Thread by @usacsmret

What We Ought to Learn From the Coronavirus newswithviews.com/what-we-ought-…

Does anything justify the borderline-insanity surrounding this coronavirus?
The vast majority of people who test positive for it seem to be recovering with no ill effects. When symptomatic, the virus attacks the respiratory system.

Yes, there have been a few thousand deaths. It’s been observed, though, that more people die of the flu or complications from it each year. Far more people died from the H1N1 virus during the Obama presidency. There were warnings, but not a mass panic.

Covid-19 testing has sometimes been spotty, meaning that more people have it than we know about, and the actual mortality rate is therefore lower than the official number. Public officials are worried about these “stealth spreaders.”

The greatest dangers from Covid-19 are to the elderly and to people with respiratory and immune systems already compromised by chronic conditions. Those people should take it very seriously.

But when all is said and done, this is clearly not the genetically engineered super flu which accidentally gets loose and wipes out most of the world in Stephen King’s The Stand

There are numerous coronaviruses. They live in animals. The official narrative is that this one jumped from bat meat to human consumers in a crowded and probably unsanitary Wuhan, China marketplace.

Yes, that can happen. It’s not impossible.

The other narrative — the one mainstream Western media wants you to dismiss as a “conspiracy theory” — is that this coronavirus (like others for which patents can be found online) was manufactured and got loose, whether by accident or by design.

Wuhan, as many reading probably know, sports a Pathogen Level 4 microbiology laboratory able to produce and study coronaviruses. It’s called the National Biosafety Laboratory and is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Do you believe that Wuhan’s being ground zero for the appearance of this coronavirus is a mere coincidence?

Molecular biologist and ecologist James Lyons-Weiler, PhD: “Now it’s really unusual to find a vector technology sequence in a virus that’s circulating in humans, and so naturally, one thing we can say, I think for certain, is that this particular virus has a laboratory origin….”

Other reports are suggesting that components of the virus are related to HIV and could not have formed naturally. This would explain why people with compromised immune systems are especially at risk.

So if this coronavirus is artificial, what was its purpose?Is it a bioweapon?

I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does for sure, either—except for those directly involved in its production.

What do we really learn from this “pandemic”?
Besides, that is, the obvious lessons about how easy it is to lead the masses by their noses through fear, and how easily politicians get in line in the face of total media saturation and potential shaming.

The “pandemic” has exposed, for all with eyes to see if they dare to look, the dark side of globalization.
Economists have noted how the lock down in China has threatened global supply lines of goods ranging from food to new technology to crucial medications.

It is worth asking, how did we get into this pattern of dependency in the first place? It happened because corporations try to make as much money as possible by locating in places with the lowest labor costs, while economists shrug off disruptive consequences as “externalities.”

The idea of economic integration isn’t new. It goes back at least to post-war Europe. The idea was if nations encouraged mutual dependencies leading to a common market they would be less likely to fight one another. This seemed to make sense, and for a while, it seemed to work.

There are dangers of economic integration, however, especially if you are not in the class of moneyed elites. I don’t think most Europeans were counting on the financial-elite dominated political union they have now.

Nor were they counting on being colonized by Muslims who would refuse to assimilate and start to destroy European cultures.

On our side of the Atlantic, what came to pass was corporations chasing the cheapest labor they can find while opening borders to immigrants from everywhere and driving down wages in advanced societies.

All while a punditry in semisecret organizations like the Trilateral Commission works out an ideological rationale and promises of a coming Utopia.

The ideology was neoliberalism, the basic premises of which were: privatize everything in sight; and value is limited to monetary and exchange value.

The Utopia long ago turned dystopian, again if you are outside the one or two percent that has reaped the lion’s share of the profits, generally from investment — “money making money” — as opposed to real productive work meeting people’s needs.

America began to gut its manufacturing base back in the 1980s, as corporations pursued profit and shareholder interest only. During the 1990s with NAFTA, GATT II, and beyond and into the 2000s, this only got worse.

China, meanwhile, was forcibly turned from a mostly agrarian country into an industrial nation in less than two generations. Now it is the second largest economy in the world.

We may ever know the extent to which ordinary Chinese people have suffered because of top-down decisions made by what is still a de jure Communist government. We know that Mao’s “cultural revolution” murdered tens of millions. China is now a techno cratically controlled society.

While this may fill the local Walmart with cheaply produced mass consumer goods, it increases the overall fragility of economies everywhere (I am using the term fragility in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s sense).

No national government or population can control what goes on halfway around the world, or even validate that what they are being told is the truth.

Today, America has millions of people whose service sector jobs fail to pay living wages, and whose standard of living has dropped. They are up to their eyeballs in debt. Most could not come up with $500 in an emergency situation without borrowing.

Workers cannot afford decent health care because their wages have stagnated relative to a rising cost of living which seems endemic to advanced “capitalist” political economies. These are the reasons we have crises in all those areas whether we like to talk about them or not.

Obamacare wasn’t the solution to the health care crisis because Obamacare wasn’t really about health care. It was about how health care was to be paid for. There wasn’t a word in Obamacare about, for example, Primary Prevention.

Primary Prevention consists of all those things you can and should do to avoid getting sick: nutritional education and healthy eating; exercising regularly; practicing basic cleanliness; not smoking; avoiding sugar and excessive caffeine and alcohol; managing your stress; etc.

In the case of the coronavirus, you can greatly reduce your risk through frequently washing your hands, not touching your face and mouth especially if you’ve touched objects in public such as handrails, and avoiding proximity with strangers.

Education for Primary Prevention would enable a people to avoid risky behaviors of all kinds, and if it began when they were children, avoidance would be automatic, not directed by authorities. It would be common horse sense.

But Primary Prevention is not profitable to those who make money by managing chronic conditions, e.g., with drugs. A healthy population doesn’t need to spend money on doctors, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, insurance premiums, etc.

Oops!

It leads, moreover, to personal resilience and self- and familial reliance. This does not serve the purposes of globalists who want dependent populations, which has included destroying the family unit.

This “pandemic” will run its course, just as did bird flu, swine flu, West Nile, SARS, and H1N1, having turned out to be much milder than its political-economic effects.

The latter are guaranteed to leave us worse off.

Especially if they destroy Trump’s reelection changes and put borderline-senile Joe Biden in the White House, ensuring us, in a couple of years, a presidency-by-committee led by whoever his VP turns out to be. (Hillary Clinton?)

Especially if we are all faced with new vaccines and encircling “health” regulations that have nothing to do with Primary Prevention but will soon be conditions of employment, etc. Trump will be gone. But the problems that got him elected will still be around, in spades.

Something almost no one talks about is relevant here: small but well-heeled folks in the scientific-military complex that will continue to play God with the sort of biogenetic engineering that probably created this coronavirus.

Viruses, too, can be patented and sold for profit.

Given the law of averages, it may be just a matter of time till one of these lunatics comes up with something truly lethal, with an extremely high or almost universal mortality rate — akin to the super flu in The Stand.

And carelessly lets it escape its test tube cage.

Then we’ll know what a real pandemic, a real existential threat to humanity, looks like!