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Apocalypse on Both Your Houses.
I am infected.
Apocalypse o' both your houses! I am sped.
What, art thou hurt?
Ay, ay, a sneeze, a sneeze. Marry, ’tis enough.
Courage, man. The hurt cannot be much.
No, ’tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. Apocalypse o' both your houses! Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat to sneeze a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a villain that fights by the book of arithmetic!
- Australian Wildfire
- Plague of Locusts across Africa and the Mideast
- Floods floods, mass floods.
- And that was all BEFORE Coronavirus plague.
In the new atmosphere of unproductive but hate-inspiring finger-pointing being stoked by our Furor, I remember a phrase from my youth not heard much today, "A word to the Wise".
When the logic, or justification for a process becomes unmoored from reality, at some point that process comes to an end. With each tick up of the United States' National debt, with it's corresponding tick down of its annual GDP, and with each trillion dollars added to the liabilities of its Central Bank's balance sheet, keeping its mortgage rates low and its GSE's NPL's silently growing as mortgage payments begin to erode, the use of the Fed as a SIV by its "independent" reserve banks, who have been for more than a decade now foisting the growing risk of its bad loans onto the public, while, the squeaky sound of a system foundering on the sandy banks of low-interest, low down-payment home loans bought up as though they were healthy assets by the Centralized Federal government's Bank, an ominous creaking sound is heard as the door opens a crack and sheds a ray of light into the squirming viper's nest of defalcations and rehypothecations hidden in murky transactions by a shadow banking system, reminiscent of 2008.
The Banks collapsed in 2008. This time, however, all the risk has been buried in the heart of darkness inside the federal government. With the Furor declaring America's Energy Independence, right in the middle of a pandemic, the world may begin to wonder if there is still any reason why oil should continue to be sold in dollars. It is the currency that most threatens to implode, its member banks now using the Lender of last resort, as though it were Mar-a Lago, the first resort. When America was the Sole SuperPower, it assumed the cloak of leadership and the burden of running the world. But it has now proclaimed that its sole motive for its actions is to put America First (By which they mean American Corporations, the People who paid for their election). Perhaps that was always the case, and they are actually happy that at last we can admit it, nay, brag about it, now; but it doesn't change the fact that we now make decisions entirely based on our own self-interest, the rest of the world, and even our own citizens, be damned.
Borrowing at 0 risk to themselves trillions of dollars of Bernanke-coined "Helicopter Money", has shuffled all that nasty risk onto the shoulders of the polity that sits in lonely, idle isolation while a mountain of liability is created in their name. Because as the Fed's balance sheet, along with the annual deficits and National Debt, all balloon, the GDP of this same United States continues to leak the hot air that was keeping its bubble economy aloft, so the revenue stream for that government is slowing to a trickle. As the revenue stream slows, while not only does annual spending continue to increase, but Corona Virus increases get larded on top of that in a classic Disaster Capitalism example of a Corporate trough-feeding frenzy, even as States are also taking on an ever larger burden of debt, perhaps more than their already straining budgets can endure.
Contrary to pent up demand just itching to be set free, there is a crashing roar from demand destruction. And no amount of cheerleading, or out-of-touch cheery ads, is likely to change that for the very sad reason that millions are dying all around the world, and their assets will be handed over to fill the demand of the survivors. And that biggest asset, now worth a fraction of the loan balance owed on it, is their personal transportation module, guaranteeing that we will come nowhere near manufacturing the 17 million we did last year (Thank god).
Of course, the problem is, that resilient consumer was resilient because she had a job, and he/she felt that buying trunkloads of Made-in-China products while saving nothing, it is, after all, disposable income, was the way to go, aren't going to be returning to their jobs, because people won't be risking their health, if not their lives, to have their nails buffed, bodies inked, and their privates waxed by strangers.
The deflationary forces unleashed by the collapse of oil prices has yet to even begin to work their way through the economy, yet three of the tools most championed as being effective to counteract it have already been deployed since the Trump took office, and are now merely an accepted part of How the Economy Runs Now:
Low interest rates: after a pathetic attempt to "Baby Step" them up, were hammered back down on the insistence of the President in 2019, which the Powell Fed weakly acceded to,
Helicopter money: Which the Trump dropped onto the corporate sector as his much-ballyhooed "Tax Reform", which raised the deficit by cutting revenues, with not just no reciprocal cut in spending, but a major increase instead, sending both the annual deficits and the National Debt soaring, yet did nothing for jobs, demand, nor consumer spending, as it never resulted in the slightest "Trickle down" effect that Screwyou economics is supposed to deliver, most of it having been siphoned into the energy sector to fund the increasingly sketchy proposition of a bankrupt oil industry somehow creating an "Energy Independent" USA.
QE: Helicopter drop is an expansionary fiscal policy that is financed by an increase in an economy's money supply. To simultaneously institute helicopter money drops while engaging in massive bouts of QE, which the Fed was in the midst of providing far in advance of any Corona Virus pandemic or threat thereof, makes the accusations against China especially galling.
Each of of these steps taken while the USA!USA! economy was "The Best Economy Ever", are or at least had been, until GW Bush got finished with the economy, considered to be last resort-type monetary stimulus strategies to spur inflation and economic output. Now they are out-of-control "business" as usual, leaving the Lender of last resort without resources when they're needed the most, all to make the stock market climb to unsustainable valuation to stoke the ego of our adulterous, Primping, Genius billionaire President who derides Elites, even while preening about claiming to be a genius: there's one elite group he apparently is envious of; while boasting of his billionaire status, an even more elitist group he spent a lifetime attempting to become a part of, while insisting he wanted to remain apart from; and of course, President, the elitist of elite groups, there being but a handful on the entire planet.
Two of the more desperate measures, that of re-igniting QE and hammering down interest rates, rates the GSE's desperately need raised as their reserves for NPL's are close to non-existent, revealed a desperation for making the economy look good to its citizens while exposing it to the world for the basket case it was. The GSE's have been buying mortgages from banks that, thanks to the suppression of interest rates that leaves them far lower than if they reflected the real amount of risk lenders assume when issuing them, the FHA and the Fanny and Freddie loans cost the US government more and more the longer they remain on their books, in terms of real collateral: the real value of the properties on their books isn't close to their appraised values, and, when inflation of the currency occurs simultaneous with deflation of the assets explains the negative interest rates facing savers. Buying mortgages whose interest rates are a mere 3.5 - 4% while inflation is still 2%, means that the interest payments go down every year after the first two, so the real interest on the loans goes negative after the third year. Which is why the banks don't want them on their books, but shuffling the riskiest assets onto a SIV's balance sheet, even when that SIV is the FED, neither reduces the riskiness of those assets nor changes the calculus of profitability. With low inflation, the interest rate equals a revenue stream to the entity that owns the asset, but when inflation eats the value of the loan, using the appreciation of the asset as a counterpoint, when the asset loses value, as a pumped up asset eventually always does, then at the slightest downturn, there is no reserve. The asset then becomes a liability as the value it holds on the books is far above its Market value, ie the amount you could actually sell it for.
IN this context, not a month after the Fed had to step into the repo market to keep it from spiraling into a credit crunch, the USA sent military personnel to Wuhan China to join in the World Military Games.
In February, the Japanese Asahi news report (print and TV) claimed the coronavirus originated in the US, not in China, and that some (or many) of the 14,000 American deaths attributed to influenza may have in fact have resulted from the coronavirus.
After collecting samples of the genome in China, medical researchers first conclusively demonstrated that the virus did not originate at the wet market but had multiple unidentified sources, after which it was exposed to the wet market from where it spread everywhere.
According to the Global Times:
A new study by Chinese (Taiwanese ... a staunch US ally) researchers indicates the novel coronavirus may have begun human-to-human transmission in late November from a place other than the Hubei seafood market in Wuhan. (The exact time it would need to incubate if it had been brought to China during those Military Games ... what a coincidence ... do you believe in such coincidences?)
Chinese medical authorities – and “intelligence agencies” – then conducted a rapid and wide-ranging search for the origin of the virus, collecting nearly 100 samples of the genome from 12 different countries on 4 continents, identifying all the varieties and mutations. During this research, they determined the virus outbreak had begun much earlier, probably in November, shortly after the Wuhan Military Games.
In February of 2020, the Japanese Asahi news report (print and TV) claimed the coronavirus originated in the US, not in China.
The Military World Games were held in Wuhan in October, and it had already been widely discussed that the virus could have been transmitted at that time – from a foreign source.
Then, Taiwan ran a TV news program on February 27, that presented diagrams and flow charts suggesting the coronavirus originated in the US.
One of his main points is that the type infecting Taiwan exists only in Australia and the US and, since Taiwan was not infected by Australians, the infection in Taiwan could have come only from the US.
The basic logic is that the geographical location with the greatest diversity of virus strains must be the original source because a single strain cannot emerge from nothing. He demonstrated that only the US has all the five known strains of the virus (while Wuhan and most of China have only one, as do Taiwan and South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam, Singapore, and England, Belgium and Germany), constituting a thesis that the haplotypes in other nations may have originated in the US.
Korea and Taiwan have a different haplotype of the virus than China, perhaps more infective but much less deadly, which would account for a death rate only 1/3 that of China.
Meanwhile while we castigate China, the world is already trading with them, as we know from the reported influx of faulty facemasks, tests that give wrong readings, and gowns that tear as easily as tissue paper, it's clear China's cheap products are still acceptable.
But people that are coming from the US once the lockdown is terminated will be highly suspect, as the country has shown itself to be in a different class than its trading partners. More like a third world country than a modern industrial state, the USA may well find itself unable to reopen, not only because of its own citizens' reluctance to get on board planes but because European countries will erect walls to keep the Americans out. With their lack of testing and their casual attitude toward spreading Covid-19 to other nations, as will be evident by the way it will continue to be spread from state to state here, since there is not even random testing, one can hardly blame them.
Already China has closed its border with Russia for precisely that reason, and yet compared to the US, Russia's response has been far less nonchalante.
While we sit in our splendid Aren't We Great Again? isolation, other countries, with forward-looking, energy-balanced growth plans that emphasize a reduction in their fuelish use of deadly energy regimes will form the same kind of blocs that some of the States within the United States are forming as they plan to re-open their businesses. And the hapless way the US has conducted its response will not encourage countries that are actually serious about infection control just won't wash: No country will want to risk the likelihood that the US will re-infect them. Nor the backlash from its citizens such a 2'nd wave might occasion.
And, as an ominous factor for the future deployment of US troops abroad, as the abrupt termination of a Naval officer who DARED speak truth to our Corona-in-Chief makes manifest, the biggest danger to our allies is the US Armed forces living in their homeland, its members now openly threatened with being summarily dismissed by the reality show-based policy of "You're Fired", if they let their hosts know they have disease-bearing military personnel frequenting their cities. They will instead, by order of said Corona-in-Chief, keep their infection status secret. Thus will every American base be the first suspected source of any future outbreaks in any country hosting them. And because their SOFA agreement with the US are couched in terms that make the US unaccountable for any such occurrences, maybe they'll be reluctant, or maybe it will be made impossible by its citizens' protests, to continue to have US bases in their country. The costs will simply prove too much as they're forced to close their economy all over again, not because of their own citizens, but because of the foreign virus living in their midst that is unable or unwilling to provide the status of infection among its troops housed in their lands. US Homeland Security mandate: Spreading a virus all over a world that takes it seriously, but that the US and its armed forces don't.
So monomaniacal has the US concept of Security become, that its President himself, the Commander-in-Chief of its armed forces claims he feels no responsibility whatsoever for the pandemic let loose in his own country. That the Head of the Military blatantly trumpets his unconcern for his own people is a clarion call to any Nation that has US troops on its soil that the US holds them responsible should an outbreak be traced back as having been caused by the US presence. Especially as the US attitude toward the coroanvirus, as suggested by such tweets as "LIBERATE MICHIGAN", is still that it's, "Only a bad flu".
Washington State Protests
 |
| Actual sign: "Give me Liberty or give me COVID-19". |
Remember, the treaty on biological warfare describes it as "any living biological entity": technically that includes human beings, even deplorable ones, which the last time I checked were biological entities. So tweeting such volatile encouragement to his groupies to protest, the Commander-in-Chief is waging biological Warfare against Blue States in his own country ... what are the chances that he would hesitate to do the same in yours?
And now the Corona-in-Chief has made it plain that it's where the virus originates that matters. Following his example they will blame the source, which will then be us, not their own lack of testing or any other preparation having been made, or rather having not been made, despite an outbreak on any base, as an outbreak, being part of the US defense strategy. Sending troops that are threatened with dismissal if they reveal their Covid-19 status makes US Army bases biological weapons of mass destruction, deployed around the world where they are free to disseminate a known deadly pathogen. That fits the exact definition of biological warfare, not what China did/didn't do.
Now, since the press has taken to likening this endeavor to a War Effort, the obsession to cast blame on one country for having started the "War" doesn't exactly imply a position of strength. On the contrary, since it resembles nothing more than puerile playground finger-pointing, it reminds me of children insisting "You started it", "Did not, You started it", wherein the one losing the fight is the one more strenuously insisting the other chap started it. And judging from the caseload as well as the casualty figures, the US, where one city alone has more cases and a higher death toll than entire countries, is the hands down loser. Again.
Now, despite all that, the main reason I believe the US is shooting itself in the foot again by following the policy of blaming China is that US energy policy, no matter where you wish to point, is having disastrous financial repercussions across the globe.
https://www.dw.com/en/davos-2020-trump-rejects-prophets-of-doom-at-climate-focused-wef/a-52083749
"Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour."
But what the adults know is that Greta is only half right, it is our Actions. Unless she means we spend more time inactive than active: our transit from one transportation module to the next is the only time we aren't sitting on our asses. We have come to associate "driving" which is an inaccurate term for our time spent sitting behind a wheel, with "action"; but human beings don't, as AI has surely shown us, "drive" cars; the engine does. Humans only pilot them. When you drive a team of horses, you expend energy in order to do so, whereas that toe on the accelerator, while indeed it fuels the engine, doesn't drive it, internal combustion resulting in controlled detonations is what drives it. "Your inaction", as Greta claims, "is (simply) fueling the flames by the hour."
The fact that Mr.Trump's rhetoric on climate change is couched in exactly the same terms that he used to forestall any counteraction to the threat of the coronavirus, including characterizing both of them as a Hoax, leaves the United Sates of America fully naked before the world as its leading Climate Criminal. Having adopted Milton Friedman's snide anti-social claim that,
“The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits: “the paramount duty of management and of boards of directors is to the corponation’s stockholders.”
... continues to inform America's stance toward the TransNational Corporatons it lets loose onto the world. If they have no responsibility in their Homeland, they certainly don't have any in the rest of the world.
"One's freedom and rights end where they infringe on the freedom and rights of others."
But Friedman nightmare economics renders this accepted maxim as simply quaint, as he turns it on its head.
Others have no rights, no freedom, if that freedom restrains your pursuit of property.
Just ask the Native American population. Well, the tattered remnants of it.
That complacency, given this lawsuit against China, the clamor for which Germany (Bild) has joined in on, may soon be coming to an end.
Despite concerns about emissions, Trump praises the US as one of the world's largest producers of natural gas. What he failed to mention, but that is a matter of documented fact, is that the US is the world's largest producer of natural gas, because it is, by far, the #1 producer of flared natural gas, pushing its total production figures higher than its competitors (and producing methane leaks all along the fracturing zones at the edge of the North American craton, with an also well-documented increase in fracturing-created MEQs (Micro Earthquakes), that result in a dramatic increase in methane emissions: you can plug a hole, you can't plug a fracture).
So the CO2 concentration continues to skyrocket, even while the world is in shutdown:
March CO2
Mar. 2019: 411.97 ppm
April CO2:
Apr. 19, 2019: 413.86 ppm
Apr. 19, 2020: 416.05 ppm
The US, unlike Canada's tar sands oil production cessation, continues to produce natural gas in abundance, but not for a market, nope ... that's so old-school; just to burn it up. Adding to the CO2 burden of the atmosphere, thereby making a mockery of, say, Denmark's zero emissions efforts. The US CO2 output, from its zero regulation regime, floods the troposphere with both CO2 and methane in outsize quantities, all to obtain a product that is priced so low that the industry producing it can't pay its bills, never mind its groaning layers of debt, occasioned by an ongoing Market failure to align demand and supply. EMT needs a real EMT?
The damage coronavirus is doing may in fact,"wash through" as they have claimed, but what the US is currently engaged in, won't. And the damage it is wreaking, as it catapults the world from Climate Change Hoax to a Climate Catastrophe Reality Show, simply to Make America Energy Independent Again, is every bit as Provable as whatever proof they come up with to extort damages claims from China (Reparations, Germany? Really? It worked out so well just one hundred years ago at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, didn't it?). The US has set the stage for its own judicial "GUILTY" verdict. And the economy, now strapped with the additional trillions upon trillions of dollars in liability this fiscal year will end with, is heading down the path of monetary implosion, destroying the one export it produces that is still coveted around the globe: The US Dollar.
The Trumpelstiltkins's Wheel of Fortuna is indeed, dear Boethius, spinning us downward. We are strapped to its wheel, which, fueled as it is by his capricious spite - blind, heedless, godless - will crush us beneath its spokes while his Confederacy of Dunces dance to his tune of Liberation.
Last but not least:
In 2005, a group including researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology published research into the origin of the SARS coronavirus, finding that China's horseshoe bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses.[7] Continuing this work over a period of years, researchers from the Institute sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across China, isolating over 300 bat coronavirus sequences.[8]
In 2015, a team including scientists from the Institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[9][10]
That was the point, so the immune system would then respond by creating antibodies, thereby conferring immunity.
The relevant article is: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
The reason? To create a vaccine.
That is why no one wants you to know the reason, because they want to sell you, or sell your government, a vaccine against the disease they spread while they were trying to develop a vaccine, with NIH funding if the Daily Mail is to be believed, against a disease that hadn't: SARS. But somehow SARS WARS fails to have the same fun-time sound of explosions and hi-tech fetishism the world loves to Marvel at.
What a world, what a world.
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