Manatee Springs, Chiefland
Chiefland, Florida, USA. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
Sunday, May 30, 2021
"There Are Always Two Voices..."
“At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other, even more reasonable, says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man’s power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.”
- Leo Tolstoy, “War and Peace”
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“All our mortal lives are set in danger and perplexity: one day to prosper,
and the next – who knows? When all is well, then look for rocks ahead.”
- Sophoclese, “Philoctetes”
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Free Download:
A little light reading from Tolstoy… 
Freely download “War and Peace”, by Leo Tolstoy, here:
"Restricting Freedom Didn't Defeat COVID"
"Restricting Freedom Didn't Defeat COVID"
by John Tamny
"Let’s travel back in time to March of 2020, when predictions of mass death related to the new coronavirus started to gain currency. One study, conducted by Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, indicated that U.S. deaths alone would exceed 2 million. The above number is often used, even by conservatives and libertarians, as justification for the initial lockdowns. “We knew so little” is the excuse, and with so many deaths expected, can anyone blame local, state, and national politicians for panicking?
The answer is a resounding yes. To see why, imagine if Ferguson had predicted 30 million American deaths. Imagine the fear among the American people then - which is precisely the point: The more threatening a virus is presumed to be, the more superfluous government force is. Really, who needs to be told to be careful if a failure to take precautions could reasonably result in death?
Death predictions aside, the other justification bruited in March of 2020 was that brief lockdowns (two weeks was the number often thrown around) would flatten the hospitalization curve. In this case, the taking of freedom allegedly made sense as a way of protecting hospitals from a massive inflow of sick patients that they wouldn’t have been able to handle, and that would have resulted in a public health catastrophe.
Such a view similarly vandalizes reason. Think about it. Who needs to be forced to avoid behavior that might result in hospitalization? Better yet, who needs to be forced to avoid behavior that might result in hospitalization at a time when doctors and hospitals would be so short-staffed as to not be able to take care of admitted patients? Translated for those who need it, the dire predictions made over a year ago about the corona-horrors that awaited us don’t justify the lockdowns; rather they should remind the mildly sentient among us of how cruel and pointless they were. The common sense that we are to varying degrees born with, along with our genetic predisposition to survive, dictates that a fear of hospitalization or death would have caused Americans to take virus-avoidance precautions that would have well exceeded any rules foisted on them by politicians.
To which some will reply with something along the lines of “Not everyone has common sense. In truth, there are lots of dumb, low-information types out there who would have disregarded all the warnings. Lockdowns weren’t necessary for the wise among us; rather they were essential precisely because there are so many who aren’t wise.”
Actually, such a response is the best argument of all against lockdowns. Indeed, it cannot be stressed enough that “low information” types are the most crucial people of all during periods of uncertainty. Precisely because they’ll be unaware of, misunderstand, or reject the warnings of the experts, their actions will produce essential information that the rule-followers never could. In not doing what the allegedly wise among us will, low information citizens will, by their contrarian actions, teach us what behavior is most associated with avoidance of sickness and death, and more important, what behavior is associated with it.
One-size-fits-all decrees from politicians don’t enhance health outcomes as much as they blind us to the actions (or lack thereof) that would protect us the most - or not. Freedom on its own is a virtue, and it produces crucial information. But wait, some will say, “how elitist to let some people act as Guinea Pigs for the rest of us.” Such a statement is naïve. Heroin and cocaine are illegal, but people still use both. Thank goodness they do. How could we know what threatens us, and what doesn’t, without the rebellious?
Still, there’s the question of “elitism.” The lockdowns were the cruelest form of elitism, by far. The implication of the lockdowns was that those who had the temerity to have jobs that were destinations - like restaurants and shops - would have to lose them. The lockdowns destroyed tens of millions of destination jobs, destroyed or severely impaired millions of businesses, not to mention the hundreds of millions around the world who were rushed into starvation, poverty, or both as a consequence of nail-biting politicians in countries like the U.S. that chose to take a break from reality. Talk about elitist actions. The very idea of wrecking the economy as a virus-mitigation strategy will go down in history as one of the most abjectly stupid policy responses the world has ever endured.
That’s the case because economic growth is easily the biggest enemy death and disease have ever known, while poverty is easily the biggest killer. Economic growth produces the resources necessary so that doctors and scientists can come up with answers to what needlessly sickens us, or shortens our lives altogether.
In the 19th century, a broken femur brought with it a 1 out of 3 chance of death, while those lucky enough to survive the break had only one option: amputation. A child born in the 19th century had as good a chance of dying as living. A broken hip was a death sentence, cancer most certainly was, but most didn’t die of cancer because tuberculosis and pneumonia got them first.
So what happened? Why don’t we get sick or die as easily as we used to? The answer is economic growth. Business titans like Johns Hopkins and John D. Rockefeller created enormous wealth, only to direct a lot of it toward medical science. What used to kill us became yesterday’s news.
Even though freedom is its own wondrous virtue, even though freedom produces essential information that protects us, and even though free people produce the resources without which diseases kill with sickening rapidity, panicky politicians erased it in 2020 on the supposition that personal and economic desperation was the best solution for a spreading virus. Historians will marvel at the abject stupidity of the political class in 2020."
"No Longer A 'Conspiracy Theory' - Our Revelation 16 Months Ago Now Widely Accepted"
"No Longer A 'Conspiracy Theory' -
Our Revelation 16 Months Ago Now Widely Accepted"
by Dohmen Capital Research
"On December 30th, 2019, a 34-year old doctor in China, Li Wenliang, wrote his colleagues on the website Weibo that he had found a new virus infection that was very contagious. He warned in a chat group with some of his colleagues to wear protective clothing to avoid infection. He had noticed seven cases of a virus that he thought looked like SARS – the virus that led to a global epidemic in 2003.
Four days later, he was summoned to the Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign a letter. In the letter he was accused of “making false comments” that had “severely disturbed the social order”. Some days later it was reported he died of a virus infection. Many say he was killed by the Chinese police. Apparently, the Chinese did not want the world to know about this new virus before it had spread and infected the world. China protected its two biggest cities, Beijing and Shanghai, but allowed Chinese citizens to fly out of the country to other countries. What was the goal and motive?
In mid-January 2020, the virus became a major concern in the media. We did research in the foreign press, not U.S. sources, and we found some revealing news. The official story circulating within the U.S. was that the virus came from the live food market in Wuhan. That was a diversion to distract from the real source. Here is what we wrote in an excerpt from our Wellington Letter Special Bulletin January 26th, 2020: “The coronavirus sickness is advancing strongly. Macau’s government says casinos may close if the coronavirus outbreak worsens. That would be very negative for the gaming companies, especially the ones that rely primarily on Macau for most of the profits. The number of deaths keeps rising.”
It was obvious that China’s government was hiding the true effects of this new disease. The origin was in the city of Wuhan, where a lab was established in 2018 to investigate some deadly pathogens, such as the SARS virus. According to the Hindustan Times, “the lab was built precisely to look into dangerous pathogens like the novel Coronavirus, conduct research on them and find a cure for them.” The most dangerous pathogens are classified as BSL-4.
We went on to explain the significance of this in that same Wellington Letter, “A ‘BSL-4’ lab like this one researches the most dangerous pathogens and have to follow the maximum safety or ‘bio-containment’ levels. Could the lab also have had the mission to weaponize such a virus and this is the result of a test gone haywire? Or were they testing the effect on the population and now have trouble controlling the outbreak?
We believe the numbers of afflicted from China is intentionally kept low. Twelve cities are being quarantined now, double the number from yesterday. That’s 35 million people. Imagine that happening in the U.S. with people is Los Angeles and NYC not allowed to leave their cities!"
A few days ago, May 25 2021, the Daily Mail of the UK wrote this: "US liberal media's Covid U-turn: A year after TRASHING theory that COVID originated from a Wuhan lab because Trump supported the suggestion - America's woke mainstream news outlets suddenly start asking if it's true!”
The first reported fatality from COVID-19 was in Wuhan, China, on January 11, 2020 By January 21 the virus was in the U.S.; a week later The Washington Times speculated about a 'lab leak'. The suggestion, picked up by Trump and embraced by China hawks, was ridiculed by the left-wing media. A year later, a growing acceptance of the possibility of a 'lab leak' has formed - ignoring past skepticism. Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation's top public health official, now says that he believes it is possible.” The liberal media have finally conceded that COVID-19 may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory - after a year spent ridiculing the suggestion.”
Our January 26, 2020 Wellington Letter reported the origin of the virus from the Wuhan Lab and other information that has just been emerging now, over one year later. Now we know that the virus was made to be very infectious in the Wuhan BioLab. That’s exactly what we wrote one year ago, based on articles in the foreign press which is not under the control of the U.S. media. It is a process known as “gain of function.” Now we also know that the Wuhan Biolab work on the virus was paid for by the U.S. NIH subsidiary, headed by Fauci. One report says $3.75 million was sent to Wuhan. Another stated that number was $81 million.
The Latest: Everywhere someone in government is urging us to get “the vaccine.” When someone is so pushy to give us something “for our health and safety” for “free,” we get suspicious. The mRNA technology used for the most popular COVID drugs was never actually approved to be widely used in vaccines. Therefore, long-term effects are not known.
By definition, it is NOT a vaccine, but a gene therapy. It does not cause the typical antibody reaction of a vaccine in the body.
The widely used therapies for COVID, Hydroxychloroquine with zinc, or Ivermectin, are inexpensive but very effective when taken early. These were suddenly “unapproved” by the FDA when the vaccine companies entered the picture. These vaccines have cost the taxpayer over $10 billion. Hydroxychloroquine costs around $8 for a prescription. There are no side effects in over 60 years of use. Is it possible that this therapy was removed to make room for something billions of times more expensive?"
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Related:
The Poet: Anne Sexton, "Courage"
"Courage"
"It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.
Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.
Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.
Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out."
~ Anne Sexton
Saturday, May 29, 2021
"This Could Get Ugly Fast; Housing Will Collapse; FOMO; Buyer Beware"
Jeremiah Babe,
"This Could Get Ugly Fast;
Housing Will Collapse; FOMO; Buyer Beware"
Must Watch! "The Homeless Festival Is Coming to a City Near You - The Economy is a Nightmare"
Must Watch! Full screen recommended.
Dan, IAllegedly,
"The Homeless Festival Is Coming to a City Near You -
The Economy is a Nightmare"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Is our Milky Way Galaxy this thin? Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is viewed edge-on from planet Earth. Also known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop on many telescopic tours of the northern sky, in the faint but well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. This sharp, colorful image reveals the spiral galaxy's boxy, bulging central core cut by obscuring dust lanes that lace NGC 4565's thin galactic plane.
An assortment of other background galaxies is included in the pretty field of view. Thought similar in shape to our own Milky Way Galaxy, NGC 4565 lies about 40 million light-years distant and spans some 100,000 light-years. Easily spotted with small telescopes, sky enthusiasts consider NGC 4565 to be a prominent celestial masterpiece Messier missed.”
"Relax..."
"Relax. They're not going to kill us. They're going to
TRY and kill us. And that is a very different thing. "
- Steve Voake, "The Dreamwalker's Child"
"A Day as a King"
"A Day as a King"
by T.L. Davis
"The frustration I heard in the voice of a four-tour force recon vet discharged after a mortar ended his service was undeniable. It was also evident that the insults hurled from a woke mayor in a Texas city had him in a state of calm, but determined resistance. He spoke of the BLM march through the city given a route that went past the “biker bar” section of town as evidence of the taunting taking place across the country by mayors and governors who are determined to get a violent reaction. “We’re not that stupid,” he said.
From someone who has seen his share of death and destruction in the chaotic villages of a war-torn nation, he knows what is being fomented against him and those like him. They want the conflict, just like they wanted to hang the “insurrection” tag on a peaceful protest in Washington D.C. on January 6th. Unlike the woke peaceful protests all summer that were embellished with flame, wrecked buildings and murder, the January 6th peaceful protest saw only instigators (probably infiltrators) breaking a window or two. There is no comparison between the occupation of federal court buildings, looting and burning by those released from jail the day before for the same mischief and a crowd being let into the capitol on the sixth only to further the insurrection narrative.
I asked how we could fix a political system intent on inciting violence against one set of people by another. It isn’t just BLM against bikers, or school systems against parents, or black against white, or Hispanic against Asian, or young against old, or left against right, or gay against straight, or vaxers against anti-vaxers, or mask wearers against mask refusers; it is the intent of government officials to inflame these conflicts to the point of violence that is the concern. His response was a slow shake of the head, a shrug of the shoulders saying what he preferred not to say.
The fact is, there is no D-Day, but rather the slow accumulation of grievances until the load can no longer be carried. His words came back to me over the whole conversation. “We’re not that stupid.” The trouble with combat veterans, like my father (Korea), is they tend to be non-confrontational in such situations, because they can smell an ambush, not because they fear engagement, but half measures won’t suffice and until they are ready to go full-on, all other responses seem tepid, but the rage builds.
This climate is being manufactured. Those who are sure they will win are goading on the conflict. Those who are not sure they will win, refuse to fight at half measure, harming only their families and friends, enraging a brutal enemy without the resolve to complete the mission. What the enemies of the people should be afraid of, if they had any sense, is a fighting force having put it off until there was nothing left to lose, but coming out dedicated to the eradication of their enemies as the only possible solution.
Caught in the middle of this brewing conflict is law enforcement. This is something they should recognize, but they have not thus far. They seem willing to be the fodder; the useful idiots of the tyrannical regimes. If they could only look into the face of what confronts them, they might choose differently, but I doubt they would. Most of them agree to impose tyranny as a means of securing their pensions, as if they can suspend their duty as American citizens while in uniform and pick it back up when they shed it. Consciously or sub-consciously they are making a decision to violate their oaths in order to receive their shekels from tyrants. That doesn’t play out well, no matter how it goes, because these municipalities have no intention of paying them the blood money they earn. One would think they had seen the devious plots of most government agencies to default on their obligations with little more than a wink at justice enough times to see what their future holds. Anything they said or did when they believed themselves to be free, will be used to deny them the benefits once they’ve done the dirty work.
The great reset is in play. These are the final days of the United States, as ever previously conceived, anyway. The new order is rising, all of these internal squabbles are mere birthing pains of the globalist desire for hegemony. Whether their intent is to get all of the various factions of the citizens to annihilate each other, a pandemic that will wipe out most of the population, a few regional nuclear wars, whatever reduces the overall population is in favor with the globalists. It’s no conspiracy theory, either. It is the stated goal and plan of people like Bill Gates and George Soros.
Part of it even makes sense. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the world can supply them what they need without the messy demands of human beings. It is the utopia of the few that they can see on the horizon that is driving all of society right now. Some are fighting against it, some are fighting for it, but it’s the fight itself that enthralls the globalist. In any other time, they would be branded as genocidal maniacs, but in this time, when they have had a chance to dumb down schools, silence critics and promote their propaganda while they purchase local officials like a buying a happy meal, they appear to be the enlightened few.
Because this is the plan of the globalists, it is the globe that is in peril. There is no nation that will not be affected. Occasionally, the people of one nation or another will smell the smoke of human incinerators running overtime and put up a resistance to it, but right now the biggest stumbling block to the whole plan is the United States. Its citizens need to be overcome, their weapons confiscated, their property confiscated, their individual wealth stolen. They need to be brought down to a subsistence level that the people of most other nations endure so that one plan can be effectively prosecuted worldwide.
All politics make sense, when you understand their plan. What does not make sense, is why so many people believe they will benefit from it, when clearly the only beneficiaries of the plan are those few who already enjoy the best the world has to offer. Perhaps, it is just a case of wanting to live a day as a king. There is no doubt, however, that everyone we have been taught to respect will be the ones they send out to kill us. Our response will reverberate for centuries."
"Even With Good People..."
"Cause even with good people, even with people that
you can kinda trust, if the truth is inconvenient,
and if the truth doesn't, like, fit, they don't believe it. "
- Marie Adler
"Virologists Say Genetic "Fingerprints" Prove COVID-19 Man-Made, 'No Credible Natural Ancestor'"
"Virologists Say Genetic "Fingerprints" Prove
COVID-19 Man-Made, 'No Credible Natural Ancestor'"
by Tyler Durden
"Two notable virologists claim to have found "unique fingerprints" on COVID-19 samples that only could have arisen from laboratory manipulation, according to an explosive 22-page paper obtained by the Daily Mail.
British professor Angus Dalgleish - best known for creating the world's first 'HIV vaccine', and Norwegian virologist Dr. Birger Sørensen - chair of pharmaceutical company, Immunor, who has published 31 peer-reviewed papers and holds several patents, wrote that while analyzing virus samples last year, the pair discovered "unique fingerprints" in the form of "six inserts" created through gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. They also conclude that "SARS-Coronavirus-2 has "no credible natural ancestor" and that it is "beyond reasonable doubt" that the virus was created via "laboratory manipulation."
Last year, Sørensen told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that COVID-19 has properties which have 'never been detected in nature,' and that the United States has 'collaborated for many years on coronavirus research through "gain of function" studies with China. The paper detailing their months-long "forensic analysis," which looked back at experiments done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology between 2002 and 2019, is set to be published in the scientific journal "Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery."
Click image for larger size.
Click image for larger size.
More via the Mail: "Digging through archives of journals and databases, Dalgleish and Sørensen pieced together how Chinese scientists, some working in concert with American universities, allegedly built the tools to create the coronavirus. Much of the work was centered around controversial 'Gain of Function' research – temporarily outlawed in the US under the Obama administration. Gain of Function involves tweaking naturally occurring viruses to make them more infectious, so that they can replicate in human cells in a lab, allowing the virus's potential effect on humans to be studied and better understood.
Click image for larger size.
Dalgleish and Sørensen claim that scientists working on Gain of Function projects took a natural coronavirus 'backbone' found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a new 'spike', turning it into the deadly and highly transmissible SARS-Cov-2.
One tell-tale sign of alleged manipulation the two men highlighted was a row of four amino acids they found on the SARS-Cov-2 spike.
Click image for larger size.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Sørensen said the amino acids all have a positive charge, which cause the virus to tightly cling to the negatively charged parts of human cells like a magnet, and so become more infectious. But because, like magnets, the positively charged amino acids repel each other, it is rare to find even three in a row in naturally occurring organisms, while four in a row is 'extremely unlikely,' the scientist said. 'The laws of physics mean that you cannot have four positively charged amino acids in a row. The only way you can get this is if you artificially manufacture it,' Dalgleish told DailyMail.com.
Their new paper says these features of SARS-Cov-2 are 'unique fingerprints' which are 'indicative of purposive manipulation', and that 'the likelihood of it being the result of natural processes is very small.' 'A natural virus pandemic would be expected to mutate gradually and become more infectious but less pathogenic which is what many expected with the COVID-19 pandemic but which does not appear to have happened,' the scientists wrote. 'The implication of our historical reconstruction, we posit now beyond reasonable doubt, of the purposively manipulated chimeric virus SARS-CoV-2 makes it imperative to reconsider what types of Gain of Function experiments it is morally acceptable to undertake.
When Sørensen and Dalgleish floated their findings last year, it was 'debunked' with the thinnest of logic - however former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove pointed to the pair's findings as an "important" development which could prove that the pandemic may have originated at the WIV.
Click image for larger size.
Sørensen and Dalgleish aren't the first scientists to find unusual features within COVID-19. Last June, the Daily Telegraph reported that there are two unique features to COVID-19: First, the virus binds more strongly to human ACE2 enzymes than any other species, including bats. Second, SARS-CoV-2 has a "furin cleavage site" missing in its closes bat-coronavirus relative, RaTG-13, which makes it significantly more infectious - a finding we reported in late February.
According to Israeli geneticist, Dr. Ronen Shemesh, the Furin site is the most unusual finding. "I believe that the most important issue about the differences between ALL coronavirus types is the insertion of a Furin protease cleavage site at the Spike protein of SARS-CoV-2," he said. "Such an insertion is very rare in evolution, the addition of such 4 Amino acids alone in the course of only 20 years is very unlikely."
"There are many reasons to believe that the COVID-19 generating SARS-CoV-2 was generated in a lab. Most probably by methods of genetic engineering," he said, adding "I believe that this is the only way an insertion like the FURIN protease cleavage site could have been introduced directly at the right place and become effective."
Dr Shemesh, who has a PhD in Genetics and Molecular Biology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and over 21 years of experience in the field of drug discovery and development, said it is even “more unlikely” that this insertion happened in exactly the right place of the cleavage site of the spike protein - which is where it would need to occur to make the virus more infectious. - Daily Telegraph. "What makes it even more suspicious is that fact that this insertion not only occurred on the right place and in the right time, but also turned the cleavage site from an Serine protease cleavage site to a FURIN cleavage site," he added.
In January 2020, a team of Indian scientists wrote in a now-retracted paper that the coronavirus may have been genetically engineered to incorporate parts of the HIV genome, writing "This uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019- nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature," meaning - it was unlikely to have occurred naturally. The next month, a team of researchers in Nankai University noted that COVID-19 has an 'HIV-like mutation' that allows it to quickly enter the human body by binding with a receptor called ACE2 on a cell membrane.
Other highly contagious viruses, including HIV and Ebola, target an enzyme called furin, which works as a protein activator in the human body. Many proteins are inactive or dormant when they are produced and have to be “cut” at specific points to activate their various functions. When looking at the genome sequence of the new coronavirus, Professor Ruan Jishou and his team at Nankai University in Tianjin found a section of mutated genes that did not exist in Sars, but were similar to those found in HIV and Ebola. - SCMP
According to the Nankai University study, the furin binding method is "100 to 1,000 times as efficient' as SARS at entering cells. "This protein cleaving protein is highly promiscuous, it’s found in many human tissues and cell types and is involved in many OTHER virus types activation and infection mechanisms (it is involved in HIV, Herpes, Ebola and Dengue virus mechanisms)," said Dr. Shemesh. "If I was trying to engineer a virus strain with a higher affinity and infective potential to humans, I would do exactly that: I would add a Furin Cleavage site directly at the original less effective and more cell specific cleavage site."
Meanwhile, Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky found last year either "a remarkable coincidence or a sign of human intervention" within COVID-19 telling the Telegraph that COVID-19 is "exquisitely adapted to humans." "We really don’t know where this virus came from - that’s the truth. The two possibilities is that it was a chance transmission of a virus...the other possibility is that it was an accidental release of the virus from a laboratory," he said, adding "One of the possibilities is that an animal host was infected by two coronaviruses at the same time and COVID-19. The same process can happen in a petri-dish."
"In other words COVID-19 could have been created from that recombination event in an animal host or it could have occurred in a cell-culture experiment. I’m certainly very much in favour of a scientific investigation. Its only objective should be to get to the bottom of how did this pandemic happen and how do we prevent a future pandemic." Keep in mind - reporting any of this last year was punishable by social media banishment, demonetiziation, and hit-piece articles from propagandists peddling CCP talking points."
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Related:
"The Destruction of Civil Society"
"The Destruction of Civil Society"
By Bill Bonner
"This month, we look at a number of dots, all grouped… like a constellation far out in space… as “The Great Reset.” The various planets and stars seem so “far out,” we have a hard time believing that it will ever really affect our lives. A switch to windmills rather than internal combustion engines… eating bugs rather than steaks… getting permission to travel, rather than traveling freely… compulsory anti-racist training… gender studies for six-year-olds… government spending nearing 50% of GDP… Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)… and double-digit real inflation.
There are some strange critters out there, we used to tell ourselves… in a galaxy far, far away. But they won’t get here during our lifetimes! Or so we hoped. And then, they started showing up.
Niagara of Liquidity: At current budget levels, for example, the U.S. government is spending 45% of GDP. Add medical care, in which the feds play a major role, and the U.S. now has about the same level of government involvement in the economy as France. And whoever expected the feds to send out stimmy checks to up to 165 million people – 75% of whom, apparently, had lost neither job nor income – not once, but three times? And even with this Niagara of liquidity flowing their way – so much that U.S. households are said to have more money than ever before – the feds are now considering “round 4” or even “round 5” of their stimmy efforts.
Aid and Succor: The effect of all this aid and succor from the federales is twofold. First, it weakens the citizens’ desire and ability to take care of themselves. “You get what you pay for,” said Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. And when the government pays for idleness and dependence, it gets plenty of both. With so much money available from stimmy checks, fewer people want to work in the Main Street economy… and even fewer want to invest in it. This shows up in the most obvious ways. The economy produces fewer and fewer goods and services, while the government produces more and more money. The result is inflation.
The second thing the feds’ aid and succor does is to make any change of direction impossible. Once you’re on this Road to Hell, you can’t turn around. Because the political pressure – from the desperate zombies you created… who now need more and more red meat from government giveaway programs… forces reformers and deniers into hiding. Inevitably, standards of living fall. So the federales need to plan for poverty and disguise it as virtue. Eating bugs, for example, as Dan explains in this month’s Bonner-Denning Letter. [Paid-up subscribers can catch up here. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can sign up here.]
Culture of Poverty: But the United States of America is not the first or only country to deliberately impoverish itself. Argentina is way ahead, having begun its “Reset” back in the 1940s. That was when Juan Domingo Perón figured out that he could win an election by promising the zombies of Buenos Aires meat from the pampas at discount prices. This was achieved by taxing and regulating the farm sector for the benefit of the urban proletariat. And so developed the “culture of poverty” – penalizing the productive sectors in order to support the more numerous zombie voters, and thus stay in power. And it continues today, seven decades later.
The “conservative” reformer Mauricio Macri, president of Argentina from 2015 to 2019, tried to break the cycle by liberating the farm sector. Instead, it broke him. Macri was defeated in the last elections. And now, the new “Peronist” government is up to its old tricks. Last week, it announced a prohibition on the export of beef. The producers suffer… But the masses get cheaper beef.
This is very bad news for Argentina… It needs revenues from exports. It’s bad news for your editor, too, who was counting on high beef prices to make sense of his investment in a cattle farm down there. But it goes to show how easily real investment can be stymied… and how readily the “culture of poverty” prevails. James Nielson at the Buenos Aires Times writes: "Poverty has always been normal, and the widespread prosperity which benefits most people, that today can be found in many parts of the world, is an aberration."
How do you like your cockroaches, Dear Reader? Well done?"
Friday, May 28, 2021
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Galaxies don't normally look like this. NGC 6745 actually shows the results of two galaxies that have been colliding for only hundreds of millions of years. Just off the above digitally sharpened photograph to the lower right is the smaller galaxy, moving away. The larger galaxy, pictured above, used to be a spiral galaxy but now is damaged and appears peculiar. Gravity has distorted the shapes of the galaxies.
Although it is likely that no stars in the two galaxies directly collided, the gas, dust, and ambient magnetic fields do interact directly. In fact, a knot of gas pulled off the larger galaxy on the lower right has now begun to form stars. NGC 6745 spans about 80 thousand light-years across and is located about 200 million light-years away."
"So Important..."
"Lifes impermanence, I realized, is what makes every
single day so precious. It's what shapes our time here.
It's what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted."
- Wes Moore
"Every Bubble is About to Burst"
Full screen recommended.
I Allegedly, PM 5/28/21:
"Every Bubble is About to Burst"
"To Tell The Truth..."
"In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is. If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its way into our minds, there are plenty of things we can do to drive the intruder away. We can get the car out or go to a party or to the cinema or read a detective story or have a row with a district council or write a letter to the papers about the habits of the nightjar or Shakespeare's use of nautical metaphor. Thus we build up a defense mechanism against self-questioning because, to tell the truth, we are very much afraid of ourselves."
- Dorothy L. Sayers
"Too Often..."
"Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word,
a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring,
all of which have the potential to turn a life around."
- Leo Buscaglia
Gregory Mannarino, AM 5/28/21: "Important Updates, Economy, Inflation"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 5/28/21:
"Important Updates, Economy, Inflation"
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Related:
FRIDAY, MAY 28, 2021 - 01:25 PM: "And Now Prices Are Really Soaring: May Rent Jump Is Biggest On Record"
"Biden’s $6 Trillion Socialist Budget Will Cause Even More Inflation And Even More Shortages"
"Biden’s $6 Trillion Socialist Budget Will Cause
Even More Inflation And Even More Shortages"
by Michael Snyder
"If you are enjoying the ride on the highway to hyperinflation, then you are going to absolutely love Joe Biden’s new budget. Instead of realizing the mistakes that he has made and reversing course, Biden has decided that now is the time to push the accelerator to the floor. That means that a lot more inflation is on the way, and I am encouraging all of my readers to do what they can to get prepared for that. In my latest book, I sound the alarm about what hyperinflation will eventually do to our economy. We are literally in the process of becoming Venezuela, and most Americans have absolutely no idea how horrific that will be. In Venezuela today, almost everyone is a millionaire, but just about everyone is also living in poverty because the money is absolutely worthless. We don’t want to end up like that, but that is the road that we are on.
While he was still in the White House, President Trump’s proposed budget for 2021 was $4.8 trillion. That is an extremely high number, but Joe Biden’s new budget for 2021 is actually 25 percent larger… The proposal represents a 25 percent increase over what former President Donald Trump proposed in his final budget – in a year that would be upended by the coronavirus. The spending levels would continue on an upward trajectory, hitting $8.2 trillion at the end of a decade, according to detailed top-line numbers leaked to the New York Times.
I could sit here all day and still probably not be able to come up with sufficient words to describe how insane it would be for the U.S. government to spend 6 trillion dollars in a single year. According to Biden, his new tax increases will offset part of the new spending, but even his own projections show us running trillion dollar deficits long into the future… The budget would have the nation continue running deficits of more than $1 trillion, a level it already topped with the onset of the pandemic – with estimated annual deficits of $1.3 trillion amid enacted and proposed federal programs.
Of course these sorts of projections are usually way too optimistic. In my estimation, Biden’s plan would have us facing deficits of at least two trillion dollars per year throughout his presidency and beyond. We can’t keep doing this to our children and our grandchildren. Already, borrowing and spending giant mountains of money that we do not have has resulted in the worst stretch of inflation since the Jimmy Carter years of the 1970s.
Larry Summers was the former director of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama, and even he is warning that big time inflation is coming… He told a CoinDesk conference: ‘We’re taking very substantial risks on the inflation side. I think policy is rather overdoing it. The sense of serenity and complacency being projected by the economic policymakers, that this is all something that can easily be managed, is misplaced,’ he added. When even Larry Summers is sounding the alarm, you know that it must be really late in the game.
As I have detailed in numerous recent articles, prices are absolutely exploding all over the nation right now. And today we learned that one prominent analyst is claiming that “US inflation data surprises are at their highest in the 20-year history of the series”… As we noted over the weekend, positive US data surprises seem to be normalizing (i.e. the Citi US econ surprise index has flatlined) due to a combination of analysts catching up with the prior stronger pace of growth, and also due to some evidence that the rate of change of US growth is peaking out (JPMorgan disagrees).
However as DB’s equity strategist Parag Thatte points out in his latest positioning piece, “US inflation data surprises are at their highest in the 20-year history of the series with the last 10 data points almost ‘off the chart’.“ We should be taking emergency measures to get inflation under control, but instead Joe Biden has decided that this is the perfect time for a spending spree.
Inflation is one of the hallmarks of a socialist economy, and another thing that we commonly see in socialist systems are shortages. At this moment, we are witnessing the most severe shortages that the U.S. has experienced in my entire lifetime. As I discussed the other day, Bloomberg is reporting that “the world economy is suddenly running low on everything”.
When there are way too many dollars chasing way too few goods and services, it is inevitable that shortages will happen. And we are being told to expect that some of the shortages will get even worse in the months ahead. In fact, CNN is telling us to expect very serious gasoline shortages this summer… And that could be the least of the problems for the those taking to the highways for summer vacations. The gas shortages experienced earlier this month when a key pipeline shut down could once again be on the horizon, according to experts. This time, the squeeze could be triggered by the lack of tank truck drivers to deliver the fuel, and a repeat of panic buying by travelers topping off their tanks.
Meanwhile, economic conditions continue to deteriorate for those at the bottom of the food chain. Earlier today, an article about current economic conditions in New York City really struck an emotional chord with me… "In Times Square, the most densely tourist-populated place in the United States, a mentally disturbed man known as Mr. Kim begs cops to kill him. ‘I want to die. You have a gun? Shoot,’ he pleads. After the officers demur, he picks up a plank of wood and starts smashing it against the Pele soccer shop.
On Sutton Place, one of the most affluent residential areas in the city, a lone man squats on the sidewalk, intently reading a paperback novel next to a shopping cart that contains his worldly goods. He begs for cash with a sign saying he has lost everything. ‘Trying to survive,’ it adds."
Joe Biden may think that he is going to bring the U.S. economy back to life with all of the borrowing and spending that he is doing, but the truth is that it is just going to make our long-term problems even worse. Unfortunately, a lot of our long-term problems are rapidly becoming short-term problems, and that is not good news for any of us."
"National Horror Story Hour"
"National Horror Story Hour"
by Jim Kunstler
"Questions du jour: Can the US government make itself even more untrustworthy? Has it become an enemy of the people? Just wondering. What would be worse, actually, is if we learn that American culture is untrustworthy, since politics is downstream of culture. It would be the equivalent writ large of a human personality at war with itself, unable to trust its own thoughts and actions.
Which perhaps explains the seeming psychosis raging through our society at the moment. The hallucinatory delusions of the day are exactly what you’d expect in the kind of personality undergoing a psychotic stress fracture, like the character Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s classic horror movie, Psycho. Poor Norman (or “Mister Bates,” as Hitch playfully had the other characters call him), developed the unfortunate habit of dressing up like deceased Mother and slashing to death any other female for whom Mister Bates had impure thoughts. That was the 1960s version of the Transsexual Story Hour. We’ve come a long way, baby, since those innocent days.
In today’s day, another part of the collective personality is suddenly coming apart: science, or The Science, as the lingo has it these days. The Science is the system of hypotheses and proofs that normally plays the hero’s role in the task of determining reality, especially about things that are dangerous to mankind. The Science is supposedly behind what we know about the Covid-19 pandemic that has turned America, and much of the whole world, upside down. The Science has become so untrustworthy that an awful lot of people harbor suspicions that it has been running a number on them for the past year.
In the early going of the War on Covid-19, The Science told its soldiers, the doctors, to jam ventilators down patients’ throats. Whoops, that didn’t work so well. The Science told everybody to fuggeddabowt Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, Zinc, and Vitamin D. The Science told New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to stash Covid-19 infected patients in nursing homes. The Science told everybody don’t bother with masks, then to definitely wear masks, then to maybe not wear masks, then to wear double masks, then to get vaccinated and wear masks. Golly, what to believe? Some people began to think that The Science was full of shit - which is, let’s face it, a dangerous thought, and something which, thank Gawd, Facebook, Twitter, and Google corrected for us.
One thing The Science remained adamant about for a whole year was that Covid-19 did not come from the Wuhan, China, Institute of Virology, where-and-to-which, it just happened, one of the US government’s Knights of The Science, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was funneling US taxpayer-funded grant money for the purpose of doing gain-of-function research on exotic bat corona viruses. Gosh, why would you even do that? (Doesn’t gain of function = make it more deadly?)
Supposedly to gain knowledge so that mankind will be prepared to fight the emergence of deadly bat viruses that somehow manage to sneak into the human population at some future date. These things can happen, you know. We’ve already tangled with bird flu and swine flu, so deadly bat flu could hardly be out of the question. Of course, one of the dangers, when you are playing with deadly respiratory viruses in a lab, is that lab workers might inhale a virus or two and become infected with a specimen that The Science has engineered to be especially troublesome… but that was very unlikely, maintained Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Science Advisor to the President.
Until this month when Dr. Fauci conceded to a Senate Committee that perhaps an investigation was warranted to find out if, perchance, Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab - since, it turns out, the Wuhan lab was such a sloppy-ass operation that its level of safety was comparable to an ordinary dentist’s office. It also turns out, according to a Wall Street Journal report this week, that three Wuhan lab workers did indeed need to be hospitalized in November 2019, which was around the time the bug got loose among the civilians of Wuhan City, while Chinese tourists and workers were still winging around the world on airplanes by the tens of thousands - prompting one to wonder whether, also perchance, this was something that the CCP wanted to happen? ¿Quién sabe?
Now that “safe and effective” vaccines are available against Covid-19, The Science is urging everybody to take it, pronto, and the government is assisting in the distribution and deployment of vaccinations even to the very borderline of coercing citizens into it by turning the “vaccine hesitant” into social pariahs. No restaurant meals or ballgames for you Science-offending trolls! How’s that working? According to Dr. Fauci, and several other Knights of The Science, more than half of the people on their staffs got vaxed voluntarily. More than half! Now that’s a ringing vote of confidence in The Science!
Never mind that the vaxes being deployed got exempted from the normal years-long safety trials that The Science previously deemed essential for new vaccines, and received special liability protection against lawsuits, should something go awry with the jabs. And never mind the strange side-effects being reported, ranging from human reproductive problems to fatal blood clots. And never mind that apparently quite a few people who got the vax have also gotten Covid-19. And never mind that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has continued to flutter about her place of business wearing color-coordinated face masks, despite being vaxed and spending her time among colleagues who are all vaxed up.
Standing by on all that to see how the vaccine beta-testers make out over a somewhat longer haul… Meanwhile, the next national reality test is underway in Arizona and just now gearing up in the state of Georgia, too. That would be Election Science, or the hypotheses and proofs of how ballots are cast and votes are tallied. These are also matters that our Knights of Public Management, such as Arizona Governor Doug Doucy and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and their Secretaries of State Hobbs and Raffensperger, declare to be unworthy of investigation. And yet, investigations are apparently proceeding against their wishes and convictions, thanks to the Arizona State Senate and some Georgia judges. Standing by now to see how much more psychotic America’s collective persona grows as that nasty business creeps forward."
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