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The Coronavirus Is Even More Dangerous Than Previously Thought
The Coronavirus Is Even More Dangerous Than Previously Thought
In addition to the lungs, it injures the heart, kidneys, nervous & circulatory systems, intestines and liver
Man, the more we learn about the honey badger virus (covid-19), the more we realize what a beast it truly is.
Yesterday’s video went into the damage the virus does to the lungs. It’s also becoming clear covid-19 also injures the heart, kidneys, nervous & circulatory systems, intestines and liver.
Again, you do NOT want to get this if you can avoid it.
We are also seeing that it’s a hard foe to defeat. In a growing number of ‘best case’ countries, when lockdowns are lifted, they’re having to be quickly re-instated as new outbreak blooms occur.
Meanwhile, the damage covid-19 is doing to the global economy is becoming increasingly clear – and grim. Demand has fallen by record amounts, the banking system is looking shaky, and food security is now becoming a concern.
The latter speaks to why we have been advocating for weeks now that you get busy starting or expanding your garden.
Scientists Discover Alarming Coronavirus Mutation That Could Render Vaccine Useless
Scientists Discover Alarming Coronavirus Mutation That Could Render Vaccine Useless
The prospect that SARS-CoV-2, the “novel” coronavirus responsible for causing the illness COVID-19, might be mutating and evolving as it spreads across the globe has been such a terrifying prospect for the scientific community, that medical experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci seem to avoid even engaging on the topic.
Asked about the possibility of viral mutation during one of the White House’s inaugural task force press briefings, Dr. Fauci assured the public that scientists have found “no evidence” of any concerning mutations, though the prospect that a mutated version of the virus might return during next year’s flu season has kept some virologists up at night with nightmares about needing to start the vaccine clock from zero.
The problem is that vaccines often aren’t as effective against viruses that mutate, like the flu does every season (that’s why you need to keep getting that flu shot year after year). And now, a new scientific paper that – like most of the coronavirus research being cited in the press – has yet to be peer reviewed claims to have identified a mutation in a sample of the virus collected in India that could create serious problems for researchers working on a vaccine.
Monitoring the mutation dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 is critical for the development of effective approaches to contain the 21 pathogen. By analyzing 106 SARS-CoV-2 and 39 SARS genome sequences, we provided direct genetic evidence that 22 SARS-CoV-2 has a much lower mutation rate than SARS. Minimum Evolution phylogeny analysis revealed the putative original status of SARS-CoV-2 and the early-stage spread history. The discrepant phylogenies for the spike protein and it receptor binding domain proved a previously reported structural rearrangement prior to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What will the world be like after coronavirus? Four possible futures
What will the world be like after coronavirus? Four possible futures
The world-wide Corona-Crisis shows the limits of market-oriented economies. A key task for us all, Simon Mair writes, is demanding that emerging social forms come from an ethic that values care, life, and democracy. The central political task in this time of crisis is living and (virtually) organising around those values. This blog first appeared on The Conversation, as part of the Insights series—’longform journalism derived from interdisciplinary research.
Where will we be in six months, a year, ten years from now? I lie awake at night wondering what the future holds for my loved ones. My vulnerable friends and relatives. I wonder what will happen to my job, even though I’m luckier than many: I get good sick pay and can work remotely. I am writing this from the UK, where I still have self-employed friends who are staring down the barrel of months without pay, friends who have already lost jobs. The contract that pays 80% of my salary runs out in December. Coronavirus is hitting the economy bad. Will anyone be hiring when I need work?
There are a number of possible futures, all dependent on how governments and society respond to coronavirus and its economic aftermath. Hopefully we will use this crisis to rebuild, produce something better and more humane. But we may slide into something worse.
I think we can understand our situation—and what might lie in our future—by looking at the political economy of other crises. My research focuses on the fundamentals of the modern economy: global supply chains, wages, and productivity. I look at the way that economic dynamics contribute to challenges like climate change and low levels of mental and physical health among workers.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Climate Change Won’t Stop for the Coronavirus Pandemic
Climate Change Won’t Stop for the Coronavirus Pandemic
The next several months could bring hurricanes, floods and fire, on top of the pandemic currently raging through the country. How do you shelter in place during an evacuation?
Is the United States Prepared for COVID-19?
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Two and a half years ago Hurricane Maria ripped open homes across the southern Puerto Rican city of Ponce, destroying the rickety electrical grid and sending thousands of people into shelters or onto the streets. People were still rebuilding when, in January, a devastating earthquake jolted the island’s southern coast. Afraid of collapsing walls and showering concrete, people moved back outdoors, where they still spend cool, wet nights under blue tarps strung to poles and tied to cars packed with coolers and lawn chairs.
Now thousands brace for a wave of illness as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads insidiously across the island, threatening people without homes, without water, some struggling even to maintain basic hygiene. It’s the latest blow in a diabolical cascade of crises, striking Puerto Ricans at their most vulnerable. When the sickness comes, doctors and nurses will be scarce; the hurricane forced almost half of them to leave the island in search of jobs.
“Everyone is in hell,” said Abel Vale, a retired environmental consultant who lives north of Ponce, “or left forgotten.”
This is how cascading catastrophes can compound in effect, kicked off or made worse by climate change, which promises to amplify the harm and make even unrelated crises more painful.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Plague and Civilization
Plague and Civilization
The plague is a disease that raises its devouring and catastrophic head every so many decades and centuries, especially when humans violently disturb the natural world.
The 2020 plague is one of a variety of pandemic diseases that have afflicted humans for millennia, not necessarily with the same intensity or virulence.
The historical record of plagues is muddled. Like us, past societies under the existential stress of pandemics, failed to keep records, much less accurate records. In many instances, past and present, rulers, medical bureaucrats, and journalists subvert the truth. Political and economic oligarchs fight for survival and supremacy. The picture that survives death is distorted, exactly like the story victors tell after war.
The Plague Among the Greeks
The case of the plague in Greek history may still give us pose for reflection.
The Greeks gave diseases precise names. They called plague loimos (pestilence), nosos (disease, sorrow, suffering), and phthora (destruction, decay, mortality, death).
The plague made its first appearance among the Greeks as a weapon of divine wrath. God Apollo used the pestilence to punish the Greeks for offending his priest.
In the beginning of the first book of the Iliad of Homer, Agamemnon, commander-in-chief of the Greek troops in the Trojan War, insulted the priest of Apollo by refusing to give back his daughter, whom he had captured in a raid. The priest knelt in front of Agamemnon and begged him to release his daughter. But Agamemnon told the priest to get out of his sight as quickly as he could, lest he lost his patience. The frighten priest run away from the Greek camp and went home. He immediately prayed to Apollo to punish the Greeks. He reminded the god he had built a temple to honor and worship him, offering him rich sacrifices. Make the Greeks pay for my tears, he appealed to Apollo.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Worst Recession in 150 Years
Worst Recession in 150 Years
The stock market had another big day today, spurred by the Fed’s massive recent liquidity injections.
But you really shouldn’t be terribly surprised by the rally. Even the worst bear markets see substantial bouncebacks. And you can expect the market to give back all of its recent gains in the months ahead as the economic fallout of the lockdowns becomes apparent.
This bear market has a long way to run. And we could actually be looking at the worst recession in 150 years if one economist is correct. Let’s unpack this…
My regular readers know I have a low opinion of most academic economists, the ones you find at the Fed, the IMF and in mainstream financial media.
The problem is not that they’re uneducated; they have the Ph.D.s and high IQs to prove otherwise. I’ve met many of them and I can tell you they’re not idiots.
The problem is that they’re miseducated. They learn a lot of theories and models that do not correspond to the reality of how economies and capital markets actually work.
Worse yet, they keep coming up with new ones that muddy the waters even further. For example, concepts such as the Phillips curve (an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment) are empirically false.
Other ideas such as “comparative advantage” have appeal in the faculty lounge but don’t work in the real world for many reasons, including the fact that nations create comparative advantage out of thin air with government subsidies and mercantilist demands.
Not the Early 19th Century Anymore
It’s not the early 19th century anymore, when the theory first developed. For example, at that time, a nation that specialized in wool products like sweaters (England) might not make the best leather products like shoes (Italy).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Fox News Reports Coronavirus Originated In Wuhan Lab
Fox News Reports Coronavirus Originated In Wuhan Lab
Fox News reports that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that “patient zero” was a lab employee who became infected before spreading it in the community – just as we have reported repeatedly over the past three months, in exchange for which Twitter’s “appropriate content” arbiters deplatformed us without reason or explanation.
According to ‘multiple sources who have been briefed on the details of early actions by China’s government,’ the initial transmission of the virus was bat-to-human, and that the ‘official’ story amplified by the MSM – namely that the virus originated at the Wuhan wet market – was a coverup by Chinese officials ‘in order to deflect blame from the laboratory, along with the country’s propaganda efforts targeting the U.S. and Italy,’ reads the report.
In what may or may not be a bit of narrative shaping from ‘official sources,’ Fox reports that China’s Wuhan laboratory was working with COVID-19 “not as a bioweapon, but as part of China’s effort to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States.“
So – lab accident while trying to compete with America’s capabilities appears to be the official story.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that the US State Department received two cables from US Embassy officials in 2018 warning of inadequate safety at WIF, which was conducting ‘risky studies’ on bat coronaviruses, according to the Washington Post, which notes that the cables have “fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Far worse to come: COVID-19 collapse of state and local governments
Far worse to come: COVID-19 collapse of state and local governments
Another sudden and unexpected factor will transform this year’s elections. Many states, cities and counties are about to, suddenly, run out of money. Wages won’t be paid. Services won’t be delivered. Institutions will shut down abruptly. Many state colleges may fold. And yet most state and local political and administrative leaders just sit and watch. Voters will not be pleased.
Millions of American workers filed for unemployment insurance during the past two weeks. That is a record and represents a collapse of our local economies. Across the country, in every state, county and city, businesses have been shut down, and many will not return after the coronavirus crisis is over. Tens of millions have lost jobs, homes, savings and retirement incomes that will never return. Owners of rental property will go under when their loan payments come due and renters can’t pay. Across the country, state and local economies are being badly damaged — many of them permanently.
The result is that state and local tax revenues will plummet. States and localities will burn through any reserves they’ve maintained like wildfire. Since most of our politicians and government managers have been raised during a decade of expanding economies, their first instinct will be to wait and then panic and then raise taxes to cover shortfalls — perhaps a special “coronavirus surtax.” Taxpayers across the country have tolerated various forms of high state and local taxes; the politicians would naturally ask, “Why should now be any different?”
But it is different. The resulting increased tax burden would be a disaster. Businesses that were barely hanging on would go under. Workers and homeowners who were barely surviving would go under. State and local tax bases would collapse even faster. There would be social unrest, possibly requiring martial law. People would migrate from high-tax states toward new jobs, accelerating a downward spiral. These large migrations would make the 2020 census results nonsense.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Impact of Corona Virus similar to some earlier peak oil scenarios
Impact of Corona Virus similar to some earlier peak oil scenarios
Empty roads, grounded aircraft, falling tourist and international student numbers, plunging car sales, empty super market shelves, disrupted supply chains…
China Car Sales Slump 92% in First Half of February on Virus
21 Feb 2020
That all sounds like peak oil has hit except that oil prices are low now. Which may change of course as low oil prices may mean that US shale oil is likely to peak earlier than otherwise would have been the case.
https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/drilling/
The graph shows that tight oil production took off when oil prices were around $100/barrel but peaked in March 2015 and then declined as oil prices dropped to $50/barrel. Production started to recover in September 2016 but almost half of the production (mainly from Bakken, Eagle Ford, Niobrara and Aanadako) has already peaked again in October 2019 and in March 2020 is estimated to be just 240 kb/d higher than the 2015 peak. The other half of the production, from the Permian (Texas) is still growing but monthly growth rates have declined from 180 kb/d in mid 2018 to 40 kb/d now. Recent data are preliminary.
Coronavirus Delivers Another Blow to Embattled Shale Drillers
29 Feb 2020
Frackers already faced financial woes in 2020, even before the virus threatened oil demand
Shale drillers were already braced for a tough year. Now the new coronavirus is putting them under even greater financial pressure.
Exploration and production companies are straining to slow growth—amid an oversupply of oil and gas—and cut spending to appease investors angry over poor returns. Now the virus has further weakened global demand for their products, posing a greater challenge to a sector where many companies are saddled with debt.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Disunited States: Government Failure to Address Coronavirus is Sparking a Mutual Aid Revolution
Disunited States: Government Failure to Address Coronavirus is Sparking a Mutual Aid Revolution
As state and local authorities struggle and the federal government focus on saving Wall Street, a volunteer-driven mutual aid revolution is taking hold in disenfranchised communities across America.
I‘m not from DC, but I live here. I’m now a part of this living, breathing being that is a city. This city. It helps me to think of cities that way, even ones that I don’t fully feel at home in – like a body. And I’m like a blood transfusion. I know this isn’t my city, my body, but it’s where my life flows now, and so I best flow with it. This body holds me – it is my literal and figurative structure. I am one of the millions of cells rushing through the veins of this place, and although I’m a relative newcomer, I can feel that this body is not well. I can feel that familiar illness – it’s the same as any city I’ve ever lived in..
Every body is weakened and bowed under the weight of capitalism. Yet, there is a new illness – one that found a foothold in our immunocompromised bones and at the same time exposes the severity of that underlying sickness so old it’s etched in our souls.
Now, with the renewed vigor of a body on high alert, cells rush in symbiotic aid to save each other. A new fever awakens dormant fighters and engages new ones. The city pulses with ancient knowledge and emergent ideas.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Deep Economic Suffering Has Erupted All Over America, But Guess Who The Federal Reserve Is Helping?
Deep Economic Suffering Has Erupted All Over America, But Guess Who The Federal Reserve Is Helping?
As millions upon millions of Americans lose their jobs in the greatest wave of unemployment in U.S. history, the Federal Reserve has decided that now is the time to spend trillions of newly created dollars in a desperate attempt to protect financial asset values. In other words, as much of the country suddenly plunges into poverty, the Federal Reserve is working exceedingly hard to protect the wealth of the elite. Approximately fifty percent of all stock market wealth is owned by the wealthiest one percent of all Americans, and the amount of stock market wealth owned by the poorest 50 percent of all Americans is so small that it really doesn’t matter. And those running the Fed certainly understand that their reckless policies will create very painful inflation that will hit average American families extremely hard, but they don’t seem to care. At this point, they figure that asset values must be protected at all costs, and that is going to continue to expand the absolutely massive gap between the rich and the poor in this country.
Over the past 3 weeks, more than 16 million Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits.
Prior to this year, the highest number that we had ever seen in any 3 week span in all of American history was about 2 million.
It is a collapse of unprecedented magnitude, and things have already gotten so bad that even “the Happiest Place on Earth” is conducting mass layoffs…
Walt Disney World Resort will furlough 43,000 union workers while its theme parks remain closed as authorities restrict large gatherings due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Service Trades Council Union.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Limits to Growth and the COVID-19 epidemic
Limits to Growth and the COVID-19 epidemic
Forty-eight years ago I led an 18-month study at MIT on the causes and consequences of growth in population and material production on the planet earth through the year 2100. “If the present growth trends … continue unchanged” we concluded, “the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.”
To illustrate this conclusion, we published a set of 13 scenarios generated by World3, the computer model built by my team. In those scenarios major global indices, such as industrial output per capita, typically stopped growing and began to decline between 2015 and 2050.
The current epidemic does not prove we were right.
When climate scientists are asked if a particular storm proves their theory of climate change, they point out that a model of long-term continuous change can not predict, nor be corroborated by a short-term discrete event. There have always been catastrophic storms. But, the climatologists point out, increasingly frequent and violent storms are consistent with the climate change thesis.
World3 is a model of continuous interactions between population, resources, and capital over the long term. In the context of 200 years, the COVID-19 pandemic is a short-term, discrete event. There have always been plagues, but increasingly frequent and violent epidemics are consistent with the limits to growth thesis.
There are two main causative links.
First, the explosive growth of humanity’s population and economy has stressed natural ecosystems, lowering their capacity to self-regulate, and making breakdowns such as epidemics more likely. In the recent past global society has been confronted with MERS, Ebola, Zika, SARS, and H1N1 plus major outbreaks of measles and cholera. And now we have COVID-19.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Coronavirus Shutdown: The End of Globalization and Planned Obsolescence – Enter Multipolarity
Coronavirus Shutdown: The End of Globalization and Planned Obsolescence – Enter Multipolarity
The coronavirus pandemic has shown that the twin processes of globalization and planned obsolescence are deficient and moribund. Globalization was predicated on a number of assumptions including the perpetuity of consumerism, and the withering away of national boundaries as transnational corporations so required.
What we see instead is not a globalization process, but instead a process of rising multipolarity and a rethinking of consumerism itself.
Normally a total market crash and unemployment crisis would usher in a period of militant labor activity, strikes, walk-outs and community-labor campaigns. We’ve seen some of this already. But the ‘medical state of emergency’ we are in, has effectively worked like a ‘lock-out’. The elites have effectively flipped-the-script. Instead of workers now demanding a restoration of wages, hours, and work-place rights, they are clamoring for any chance to work at all, under any conditions handed down. Elites can ‘afford’ to do this because they’ve been given trillions of dollars to do so. See how that works?
All our lives we’ve been misinformed over what a growing economy means, what it looks like, how we identify it. All our lives we’ve been lied to about what technical improvement literally means.
A growing economy in fact means that all goods and services become less expensive. That cuts against inflation. Rather all prices should be deflating – less money ought to buy the same (or the same money ought to buy more). Technical innovation means that goods should last longer, not be planned for obsolescence with shorter lifespans.
Unemployment is good if it parallels price deflation. If both reached a zero-point, the problems we believe we have would be solved.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What the Sunrise Will Show
What the Sunrise Will Show
A storm blew in late last night, dropping trees and powerlines and sweeping the porch of all chairs, bowls, and benches. At 5 a.m. I took a short walk to take stock of the yard and barnyard areas before returning to my desk to type this post. Now, waiting for sunup to take full inventory of the damage seems to echo the world at large: we are all waiting with apprehension for what lies in the wake of the storms.
It is not often that this blog can be accused of prescience, but on February 1st I wrote this:
This past week, off the farm for work, I chanced into a conversation with a computer scientist experienced in modeling disease outbreaks. For a couple of hours, we parsed the data of the coronavirus, looked at his modeling of the numbers, discussed the true fragility of a global economy. He had, with the exception of his current trip, canceled all work-related travel for the next eight weeks. The system will be overloaded during that period, he predicted.
I found myself wondering if it was wrong to find a kernel of hope in the prospect of a global slowdown built on the bones of a possible pandemic. Ten years after the great recession brought housing expansion in our valley to a halt, the maw of our species is being stuffed once again as wooded lots are bulldozed and foundations laid. This frenzy too may end only with the close of the day. The sun sets on everything, eventually.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Little Managers
Little Managers
It’s funny how things go sometimes, how times roll -not just the good ones-. I said last week that all the world’s “leaders” had failed terribly, and I’m not taking that back. They all failed to a horrific extent at their no. 1 task when it comes to Disasters, Pandemics, whatever their respective governments file these events under: Prevention. But now we’re in a whole new world.
Now these failed leaders move into a situation they actually MAY be able to handle. That is, the -crisis- management that inevitably follows AFTER the failure at their no. 1 task of Prevention. They MAY be able to pull this off because it’s what they were trained to do: be little managers. You know them, because every company these days is full of them, and some will make it to biggest little manager status, through blind ambition and/or licking up to previous little managers. Some may even become government ministers. Core characteristic: these people don’t act, they re-act. Prevention is a job they’re absolutely not qualified for
Trump, Macron, BoJo, Merkel, Rutte, Xi, Abe, Conte, you name them, they’re all little managers, they’re not leaders, they have no ideas or visions, at least not original ones. People with original ideas don’t become politicians, not in the climate we have created since the 1950’s. The 20th century was poor anyway when it comes to vision, it was all about money, and no great vision has ever been derived from that.
The last century had Gandhi and Martin Luther King -and I would personally add Muhammad Ali-, and that combination says a lot about what we could have become vs what we have. In a way, the world chose money over itself. The 20th century was when Faust won, when humanity sold its soul. That it also sold its home, its planet, seems almost irrelevant compared to that.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
