Best of the Web:


Bullseye

Best of the Web: The luxury of apocalypticism: The elites want us to panic about Covid-19 - we must absolutely refuse to do so

Brendan O'Neill
Spiked
Tue, 17 Mar 2020 20:30 UTC
coronavirus shop
The elites want us to panic about Covid-19 – we must absolutely refuse to do so.
People's refusal to panic has been a great source of frustration for the establishment in recent years. 'The planet is burning', they lie, in relation to climate change, and yet we do not weep or wail or even pay very much attention. 'I want you to panic', instructs the newest mouthpiece of green apocalypticism, Greta Thunberg, and yet most of us refuse to do so. A No Deal Brexit would unleash economic mayhem, racist pogroms and even a pandemic of super-gonorrhoea, they squealed, incessantly, like millenarian preachers balking at the imminent arrival of the lightning bolt of final judgement, and yet we didn't flinch. We went to work. We went home. We still supported Brexit.

Our skittish elites have been so baffled, infuriated in fact, by our calm response to their hysterical warnings that they have invented pathologies to explain our unacceptable behaviour. The therapeutic language of 'denialism' is used to explain the masses' refusal to fret over climate change. Environmentalists write articles on 'the psychology of climate-change denial', on 'the self-deception and mass denial' coursing through this society that refuses to flatter or engage with the hysteria of the eco-elites. Likewise, the refusal of voters to succumb to the dire, hollow warnings of the ferociously anti-Brexit wing of the establishment was interpreted by self-styled experts as a psychological disorder. '[This is] people taking action for essentially psychological reasons, irrespective of the economic cost', said one professor.


Comment: Earth Changes are very real but we could learn a lot about our planet by understanding what is really driving them - what we do know is that it's not CO2.


Comment: It's clear that some factions within the establishment are weaponizing terror of all kinds to implement agendas few in the public would otherwise willingly agree to, and it seems with the contrived Covid-19 crisis they've succeeded in inciting some citizens to beg for their freedoms to be taken away:

Read More...
Magnify

Best of the Web: Israel, Corona and Abraham Wald

Gilad Atzmon
gilad.online
Thu, 19 Mar 2020 11:04 UTC
gilad bombers coronavirus
© gilad.online
The Jewish state has been taking drastic measures to try to suppress the Corona outbreak within its territory. Tens of thousands of Israelis are isolated in quarantine conditions. So far, hundreds of Israelis have been diagnosed as carriers of the virus. PM Netanyahu delivered an apocalyptic speech and had his trial postponed indefinitely.

There are a few aspects peculiar to Israel and its Corona hysteria. As of this writing, no one in Israel has died because of the virus. To date, only six Israelis are in critical condition. It is possible that the Israeli health system is more advanced than all the other nations, it is also possible that Israeli doctors are more gifted than all other doctors. It may even be possible that Jews are somewhat resistant to Corona. But it is more likely that Israel has been living with Corona much longer than they are willing to admit. It is likely that, like China, they have already survived the worst of the Corona virus.

On January 6th Haaretz's headline read "Dozens Hospitalized in Serious Condition Amid Swine Flu Outbreak in Israel." The Israeli paper reported that "The number of visits to clinics and hospitals due to flu symptoms and pneumonia, which is a common complication, is about 18 per 1,000 people, compared to 7 per 1,000 in the same period last year." The increase is mainly in those under age 2 and over age 65. Back in January, the Israeli health system struggled to cope.
Israel swine flu corona
© Haaretz

Comment: Here's an article The Guardian ran about Britain's flu epidemic and NHS hospital crisis in early December 2019... officially, BEFORE this COVID-19 outbreak:
Guardian NHS flu hospitals
© The Guardian
More than half of hospitals have opened extra beds to help them cope with the NHS winter crisis amid an influx of patients with potentially fatal breathing problems.

Many of the so-called escalation beds are already occupied by people suffering from flu, pneumonia or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbated by the arrival of very cold weather in many parts of the UK.

The British Thoracic Society (BTS), which represents specialist lung doctors and nurses, has found that 52% of UK hospitals have already created extra bed capacity to help them prepare for the imminent surge in winter demand.
On the one hand, this shows how 'normal' a bad flu season is, and the demands this puts on hospitals. On the other, it suggests COVID-19 was already driving a spike in NHS resources by late November 2019.

Then there was reportedly a mystery outbreak of about 10,000 flu cases in the US last August - mentioned in passing in this Chinese Global Times editorial. However, the internet has apparently been scrubbed of information about this because we can no longer find articles or studies on it.

Read More...
2 + 2 = 4

Best of the Web: Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19

Aaron Ginn
Medium
Fri, 20 Mar 2020 06:38 UTC

Comment: Interestingly, Medium pulled this article down because it 'violated its policies'. It seems like their policy is to now play along with the hysteria game and censor anything that casts doubt on the official line. Here is the archived copy.


surgical mask
After watching the outbreak of COVID-19 for the past two months, I've followed the pace of the infection, its severity, and how our world is tackling the virus. While we should be concerned and diligent, the situation has dramatically elevated to a mob-like fear spreading faster than COVID-19 itself.

When 13% of Americans believe they are currently infected with COVID-19 (mathematically impossible), full-on panic is blocking our ability to think clearly and determine how to deploy our resources to stop this virus. Over three-fourths of Americans are scared of what we are doing to our society through law and hysteria, not of infection or spreading COVID-19 to those most vulnerable.

The following article is a systematic overview of COVID-19 driven by data from medical professionals and academic articles that will help you understand what is going on (sources include CDC, WHO, NIH, NHS, University of Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, NEJM, JAMA, and several others). I'm quite experienced at understanding virality, how things grow, and data. In my vocation, I'm most known for popularizing the "growth hacking movement" in Silicon Valley that specializes in driving rapid and viral adoption of technology products. Data is data. Our focus here isn't treatments but numbers. You don't need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn't say. Numbers are universal.

I hope you walk away with a more informed perspective on how you can help and fight back against the hysteria that is driving our country into a dark place. You can help us focus our scarce resources on those who are most vulnerable, who need our help.

Note: The following graphs and numbers are as of mid-March 2020. Things are moving quickly, so I update this article twice a day. Most graphs are as of March 20th, 2020.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Seismograph

Best of the Web: Croatia's capital Zagreb rocked by 5.3M earthquake: Many buildings damaged - Strongest to hit city in 140 years

Mark Thomas
The Dubrovnik Times
Sun, 22 Mar 2020 06:25 UTC

Comment: This comes less than a month after a spectacular daytime meteor fireball detonated above Croatia and Slovenia, setting off seismic monitors...


zagreb earthquake church
© Antonio Bronic/ReutersA man looks at damages at the Basilica of the Heart of Jesus, following an earthquake in Zagreb
The Croatian capital was awoken this Sunday morning by a huge earthquake measuring 5.3 on the Richter scale.

At 6.23 this morning Zagreb was rocked as the earthquake, with an epicentre seven kilometres north of the city and at a depth of ten kilometres caused havoc. Parts of the capital were left without electricity and the facades of buildings fell onto the fortunately empty streets. There is no news of any injuries or fatalities, however material damage has been reported.




Comment: Among the older buildings that were badly damaged were churches, including Zagreb's cathedral, the tallest building in Croatia - and which is dedicated to the Assumption of Mary, like Notre Dame in Paris. Part of one of its two towers broke off during the quake:



Croatia's PM Andrej Plenkovic has since described this as "the strongest quake to hit Zagreb in 140 years."

RT reports that local authorities are urging citizens to get out of their homes and check on the elderly... while maintaining social distancing:
Strong quakes have struck Croatia's capital Zagreb, damaging buildings downtown, including the city's main historic cathedral. Officials urged people to leave home but keep social distancing amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Zagreb's head of emergency services, Pavle Kalinic, urged people to leave their homes. "Get out of the houses and help your older neighbors," he said.

The Interior Ministry asked people who had fled their homes to maintain a "necessary distance" to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 disease, and to wear face masks if possible.
Welcome to full-blown Idiocracy.

We're anticipating many more earthquakes in the months ahead. When you mess with the human population's normal routines, all that energy they normally express while going about their lives has to go somewhere, so it largely goes 'into the ground'.

Now we're going to see how humans really affect the environment; not by 'polluting it with CO2', but by the impact of their collective psychic energy. And, right now, the species is in a state of worry/terror/confusion...

In line with that, Salt Lake City, Utah, received its first-ever direct-hit earthquake a few days ago:

5.7M earthquake strikes Salt Lake City - First ever to directly hit Utah's capital - Angel statue atop Mormon HQ loses its trumpet

Read More...
Eye 1

Best of the Web: DOJ wants to suspend certain constitutional rights during coronavirus emergency

Betsy Woodruff Swann
Politico
Sat, 21 Mar 2020 04:49 UTC
william barr
© MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States.

Documents reviewed by POLITICO detail the department's requests to lawmakers on a host of topics, including the statute of limitations, asylum and the way court hearings are conducted. POLITICO also reviewed and previously reported on documents seeking the authority to extend deadlines on merger reviews and prosecutions.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on the documents.
Read More...
Biohazard

Flashback Best of the Web: CDC suddenly shuts down US Army's Fort Detrick bioweapons lab due to 'lapses in safety'

Shawna Williams
The Scientist
Wed, 07 Aug 2019 19:54 UTC

Comment: Was this an emergency containment effort at the US govt's top bioweapons lab last August?

And did it fail?


lab maryland
© FLICKR, MARYLAND GOVPICS
Research on dangerous pathogens has been suspended at an Army lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found biosafety lapses there, the Frederick News-Post reported August 2. A spokesperson for the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) tells the newspaper that no disease-causing materials have been found outside authorized areas at the site.

According to its website, USAMRIID has been the US Department of Defense's lead laboratory for medical biological defense research since 1969. The News-Post reports that the facility has both level 3 and level 4 biosafety labs and has worked on pathogens such as Ebola, Yersinia pestis (plague), and Francisella tularensis (tularemia). Those pathogens are among those considered "select agents and toxins" by the Department of Health and Human Services, which only allows authorized labs to work on them.

Comment: See also:

Why was a US military lab handling high-level disease shut down in July 2019?

Read More...
Top Secret

Best of the Web: Why was a US military lab handling high-level disease shut down in July 2019?

Leng Shumei
Global Times
Sun, 15 Mar 2020 22:03 UTC
Fort Detrick Maryland
Fort Detrick, Maryland, actual source of the 'Wuhan' Flu?
Netizens and experts are calling for the US government to release information on the suspension of an infectious disease research lab under the US Army, as a petition on the White House website listed coincident events between the closure and the outbreak of COVID-19, urging the US government to clarify whether the lab was related to the deadly virus.

While the origin of the novel coronavirus is still unknown and conspiracy theories have caused widespread panic, experts said that timely information disclosure to the public would benefit global unity and cooperation against the pandemic, which had infected more than 150,000 people and killed 5,400 around the world as of Saturday.

The Fort Detrick laboratory that handles high-level disease-causing material, such as Ebola, in Fredrick, Maryland was shut after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a cease and desist order to the organization in July, 2019 according to local media.

The suspension was due to multiple causes, including failure to follow local procedures and a lack of periodic recertification training for workers in the biocontainment laboratories. The wastewater decontamination system of the lab also failed to meet standards set by the Federal Select Agent Program, media reported.

Comment: Mandated to cease biological weapon research, labs such as the one at Fort Detrick merely change their official name, re-describe their purpose and continue the same research under a new cover identity. Who makes these decisions? Who do these labs answer to?

If it transpires that bioweapons scientists at Fort Detrick were messing around with viruses in vaccines that mutated and 'went wild', should we call this outbreak 'the American Flu'?

See also:

Read More...
Caesar

Best of the Web: Viktor Frankl: Saying Yes to Life in Difficult Times

Michael Cook
Intellectual Takeout
Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl
Man's Search for Meaning is one of the most powerful arguments for human dignity of the 20th Century. The author is Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and a Jew, who spent about three years in concentration camps, including Auschwitz. His father, mother, brother and his pregnant wife all perished in the camps.

Frankl was astonishingly productive and soon after he was released in April 1945, he was back at work. The next year he wrote his memoir of Auschwitz. In German the title of the first edition was Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, which translates roughly as "In spite of everything, say Yes to life: a psychologist's experience of the concentration camp". Later he added a section reflecting on his experiences and sketching what became the third school of Viennese psychology, logotherapy.

Man's Search for Meaning was an immediate best-seller which made the author famous around the world. By the time of his death in 1997, it had sold more than 10 million copies.

It's astonishingly contemporary, for more than any other book I've read, it speaks to the anxieties of a society in which suffering has no meaning and euthanasia seems like a plausible solution to life's pain.

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Chalkboard

Best of the Web: COVID-19: All truth has three stages

Larry Romanoff
Global Research
Thu, 19 Mar 2020 07:47 UTC
coronavirus green


First, it is ignored.

Second, it is widely ridiculed.

Third, it is accepted as self-evident.

With COVID-19, we have now entered Stage 2. At first, the media ignored the claims and the analysis that the virus could have originated in the US. But the spread of information and restatements of evidence from all sides, including in the US itself, has become too intense and now the claims are being openly ridiculed in the Western media.

Briefly, Chinese virologists discovered conclusively that the original source of the virus was not China, nor Wuhan, nor the seafood market, but had been traced to the US, a possible scenario being that the virus might have originated at the US Military's bio-weapons lab at Fort Detrick (which was shut down by the CDC in July, because of outbreaks), and brought to China during the World Military Games in October 2019.

Also, Japanese and Taiwanese virologists arrived independently at the conclusion that the virus could have originated in the US.

The Americans did their best from before the beginning to deflect culpability by crafting tales of bats, snakes, pangolins, the seafood market, the Wuhan University being a bio-weapons facility (which it is not), and the CIA tale leaked through the VOA and Radio Free Asia that the virus leaked from that university. They stated (factually) that Chinese researchers had participated (7 years ago) in similar virus research funded by the US NIH, thus somehow insinuating Chinese culpability, ignoring that the prior research was irrelevant to current events.

Comment: Indeed, the media 'doth protesteth too much' by directly and loudly attacking this particular 'conspiracy theory'.

We like the author's research on this. It's reasonably solid and certainly plausible.

We would like to offer one qualifying remark, however: we do not think anyone in the US intended to do this deliberately to China. Those US soldiers participating in the Military Games in Wuhan last Fall were more likely unwitting carriers of 'COVID-19' after it leaked containment at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

See also:

Read More...
Family

Flashback Best of the Web: The flu has already killed 10,000 across US as world frets over coronavirus

Jessica Bursztynsky
CNBC
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 01:20 UTC

Comment: This was reported by the MSM 6 weeks ago, before they ramped up the virus hysteria. How quickly their tune has changed! Interestingly, those numbers weren't enough to shut down global economies and put citizens into lockdown mode. Neither were your neighbours or those around them concerned with 'protecting the vulnerable'. Life went on as usual. The sleight of hand performed on the world by the media and governments to convince us that this coronavirus merits the loss of our freedoms and safety will go down in history as one of the biggest frauds we have ever seen.


influenza, cold virus, sick woman
© Miguel Vidal / Reuters
While the new coronavirus ravages much of China and world leaders rush to close their borders to protect citizens from the outbreak, the flu has quietly killed 10,000 in the U.S. so far this influenza season.

At least 19 million people have come down with the flu in the U.S. with 180,000 ending up in the hospital, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The flu season, which started in September and can run until May, is currently at its peak and poses a greater health threat to the U.S. than the new coronavirus, physicians say. The new virus, which first emerged in Wuhan, China, on Dec. 31, has sickened roughly 17,400 and killed 362 people mostly in that country as of Monday morning.

"In the U.S., it's really a fear based on media and this being something new," Dr. Jennifer Lighter, hospital epidemiologist at NYU Langone Health, said of the new coronavirus. "When in reality, people can take measures to protect themselves against the flu, which is here and prevalent and has already killed 10,000 people."

Comment: See also:

Read More...