Patrick's Notebook

By Robert Miller, GilmoreHealth.com

Contrary to the narrative that is being pushed by the mainstream that the COVID 19 virus was the result of a natural mutation and that it was transmitted to humans from bats via pangolins, Dr Luc Montagnier the man who discovered the HIV virus back in 1983 disagrees and is saying that the virus was man made.

Professor Luc Montagnier, 2008 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, claims that SARS-CoV-2 is a manipulated virus that was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Chinese researchers are said to have used coronaviruses in their work to develop an AIDS vaccine. HIV DNA fragments are believed to have been found in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.

We knew that the Chinese version of how the coronavirus emerged was increasingly under attack, but here’s a thesis that tells a completely different story about the Covid-19 pandemic, which is already responsible for more than 110,000 deaths worldwide. According to Professor Luc Montagnier, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for “discovering” HIV as the cause of the AIDS epidemic together with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that was manipulated and accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, in the last quarter of 2019. According to Professor Montagnier, this laboratory, known for its work on coronaviruses, tried to use one of these viruses as a vector for HIV in the search for an AIDS vaccine!

“With my colleague, bio-mathematician Jean-Claude Perez, we carefully analyzed the description of the genome of this RNA virus,” explains Luc Montagnier, interviewed by Dr Jean-François Lemoine for the daily podcast at Pourquoi Docteur, adding that others have already explored this avenue: Indian researchers have already tried to publish the results of the analyses that showed that this coronavirus genome contained sequences of another virus, … the HIV virus (AIDS virus), but they were forced to withdraw their findings as the pressure from the mainstream was too great. » Read the rest of this entry «

Data from the previous two weeks:

By James Rickards, The Daily Reckoning

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. » Read the rest of this entry «

By John W. Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute

Cash may well become a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic

As these COVID-19 lockdowns drag out, more and more individuals and businesses are going cashless (for convenience and in a so-called effort to avoid spreading coronavirus germs), engaging in online commerce or using digital forms of currency (bank cards, digital wallets, etc.). As a result, physical cash is no longer king.

Yet there are other, more devious, reasons for this re-engineering of society away from physical cash: a cashless society—easily monitored, controlled, manipulated, weaponized and locked down—would play right into the hands of the government (and its corporate partners).

To this end, the government and its corporate partners-in-crime have been waging a subtle war on cash for some time now.

What is this war on cash?

It’s a concerted campaign to shift consumers towards a digital mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.

According to economist Steve Forbes, “The real reason for this war on cash—start with the big bills and then work your way down—is an ugly power grab by Big Government. People will have less privacy: Electronic commerce makes it easier for Big Brother to see what we’re doing, thereby making it simpler to bar activities it doesn’t like, such as purchasing salt, sugar, big bottles of soda and Big Macs.”

Much like the war on drugs and the war on terror, this so-called “war on cash” is being sold to the public as a means of fighting terrorists, drug dealers, tax evaders and now COVID-19 germs. » Read the rest of this entry «

That was the week that was!

• Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont ended his presidential candidacy on Wednesday, concluding a quest for the presidency that elevated him as a standard-bearer of American liberalism, clearing the way for a general election between Joe Biden Jr. and Donald Trump, at a time of national crisis.
• The US saw a surge in covid-19 deaths with a total of more than 8900 deaths from Monday through Friday, and a dubious record number of more than 2000 confirmed deaths on Friday alone.
• With social distancing, lockdowns, work-at-home policies, and the ‘temporary’ closure of many businesses to thwart the spread of the pandemic, more than 16 million people have lost their jobs and filed for unemployment benefits in the past 3 weeks with a total of 6.6 million new claims this week, rivaling the unemployment rates not seen since the great depression of the 1930’s.
• But as Main Street suffered, Wall Street partied. Despite the ever increasing havoc being wreaked upon the economy by covid-19 and the unprecedented number of unemployed, the stock market had it’s greatest week in decades, thanks to the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill and the $4 trillion credit accommodation to the Federal Reserve; corporate welfare and socialism for the wealthy.
• In short, it was a momentous week, one in which we learned that the Fed will do anything – even if it means destroying the dollar completely – to rescue the super rich, while everyone else was getting devastated. And nothing captures the zeitgeist better than the above screen grab courtesy of Justin Horwitz who aptly titled the tweet “Everything that is wrong with America, in one image.”

COVID-19 statistics

total Test Results == 2,666,022
positive == 523,199
negative == 2,142,823
pending == 16,593
hospitalized Currently == 51,409
in ICU Currently == 13,563
on Ventilator Currently == 5,978
recovered == 24,196
last Modified == Sat Apr 11, 2020 10:12 PM UTC
deaths == 20,339

by Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
A hedge fund that serves a bunch of billionaire family offices? Who cares? They don’t get to summer in the Hamptons? Who cares!”

Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya stunned CNBC anchor Scott Wapner and generated widespread applause on social media by declaring in a television interview Thursday that the U.S. government should let hedge funds and billionaire CEOs “get wiped out” by the coronavirus-induced economic collapse and instead focus its attention on rescuing Main Street.

When Wapner, seemingly incredulous at what he was hearing, asked Palihapitiya why he would support the collapse of large companies, the Social Capital CEO said “this is a lie that’s been purported by Wall Street.”

“When a company fails, it does not fire their employees, it goes through a packaged bankruptcy,” said Palihapitiya. “If anything what happens is the people who have the pensions inside the companies, the employees of these companies, end up owning more of the company. The people that get wiped out are the speculators that own the unsecured tranches of debt or the folks that own the equity. And by the way, those are the rules of the game. That’s right. These are the people that purport to be the most sophisticated investors in the world. They deserve to get wiped out.”

“Why does anybody ‘deserve,’ using your word, to get wiped out from a crisis created like this?” replied Wapner.

“Just be clear, like, who are we talking about?” said Palihapitiya, himself a billionaire. “A hedge fund that serves a bunch of billionaire family offices? Who cares? Let ’em get wiped out. Who cares? They don’t get to summer in the Hamptons? Who cares!” » Read the rest of this entry «