COVID-19 notes
Reuters Graphics: Tracking the spread of the novel coronavirus
Financial Times: Coronavirus
tracked: the latest figures as countries fight to contain the pandemic | Free
to read
Now-Dominant
Strain Of Coronavirus Could Be More Contagious Than Original.
Scientists have identified a
new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to
be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the
COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos
National Laboratory. The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated
quickly to the East Coast of the United States and has been the dominant strain
across the world since mid-March, the scientists wrote. In addition to
spreading faster, it may make people vulnerable to a second infection after a first
bout with the disease, the report warned.
The 33-page report was
posted Thursday on BioRxiv, a website that researchers use to share their work
before it is peer-reviewed, an effort to speed up collaborations with
scientists working on COVID-19 vaccines or treatments…:
Spike mutation
pipeline reveals the emergence of a more transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2
Five Steps to
Eradicate COVID-19
The first thing I wrote for
this platform was an explainer on what the Imperial Report Means for Asia.
Ferguson’s Imperial report has now been proven wrong on at least two key
premises but is correct about one for any country not practicing a strategy of
COVID19 eradication.
The first premise they were
wrong about was that this virus is uncontainable. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam,
South Korea, China, Macau, Australia, New Zealand prove this wrong (and
Singapore will likely soon rejoin the group). The second premise was the entire
point of #BendTheCurve – for complex reasons we still don’t fully understand,
hospital over-capacity has proven rare even in places with high attack rates.
Where the model is correct is that not pursuing an eradication strategy
will likely mean that a country will fight a losing battle against this virus
for years. The choices are either ‘do nothing’ or various suppression
strategies that turn off and on until herd immunity (~70%) is reached. Except
there are worrying signs that immunity, either from infection or a vaccine,
might prove short lived. In that nightmare scenario of repeat infections, the
only strategy any locale should take at this still-early stage is eradication:
extinct COVID19 like we did SARS.
Any country that is not actively trying to eradicate COVID-19 within the
next two to three months has explicitly set their nation on a course to fight a
losing battle with COVID-19 for years…
Marc Wathelet : The health situation requires a delay in the
implementation of phase 1a of the lockdown exit strategy. May 2, 2020.
… Belgium is not yet ready to break out of
containment, that’s all. It would be a waste of the efforts of the whole
population to get out of it too early, it would then have to be confined again
and at a greater economic cost. We must wait until the virus reproduction
rate is less than 0.2 and have the sample collection system, the screening and
tracing system all in place, each at the required capacity, and all with
adequate personnel protection: we’re not there yet!
… there is all the necessary evidence in the
scientific literature to demonstrate that transmission by microdroplets
suspended in the air in aerosol is the dominant mode of transmission of
COVID-19. ... Heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems concern not only
buildings but also all means of public transport. It is a source of massive
contamination.
… Likewise, Herman Goossens tells us about the
transmission of the virus by children: “Children are absolutely no risk to
adults and probably not even to older people. Absolutely not. No study has yet
shown that a child has infected an adult or older person, none to date.” This
statement by Herman Goossens is anti-scientific: saying that there is
absolutely no risk of transmission from a child to an adult is based on no
solid evidence, but rather on the absence of studies that would prove this
transmission. It is noted that it would be difficult to have epidemiological
evidence of this transmission since the schools have been closed since
mid-March. Again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The
solid scientific data we have is that the amount of virus present in swabs does
not depend on the age of the individual: there is no significant difference in
the distribution of viral loads when comparing age categories of children and adults,
and this is validated by three methods of statistical analysis
… The possibility that COVID-19 may be linked to a
severe form of vascular disease in children, which requires intensive care,
which can affect the heart and which has features of Kawasaki disease, has been
reported by pediatricians in several countries … Wouldn’t it be wise to
seriously consider these alerts rather than directly minimizing them, as Yves
Van Laethem and Dimitri Van der Linden do? Reopening schools when conditions do
not ensure the safety of either children, school staff or ultimately that of
parents and the rest of the population, while a new virus is circulating for
which we have no treatment, no vaccine, and while this virus can cause severe
illness or even death, it’s actually conducting an experiment on humanity. An
experiment on human beings morally and legally requires the informed consent of
the participants. This consent is not properly informed because of the untruths
expressed about the situation by the government or its representatives.
… since the very beginning of this crisis, the government and its experts have minimized the reality of the danger posed by this new coronavirus. Unfortunately, this error persists, the government and its experts still minimize the reality of the danger posed by this new coronavirus. It’s toxic. The result is that people are confused and the government is making decisions that are not based on the reality of the virus.
Reminder of what that reality is: My dad is an ICU doctor treating COVID-19 patients. Stay Home.
…It’s early May, and there no longer are any excuses
for anyone in the western world not wearing face coverings in public, and
neither are there excuses for countries lacking the capacity to test their
citizens appropriately. Still, in most countries, we are nowhere near that
capacity. That is inexcusable. … The exit strategy is testing while Big Pharma
looks for a vaccine. Good thing we don’t have to wait for the latter, because,
yes, that would risk an indefinite closure. Testing will get us out once our
“leaders” resolve to make it a priority. They should all be voted out of office
for not having done that yet, and take their scientific advisers with them… We
may need to overhaul a whole bunch of things to make sure no such perfectly
preventable failures happen ever again. But you know how people are. And
anyway, we’re in a bit of a bind at the moment. It’s been 125 days since the
first WHO warning, and there are still many rich countries that can’t manage to
test their medical workers, let alone the rest of their people…
The Quarantine is Failing because Our Institutions
Weren’t Built For It
All around us, the quarantine is beginning to die. In
the US, the Southern states are slowly abandoning it and many Midwestern states
are planning to follow. But it’s not just Republicans. European states are
bailing too. If you ask Democrats why states are beginning to defect, they will
tell you it comes down to greed and stupidity. They’ll tell you the rich
Republicans are greedy and the poor Republicans are stupid. But this policy was
never a good fit for either the American or European political systems. To
work, it needed a lot of economic support from regional authorities; it never
got it.
For most of the last century, the social pact in
America has been pretty simple. If you’re willing to work, you get healthcare
and housing. If you’re not willing to work, you lose both. If there are no jobs
available, the government promises to create them, and to take care of your
healthcare and housing in the interim. Full employment protects against
precarity. The quarantine violates this pact by deliberately annihilating
millions of jobs. It intentionally sets about destroying full employment.
If we’re to end full employment, there needs to be an
alternative way to provide healthcare and housing. These things will have to be
guaranteed to us regardless of employment status. That’s really expensive.
Individual US states don’t have the tax revenue to pay for that. The European
Union’s fiscal rules would ordinarily prohibit that kind of spending. To get
it, we’d need action from the federal government and from the EU.
Initially, it looked like we might get it. In the US,
a big $2 trillion stimulus came out. But most of the money was loans to
businesses and direct cash payouts to citizens. The cash payouts were too small
to properly cover healthcare and housing. Much of the cost of the quarantine
continued to fall on US states. Now US states are turning to the federal
government for aid. If they don’t get it, the losses in revenue will overwhelm
them, forcing them to make sweeping cuts to schools, infrastructure, and
pension programs. Congressional Republicans want to withhold the money until
Democratic governors agree to gut their states’ pension programs. Do Democratic
governors want to use federal money to resolve long-standing budget problems?
Of course. But by withholding the money, Republicans make the states skittish about
continuing to take on economic damage. Their voters are getting desperate, and
they don’t have the resources to help, and they can’t rely on the federal
government to provide those resources. So they’ll take their chances and hope
that ending the quarantine in stages gets them some economic relief. …
Peter Turchin: A Tale of Two Countries
Sweden and Denmark are both Nordic countries speaking
similar languages, sharing a lot of culture and a lot of common history. But
they followed very different approaches to managing the Covid-19 pandemic.
Denmark was among the first in Europe to shut down schools, restaurants and
other businesses like beauty salons. Sweden, in contrast, allowed businesses to
stay open and street travel to continue unimpeded. These two countries, thus,
offer us a natural experiment to investigate the effectiveness of lockdown in
controlling Coronavirus. This question is quite important, as lockdown is hugely
disruptive both socially and economically. Currently it looks bad for Sweden… [but…]
OPENING UP. By Zvi
Bar-Yam, Chen Shen, Yaneer Bar-Yam, New England Complex Systems Institute. May 1,
2020.
Before you begin to restart the economy make sure you
are not starting another economic collapse. Premature relaxation of
restrictions will guarantee loss of all that was gained. A premature
relaxation, even briefly, would seed new transmissions that cannot be undone
within weeks.
Conditions and process to follow:…
Including this: …while
restrictions are present, some things are still possible:
1) Going outdoors in an area where other people are
very rare.
2) Meeting one or two people outdoors but staying
18-27 ft (6-9 m) apart (6 ft is not enough). Closer distances are possible
when wind is blowing.
“October 2020,” said emerging diseases expert Amesh
Adalja of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, “won’t look
nothing like October 2019.”
And neither will October 2021, according to an
analysis released on Thursday by epidemiologist Michael Osterholm of the
University of Minnesota and his colleagues. They envision three possible
futures, depicted as seascapes, their waves of different heights and widths
approaching the unseen and unsuspecting beachcombers on a placid shore.
The effect of stay-at-home orders on COVID-19 infections in the United
States
Sweden says its coronavirus approach has worked. The
numbers suggest a different story
Small Group Of ‘Superspreaders’ Responsible For 80% Of
Coronavirus Cases, China Study Suggests
An analysis of COVID-19 cases in Shenzhen, China,
found that infection rates in young children were no lower than the
population average, and that women were roughly equally represented as men,
but men were 2.5 times as likely to exhibit severe symptoms.
NEW RESEARCH SUGGESTS SIGNIFICANT UNDERCOUNT OF
CHILDREN WITH CORONAVIRUS
A Mysterious, COVID-Linked Surge In Heart Symptoms Has
Forced Cardiologists To Adapt
The False Dawn of Ending Coronavirus Lockdowns
We’ve pointed out that too many people don’t want
to face up to the fact that conflict between the inevitable force of the
coronavirus and the seeming immovable object of our social and economic
systems, the coronavirus is in charge.
That won’t change until we have a vaccine, which will
either take quite a while or will never be attained, or we have treatments that
reduce the severity of the disease.
This is a pretty depressing state of affairs, and most
people are not wired to confront depressing truths. Even yours truly, who has a
dour nature …
But it appears instead that many Americans are
resorting to magical thinking, that if we just end the lockdowns, things will
go back to status quo ante save some nursing home residents croaking early.
That’s just not happening
The Ars COVID-19 vaccine primer: 100-plus in the
works, 8 in clinical trials
Here's where we are and what may lie ahead for a
vaccine against COVID-19.
Generally, vaccines must go through three
progressively more stringent human trial phases before they are considered safe
and effective. The phases assess the candidates’ safety profile, the strength
of the immune responses they trigger, and how good they are at actually
protecting people from infection and disease.
Most vaccine candidates don’t make it. By some
estimates, more than 90 percent fail. And, though a pandemic-propelled timeline
could conceivably deliver a vaccine in as little as 18 months, most vaccines
take years—often more than 10 years, in fact—to go from preclinical vetting to
a syringe in a doctor’s office. … Researchers already have reason to be a
little anxious about the safety of any COVID-19 vaccine. When they tried in the
past to make vaccines against some of SARS-CoV-2’s coronavirus relatives, they
found a small number of instances when candidate vaccines seemed to make
infections worse.
When will we get the Covid-19 vaccine?
There are, I think, three possible futures for the
coronavirus pandemic. Either nearly everyone gets it, and the survivors stay
immune, and we get herd immunity that way; or it becomes endemic in the
population, turning up each year like flu; or we get a vaccine.
In the shorter term, there are other options:
decisions to be made about testing and tracing, about when to open schools and
bars and football stadiums, about masks. They’re all important. But we can’t
keep people in their homes forever, and unless we eradicate every single case
of the disease, it will eventually come back. So, as people say, unless
everyone gets it and the disease burns itself out, there’s no going back to
normal until we get a vaccine.
So: when will that happen? There are bullish reports
from Oxford that a new vaccine is showing early promise; that it has protected
inoculated macaques from the virus when unvaccinated ones consistently get
sick. They think that they could get the first few million doses off the
production line and ready for human consumption by September. Other people talk
about being able to return to full economic activity in 18 months.
Not everyone is so hopeful, though. A report by a
biopharma analyst for the investment bank SVB Leerink, titled “Sober Up! 25
Reasons Not to Count on COVID Vaccine for Herd Immunity in 1-2 years”, suggests
that it could be years, rather than months – attesting gloomily that “There is
absolutely no evidence that a vaccine can protect against human infection with
SARS-nCoV2” and that new kinds of RNA- or DNA-based vaccines are so far
completely untested.
As I said last week, predictions are hard, especially
about the future. I don’t know which of the two extremes is more likely. But I
thought I could go through some of the challenges.
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could have been prevented
After SARS-CoV, a number of laboratories continued
their research on the virus, but big Pharma lost interest in the virus –
because it had disappeared from the face of the Earth. There was no money to be
made in SARS-CoV antivirals or vaccines, so none were made. As a result, when
SARS-CoV-2 emerged in late 2019, humanity was completely unable to stop its
inexorable spread around the globe.
… All of this research and more is taking place after
the fact – too late to impact the pandemic. Companies are now motivated because
the profit to be had is clear. Until such therapies are available – too late to
impact the 2020 outbreak – we are left with testing antiviral drugs that were
developed for other purposes, and they are not ideal. One that is being highly
touted is Remdesivir, a drug that must be given intravenously (it is not
sufficiently absorbed after oral administration) which means it is typically
given only to very sick patients. By that time, virus loads in the lung are
already low and giving an antiviral drug will have little impact. We could have
had so much more than this.
… Our model of how we make life-saving vaccines and
antiviral drugs has to change. We cannot be dependent on for-profit companies
and governments with lack of vision to save our lives.
Regular Related Fare:
Investing Legend Sees A Second Great Depression For Stocks By 2023
Kiril Sokoloff, author of the weekly WILTW (What I Learned This Week)
newsletter through his advisory firm 13D Global Strategy & Research,
… How does Sokoloff - who has traditionally been upbeat, optimistic and
generally bullish - justify his outlook so apocalyptic it could be taken from a
post on that tinfoil conspiracy theory website Zero Hedge? Here's how:
"The more debt you add [via monetary and even some fiscal policy],
the more unproductive the debt becomes,” says Sokoloff, who is now positioned
at the dining table in front of his screen. It’s not a popular view these days.
Austerity is out, and MMT — the notion that a country that controls its own
currency can print it freely to fund deficit spending without worry — is in.
(MMT stands for “modern monetary theory” or “magic money tree”, depending on
your viewpoint.) But Sokoloff believes the stimulus programmes being launched
in the US, Europe and many other parts of the world will very likely end in
tears.
“I think we’re at the beginning of a long-term period of deflation,
falling prices and the loss of pricing power. The only way out of it will be to
have a long period of austerity, and to get the US savings rate up
dramatically.”
Dr. Lacy Hunt, Hoisington Investment Management Company:
We had trouble coming out of the last three recessions, two of which were
very mild, the 1991, 2001, they were mild recessions. But they were both
recessions that were heavily influenced by the beginning surge of over
indebtedness. And then of course we had difficulty coming out of the 2009
recession.
But if you go back and you look at the spread between the T-bill rate and
the long Treasury bond, after each of those recessions, we had a prolonged
period in which the shape of the yield curve, the steepness of the yield curve
was 300 to 400 basis points for several years. After the 2001, 1991, 2008-2009
recessions, there's no way to generate that type of steep yield curve. And so
that will tend to undermine the viability of the banks and the financial
intermediaries. I personally don't know of any historic situations where you
can have strong economies without strong financial intermediaries. Look at
Japan.
[A deflationary period] will anchor the Treasury yield curve to the zero
bound. And the yield curve will be very flat. Very, very flat. And that yield
curve anchored to the zero bound will be very persistent. And by the way, that
will also add to the inefficacy of monetary policy.
Lance Roberts: The Fed is now
permanently stuck at zero.
… The debt problem exposes the risk posed to the Fed and why they are now
forever trapped at the zero-bound. With an economy now $20 Trillion more in
debt than it was before the financial crisis, any small increases in interest
rates have almost immediate and catastrophic results on a debt-dependent
economy. …
End Game: History is pretty clear about future outcomes
from the Fed’s current actions. More importantly, these actions are coming at a
time where there were already tremendous headwinds plaguing
future economic growth:
An aging demographic; A heavily indebted economy; A decline in exports; Slowing
domestic economic growth rates; An underemployed younger demographic; An
inelastic supply-demand curve; Weak industrial production; Dependence on
productivity increases
The lynchpin, like Japan, remains demographics and interest rates. As the
aging population grows becoming a net drag on “savings,” the dependency on the
“social welfare net” will continue to expand. The problem is that after a
decade of pulling forward future consumption to stimulate economic activity, a
further expansion of the wealth gap, increased indebtedness, and low rates of
economic growth, will weigh on future economic opportunity for the masses.
China faces an
economic reckoning as Covid-19 turns world against globalisation
PPP Program Was
Not Designed To Help Small Business aka: Everyone is focusing on the wrong problem with the PPP program.
Study: 71
percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits
How
Neoliberalism Destroyed Capitalism
The Fed broke what was left of capitalism: there is very little that is
good left when the allocation system doesn’t work even by the terms of
capitalism.
One of the effects is the complete bungling of Coronavirus in America and
the UK, the heartlands of neoliberalism. Another effect is suggested by this:
More than 40% of the U.S.’s 30 million small
businesses could close permanently in the next six months because of the
pandemic: Chamber of Commerce survey.
The stock market is doing fine, because it was bailed out. Small
businesses aren’t, because they weren’t.
Covid is no one’s fault, but how it is dealt with is a policy decision.
That policy decision reveals that the folks who run our economy will take care
of the parts of the economy they directly benefit from and won’t help other
parts of the economy.
First Wave Of
Disastrous Real Economy Data
.. It seems quite likely that it will take a few months for data to
settle into a new steady state. There should be a return to work as
stay-at-home orders are lifted, and the sectors that see a burst in demand
hire. However, the second-order effects will also result in job losses, and
relaxation of health codes will not stop those losses.
·
The fracking industry has had to throttle back
production, and it appears unlikely to revive any time soon.
·
Retailers that were severely weakened by
private equity owners using excessive leverage will fail. Delivery will rise at
the expense of retail sales floor employees.
·
Restaurants will pivot to delivery, which
eliminates the need for wait staff.
·
Plane travel is not going to revive any time
soon, and so mass tourism sites are in deep trouble.
·
The main risk is that austerity policies (at
the state and local level) will add to demand destruction.
Art Berman: GAME OVER FOR
OIL, THE ECONOMY IS NEXT
Coronavirus has changed everything. The longer it lasts, the less the
future will look anything like the past.
Most people, policy makers and economists are energy blind and cannot,
therefore, fully grasp the gravity or the consequences of what is happening.
For Albert
Edwards This Is The One Chart Proving Just How Insane The Market Has Become
Edwards’ conclusion: “I still believe we will see negative Fed
Funds soon”
Rogoff: The Case for
Deeply Negative Interest Rates
For those who viewed negative interest rates as a bridge too far for central
banks, it might be time to think again. Right now, in the United States, the
Federal Reserve – supported both implicitly and explicitly by the Treasury – is
on track to backstop virtually every private, state, and city credit in the
economy. Many other governments have felt compelled to take similar steps. A
once-in-a-century (we hope) crisis calls for massive government intervention,
but does that have to mean dispensing with market-based allocation mechanisms?
Blanket debt guarantees are a great device if one believes that recent
market stress was just a short-term liquidity crunch, soon to be alleviated by
a strong sustained post-COVID-19 recovery. But what if the rapid recovery fails
to materialize? What if, as one suspects, it takes years for the US and global
economy to claw back to 2019 levels? If so, there is little hope that all
businesses will remain viable, or that every state and local government will
remain solvent.
A better bet is that nothing will be the same. Wealth will be destroyed on
a catastrophic scale, and policymakers will need to find a way to ensure that,
at least in some cases, creditors take part of the hit, a process that will
play out over years of negotiation and litigation. For bankruptcy lawyers and
lobbyists, it will be a bonanza, part of which will come from pressing
taxpayers to honor bailout guarantees. Such a scenario would be an unholy mess.
Now, imagine that, rather than shoring up markets solely via guarantees,
the Fed could push most short-term interest rates across the economy to near or
below zero. Europe and Japan already have tiptoed into negative rate territory.
Suppose central banks pushed back against today’s flight into government debt
by going further, cutting short-term policy rates to, say, -3% or lower.
For starters, just like cuts in the good old days of positive interest
rates, negative rates would lift many firms, states, and cities from default.
If done correctly –… negative rates would operate similarly to normal monetary
policy, boosting aggregate demand and raising employment. So, before carrying
out debt-restructuring surgery on everything, wouldn’t it better to try a dose
of normal monetary stimulus? …
What do negative
US interest rates mean?
Not the cheese!! French farmers
sound alarm in cheese market meltdown
Food
Banks Can’t Go On Like This
Regular Fare:
zilch
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
“I have published these words in order to prevent them from becoming true. If we do not stubbornly keep in mind the strong probability of the disaster, and if we do not act accordingly, we will be unable to find a way out. There is nothing more frightful than to be right.—And if some, paralyzed by the gloomy likelihood of the catastrophe, have already lost courage, they still have a chance to prove their love of man by heeding the cynical maxim: ‘Let’s go on working as though we had the right to hope. Our despair is none of our business.’” – Günther Anders
From: A Failure of the
Imagination – COVID-19 and Catastrophe
More:
What the COVID-19 crisis has revealed is the extent to which an enforced cultural
bias to believe that “things will get better” has left us unprepared (mentally
and emotionally) for a situation in which things keep getting worse.…. At the
present moment a defiant commitment to the belief that “things will get better”
may really be the main thing keeping some people going. But given all that has
happened, we are fooling ourselves if we aren’t seriously preparing for the
much more likely scenario in which things keep getting worse.
…The great social critic and philosopher of impending doom, Günther
Anders coined a term that perfectly encapsulates the issue: Apokalypseblindheit
which translates roughly to “blindness towards the apocalypse” or “apocalypse
blinders”. For Anders the problem was that people refused to genuinely see the
potential for catastrophic disaster, and as they failed (or refused) to see it,
they were unable (and unwilling) to take the necessary steps.
…
A society that celebrates technological solutions, fixates on progress,
and maligns those who raise the specter of risks tends not to be prepared for
disasters. After all, such a society treats disasters as horrific events that
breach normality, rather than recognizing that an expectation of disasters
needs to be folded into normality (and therefore more needs to be done to
prepare).
Why did the US not better prepare for COVID-19? For the same reason it
did not better prepare for Hurricane Katrina, or Hurricane Sandy, or Hurricane
Maria – and for the same reason why the US is not doing more to prepare for
climate change. Because we cannot imagine that the catastrophe is really going
to happen. The inability, or refusal, to believe that the worst can genuinely
happen, means that one will not bother to take the steps to prevent, or
prepare, for that eventuality.
Seafloor
Discovery Shows The Ocean's Undergoing a Change Not Seen in 10,000 Years
the ocean is more sensitive to modern climate changes than previously
thought, and we will have to adapt.
Why the
Renewable Rocket Has Failed to Launch
Part of the disconnect is that most analysts incorrectly use price, cost
and value interchangeably. The price is what I pay as a consumer. The cost is
what the provider pays to produce the product. The value is what the product
creates for the consumer and society.
In the case of oil, the price is now about $24/barrel. The cost is about
$65. A barrel of oil contains ~4.5 years of human labor in megawatt hours,
joules or whatever unit you prefer. The value is about $117,000 using a median
U.S. income of $26,000/year. Oil has the greatest energy density of any of the
available sources today.
And that is the problem for renewable energy. It has a much lower energy
density so it can never provide the same value regardless of its price or its
cost. The only way to meet current energy needs with renewables is to greatly
expand the number of units—solar panels or wind turbines—that provide the
energy. To provide more energy output requires more energy input–pretty basic
physics. That in turn creates more emissions and confounds the purpose of
cleaner energy.
…
A 100% renewable economy is fine only if we are willing to accept a lower
living standard and much smaller population than we have today.
Humans have never gone from a higher to a lower density energy source. A
renewable energy world would have a smaller and less productive economy because
of the lower energy density of its primary source.
I am an advocate for solar and wind, and I take climate change very
seriously. It is, however, critical that people know the truth: the world will
be much poorer when fossil energy is abandoned.
Many believe that the Coronavirus crisis will hasten the transition to
renewable energy. I believe the opposite will occur. As I wrote last month, “A
world in economic depression will default to the cheapest and most productive fuels.
Oil will be cheap and abundant for a long time. There will be little money or
appetite for the massive equipment changes that renewable sources require.
Climate change will not be high in the consciousness of people struggling to
survive.”
Long Read(s):
From 9/11 to 2008 and COVID-19: Signs and Wonders of a Collapsing Global (Dis)order. Zero Anthropology.
Hat tip from nakedcapitalism: “This is part 1 of 5. Part 1 is good. Part 2 is Great!!! Shredding globalization
and neoliberal individualism. Part 3 is a much deserved smack down of America.
Part 4 gets a bit existential. Part 5
looks towards the future.”
Big Thoughts:
Pepe Escobar: The deeper roots
of Chinese demonization
Hegel saw history moving east to west – 'Europe thus absolutely being the
end of history, Asia the beginning'
Fasten your seat belts: the US hybrid war against China is bound to go on
frenetic overdrive, as economic reports are already identifying Covid-19 as the
tipping point when the Asian – actually Eurasian – century truly began.
The US strategy remains, essentially, full spectrum dominance, with the
National Security Strategy obsessed by the three top “threats” of China, Russia
and Iran. China, in contrast, proposes a “community of shared destiny” for mankind,
mostly addressing the Global South.
The predominant US narrative in the ongoing information war is now set in
stone: Covid-19 was the result of a leak from a Chinese biowarfare lab. China
is responsible. China lied. And China has to pay.
The new normal tactic of non-stop China demonization is deployed not only
by crude functionaries of the industrial-military-surveillance-media complex.
We need to dig much deeper to discover how these attitudes are deeply embedded
in Western thinking – and later migrated to the “end of history” United States.
Matt Taibbi: The Inevitable
Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is Here
As the Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid
calls for China-style control of the Internet
Screen New Deal: Under Cover of Mass Death, Andrew Cuomo Calls in the Billionaires to
Build a High-Tech Dystopia
Other Fare:
Dirty money piling up in L.A. as coronavirus cripples
international money laundering
ECONOMICS AS IDEOLOGY (1): INTRODUCTION
US Democracy Political Fare:
Believe Women is
Now Believe Obama.
[Tom Perez said] “Barack Obama trusted Joe Biden. I trust Joe Biden. And
those investigations have been done.” There you have it. Believe women has morphed into believe Barack
Obama.. The saintly Obama wouldn’t have
picked Joe as his VP if Joe wasn’t a great guy.
Right? … Surely the DNC should seek the most thorough investigation
before going all-in on Joe Biden. Right?
But the fix has been in since the very beginning. Joe Biden is the nominee, credible
accusations be damned. After all, if
Obama picked him, how can he be anything less than a great and wonderful guy?
If Trump is a
Pathological Liar, What Type of Liar is Biden?
I’ll get to Biden—whose lies, not his gaffes, are what the Blue Team
should worry most about. But first, some of what makes Trump an exceptional and
extraordinary liar, even for a US president. Trump is obviously not the first
politician to have zero allegiance to the truth, but he remains extraordinary —
not merely in the sheer quantity of his lies but also in other ways. The most
obvious area of Trump’s extraordinariness as a liar is his staggering number of
lies.
Fun Fare:
Trump Says To
Drink Lots Of Water, Media Reports He Told Everyone To Drown Themselves
Study Finds It
Statistically Impossible That Your Mom The Best Mom In The World
Quotes of the Week:
Kunstler: “Spring is popping now with
a ferocious energy that can only remind the sullenly sequestered masses that
life is going on without them. Every living thing is busy making-and-doing out
there, except the poor humans, idled without work or purpose. That won’t last
long. People don’t submit automatically to zombification when some pissant
bureaucrats issue them $1200 checks. They yearn to bust out like everything
else on this living planet. And if they can’t do it in a good way, well….”
Pic of the Week:
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