the truce in Doha Saturday, the first major milestone in the controversial deal that saw Washington engage with terrorists while desperately wanting to bring an end to the eighteen-year long occupation would have ultimately seen all American troops out of Afghanistan within 14 months. 

That now appears a pipe dream, and awkward timing to say the least, given President Trump just held a phone call with the Taliban’s top representative Tuesday.

CNN reports of the details of the attack via drone strike:

The United States conducted an airstrike Wednesday against Taliban fighters in Afghanistan who are accused of attacking an Afghan National Defense and Security Forces checkpoint, according to the US military.

The strike comes hours after a telephone call between President Donald Trump and Taliban chief negotiator Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar on Tuesday amid reports that the Taliban had resumed violence in Afghanistan days after the US and the Taliban signed a historic agreement in Qatar on Saturday.

A Pentagon spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan said in a series of statements, “The US conducted an airstrike Wednesday against Taliban fighters in Nahr-e Saraj, Helmand, who were actively attacking an #ANDSF checkpoint. This was a defensive strike to disrupt the attack. This was our 1st strike against the Taliban in 11 days.”

US defense leaders have lately sought to temper expectations in the wake of the deal’s signing. “To think that there’s going to be an absolute cessation of violence in Afghanistan, that is probably not going to happen,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, said Monday.

And Monday was the very day the Taliban declared it would resume operations against Afghan security forces, effectively ending the partial truce. There’s been a noticeable ramping up of attacks and bombings against national forces in the past two days.

The whole thing appears to have unraveled after Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid had again demanded the government release some 5,000 Taliban prisoners held by the Kabul government.

But Afghan President poured cold water on this key element of the deal, responding earlier, “There is no commitment to releasing 5,000 prisoners. This is the right and the self-will of the people of Afghanistan. It could be included in the agenda of the intra-Afghan talks, but cannot be a prerequisite for talks.”

This seems to be driving the Taliban’s non-commitment to the truce, even after all the hype in Western media. It increasingly appear the headlines never matched the reality in the first place, considering how it unraveled pretty much immediately upon being signed with Washington.

Authored by John Solomon via JustTheNews.com,

A Ukrainian court has ordered an investigation into whether Joe Biden violated any laws when he forced the March 2016 firing of the country’s chief prosecutor.

The ruling could revive scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s lucrative relationship with an energy firm in that corruption-plagued country just as the former vice president’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is surging after a lackluster start.

Former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who has long alleged he was fired because he would not stop investigating the Burisma Holdings firm that employed Hunter Biden, secured the ruling last month. Ukrainian officials confirmed the State Bureau of Investigation has since complied and initiated the probe.

The Pecherskyi District Court of Kyiv ruled last month that Shokin’s lawyers had provided sufficient evidence to warrant a probe and “obliged the authorized officials of the State Bureau of Investigation” to accept the ex-prosecutor’s complaint and “start pre-trial investigation of the reported data,” according to an official English translation of the ruling provided by Shokin’s attorney.

The ruling does not mention Biden by name, but court filings by Shokin’s lawyers that led to the decision show that the former prosecutor had alleged “the commission of a criminal offense against him by Joseph Biden, a citizen of the United States of America, in Ukraine and abroad: interference in the activities of a law enforcement officer.”

Ukraine officials say the court-ordered investigation could include a review of non-public documents and possibly even interviews.

The court order revives allegations that were at the center of President Trump’s recent impeachment and acquittal, and which have dogged Joe Biden since he boasted in a 2018 video interview that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S.-backed loan guarantees if Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko did not fire Shokin as the country’s chief prosecutor.

Shokin alleges he was fired on March 29, 2016 specifically because his office refused to shut down a long-running corruption investigation into Burisma, one of Ukraine’s larger natural gas companies.  The firm hired Hunter Biden as a board member in spring 2014, shortly after Joe Biden was named by President Obama to oversee Ukraine-U.S. relations. Records gathered by the FBI show Hunter Biden’s American firm was paid more than $3 million between 2014 and 2016.

President Trump’s private lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, asked the State Department and Ukraine officials back in 2019 to investigate the Bidens, an act which gave rise to the impeachment proceedings,

During impeachment testimony, multiple State Department officials said they believed the Bidens’ arrangement created the appearance of a conflict of interest and that the department even blocked a business deal with Burisma at one point over concerns the company was corrupt.

Joe Biden and his defenders have denied any wrongdoing, saying the vice president sought Shokin’s firing because the prosecutor was ineffective in fighting corruption. His supporters have also claimed that the Burisma investigation was dormant at the time Shokin was fired and therefore not a high priority.

But evidence has emerged in recent weeks that the probe into Burisma, in fact, was heating up when Shokin was fired in spring 2016. The prosecutor’s office had secured a ruling re-seizing assets of Burisma’s owner in early February 2016, and the Latvian government acknowledges it sent a warning to Ukraine officials that same month flagging several Burisma transactions, including payments to Hunter Biden, as “suspicious.”

Documents recently released under the Freedom of Information Act also show Burisma’s lawyers were pressuring the State Department in February 2016 to end the corruption allegations against the firm, even invoking Hunter Biden’s name as the reason.

And Shokin himself says he was making plans to interview Hunter Biden, an act that likely would have garnered major attention in the United States as Democrats were trying to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

Hunter Biden recently left Burisma’s board and said he believes in retrospect it was bad judgment to join the Ukraine company while his father oversaw U.S.-Ukraine relations. He also acknowledged he likely got the job because of his last name.

Whatever Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation does, the emergence of an investigation in Ukraine focusing attention on the Biden’s ethics comes at an unwelcome time for Joe Biden, whose presidential campaign lagged for months but got a jolt over the weekend when he won convincingly in South Carolina’s primary.

Biden’s momentum continued Monday on the eve of the critical Super Tuesday elections when rivals Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg dropped from the 2020 Democratic presidential race and announced plans to endorse the former vice president.

While the Ukraine probe just gets started, a separate investigation launched by Republicans in the U.S. Senate has been growing for weeks as investigators seek documents on Hunter Biden’s finances, his overseas travels with the vice president and possible interviews with Ukraine officials.

For a more complete timeline of key events in the Ukraine scandal, click here.

First Chuck Schumer threatened President Trump when he said the intelligence community has “six ways from Sunday” of getting back at him. Now it’s Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch – who will “pay the price” and “won’t know what hit you” if they rule the wrong way on a landmark abortion case.

In which Chuck Schumer threatens TWO sitting Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. pic.twitter.com/pA3mryeVK2

— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) March 4, 2020

Schumer was speaking at a rally in front of the Supreme Court, where the justices heard June Medical Service v. Russo – in which an abortion provider has challenged a 2014 Louisiana state law, the “Unsafe Abortion Act,” which requires abortion doctors to hold admitting privileges in a hospital at least 30 miles away from the abortion facility.

His comments drew rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, who said that his comments were “not only inappropriate, they are dangerous.“

NEW: Chief Justice Roberts chastises Schumer for “threatening” statements about Kavanaugh, Gorsuch. pic.twitter.com/jQWHJTfpks

— Greg Stohr (@GregStohr) March 4, 2020

Opponents argue that the law would limit abortion access across the country – hence the protests against the two recent conservative additions to the Supreme Court. If the law is upheld, all three of Louisiana’s abortion clinics could no longer end the lives of unborn children.

When the law was signed in 2014, only one of the state’s six abortion clinics at the time had a physician who was compliant with its requirements. The law has been largely blocked from implementation, but was briefly allowed to go into effect in early 2016, prompting the closure of two of the state’s remaining clinics.

Today, Louisiana has just three abortion clinics across the state. If the Supreme Court finds Louisiana’s law constitutional, all of them would stop offering the procedure, as first reported by CBS News. The court’s ultimate decision is expected early this summer. –CBS News

Pro-life advocates also gathered at the Wednesday rally. 

Schumer spokesman Justin Goodman put quite the spin on the threat, telling the Daily Caller that the senator’s comments referenced the political price Republicans “will pay for putting them on the court,” as well as “a warning that the justices will unleash major grassroots movement on the issue of reproductive rights against the decision.”

Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse slammed Schumer, saying that Schumer threatened Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

“The Democratic Party is so radicalized on abortion politics that today Chuck Schumer threatened Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh if they didn’t strike down a simple, common-sense, pro-woman law that simply says that abortion doctors need to have admission privileges at a local hospital,” Sasse said in a statement provided to the DCNF.

The Nebraska senator argued that if a Republican threatened Supreme Court Justices Sotomayor or Ginsburg, “it would be the biggest story not just in Washington but all across America.” –Daily Caller

“But, Chuck Schumer’s bully tactics aren’t getting much air time right now because there’s so many people in bed with his defense of abortion and his attack on an independent judiciary,” Sasse continued. “These bullying tactics need to stop.”

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

For a while now I have been hearing it said that Americans are “in a panic” over the coronavirus outbreak in the US, and that mainstream media outlets are “feeding the fear”.  This is an odd conclusion to come to and something worth noting, because the truth is mostly the opposite.  For the past couple of months the WHO, the CDC and even Donald Trump have been dismissing Covid 19 as nothing much to worry about.  The WHO actually still refuses to call it a pandemic even though the virus meets all of their own criteria.

Until recently the mainstream media was also been pumping out article after article on why Covid 19 is “no more dangerous than the flu”.  With the official death rate at 2.3% to 3% (changing by the week), the virus already has higher mortality than the average flu.  If we take into account the fact that multiple medical professionals within China have revealed (despite threats of punishment) that the Chinese government is hiding the true (and much higher) death and infection statistics, then the official data goes out the window.  We can’t even trust the infection numbers from the CDC in the US, because they been refusing to test most people unless they have recently traveled to China.

Because of government lies we have to assume that the crisis is more pervasive than we know.  And so far the average American is oblivious to it.

While we do see a handful of videos of crowds stockpiling supplies at Costco or Walmart, there simple is not enough of them.  Frankly, I would prefer to see a nationwide rush to stock up on necessities; at least then we would know that a large number of people will not starve immediately following a supply chain disruption.  The more people that have supplies, the less desperation and potential crime there will be.

Only in the past week have the media and certain government representatives suddenly decided to take the pandemic issue seriously.  Why wait until there are large community outbreaks in South Korea, Iran and Italy before instituting some travel guidelines?   Why are flights still moving back and forth from these places to the US?  Why is Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow telling the country that the pandemic “is contained” and there’s no threat to the economy?  Why is the Surgeon General of the US telling people to ‘Stop buying N95 masks’ because they will not work for you; they only work for medical and CDC professionals?  This is warped fuzzy logic, and it’s bizarre.

I believe this behavior is quite deliberate, and that for the past two months there has been a conspiracy to downplay the danger and keep as many people as possible passive and unprepared.  Governments and the media have changed their tune in the past week because the threat can no longer be hidden.  The outbreak is here, as we have seen in Washington State where nine people have died already.

So, now that there is no longer any question that the US will experience outbreak conditions, we have to ask how this will play out over the coming months because this will determine how we prepare and what problems we will face.  This is how I see the pandemic escalating in 2020…

Multiple Community Outbreaks In The US

Get ready for Washington State to become a large community infection event involving thousands of people.  The virus’ incubation period of up to 24 days while a person is still contagious makes isolation and quarantine impossible.  What is happening in Washington State will happen in other states.

Going by the speed of the outbreaks in Italy and South Korea, it is likely that two weeks from now the American public will finally realize how bad the situation actually is.  The government at this stage will demand “voluntary quarantine” of individuals who think they might have the virus.  Testing will finally increase, though hospitals will have to test each person 2-3 times to get accurate results.  Expect a lot of false negatives that end up ultimately as positives for the infection.

The government, while admitting that the virus is spreading, will continue to downplay the threat to keep people as apathetic as they can.  The authorities will clam that this was done “for the greater good” in order to avoid mass panic, but they don’t care about preventing “panic”, they care about control.  The more desperate people are in the aftermath of a crisis the more likely they are to trade their freedoms for some semblance of security.

Travel Lockdown

Within the next two months we will probably see at least a handful of government enforced quarantines.  Watch for checkpoints going up on main roads and highways testing for fever and symptoms, and if you live in a high population area it may be time to get out.  The biggest threat may not be the virus but the subsequent economic crash as supply lines are cut off.  I find most people are more driven by conscience than we often see displayed in movies and TV shows, but without organization and a move to become self sustainable, some people will inevitably turn to violence to get what they need.

In the span of perhaps three months, the majority of airline flights out of the US will stop.  All interstate travel will be restricted.  If you need to go somewhere other than where you currently live, now would be the opportunity to do it.

Vaccine Promises

There will be hundreds of announcements by government officials and the media hinting that a vaccine is “right around the corner”.  Don’t believe it.  On average a vaccine takes 1 year to develop at minimum.  That is the fastest it could be accomplished an this is under the best possible circumstances.  Also, keep in mind that Covid-19 has many similarities to SARS, and the last time they tried to develop a vaccine for SARS it caused an “immunopathologic lung reaction” in test animals, meaning a negative reaction that can cause death.  They also found the vaccine caused liver damage through hepatitis.  I would not trust any vaccine or drug cocktail coming from the CDC and FEMA, especially if it is fast-tracked into existence.

The only purpose to constantly injecting vaccine promises into the public consciousness would be to give people false hope and to make them docile as they sit inactive waiting for the authorities to save the day; as well as to keep stock markets from plunging too fast.  The bottom line is, a vaccine can take up to ten years to produce, one year if there is a massive effort and mountains of money invested.  There will be no legitimate vaccine in 2020.

Election Disruption

Donald Trump’s behavior surrounding this event might seem strange to many people as he continues to dismiss virus concerns, shows more interest in the stock market than the health crisis and talks about a vaccine that will not be coming anytime soon.

As I have noted in numerous articles, Trump is a puppet of the globalists and has been for decades.  His relationship with the Rothschild banking family goes back to the 1990’s when he was bailed out of his debts in numerous properties in Atlantic City.  Rothschild banker Wilber Ross arranged the deal and now Ross is Trump’s Commerce Secretary.  The number of CFR members and elites within Trump’s cabinet indicates he is at the very least an unwilling participant, if not completely complicit in the agenda.

Trump’s behavior makes sense when this fact is taken into account.  Trump’s role is to become a pied piper for conservatives, and as he leads the US into disaster his job is to act as a bumbling villain.  As Trump’s image goes down he is meant to drag all conservatives and conservative principles of sovereignty and limited government down with him.

As part of this narrative I do see a chance that Trump will announce “delays” on the 2020 election in November.  Do not be surprised if the election is canceled entirely.  This would enrage leftists and accusations of dictatorship would be made against Trump.  The question is, will a large number of conservatives support the action?  Remember, elections are irrelevant; both sides are controlled, but why not use them instigate a civil war within the US on top of the pandemic crisis?

Alternative Media Shutdown

Liberty websites like mine and many others will eventually be shut down or blocked from public view by the government.  They will claim that we are “spreading panic” or “fake news” and “putting the public at risk”.  This is what is happening in China and it could just as easily happen here.  They will assert that the ONLY authority on the pandemic is the government, and alternative sources cannot be allowed to exist.  Anyone that questions the narrative that centralization is the solution will be targeted.

I expect this kind of lockdown of the web closer to election season and the end of the year if the current virus trend continues.  Mainstream media and spin control websites will remain intact.  Their job will be to flood the public with false news stories and maintain government dominance of the narrative.

At this point the only way to get legitimate information to the average person would be Ham radio networks, which the FCC will attempt to interfere with also (though this would be very difficult).

The Extent Of The Crash

An economic crash is built into this event.  There is no way around it, and I am not simply talking about stock markets, which are a meaningless trailing indicator.  With supply chain and labor disruptions central banks can do nothing to intervene, and stimulus measures would be pointless except as a placebo for the masses.  But how bad will it actually get?

I am doubtful of total breakdown of government unless there is a larger scale rebellion against martial law measures.  The system will remain somewhat functional, but constantly inadequate to help the public.  The system’s only purpose will be to keep people inactive and in check as their prospects turn worse and worse.  Agencies like FEMA and the CDC will attempt to herd the public into “treatment centers” and camps in the worst hit areas.  Gun confiscation on the grounds of “national emergency” provisions will eventually be suggested as some people will resist.  If you and your community have had success in self quarantine do not expect to be left alone.  In fact, expect interference that will put you and your community at risk.

Finally, a “solution” will be presented to the world by global institutions like the WHO and the IMF.  As the globalists suggested in their “Event 201” pandemic exercise which simulated a coronavirus outbreak killing 65 million people and was staged TWO MONTHS before the real pandemic started, the great fix will be to form a global financial authority to manage the response.  And thus we see the beginning of global governance…

The solution to the problem is not more centralization, more globalization and more government power; the solution is decentralization and localized response.  The solution is for people to be less dependent on the system and more self sufficient.  And, the solution is self quarantine organized around a local model, not federal government enforcement.  If these measures are not taken soon by individuals with foresight, the elites within the establishment will make this particular crisis into a hell on earth for everyone.

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