Guest Post by John Stossel
Coronavirus is frightening.
I’m working from home, practicing “social distancing.” Experts say it’ll help “flatten the curve” so fewer people will be infected simultaneously. Then hospitals won’t be overwhelmed.
But the infection rate grows. Doctors and hospitals may yet be overwhelmed.
It didn’t have to get to this point.
Coronavirus deaths leveled off in South Korea.
Continue reading “The Red Tape Pandemic”
U.S.—The party known for being loving and tolerant of everyone also wished for the death of their political opponent this week, with many Democrats on social media erupting in celebration as Senator Rand Paul announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus.
Continue reading “Party Of Love And Tolerance Wishes Death On Political Opponent”
Guest Post by Simon Black
[Editor’s note: This letter was written by Tim Staermose, Sovereign Man’s Chief Investment Strategist and Editor of the 4th Pillar newsletter.]
I’m writing from my remote rural villa in Southern Bali. I made a mad dash to get back here from Hong Kong before the borders effectively shut to visitors, and airlines cancelled virtually all flights.
Nearly a quarter of a million tourists and other temporary visitors have left Bali in February and March, and no one has come in to replace them.
Up to 80% of the island’s economy relies directly or indirectly on the tourist trade. So, it’s going to be very hard for most people here to make ends meet for as long this coronavirus pandemic, and the extreme government measures instituted to try and deal with it, last.
Continue reading “If you think it’s too late, think again. There’s still time”
Summary:
Guest Post by Tom Luongo
The fear over COVID-19 has gone ballistic. We have moved from rational precaution to mass insanity in a matter of days. The speed with which those seeking power are moving is astounding.
With each passing day another person is jumping up, Alexander Haig like, to assume powers they do not have to demand control over the population they legally govern.
Continue reading “Will We Allow the Coronapocalypse to Bail Out the Failure of Socialism?”
Guest Post by Pat Buchanan
How long can the shutdown be sustained if the necessities of life for the unemployed and unpaid begin to run out? Is it necessary to create an economic and social crisis to solve the medical crisis?
“We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” tweeted the president on Sunday night, adding that, after the current 15-day shutdown, “we will make a decision as to which way we want to go.”
President Trump is said to be privately expressing a deepening concern at the damage the coronavirus shutdown is doing to the U.S. economy and debating whether it can be safely reopened.
Though castigated for his remark, Trump has a point.
Continue reading “Must We Kill the Economy to Kill the Virus?”
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Hysterical headlines today – Sunday, March 21 – about the number of Americans supposedly identified as having been infected with Coronavirus. The modifier supposedly used because the tests being used to identify the virus are of dubious reliability. But, regardless – 25,493 as of today. A big number, banner-headlined across the Internet.
But there’s another number you have to look for, which isn’t being banner-headlined around the Internet.
307.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Democratic lawmakers are blocking the stimulus bill proposed in Congress, slamming their Republican colleagues for refusing to include reparations for transgender Native Americans affected by climate change.
Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
I never subscribed to the nostrums of Marxism, but old Karl sure had a point when he said, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Is that exactly where we’re at, or what?
Guest Post by The Zman
Everyone is familiar with the garden gnome, the little ornamental figurines that look the dwarfs from children’s stories. Most people assume they originated in Germany, but they have their roots in ancient Rome. Small stone statues depicting the Greco-Roman fertility god Priapus were placed in the garden of Roman citizens. Like many Roman customs, the use of garden statues spread throughout the empire and eventually we got what we now call the garden gnome.
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” ― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
“A Crisis mood does not guarantee that the new governing policies will be well designed or will work as intended.
To the contrary: Crisis eras are studded with faulty leadership and inept management—from President Lincoln’s poor record of choosing generals to President Roosevelt’s colossal blunders with such alphabet soup agencies as the AAA, NRA, and WPA.
What makes a Crisis special is the public’s willingness to let leaders lead even when they falter and to let authorities be authoritative even when they make mistakes.
Wars become more likely and are fought with efficacy and finality. The risk of revolution is high—as is the risk of civil war, since the community that commands the greatest loyalty does not necessarily coincide with political (or geographic) boundaries. Leaders become more inclined to define enemies in moral terms, to enforce virtue militarily, to refuse all compromise, to commit large forces in that effort, to impose heavy sacrifices on the battlefield and home front, to build the most destructive weapons contemporary minds can imagine, and to deploy those weapons if needed to obtain an enduring victory.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
The quote by Lenin has been reverberating in my conscience for the last few weeks. I believe the quote from Strauss & Howe provides context to what has happened and will happen as this Fourth Turning advances towards its climax. I began a new role in my organization two weeks ago, after only seven months in my previous role. I’ve been in non-stop crisis meetings, as this coronavirus pandemic has flipped everyone’s world upside down. As of Thursday, we were ordered to work from home.
Some people think we can do better than China, Italy, or other countries, because of various (mostly stupid, some not, but all fanciful) reasons, or they point to how well South Korea and Japan handled/are handling this outbreak. There’s a reason for that performance.
Nota bene*:
SK has 22 hospital beds per 1000 people.
Japan has 13.4 per 1000.
Italy has 3.2 per 1000.
The US has 2.8 per 1000.
The UK has 2.8 per 1000.
Canada has 2.7 per 1000.
We’re not going to do as well as countries that have 4 to 7 times as many available hospital beds as we have.
To pull off a South Korea, we’d need 6.3M hospital beds, instead of 900K.
And BTW, we couldn’t staff those beds (with doctors, nurses, etc.) in 30 years of WWII full mobilization effort. You’d need another 5M doctors and 10M nurses, which is also 500% more of either than we have right now.
So that’s not going to happen.
Guest Post by Tomas Pueyo
This article follows Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now, with over 40 million views and 30 translations. If you agree with this article, consider signing the corresponding White House petition. Translations available in 19 languages at the bottom. Running list of endorsements here. 4 million views so far.
Summary of the article: Strong coronavirus measures today should only last a few weeks, there shouldn’t be a big peak of infections afterwards, and it can all be done for a reasonable cost to society, saving millions of lives along the way. If we don’t take these measures, tens of millions will be infected, many will die, along with anybody else that requires intensive care, because the healthcare system will have collapsed.
Within a week, countries around the world have gone from: “This coronavirus thing is not a big deal” to declaring the state of emergency. Yet many countries are still not doing much. Why?
Every country is asking the same question: How should we respond? The answer is not obvious to them.
Americans are split on whether to trust news media with information regarding the coronavirus outbreak, according to a new poll.
As Statista’s Willem Roper notes, a joint poll conducted by NPR, PBS NewsHour and Marist, shows that 47 percent of U.S. adults responded by saying “not very much” or “not at all” when asked how much they trusted news media with coronavirus information.
Continue reading “Half Of Americans Don’t Trust Mainstream Media’s COVID-19 Coverage”
Submitted by P2
Guest Post by Brian Cates
If you’d told me just a few weeks ago that Trump Derangement Syndrome had reached the point that prominent American politicians and news media people would be openly rooting for a major pandemic to collapse the financial markets, I would not have believed it. Surely, they would never go THAT far, I would have thought.
And then I watched it happen before my eyes.
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,
“Reality is that which when we stop believing in it doesn’t go away.”
– Philip K. Dick
In March of 2003, we broke ground on the first real thing I ever built. The house I currently live in. Then I understood that there was only one way this economic and political system ended, badly.
And I knew then that I was woefully unprepared for the challenge. When I started building my house I could barely drive a nail straight. By the time the first part of it was finished I could lay a square of asphalt shingles with the best of them…. if only until about 10 am or so.
Continue reading “Welcome To The Coronapocalypse: “Now The World Gets Real””