Patrick's Notebook

by Zerohedge.com

This essay is adapted from Mr. Ferguson’s new book, “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe,” which will be published by Penguin Press on May 4. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

In 1957, the U.S. rose to the challenge of the ‘Asian flu’ with stoicism and a high tolerance for risk, offering a stark contrast with today’s approach to Covid-19…

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/But to be young was very heaven!” Wordsworth was talking about France in 1789, but the line applies better to the America of 1957. That summer, Elvis Presley topped the charts with “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.” But we tend to forget that 1957 also saw the outbreak of one of the biggest pandemics of the modern era. Not coincidentally, another hit of that year was “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” by Huey “Piano” Smith & the Clowns.

When seeking historical analogies for Covid-19, commentators have referred more often to the catastrophic 1918-19 “Spanish influenza” than to the flu pandemic of 1957-58. Yet the later episode deserves to be much better known, not just because the public health threat was a closer match to our own but because American society at the time was better prepared—culturally, institutionally and politically—to deal with it.

The “Asian flu”—as it was then uncontroversial to call a contagious disease that originated in Asia—was a novel strain (H2N2) of influenza A. It was first reported in Hong Kong in April 1957, having originated in mainland China two months before, and—like Covid-19—it swiftly went global. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Xinhuanet.com

The Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, blasts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in south China’s Hainan Province, April 29, 2021. China on Thursday sent into space the core module of its space station, kicking off a series of key launch missions that aim to complete the construction of the station by the end of next year

China on Thursday sent into space the core module of its space station, kicking off a series of key launch missions that aim to complete the construction of the station by the end of next year.

The Long March-5B Y2 rocket, carrying the Tianhe module, blasted off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on the coast of the southern island province of Hainan at 11:23 a.m. (Beijing Time).

Tianhe will act as the management and control hub of the space station Tiangong, meaning Heavenly Palace, with a node that could dock with up to three spacecraft at a time for short stays, or two for long, said Bai Linhou, deputy chief designer of the space station at the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.

Tianhe has a total length of 16.6 meters, a maximum diameter of 4.2 meters and a takeoff mass of 22.5 tonnes, and is the largest spacecraft developed by China.

The space station will be a T shape with the core module at the center and a lab capsule on each side. Each module will be over 20 tonnes. When the station docks with both manned and cargo spacecraft, its weight could reach nearly 100 tonnes. » Read the rest of this entry «

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

“A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power.”― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

For good or bad, COVID-19 has changed the way we navigate the world.

It is also redrawing the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up.

Owing in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations, it has become increasingly obvious that we have entered into a new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations.

This powerful international cabal, let’s call it the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

We’ve been inching closer to this global world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which has seen governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, has shifted this transformation into high gear. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Jim Quinn

An entire nation was convinced, by those controlling the narrative, the annual flu was a pandemic by giving it a new name, marketing the hell out of it, using a faulty test to artificially inflate cases, and understanding they were dealing with compliant obedient sheep. If they can make you believe that, they can make you believe anything

“Fools, as it has long been said, are indeed separated, soon or eventually, from their money. So, alas, are those who, responding to a general mood of optimism, are captured by a sense of their own financial acumen. Thus it has been for centuries; thus in the long future it will also be.” ― John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria

The signs of an epic bubble of historic proportions are everywhere. The stock market is a bubble, with valuations exceeding 2001. Margin debt is at all-time highs. The bond market is a bubble, with the Fed artificially suppressing rates and pumping trillions of QE into Wall Street. Housing is experiencing another bubble, with prices now far exceeding the 2005 peak. Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto-currencies are a bubble, being driven by the excess liquidity sloshing around the system. A joke crypto currency like Dogecoin soars into the stratosphere because money has no meaning anymore.

Corporate, government and personal debt are at all-time highs and heading higher. Clueless millennial dolts are using their stimmy checks to day trade on Robinhood. Now the shysters have come up with a ridiculous concept called Non-fungible tokens (NFT), which has created a further frenzy of greed and fleecing. We are busy selling worthless electronic concepts to each other at higher and higher prices. The world has truly gone mad. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Ryan McMaken

President Biden announced last week that he planned to remove all combat troops from Afghanistan by September, which he says will mark the end of what is now a twenty-year war in the central Asian country.

A week earlier, the US and Iraq reaffirmed a deal to withdraw “any remaining combat forces” from Iraq, and to further wind down the US involvement there, which dates back to the 2003 invasion.

In both cases, of course, the stated plans to end military intervention have been framed in polite language designed to make it look like the US is leaving on its own terms—and also to allow the US regime some level of plausibility when it claims “mission accomplished.”

In reality, of course, both Iraq and Afghanistan are just two more wars that the United States has lost in a long list of botched military interventions dating back to Vietnam and Korea. Moreover, these withdrawals signal the US’s continued geopolitical decline in a world that is becoming multipolar and highly motivated to bring to a final end the US’s vanishing “unipolar moment.”

But what exactly do we mean by “lost” in this context? Well, by the standards of the objectives presented by the US regime itself when these wars began, these wars are complete failures. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Paul Alexander

Is there a chance to recover and to effectively vanquish Covid-19, at least to end the pandemic and return to normal lives again? We function here as prognosticators and contrarians that seek to inform and share and to learn, and we thus argue yes, and while we were blindsided and there were grave initial mistakes and some very consequential such as the very flawed and botched initial testing by the CDC that left the United States vulnerable and flying blind and allowed the virus to seed for 4 to 5 weeks initially, the following are the key components of the Covid-19 response that should have been enacted from inception (save 3-4 weeks initially to understand the pathogen) and which should be urgently implemented based on the experiences over the last 14 months or so. In our opinion.

We offer this as a pathway forward and ask that we consider these as we try to deal with essentially failed approaches thus far, and use our common sense and deductive reasoning and logic to interpret the science and make informed decisions. We call on the medical experts who inform governments to likely for the first time, use some common sense and logic and some critical thinking; if it is all about the science, we implore the medical decision-makers to follow the data and science and to use it and use critical analysis of the data; we argue they have not; these decision-makers must understand the impact of their policies and stopping Covid ‘at all costs’ is not a policy and not attainable; if a policy is devastating and causing great harm to the population, you stop it, you do not harden it and reapply it as that is patently absurd and harmful; as such, we also ask our decision-makers to conduct the appropriate hazard analyses and cost-effective analyses.

Our pathway forward is as follows:

» Read the rest of this entry «

by zerohedge.com

Courtney Ann Taylor

While Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter are chock full of virtue-signaling sheep declaring their double, triple, quadruple masking efforts; their personal sacrifices for the greater good of all mankind (against a virus that leave 99.7% of those infected unharmed); and blindly following the ‘science’ from political operatives who need a crisis to drive their agenda; one Georgia mom has had enough.

Instead of virtue-signaling to the world, Georgia mother Courtney Ann Taylor blasted Gwinnett County Board of Education members for requiring children to wear masks despite evidence that kids are largely safe from COVID-19, demanding, “take these masks off of my child.”

Taylor slammed the board who for months have proclaimed the importance of “social, emotional health” telling them, “if you truly mean that, you would end the mask requirement tonight. Tonight.”

“This is not March 2020 anymore,” the mom of a 6-year-old rage…

“We have three vaccines, every adult in the state of Georgia that wants that vaccine is eligible to get it, right now, and every one of us knows that young children are not affected by this virus.”

» Read the rest of this entry «