Aerobic Exercise Helps Protect Against Coronavirus

Scientists with the University of Virginia School of Medicine have shown that endurance exercise may help to protect against severe health damage from Coronavirus.

The scientists – led by Dr. Zhen Yan – point out that oxidative stress can lead to and exacerbate many of the things which can lead to death from Coronavirus: Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), cytokeine storm, and multi-organ failure.

An announcement from the University of Virginia points out:

Research conducted prior to the pandemic suggested that approximately 45% of patients who develop severe ARDS will die.

And the University of California at San Francisco Medical School notes:

The leading cause of death in COVID-19 patients is acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a form of oxygen starvation associated with the flooding of the tiny air sacs within the lungs called the alveoli.

Although treatment has greatly improved over the past two decades, ARDS arising from influenza infections still kills thousands of patients each year in the United States, notes UCSF pulmonologist and critical care specialist Matthay. The number of COVID-19 deaths due to ARDS is expected to be much greater.

“Most of the mortality in COVID-19 is due to severe ARDS,” Matthay said. “Somewhere between about 17 percent to 30 percent of hospitalized COVID-19 patients are ending up with ARDS, and about 40 to 50 percent who develop ARDS are dying, based on data from China and some regions of the U.S.”

ARDS in very difficult to treat – especially in patients weakened in other ways – which largely explains why so many people are dying from Coronavirus.

But in a new study, Yan shows that cardio exercise releases a chemical called “extracellular superoxide dismutase” (EcSOD for short), and circulates it to the lungs, organs and peripheral tissues. This reduces the oxidative stress on those vulnerable parts of the body, reducing the likelihood that ARDS, cytokein storms, and multi-organ failure develop.

Exercise may even help to partially explain why most people don’t get very sick from Coronavirus, but some people – especially those who are obese – are at much higher risk (since frequent aerobic exercise can help prevent death from Coronavirus and tends to be associated with less obesity):

“All you hear now is either social distancing or ventilator, as if all we can do is either avoid exposure or rely on a ventilator to survive if we get infected,” Yan said. “The flip side of the story is that approximately 80% of confirmed COVID-19 patients have mild symptoms with no need of respiratory support. The question is, ‘Why?’ Our findings about an endogenous antioxidant enzyme provide important clues and have intrigued us to develop a novel therapeutic for ARDS caused by COVID-19.”

This potent antioxidant [EcSOD] hunts down harmful free radicals, protecting our tissues and helping to prevent disease. Our muscles naturally make EcSOD, secreting it into the circulation to allow binding to other vital organs, but its production is enhanced by cardiovascular exercise.] hunts down harmful free radicals, protecting our tissues and helping to prevent disease. Our muscles naturally make EcSOD, secreting it into the circulation to allow binding to other vital organs, but its production is enhanced by cardiovascular exercise.

A decrease in the antioxidant is seen in several diseases, including acute lung disease, ischemic heart disease and kidney failure, Yan’s review shows. Lab research in mice suggests that blocking its production worsens heart problems, while increasing it has a beneficial effect. A decrease in EcSOD is also associated with chronic conditions such as osteoarthritis.

Research suggests that even a single session of exercise increases production of the antioxidant ….

“We cannot live in isolation forever,” he said. “Regular exercise has far more health benefits than we know. The protection against this severe respiratory disease condition is just one of the many examples.”

We sent Dr. Yan a Swiss study from 2014 regarding oral SOD supplements, and asked him whether oral SOD supplements can provide protection against ARDS and other disease worsened by Coronavirus. Dr. Yan responded:

I noticed this paper. If the combination would stimulate EcSOD production in the body, it may have the same benefit. However, the SOD supplement itself is different from EcSOD. EcSOD has HBD and can specifically bind to vital organs in the right place to scavenge superoxide. None of the other antioxidants and antioxidant enzymes has this property. Intake SOD will unlikely stimulate EcSOD expression as our body needs stimuli to promote an adaptive response (the concept of homeostasis).

We do not lack of clinical trials of using antioxidants in various oxidative stress-related diseases, most of them failed. I believe it is due to the fact that we naively thought that simply increasing antioxidant would cure the disease. EcSOD is different. Lung tissue has the highest level of EcSOD, hence EcSOD is particularly protective against lung diseases, including ARDS.

In other words, aerobic exercise – which is free and widely available – is more protective than expensive supplements.

I also asked Dr. Yan if the furin-binding property of EcSOD which he noted in his study may also help prevent severe damage from Coronavirus:

Because Covid19 has an unusual spike protein which can cleave to furin (see ), do you think that EcSOD may inhibit Covid’s ability to interact with furin?

He responded:

The possibility cannot be ruled out. Generally speaking, when two proteins interact with the same protein, they may compete against each other.

Postscript: For those interested in learning more, below are some interesting quotes from Dr. Yan’s scientific paper:

Oxidative stress has been shown to play an important role in many disease pathologies, such as … acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS).

***

EcSOD is widely expressed in many tissues/organs with the highest levels in the lung and kidney. EcSOD is so far the only known antioxidant enzyme that functions to scavenge biologically toxic O2.- in the extracellular space.

***

Finally, EcSOD has a heparin binding domain (HBD) on the C-terminus, consisting of six positively charged lysine and arginine residues. This HBD is responsible for EcSOD binding to proteoglycans, such as heparin, collagen and fibulin, which allows for EcSOD localization to the cell surface and extracellular matrix. In order for EcSOD to be released into plasma and other fluids, carboxylases and furin-like proteases have to cleave EcSOD near the HBD.

***

Exercise-induced EcSOD expression seems to be specific for endurance exercise, not induced by resistance exercise.

***

Exercise-induced increase of EcSOD promotes removal of O2.- and preserved NO availability to effectively prevent endothelial dysfunction. C) O2.- stimulates pro-inflammatory cytokines and expression of cell surface adhesion molecules, such as VCAM-1, ICAM-1, and E-selectin.

***

Considering the current outbreak of the 2019 Novel Corona virus infection (COVID-19), which is an infectious disease that leads to progressive ALI/ARDS in many patients, it is conceivable that regular exercise might be effective in preventing while EcSOD gene/protein therapy might be effective in treating ALI/ARDS under the condition of COVID-19 infection.

***

Multiple Organ Dysfunction Syndrome (MODS), a major contributor of intensive care unit (ICU) mortality, occurs when multiple organs are damaged to the point where they cannot maintain homeostatic function. Emerging evidence suggests that oxidative stress-induced endothelial cell activation (induced expression of adhesion molecules) in vital organs is a key step in the pathology as it leads to exacerbated inflammatory cell infiltration and tissue damage. *** we demonstrated that EcSOD protected against LPS-induced MODS by preserving lung function, reducing endothelial cell activation, and decreasing endothelial cell adhesion.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2020-04-18/aerobic-exercise-helps-protect-against-coronavirus

I must admit that I find it hard to believe anything AOC says.

She is a hair headed left-winger who never had a real job in her life.

AOC is almost 30, never married and childless (that biological clock must be ringing LOUDER by the hour).

Well, anyways, here, below, AOC is honest. Wow!

Unlike her fellow DemoCREEPS who were, previously, protecting the Presidential Sexual Harasser in Chief and Rapist.

Earlier they had turned a blind eye on Teddy Kennedy, a serial sexual harasser (and killer of campaign aid).

But, Teddy, like Billy, was a baby killer (in the political sense).

The article is at National Review: a Deep State publication.

AOC Calls Out Hypocritical Response to Biden Sexual Assault Allegation: ‘Believe Women…Until It Inconveniences Us’

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) criticized the lack of mainstream discussion surrounding the recent sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden made by former Senate staffer Tara Reade, calling the situation a “silencing of all dissent” that amounted to “a form of gaslighting.”

“I think it’s legitimate to talk about these things. And if we want, if we again want to have integrity, you can’t say both believe women, support all of this, until it inconveniences you, until it inconveniences us,”

Ocasio-Cortez said in response to a question during an online conversation Tuesday night with The Wing, a networking and community space for women.

She added that the dismissing of allegations was the “exact opposite of integrity,” after the Biden campaign categorically denied the allegation and caused the New York Times to retroactively edit its coverage of the allegation after complaining “that the phrasing was awkward.” The Times’s coverage came nearly three weeks after the story was first reported, while CNN has yet to detail the allegations.

“It almost felt like we started this cycle where we had kind of moved on from, you know, from all of this. And now it feels like we’re kind of back in it,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And, you know, the most diverse field that we’ve ever seen — that we’re kind of back kind of replaying old movies in a way.”

Ocasio-Cortez revealed on Wednesday that the Biden campaign had reached out to her after she told the Times in an interview that she had never spoken with the former vice president, but would not say if she would endorse Biden’s campaign.

.@AOC speaking on Playbook event says that since NYT article Monday, her and Biden’s teams have been in touch. She says “we’ll see” on if she’s going to endorse him or be a surrogate. But she said it is important to support Biden in November.

The freshman congresswoman, who is up for reelection in November, has clashed with Biden in the past. She said the former vice president would not be a “pragmatic” choice as the Democratic 2020 presidential nominee in June before endorsing Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.). After Biden implied in December that Ocasio-Cortez did not represent the mainstream position of the Democratic Party, the New York progressive fired back by saying the party was. “too big of a tent.”

“In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are,” Ocasio-Cortez told New York Magazine.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/aoc-calls-out-hypocritical-response-to-biden-sexual-assault-allegation-believe-women-until-it-inconveniences-us/

Sadly, in a TWEET, the said AOC tells us that, in the end, she WILL support Biden, the current DemoCREEP Sexual Harasser, running for the presidency against the Big Bad Orange Man.

From an Eliza Collins Tweet, on April 15:

@AOC speaking on Playbook event says that since NYT article Monday, her and Biden’s teams have been in touch. She says “we’ll see” on if she’s going to endorse him or be a surrogate. But she said it is important to support Biden in November.

Bernie sold out for few millions (my guesstimate).

How much will AOC sell out for?

COVID – The squeeze play on the population

by Jon Rappoport – April 13, 2020

It’s a con as old as the hills. The ancient chieftain of a little territory looks out across his domain and says to his top aide, “You know, we have these clusters of people worshiping different gods. That’s not good for business. Our business is CONTROL, so we need UNITY. Make up the name of some god, and go out there and sell it. Take down those little shrines and tell all the people they have to believe in the new deity. Use force and censorship when necessary. Later on, I may decide I’M really the name you chose for the new god. We’ll see. If you have any trouble right away, call me on my cell. I’ll be out sunning by the pool.”

Unity of thought. That’s what controllers are after.

In the case of this fake epidemic, the population must view WHAT IT IS in the way public officials and the press are describing it. Dissenting analysis must be pushed into the background.

Here is a 4/9 Bloomberg News headline: “5G Conspiracy Theory Fueled by Coordinated Effort.” [1] A sub-headline states, “Researchers identify disinformation campaign but not source.” The article begins: “A conspiracy theory linking 5G technology to the outbreak of the coronavirus is quickly gaining momentum…”

Obviously, such wayward thinking has to be stopped. And down further in the Bloomberg article, we have chilling news: “Some social media companies have taken action to limit the spread of coronavirus conspiracy theories on their platforms. On Tuesday, Google’s YouTube said that it would ban all videos linking 5G technology to coronavirus, saying that ‘any content that disputes the existence or transmission of Covid-19’ would now be in violation of YouTube policies.”

“In the U.K., a parliamentary committee on Monday called on the British government to do more to ‘stamp out’ coronavirus conspiracy theories, and said it was planning to hold a hearing later this year at which representatives from U.S. technology giants will be asked about how they have handled the spread of disinformation on their platforms.”

Independent analysis of the “epidemic” hangs in the balance. The masters of control want to maintain an information monopoly.

It goes without saying that, in order to achieve this monopoly, detailed surveillance of Internet content is necessary.

Another type of surveillance is also part of the squeeze play. Apple.com has the story (press release, 4/10) [2]:

“Across the world, governments and health authorities are working together to find solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic, to protect people… Since COVID-19 can be transmitted through close proximity to affected individuals, public health officials have identified contact tracing as a valuable tool to help contain its spread. A number of leading public health authorities, universities, and NGOs around the world have been doing important work to develop opt-in contact tracing technology.”

“To further this cause, Apple and Google will be launching a comprehensive solution that includes application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technology to assist in enabling contact tracing. Given the urgent need, the plan is to implement this solution in two steps while maintaining strong protections around user privacy.”

“First, in May, both companies will release APIs that enable interoperability between Android and iOS devices using apps from public health authorities. These official apps will be available for users to download via their respective app stores.”

“Second, in the coming months, Apple and Google will work to enable a broader Bluetooth-based contact tracing platform by building this functionality into the underlying platforms. This is a more robust solution than an API and would allow more individuals to participate, if they choose to opt in, as well as enable interaction with a broader ecosystem of apps and government health authorities. Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders. We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyze.”

“All of us at Apple and Google believe there has never been a more important moment to work together to solve one of the world’s most pressing problems. Through close cooperation and collaboration with developers, governments and public health providers, we hope to harness the power of technology to help countries around the world slow the spread of COVID-19 and accelerate the return of everyday life.”

If you believe citizen privacy is an utmost concern in the minds of Google and Apple, I have condos for sale on the far side of the moon.

The tracing tools appear to involve a very rapid expansion of Snitch Culture.

What else are “opt-in users” going to communicate about? The weather? Lunch?

“Dear Relevant Users and Public Health Officials: Yes, I know Marty. Sad to hear he’s been diagnosed with COVID-19. I did have a brief meeting with him just prior to the lockdown. I suppose I might be infected. I should get tested right away. Let’s see, who else was at the meeting? Marty’s brother, Felix, and Carrie, who is Felix’ on and off girlfriend. Six months ago she was tested for an STD, I don’t know the results—Sandy, the broker at Wilson and Wise was also at the meeting—OMG, that could mean the whole company is infected—and Sandy’s dog Tootsie—can animals spread the virus?—then there was a janitor who came into the room, I think his name is Al. He lives down near the docks. He has a brother who I hear is a drug dealer and a compulsive gambler. He owes money to some nasty people, I think…Anything I can do to stop the spread of the virus, let me know…”

Enlist the citizenry to act as spies on each other. A useful tactic.

It rips the fabric of social trust.

It blows apart privacy.

It exposes people to government intervention.

It cements the UNITY DICTUM: the epidemic has only one portrait, and the population must bow before it.

An answer? A counter? More citizens must become independent reporters and publish their findings. More citizens must set up blogs and sites that act as old-fashioned street newsstands, posting the work of independent journalists and investigators.

For every ten they censor, a hundred must spring up.

Nothing is riding on this except the immediate future—freedom, slavery, medical dictatorship, a borderless planet operated as one super-corporation, the individual vs. the collective, the energy of the individual soul.

Or people can say doom is upon us and nothing can be done about it.

Or people can sit at home and suck on the lockdown lollipop.

In Ohio, there is a protest:

https://www.youtube[dot]com/watch?v=bJZyikCVmsM

https://www.youtube[dot]com/watch?v=Ev4tRS4rJU8

SOURCES:

[1]: 5G Virus Conspiracy Theory Fueled by Coordinated Effort
[2]: Apple and Google partner on COVID-19 contact tracing technology

(To join our email list, click here.)

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/04/13/covid-the-squeeze-play-on-the-population/

Read at the UNZ Review:

this coronavirus in no way warrants the totalitarian emergency measures that have been imposed on most of humanity, it will be become clear in the months ahead. Despite the best efforts of the “health authorities” to count virtually anything as “a Covid-19 death,” the numbers are going to tell the tale.

The “experts” are already memory-holing, or recalibrating, or contextualizing, their initial apocalyptic projections. The media are toning down the hysteria. The show isn’t totally over yet, but you can feel it gradually coming to an end.

Brave New Normal

C.J. HOPKINS • APRIL 13, 2020

So, the War on Populism is finally over. Go ahead, take a wild guess who won.

I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t the Russians, or the white supremacists, or the gilets jaunes, or Jeremy Corbyn’s Nazi Death Cult, or the misogynist Bernie Bros, or the MAGA-hat terrorists, or any of the other real or fictional “populist” forces that global capitalism has been waging war on for the last four years.

What? You weren’t aware that global capitalism was fighting a War on Populism? That’s OK, most other folks weren’t. It wasn’t officially announced or anything. It was launched in the summer of 2016, just as the War on Terror was ending, as a sequel to the War on Terror, or a variation on the War on Terror, or continuation of the War on Terror, or … whatever, it doesn’t really matter anymore, because now we’re fighting the War on Death, or the War on Minor Cold-like Symptoms, depending on your age and general state of health.

That’s right, folks, once again, global capitalism (a/k/a “the world”) is under attack by an evil enemy. GloboCap just can’t catch a break. From the moment it defeated communism and became a global ideological hegemon, it has been one evil enemy after another.

No sooner had it celebrated winning the Cold War and started ruthlessly restructuring and privatizing everything than it was savagely attacked by “Islamic terrorists,” and so was forced to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, and kill and torture a lot of people, and destabilize the entire Middle East, and illegally surveil everybody, and … well, you remember the War on Terror.

Then, just as the War on Terror seemed to be finally winding down, and the only terrorists left were the “self-radicalized” terrorists (many of whom weren’t even actual terrorists), and it looked like GloboCap was finally going to be able to finish privatizing and debt-enslaving everything and everyone in peace, wouldn’t you know it, we were attacked again, this time by the global conspiracy of Russian-backed, neo-fascist “populists” that caused the Brexit and elected Trump, and tried to elect Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, and loosed the gilets jaunes on France, and who’ve been threatening the “fabric of Western democracy” with dissension-sowing Facebook memes.

Unfortunately, unlike the War on Terror, the War on Populism didn’t go that

well. After four years of fighting, GloboCap (a/k/a the neoliberal Resistance) had … OK, they had snuffed both Corbyn and Sanders, but they had totally blown the Russiagate psyop, and so were looking at four more years of Trump, and Lord knows how many of Johnson in the U.K. (which had actually left the European Union), and the gilets jaunes weren’t going away, and, basically, “populism” was still on the rise (if not in reality, in hearts and minds).

And so, just as the War on Populism had replaced (or redefined) the War on Terror, the War on Death has been officially launched to replace (or redefine) the War on Populism … which means (you guessed it), once again, it’s time to roll out another “brave new normal.”

The character of this brave new normal is, at this point, unmistakably clear … so clear that most people cannot see it, because their minds are not prepared to accept it, so they do not recognize it, though they are looking right at it. Like Dolores in the Westworld series, “it doesn’t look like anything” to them. To the rest of us, it looks rather totalitarian.

In the span of approximately 100 days, the entire global capitalist empire has been transformed into a de facto police state. Constitutional rights have been suspended. Most of us are under house arrest. Police are rounding up anyone not cooperating with the new emergency measures. They are pulling riders off of public transportation, arresting people whose papers aren’t in order, harassing, beating, intimidating, and arbitrarily detaining anyone they decide is “a danger to public health.”

Authorities are openly threatening to forcibly pull people out of their homes and quarantine them. Cops are hunting down runaway grandmothers. They’re raiding services in churches and synagogues. Citizens are being forced to wear ankle monitors. Families out for a walk are being menaced by robots and Orwellian drones.

Counterterrorism troops have been deployed to deal with non-compliant “rule breakers.” Anyone the U.S. authorities deem to have “intentionally spread the coronavirus” can be arrested and charged as a coronavirus terrorist. Artificial intelligence firms are working with governments to implement systems to log and track our contacts and movements. As a recent Foreign Policy article put it:

“The counterterrorism analogy is useful because it shows the direction of travel of pandemic policy. Imagine a new coronavirus patient is detected. Once he or she tests positive, the government could use cell-phone data to trace everyone he or she has been in close proximity to, perhaps focusing on those people who were in contact for more than a few minutes. Your cell-phone signal could then be used to enforce quarantine decisions. Leave your apartment and the authorities will know. Leave your phone behind and they will call you. Run the battery down and a police car will be at your door in a manner of minutes …”

I could go on, but I think you get the picture, or … well, you either do or you don’t.

And that is the really terrifying part of the War on Death and our “brave new normal” … not so much the totalitarianism. (Anyone who’s been paying attention is not terribly shocked by GloboCap’s decision to implement a global police state. The simulation of democracy is all fine and good, until the unwashed masses start to get unruly, and require a reminder of who’s in charge, which is what we are being treated to currently.)

No, the terrifying part is how millions of people immediately switched off their critical faculties, got into line, and started goose-stepping, and parroting hysterical propaganda, and reporting their neighbors to the police for going outside for a walk or jog (and then sadistically shrieked abuse down at them like the Goodbye Jews Girl in Schindler’s List as they were wrestled to the ground and arrested).

They are out there, right now, on the Internet, millions of these well-meaning fascists, patrolling for signs of the slightest deviation from the official coronavirus narrative, bombarding everyone with meaningless graphs, decontextualized death statistics, X-rays of fibrotic lungs, photos of refrigerated morgue trucks, mass graves, and other sensationalistic horrors intended to short-circuit critical thinking and shut down any and all forms of dissent.

Although undeniably cowardly and sickening, this kind of behavior is also not shocking. Sadly, when you terrorize people enough, the majority will regress to their animal instincts. It isn’t a question of ethics, or politics. It is purely a question of self-preservation. When you cancel the normal structure of society and place everyone in a “state of emergency” … well, it’s like what happens in a troop of chimpanzees when the alpha chimp dies or is killed by a challenger. The other chimps run around hooting and grimacing until it’s clear who the new dominant primate is, then they bend over to demonstrate their submission.

Totalitarians understand this. Sadists and cult leaders understand this. When the people you are dominating get unruly, and start questioning your right to dominate them, you need to fabricate a “state of emergency” and make everyone feel very afraid, so that they turn (or return) to you for protection from whatever evil enemy is out there, threatening the cult, or the Fatherland, or whatever. Then, once they’ve returned to the fold, and stopped questioning your right to dominate them, you can introduce a new set of rules that everybody needs to follow to prevent this kind of thing happening again.

This is obviously what is happening at the moment. But what you probably want to know is … why is it happening? And why is it happening at this precise moment?

Lucky for you, I have a theory.

No, it doesn’t involve Bill Gates, Jared Kushner, the WHO, and a global conspiracy of Chinese Jews defiling our precious bodily fluids with their satanic-alien 5G technology. It’s a little less exciting and more abstract than that (although some of those characters are probably part of it … all right, probably not the Chinese Jews, or the Satanic-Alien Illuminati).

See, I try to focus more on systems (like global capitalism) than on individuals. And on models of power rather than the specific people in power at any given time. Looking at things that way, this global lockdown and our brave new normal makes perfect sense. Stay with me now … this gets kind of heady.

What we are experiencing is a further evolution of the post-ideological model of power that came into being when global capitalism became a global-hegemonic system after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In such a global-hegemonic system, ideology is rendered obsolete. The system has no external enemies, and thus no ideological adversaries. The enemies of a global-hegemonic system by definition can only be internal. Every war becomes an insurgency, a rebellion breaking out within the system, as there is no longer any outside.

As there is no longer any outside (and thus no external ideological adversary), the global-hegemonic system dispenses with ideology entirely. Its ideology becomes “normality.” Any challenge to “normality” is henceforth regarded as an “abnormality,” a “deviation from the norm,” and automatically delegitimized. The system does not need to argue with deviations and abnormalities (as it was forced to argue with opposing ideologies in order to legitimize itself). It simply needs to eliminate them. Opposing ideologies become pathologies … existential threats to the health of the system.

In other words, the global-hegemonic system (i.e., global capitalism) becomes a body, the only body, unopposed from without, but attacked from within by a variety of opponents … terrorists, extremists, populists, whoever. These internal opponents attack the global-hegemonic body much like a disease, like a cancer, an infection, or a virus. And the global-hegemonic body reacts like any other body would.

Is this model starting to sound familiar?

I hope so, because that is what is happening right now. The system (i.e., global capitalism, not a bunch of guys in a room hatching a scheme to sell vaccines) is reacting to the last four years of populist revolt in a predictable manner. GloboCap is attacking the virus that has been attacking its hegemonic body. No, not the coronavirus. A much more destructive and multiplicitous virus … resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology.

If it isn’t already clear to you yet that this coronavirus in no way warrants the totalitarian emergency measures that have been imposed on most of humanity, it will be become clear in the months ahead. Despite the best efforts of the “health authorities” to count virtually anything as “a Covid-19 death,” the numbers are going to tell the tale. The “experts” are already memory-holing, or recalibrating, or contextualizing, their initial apocalyptic projections. The media are toning down the hysteria. The show isn’t totally over yet, but you can feel it gradually coming to an end.

In any event, whenever it happens, days, weeks, or months from now, GloboCap will dial down the totalitarianism, and let us out, so we can go back to work in whatever remains of the global economy … and won’t we all be so very grateful! There will be massive celebrations in the streets, Italian tenors singing on balconies, chorus lines of dancing nurses! The gilets jaunes will call it quits, the Putin-Nazis will stop with the memes, and Americans will elect Joe Biden president!

Or, all right, maybe not that last part, but, the point is, it will be a brave new normal! People will forget all that populism nonsense, and just be grateful for whatever McJobs they can get to be able to pay the interest on their debts, because, hey … global capitalism isn’t so bad compared to living under house arrest!

And, if not, no problem for GloboCap. They’ll just have to lock us down again, and keep locking us down, over and over, indefinitely, until we get our minds right. I mean, it’s not like we’re going to do anything about it … right? Didn’t we just demonstrate that? Sure, we’ll bitch and moan again, but then they’ll whip out those pictures of mass graves and death trucks, and the graphs, and all those scary projections, and the Blockwart-hotlines will start ringing again, and …

https://www.unz.com/chopkins/brave-new-normal/

The BEATLES as agents of the Deep State

This, below, is from Miles Mathis, who runs, single-handedly, a very perceptive and informative site.

Miles Mathis’ site can be found here (when it is not being attacked): http://mileswmathis.com/updates.html

The Beatles, and most, if not all, of the bands of the 60s were controlled by the Secret Services:

…Since we are talking about the Home Office, you may also wish to revisit the cover of Sgt. Peppers again. You may start by asking why Robert Peel’s picture is included. He is the key to unlocking the entire cover.

Peel was British Home Secretary from 1822 to 1830. The Home Secretary is of course in charge of the Home Office. Although the Home Office was formed in 1782, it wasn’t until the arrival of Peel in the 1820’s that the police services (and especially the secret police) were brought into it. This was Peel’s specialty. He is sort of the father of the British Secret Service. He didn’t invent it, he just coordinated it and expanded it.

Just above Peel on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, you find Aleister Crowley, who was recruited by the Home Office from Cambridge in the 1890’s. Just as the Beatles promoted yogis and Cheiro, they also promoted Aleister Crowley. Why would they do that?

The common interpretation is that the Beatles found him fascinating as a tarot-reading mystic, in the same vein as their yogis. Or that they dabbled in Satanism like many other 60’s bands, mainly for the purpose of looking cool or avant garde. But that isn’t the right answer. The right answer is just below.

Also above Peel on the cover is Sri Yukteswar Giri, whose ideas were imported from India into the US with others like Vivekananda and Krishnamurti in the 1890’s and afterwards. I have shown in a recent paper that this importation of mixed Eastern ideas at that time was a long-term operation by Western Secret Services, initiated in the 1870’s by the Theosophical Society.

After reading that paper, you can uncloak Sri Mahavatar Babaji, Sri Paramahansa Yogananda, Sri Lahiri Mahasaya, Terry Southern, and William Burroughs; and from reading subsequent papers in that series, you can unveil Wallace Berman, Larry Bell, Richard Lindner, H. C. Westermann, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In this way, you will finally understand the link between all the people pictured on that cover.

You will also be able to pull in Peter Blake and Robert Fraser, who designed and directed the cover of Sgt. Peppers, respectively. The album cover is linking them all to various secret services, in the US, England, and English controlled India. For more indication of that, all we have to do is look at the name of the album: Sgt. Pepper’s.

Who is Sgt. Pepper? Well, just listen to the first line of the lyrics of the first song: It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. The album came out in 1967, so twenty years ago it was 1947. First year of the CIA, which leads us in.

Of course, the Beatles weren’t American, they were British, so we should look at what the British Secret Service was up to in 1947. The research isn’t difficult, which makes it all the more surprising no one has done it.

Google on “Pepper MI6” and you find a Major John Pepper who was head of BSC in 1947. What is BSC? According to Wikipedia and Google Books, BSC is “the SIS cover organization in the United States’ SIS is just another name for MI6, the British equivalent of CIA.

Pepper succeeded William Stephenson as chair of BSC. The BSC is the British Security Coordination, which even Wikipedia now admits was a covert organization set up in New York City in 1940 upon the authorization of Winston Churchill “to mobilize pro-British opinion in the US.” This “massive propaganda campaign” was mobilized from Rockefeller Center.

It was supported by the OSS, the precursor of the CIA. The front for the BSC was the British Passport Control Office. Notable employees of BSC include Roald Dahl—who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Willie Wonka), Ian Fleming (James Bond), the screenwriter Eric Maschwitz (later BBC and ITV head and creator of Doctor Who), Dorothy Maclean (Findhorn Foundation), and David Ogilvy (the father of advertising). As you can see from this list, the propaganda campaign extended into the arts, including literature and—as we now see—popular music.

The Beatles themselves are telling you that the BSC “taught the band to play.” Which means EMI and George Martin were involved. Although I found no confirmation of it online, we must assume Martin was another employee of BSC, “mobilizing pro-British opinion in the US.” What other group mobilized pro-British opinion in the US more than the Beatles?

What most people forget is that the Beatles were in the toilet in 1966. Their US tour had been a flop, playing to half-empty venues. The masters of propaganda behind them had made a big mistake with the “we’re more popular than Jesus now” quote. That line had been no accident. Lennon didn’t just say it as a joke, off-the-cuff. It was an important part of the storyline, since part of the propaganda was the destruction of Christianity.

Intelligence had been trying to destroy Christianity since at least 1875, when Theosophy was created to help do just that. But they played their hand too far and encountered serious backlash in the US in 1966.

Rather than quit, Intelligence decided to re-invent the Beatles, creating a brand-new PR push and a total repackaging. To counter Christianity, they used the slightly more subtle approach of pushing Buddhism—as with Theosophy.

The Beatles suddenly became Buddhists and Eastern mystics and all that. At the same time, Intelligence imported the manufactured drug culture into the Beatles’ regimen, including pushing LSD and other drugs.

The Beatles denied that Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was written to push LSD, but that denial falls flat. Do you really think it is just an accident the song title includes the initials LSD? No.

Many of the 60’s bands were turned into drug pushers on purpose. These drugs were one of the top weapons of Intelligence against the hippies and the anti-war movement.

I’m not saying these bands, including the Beatles, weren’t talented. Lyndon Larouche has dismissed those bands as posers. They weren’t. Many great songs were written, though it is often hard to say who wrote them. A large number of people either in the bands or behind them were very talented at creating catchy tunes, preparing instrumentals, and producing a nice finished product.

And even if the people in the bands weren’t writing the songs, some of them could play their instruments quite well and many were accomplished singers and performers. If you wish to critique pop music, you have to do so rationally. No one who has grown up on the music can deny its beauty and power.

That said, we cannot refuse to follow evidence when we find it, and there is plenty of evidence popular music has been controlled from the beginning.

This Intelligence reading of Sgt. Pepper’s also explains Brian Wilson’s reaction to the release of the album in 1967. As we are told, Wilson went into a funk. Why? Because British Intelligence had just beaten American Intelligence at the propaganda game.

Pet Sounds was the US entry in the competition for greatest album manufactured by Intelligence, and it was pretty successful. But compared to Sgt. Pepper’s, it was seen as a dud. Wilson realized he couldn’t compete with the combined forces of George Martin, the BSC, and MI6.

Sgt. Pepper’s had a whole team of invisible songwriters, musicians, photographers, set designers, and promoters, and at the time the US team simply couldn’t match them. Yes, both the Beatles and The Beach Boys were on the EMI label, but the US EMI team simply couldn’t match the British EMI team.

Although John Pepper was head of the entire British spy organization in the US from the late 1940’s, his presence has been pretty well scrubbed from the literature. While the first head of BSC, William Stephenson, has a long page at Wikipedia, Pepper has nothing.

They can now admit Stephenson was a master spy, the inspiration for James Bond, but Pepper is still in the shadows. Why? Because his name was used by the Beatles for an album. They foolishly used his real name and told you to look twenty years before.

The album actually lacks any subtlety, and as you have seen, they give you a list of agents on the cover, providing you with their pictures in case you don’t know their names.

Sgt. Pepper’s blows the cover of almost 100 agents, so its success as propaganda relies on the assumption of an incredible ignorance and laziness by the audience—which assumption turned out to be true.

An intelligent audience would have taken the hint and marked all these people as “compromised”, never believing them again; but the audience did just the opposite.

Without exception, everyone who appeared on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s added greatly to his or her fame, and the album was voted the greatest album of all time by Rolling Stone in 2003.

Which means we can add Rolling Stone to the “compromised” list. It is yet another creation of Intelligence.

http://mileswmathis.com/lennon.pdf

https://www.google.com/search?q=sgt+pepper%27s+album+cover&tbm=isch&hl=en-US&chips=q:sgt+pepper%27s+album+cover,g_1:high+resolution:NbEdQb2bacY%3D&hl=en-US&ved=2ahUKEwie3f-ZguLoAhUaJqYKHSaiAv8Q4lYoAHoECAEQFA&biw=1903&bih=942

National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood

The book, mentioned in the Sputnik article, is being sold on AMAZON.

This is a book about secrecy, militarism, manipulation, and censorship at the heart of the world’s leading democracy—and about those who try to fight them.

Using thousands of pages of documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act National Security Cinema exclusively reveals that the national security state—led by the CIA and Pentagon—has worked on more than eight-hundred Hollywood films and over a thousand network television shows.

The latest scholarship has underestimated the size of this operation, in part because the government has gone to considerable lengths to prevent data emerging, especially in the 21st Century, as the practice of government-Hollywood cooperation has escalated and become more aggressive.

National Security Cinema reveals for the first time specific script changes made by the government for political reasons on dozens of blockbusting films and franchises like Transformers, Avatar, Meet the Parents, and The Terminator.

These forces have suppressed important narratives about: CIA drug trafficking; illegal arms sales; military creation of bio-weapons; the interaction of private armies and oil companies; government treatment of minorities; torture; coups; assassinations, and the failure to prevent 9/11.

https://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Cinema-Government-Hollywood/dp/1548084980/

The Beatles were abortionists

I am saddened to find out that the musicians of my young adulthood were … tools of the Deep State.

This, below, is from a COMMENTer at the same article on the control of the media by the US government:

This goes a long way toward explaining why so many US actors spew venom at the current US Administration at the snap of the Deep State’s blood-drenched and opium-dealing fingers; they are compelled to, paid to be other than what they are not for the cameras and many have probably drunk and doped themselves to death from the stress and private shame at having sold out their souls for the sake of the CIA dollar.

A similar book is welcome concerning how several governments, concerned that all that “black devil music” of American rock and roll, R & B and soul would undermine the US Federal and centralized governments’ influence, decided to shut down all of America’s blind pigs at the same time (a blind pig is an off-licence drinking and music establishment which gave young blacks of the 1950’s and 1960’s a place of their own to safely socialize; most were under either storefront church supervision and/or local police supervision) .

At the time of the 1967 Detroit riots, there were 15,000 blind pigs within the Motor City’s borders. Those riots too were orchestrated by the Deep State like so many US demonstrations were and are. Then (surprise!) all that Larry Williams, Chuck Berry, Etta James, Chicago Slim, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf music was being done…by white people!

The upside to that manufactured trend had an upside: for the first time, Mississippi Delta blues bands were earning royalties from those white bands’ performances and recordings. It is ridiculous to think that white rock and roll was anything other than a CIA and British Intelligence project.

The Beatles got their first gigs at the British Army of the Rhine military clubs in Germany; it was little different in the instances the Who, Hendrix (two white guys with an expendable token black as frontman and captive instructor–and himself a military veteran) and the Rolling Stones.

No one will say it out loud, but R & R never caught on in France or Francophone countries as they had already been down that road: in fact the model for the transformation of American music from a mode of expression of public emotion for entertainment into a massive juggernaut of political propaganda was based on the French experience with the jazz movement of the 1920’s up until the 1940’s especially in the case of Josephine Baker and Duke Ellington.

Germany had already had experience of the tailored government mutation of the political significance of popular music from having to deal with Beethoven, Wagner and Richard Strauss as well as the Kabaret jazz movement which is why German R & R has been and remains a “meh” moment in musical history.

https://sputniknews.com/us/201708181056586360-us-military-hollywood-cia/

Also, a picture I had never seen before; the Beatles as abortionists.

Well, there is a POSITIVE side.

I fell a bit better about John Winston Lennon’s late Post-birth abortion, now.

Winston?

As in Winston Churchill, the infamous drunken War Monger?

An article a SPUTNIK about the influence (control?) of the US government over Hollywood and the media.

Documents Expose How US Government Uses Hollywood to Promote and Propagandize

A vast swathe of documents revealing the extent of US government influence in Hollywood – including editing scripts, and blocking critical movies from ever being made – have been unearthed, indicating US officials have covertly helped produce at least 800 major movies and 1,000 television shows since 1910.

The files were uncovered by Tom Secker, an independent researcher, and Dr. Matthew Alford, a teaching fellow at the University of Bath, after diligent trawling of over 4,000 US military and intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. They form the basis of the duo’s book National Security Cinema.

Among the trove are office diary reports from assorted military entertainment liaison offices, documents from the Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency on changes made to film scripts, production assistance agreements signed between military officials and film producers, and internal government communications about the entertainment industry.

The Racket

It may not be entirely surprising that the US government seeks to influence films and TV — after all, the power of media to shape public perceptions of major contemporary issues and historical events is well-documented — and it’s no secret US government agencies operate “entertainment liaison offices” connecting entertainment industry professionals with department officials.

However, the publicly purveyed image of these offices — small operations, assisting actors, authors, directors, producers and screenwriters upon request, with minimal input on media projects beyond ensuring “authenticity” and accurate portrayal of agencies in the media — could not be further from the truth. Moreover, previous estimates of how many projects the US government has assisted were woefully inadequate — to say the least, Messrs Secker and Alford were shocked by the scale of what they discovered, and what the US security establishment’s combined efforts have produced.

Typically, state involvement in media projects begin when their producers approach an entertainment liaison office, in search of support and guidance — often, they wish to borrow military equipment, or feature locations and/or personnel in their work, which would cost millions to hire privately. The US security state is more often than not happy to oblige — in return for a say on the project’s content.

As a result, any project US government agencies are involved in is likely to be subject to script changes, in some cases quite seismic, in others small but significant — for example, if there are characters, action or dialog an agency doesn’t approve of, filmmakers must accommodate their demands. Production Assistance Agreements - — contracts between the agency and project —then lock filmmakers into using the military-approved version of the script.

“It’s about promoting themselves, and promoting foreign and security policies and in some cases worldviews that justify their continued existence and massive budgets,” Mr. Secker told Sputnik.

Origins

Pentagon involvement in the US film industry dates back to the 1910s — although perhaps predictably, they became much more heavily involved during WW2, establishing the entertainment liaison office system shortly after the war. Since then, the documents suggest the Pentagon has worked on at least 800 movies.

The CIA became involved almost immediately upon its creation in 1947, although its forebear, the Office of Strategic Services assisted with the production of three films in the immediate aftermath of the World War II — O.S.S., Cloak and Dagger and 13 Rue Madelaine. Each movie deals with the work of the OSS, and to Mr. Secker’s mind “glorify” US covert operations — in fact, the movies arguably make the case for the creation of the CIA.

“O.S.S. is particularly obvious in this respect. It’s a story about guys being recruited into the agency and being sent to France to help the resistance. In one scene, an instructor says to his recruits “we need a central intelligence agency” and talks about how the US is languishing behind its enemies in intelligence terms, as “they’ve been doing it for 200 years” — obviously a reference to Russia and the Soviet Union, rather than Nazi Germany,” Mr. Secker said.

These lines are particularly disconcerting when one considers the film itself was released in 1946, before the term “Central Intelligence Agency” had appeared in any official document, and before most historians suggest the Cold War had commenced — indeed, far from an enemy, the Soviet Union was still considered an ally by many Western politicians and citizens alike.

Expansion

However, it was not until the 1990s the CIA began official initiatives to boost their Hollywood influence — the agency established an entertainment liaison office of its own in 1996 and since then have had a “consistent, steady” influence on films and TV shows, Mr. Secker says. Some of the projects that boast covert state involvement are perhaps predictable — sci-fi blockbusters such as Transformers and War of the Worlds — others baffling.

For instance, since 2005 the Pentagon has worked on dozens of reality TV projects, including Cupcake Wars, American Idol and Top Chef. The CIA also worked on an episode of the latter series, as did the State Department.

“The approach seems to be almost anything can be used to promote the US security state, its ideology and objectives. They’re trying to reach out to audiences beyond the usual young men who go to see war/action movies,” Mr. Secker explained.

The documents also make clear the US government have massively expanded its involvement in the entertainment industry since the 1990s. Mr. Secker suggests this was driven by cost-cutting initiatives during Bill Clinton’s Presidency, which almost led to the liaison offices being shut down. Motion Picture Association President Jack Valenti and others wrote to the Secretary of Defense “begging” for them to remain open.

“I think they’re partly just trying to prove their worth, but it’s also because there’s a lot more TV being made these days with free to air digital channels multiplying the hours of content. More TV means more requests for assistance, which in turn means more supported projects. I imagine there’s also an element of trying to justify their massive budgets in the absence of a Cold War-style external threat,” Mr. Secker told Sputnik.

Mr. Secker thinks the DOD’s Hollywood database is the most fascinating set of documents, as they sometimes reveal the nature of script changes — for example, 2003 film Tears of the Sun, about a fictional Navy SEAL rescue operation in Nigeria, was heavily edited to remove the impression that the US government is involved in “nasty conspiracies overseas.”

In other cases it’s about “civilianizing” troublesome elements of a script, to distance a story’s content from the US defense establishment. For instance, Mr. Secker was “quite astonished” by the Marine Corps’ notes on Ang Lee’s 2003 film Hulk — they speak overtly of “radical changes” made to the script, including “civilianizing” the lab in which the titular green giant is created, the primary villain becoming an ex-military character (as opposed to a currently serving military officer), the removal of dialogue referring to military experiments on human subjects, and the codename for the operation to catch Hulk becoming “Angry Man” — it was originally “Ranch Hand” in the script.

For Mr. Secker, this is possibly the most disturbing change identified over the course of their research, as Ranch Hand was the name of a real-world military operation, launched in 1962, in which millions of gallons of herbicides and poisons (including the infamous Agent Orange) were dumped on Vietnam and Laos.

Officially intended to expose roads and trails used by North Vietnamese troops, Vietnam veterans to this day suffer adverse health issues due to the operation, including skin rashes, cancer and birth defects in their children. Similar problems, including a shockingly high incidence of miscarriages and congenital malformations, have been documented among Vietnamese people who live in the areas where the chemicals were used.

Other revealed examples of CIA scriptural meddling are more surprising than troubling — for instance, the CIA were involved in the production of yuletide-themed comedy Ernest Saves Christmas, and blockbuster romcom Meet the Parents (and sequel Meet the Fockers).

In the latter instance, Robert De Niro plays Jack Byrnes, a retired CIA operative — the real-world CIA secured several changes to the script, most notably a scene in whcih protagonist Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) discovers Byrnes’ secret hideaway. In the original script, Focker finds CIA torture manuals on Byrnes’ desk — in the finished film, he merely stumbles upon photos of Byrnes with various famous political figures.

As many files are still withheld by the US security state, it’s impossible to know exactly how widespread military censorship of entertainment has been, or is. Nonetheless, the next time a major movie featuring US military and/or intelligence to any degree hits cinema screens, readers may wish to keep their eyes and ears keenly open — its content may well have been fiddled with by the US secret state.

https://sputniknews.com/us/201708181056586360-us-military-hollywood-cia/

This is from Pepe Escobar.

A Brazilian born (I think) journalist based in Asia.

He is usually too Sinophiliac to my taste, well …usually.

“The Chinese New Silk Road will profit EVERYONE!”, and so on.

But in this article, Pepe is bloody spot on, I think.

The OLIGARCHY that runs the world will be profiting from this Kung Flu Virus (Wuhan flu, COVID-19) manufacted fear … unless…

I found this article at the UNZ Review.

The UNZ Review is a Samizdat site, where alternative voices from the RIGHT, from the LEFT and from the CENTER, find a home

Who Profits from the Pandemic?

PEPE ESCOBAR • APRIL 8, 2020

You don’t need to read Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics to understand that neoliberalism – in deep crisis since at least 2008 – is a control/governing technique in which surveillance capitalism is deeply embedded.

But now, with the world-system collapsing at breathtaking speed, neoliberalism is at a loss to deal with the next stage of dystopia, ever present in our hyper-connected angst: global mass unemployment.

Henry Kissinger, anointed oracle/gatekeeper of the ruling class, is predictably scared. He claims that, “sustaining the public trust is crucial to social solidarity.” He’s convinced the Hegemon should “safeguard the principles of the liberal world order.” Otherwise, “failure could set the world on fire.”

That’s so quaint. Public trust is dead across the spectrum. The liberal world “order” is now social Darwinist chaos. Just wait for the fire to rage.

The numbers are staggering. The Japan-based Asian Development Bank (ADB), in its annual economic report, may not have been exactly original. But it did note that the impact of the “worst pandemic in a century” will be as high as $4.1 trillion, or 4.8 percent of global GDP.

This an underestimation, as “supply disruptions, interrupted remittances, possible social and financial crises, and long-term effects on health care and education are excluded from the analysis.”

We cannot even start to imagine the cataclysmic social consequences of the crash. Entire sub-sectors of the global economy may not be recomposed at all.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) forecasts global unemployment at a conservative, additonal 24.7 million people – especially in aviation, tourism and hospitality.

The global aviation industry is a humongous $2.7 trillion business. That’s 3.6 percent of global GDP. It employs 2.7 million people. When you add air transport and tourism —everything from hotels and restaurants to theme parks and museums — it accounts for a minimum of 65.5 million jobs around the world.

According to the ILO, income losses for workers may range from $860 billion to an astonishing $3.4 trillion. “Working poverty” will be the new normal – especially across the Global South.

“Working poor,” in ILO terminology, means employed people living in households with a per capita income below the poverty line of $2 a day. As many as an additional 35 million people worldwide will become working poor in 2020.

Switching to feasible perspectives for global trade, it’s enlightening to examine that this report about how the economy may rebound is centered on the notorious hyperactive merchants and traders of Yiwu in eastern China – the world’s busiest small-commodity, business hub.

Their experience spells out a long and difficult recovery. As the rest of the world is in a coma, Lu Ting, chief China economist at Nomura in Hong Kong stresses that China faces a 30 percent decline in external demand at least until next Fall.

Neoliberalism in Reverse?

In the next stage, the strategic competition between the U.S. and China will be no-holds-barred, as emerging narratives of China’s new, multifaceted global role – on trade, technology, cyberspace, climate change – will set in, even more far-reaching than the New Silk Roads. That will also be the case in global public health policies. Get ready for an accelerated Hybrid War between the “Chinese virus” narrative and the Health Silk Road.

The latest report by the China Institute of International Studies would be quite helpful for the West — hubris permitting — to understand how Beijing adopted key measures putting the health and safety of the general population first.

Now, as the Chinese economy slowly picks up, hordes of fund managers from across Asia are tracking everything from trips on the metro to noodle consumption to preview what kind of economy may emerge post-lockdown.

In contrast, across the West, the prevailing doom and gloom elicited a pricelesseditorial from The Financial Times. Like James Brown in the 1980s Blues Brothers pop epic, the City of London seems to have seen the light, or at least giving the impression it really means it. Neoliberalism in reverse. New social contract. “Secure” labor markets. Redistribution.

Cynics won’t be fooled. The cryogenic state of the global economy spells out a vicious Great Depression 2.0 and an unemployment tsunami. The plebs eventually reaching for the pitchforks and the AR-15s en masse is now a distinct possibility. Might as well start throwing a few breadcrumbs to the beggars’ banquet.

That may apply to European latitudes. But the American story is in a class by itself.

For decades, we were led to believe that the world-system put in place after WWII provided the U.S. with unrivalled structural power. Now, all that’s left is structural fragility, grotesque inequalities, unpayable Himalayas of debt, and a rolling crisis.

No one is fooled anymore by the Fed’s magic quantitative easing powers, or the acronym salad – TALF, ESF, SPV – built into the Fed/U.S. Treasury exclusive obsession with big banks, corporations and the Goddess of the Market, to the detriment of the average American.

It was only a few months ago that a serious discussion evolved around the $2.5 quadrillion derivatives market imploding and collapsing the global economy, based on the price of oil skyrocketing, in case the Strait of Hormuz – for whatever reason – was shut down.

Now it’s about Great Depression 2.0: the whole system crashing as a result of the shutdown of the global economy. The questions are absolutely legitimate: is the political and social cataclysm of the global economic crisis arguably a larger catastrophe than Covid-19 itself? And will it provide an opportunity to end neoliberalism and usher in a more equitable system, or something even worse?

‘Transparent’ BlackRock

Wall Street, of course, lives in an alternative universe. In a nutshell, Wall Street turned the Fed into a hedge fund. The Fed is going to own at least two thirds of all U.S. Treasury bills in the market before the end of 2020.

The U.S. Treasury will be buying every security and loan in sight while the Fed will be the banker – financing the whole scheme.

So essentially this is a Fed/Treasury merger. A behemoth dispensing loads of helicopter money.

And the winner is BlackRock—the biggest money manager on the planet, with tentacles everywhere, managing the assets of over 170 pension funds, banks, foundations, insurance companies, in fact a great deal of the money in private equity and hedge funds. BlackRock — promising to be fully “transparent” — will buy these securities and manage those dodgy SPV s on behalf of the Treasury.

BlackRock, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink, may not be as big as Vanguard, but it’s the top investor in Goldman Sachs, along with Vanguard and State Street, and with $6.5 trillion in assets, bigger than Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank combined.

Now, BlackRock is the new operating system (OS) of the Fed and the Treasury. The world’s biggest shadow bank – and no, it’s not Chinese.

Compared to this high-stakes game, mini-scandals such as the one around Georgia Senator Kelly Loffler are peanuts. Loffler allegedly profited from inside information on Covid-19 by the CDC to make a stock market killing. Loffler is married to Jeffrey Sprecher – who happens to be the chairman of the NYSE, installed by Goldman Sachs.

While corporate media followed this story like headless chickens, post-Covid-19 plans, in Pentagon parlance, “move forward” by stealth.

The price? A meager $1,200 check per person for a month. Anyone knows that, based on median salary income, a typical American family would need $12,000 to survive for two months. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in an act of supreme effrontry, allows them a mere 10 percent of that. So American taxpayers will be left with a tsunami of debt while selected Wall Street players grab the whole loot, part of an unparalleled transfer of wealth upwards, complete with bankruptcies en masse of small and medium businesses.

Fink’s letter to his shareholders almost gives the game away: “I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.”

And right on cue, he forecasted that, “in the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant reallocation of capital.”

He was referring, then, to climate change. Now that refers to Covid-19.

Implant Our Nanochip, Or Else?

The game ahead for the elites, taking advantage of the crisis, might well contain these four elements: a social credit system, mandatory vaccination, a digital currency and a Universal Basic Income (UBI). This is what used to be called, according to the decades-old, time-tested CIA playbook, a “conspiracy theory.” Well, it might actually happen.

A social credit system is something that China set up already in 2014. Before the end of 2020, every Chinese citizen will be assigned his/her own credit score – a de facto “dynamic profile”, elaborated with extensive use of AI and the internet of things (IoT), including ubiquitous facial recognition technology. This implies, of course, 24/7 surveillance, complete with Blade Runner-style roving robotic birds.

The U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Canada, Russia and India may not be far behind. Germany, for instance, is tweaking its universal credit rating system, SCHUFA. France has an ID app very similar to the Chinese model, verified by facial recognition.

Mandatory vaccination is Bill Gates’s dream, working in conjunction with the WHO, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Big Pharma. He wants “billions of doses” to be enforced over the Global South. And it could be a cover to everyone getting a digital implant.

Here it is, in his own words. At 34:15: “Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person…Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around.”

Then comes the last sentence which was erased from the official TED video. This was noted by Rosemary Frei, who has a master on molecular biology and is an independent investigative journalist in Canada. Gates says: “So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”

This “digital immunity proof” is crucial to keep in mind, something that could be misused by the state for nefarious purposes.

The three top candidates to produce a coronavirus vaccine are American biotech firm Moderna, as well as Germans CureVac and BioNTech.

Digital cash might then become an offspring of blockchain. Not only the U.S. but China and Russia are also interested in a national crypto-currency. A global currency – of course controlled by central bankers – may soon be adopted in the form of a basket of currencies, and would circulate virtually. Endless permutations of the toxic cocktail of IoT, blockchain technology and the social credit system could loom ahead.

Already Spain has announced that it is introducing UBI, and wants it to be permanent. It’s a form insurance for the elite against social uprisings, especially if millions of jobs never come back.

So the key working hypothesis is that Covid-19 could be used as cover for the usual suspects to bring in a new digital financial system and a mandatory vaccine with a “digital identity” nanochip with dissent not tolerated: what Slavoj Zizek calls the “erotic dream” of every totalitarian government.

Yet underneath it all, amid so much anxiety, a pent-up rage seems to be gathering strength, to eventually explode in unforeseeable ways. As much as the system may be changing at breakneck speed, there’s no guarantee even the 0.1 percent will be safe.

Pepe Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is “2030.” Follow him on Facebook.

(Republished from ConsortiumNews by permission of author or representative)

https://www.unz.com/pescobar/who-profits-from-the-pandemic/

A news I found at the NEW YORK POST, of all places.

Short story: the number of deaths due to the WUHAN. KUNG FLU, COVID-19 virus is …INFLATED.

Beware the Fake News.

Feds classifying all coronavirus patient deaths as ‘COVID-19’ deaths, regardless of cause

The federal government is classifying the deaths of patients infected with the coronavirus as COVID-19 deaths, regardless of any underlying health issues that could have contributed to the loss of someone’s life.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force, said the federal government is continuing to count the suspected COVID-19 deaths, despite other nations doing the opposite.

“There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU [intensive care unit] and then have a heart or kidney problem,” she said during a Tuesday news briefing at the White House. “Some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death.

“The intent is … if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that,” she added.

Asked whether the numbers could skew data the government is trying to collect, Birx said that would mostly apply more to rural areas where testing isn’t being implemented on a wide scale.

“I’m pretty confident that in New York City and New Jersey and places that have these large outbreaks and COVID-only hospitals. … I can tell you they are testing,” she said.

Dr. Michael Baden, a Fox News contributor, said it’s reasonable to include the death of someone infected with the virus, who also had other health issues, in the COVID-19 body count.

“In the normal course, autopsies would then determine whether the person died of the effects of the COVID virus, whether the person had a brain tumor or brain hemorrhage, for example, that might be unrelated to it and what the relative significance of both the infection and the pre-existing disease is,” Baden told Fox News.

However, the number of autopsies being performed could be low due to the danger of infection, he said.

“Then you will include in those numbers some people who did have a pre-existing condition that would have caused death anyway, but that’s probably a small number,” Baden said.

The United States had 398,185 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of Tuesday night, including more than 12,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

President Trump spent Monday trying to assure Americans that the US and health facilities are prepared for a possible surge in cases in the coming weeks.

“Progress has been made before the surge,” Trump said during the White House coronavirus briefing, where he said hospitals will be stockpiled with much-needed equipment. “The next week, week and a half is when the big surge is going to come.”

https://nypost.com/2020/04/07/feds-classify-all-coronavirus-patient-deaths-as-covid-19-deaths/