Western civilization, led by the US government and media, has embarked upon a campaign of mass psychological terrorism designed to cover for the collapsing economy, set up a new pretext for Wall Street’s ongoing plunder expedition, radically escalate the police state, deeply traumatize people into submission to total social conformity, and radically aggravate the anti-social, anti-human atomization of the people.

The pretext for this abomination is an epidemic which objectively is comparable to the seasonal flu and is caused by the same kind of Coronavirus we’ve endured so long without totalitarian rampages and mass insanity.

The global evidence is converging on the facts: This flu is somewhat more contagious than the norm and is especially dangerous for those who are aged and already in poor health from pre-existing maladies. It is not especially dangerous for the rest of the population.

The whole concept of “lockdowns” is exactly upside down, exactly the wrong way any sane society would respond to this circumstance.

It’s the vulnerable who should be shielded while nature takes its course among the general population, who should go about life as usual. Dominionist-technocratic rigidity can’t prevent an epidemic from cycling through the population in spite of the delusions of that religion, especially since Western societies began their measures far too late anyway.

So it’s best to let herd immunity develop as fast as it naturally will, at which time the virus recedes from lack of hosts (and is likely to mutate in a milder direction along the way). This is the only way to bring a safer environment for all including the most vulnerable.

The fact that most societies have rejected the sane, scientific route in favor of doomed-to-fail attempts at a forcible violent segregation and sterilization is proof that governments aren’t concerned with the public health (as if we didn’t know that already from a thousand policies of poisoning the environment while gutting the health care system), but are very ardent to use this crisis they artificially generated in order radically to escalate their police state power toward totalitarian goals.

The whole concept of self-isolation and anti-social “distancing” is radically anti-human. We evolved over millions of years to be social creatures living in tight-knit groups. Although modern societies ideologically and socioeconomically work to massify and atomize people, nevertheless almost all of us still seek close human companionship in our lives.

(I suspect most of the internet police-state-mongers are not only fascists at heart but are confirmed misanthropic loners who couldn’t care less about human closeness.)

This terror campaign seeks to blast to pieces any remaining human closeness, which means any remaining humanity as such, the better to isolate individual atoms for subjection to total domination. Arendt wrote profoundly on this goal of totalitarian governments, though even she didn’t envision a state-driven cult of the literal physical repulsion of every atom from every other atom.

So far the people are submitting completely to a terror campaign dedicated to the total eradication of whatever community was left in the world, and especially whatever community was starting to be rebuilt.

Some dream of this terror campaign somehow bringing about a magical collective transformation. They don’t explain how that is supposed to happen when everyone’s so terrorized they’re desperate to detach physically from their own shadows, let alone physically come together with other people. But any kind of political or social action, any kind of movement-building, requires close person-to-person contact.

It seems that for most erstwhile self-alleged dissidents, the fact that social media is no substitute for face-to-face organizing and group action, a fact hitherto universally acknowledged by these dissidents, is another truth suddenly to be jettisoned replaced by its complete antithesis.

Thus the terror campaign is a virus causing those it infects to abdicate all activism and all prospect for all future activism, for as long as they remain insane with the fever of this propaganda terror.

Far more profoundly and evoking despair, the terror campaign is a virus causing those it infects to fear and loathe all human contact, all companionship, all closeness, all things which ever made us human in the first place. Prior totalitarian regimes sought this lack of contact and trust through networks of informers.

These networks are part of today’s terror campaign as well, encouraged from above and spontaneously arising from below as a result of the feeling of terror as well as the exercise of prior petty-evil intentions on the part of petty-evil individuals.

But today’s totalitarian potential is far worse than this. Now the regimes aspiring to total domination have terrorized and brainwashed the vast majority of people into an automatic physical distrust of all other people. One no longer fears that someone is an informer, but fears the very existence of another human being.

Any kind of human relations, from personal friendship and romance to friendly social gatherings and clubs to social and cultural movements become impossible under such circumstances. This threatens to be the end of the very concept of shared humanity, to be replaced by an anthill of slave atoms with no consciousness beyond fear and the most animal concern for food and shelter, which already is allowed or denied in the same way experimenters do with lab rats.

And the more people fear and loathe the literal physical existence of all other people, the more the situation becomes ripe for every epidemic of murder, from the spiking rate of domestic violence and killings to incipient lynch mobs to pogroms to Nazi-style extermination campaigns.

This is the system’s end goal. It’s the logical end where every trend of today leads. All of it is trumped up over an epidemic which objectively is a flu season somewhat rougher than average.

Why do the people want to surrender and throw away all reality and future prospect of shared humanity, happiness, freedom, well-being, over so little? Is this really a terminal totalitarian death cult, the globe as one massive Jonestown?

So far it seems this is what the majority wants. If they don’t really want this consummation of universal death in spirit, emotion and body, they’d better snap out of their terror-induced mental delirium fast, before it’s too late.

The Big Picture of the plan is clear. It plays out in front of our eyes. And we do not want to see it. Or we are blinded by the relentless lie- and deceit-propaganda stream flooding us with false news and outright lies about covid – and what’s to come.

When we understand that since more than 70 years the overall concept of the Rockefeller cum Gates plan – and certainly others, like Soros – and the rest of the Bilderberger and the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) members, and yet others – whose affiliates overlap different semi-obscure organizations – is to drastically reduce the world population – and that this moment has come now – then we understand much better what is happening today; then we get a better overview of the Big Picture.

The time has come in the form of an invisible virus called SARS-CoV-2 – later renamed by WHO to “Covid-19 Disease”; with massive and non-stop fear propaganda throughout the west; and with the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) “Covid-19 – The Great Reset”, authored by Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO of the WEF (1971) and his associate, Thierry Malleret.

The Great Reset is a Globalist Agenda that is managed by a small ultra-rich neoliberal group of oligarchs – names shall not be mentioned at this point – who want to implement a world destructive plan, leading to “deleting” humanity to a minimum, so that those who are left, may serve as serfs to these plutocrats, sort of the “Epsilon” people, when you compare the plan to the Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

When we understand this, it should come like an awakening what is currently happening with the different purposefully uncoordinated lockdowns around the globe. Especially since covid – the falsely declared pandemic, actually a Plandemic – has engulfed all 193 UN member countries at once. It is physically and scientifically impossible that a virus hits the entire world at the same time. Unless it has been artificially (human-made) spread to every corner of the world at the same time.

Therefore, the current killer-measures – lockdowns, obligatory mask wearing, defacing of our dignity;

• humiliating of humanity; “social distancing”;
• quarantines; homeoffice work;
• separation from colleagues; school from home via Zoom or Skype

The monstruous fear campaign – the repressive police and military measures to implement these society, family and friendship breaking rules – are all the puzzles of a much larger picture.

They are only the beginning of an unraveling Big Picture.

But you remember the end-goal – “deletion” of humanity, and you will not be surprised at what’s planned – and indeed coming – if we do not stop it. We must stop it.

Because, if we, the People – do not stop this horrendous crime on humanity by disobedience and spiritual connection – we will soon look back on 2020 as a year of paradise.

What is in the making – the implementation of the real UN Agenda 21-30 – a disaster and crime on humanity of an epic dimension.

Do not get fooled by the UN Agenda’s 17 noble Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) which are designed to make people believe the UN is interested in alleviating poverty in the world, to bring the Global South and the Global North on an even keel. That’s at best an illusion and in reality, a false pretense, to deviate your attention from reality. From the outset it is clear – has been clear since their design – that these goals will not be met.

To even getting closer to meet the 17 SDGs, would require an enormous amount of capital and implementation capacity. Where should capacity and capital come from? – The funding, naturally, from the IMF and the World Bank and the associated regional development banks and bilateral development agencies. Absorptive capacity is secondary. Debt and enslavement are priority.

Such capital “injections” in the form of loans, in some cases grants – would come with terrifying strings attached. For example, developing country governments will have to follow the strict rules of the global covid narrative; they also have to grant concessions for exploitation of their natural resources to foreign corporations – and they have to “structurally reform” their internal economy, meaning massively reducing public employees, making them redundant, unemployed. And of course, the usual – they have to adopt severe austerity programs. Just the contrary of what would allow destroyed economies to breathe and recover.

Back to the big picture of massive population reduction and total digital control of the remaining population under a One World Order (OWO) – as proclaimed by the WEF’s Great Reset. The Great Restructuring, as the IMF calls it, has various phases – the end-phase being – “you own nothing but you are happy”. The Great Reset and the end of the UN Agenda 21-30, is to be achieved in a decade. This will require a fair amount of mind manipulations of the “Epsilon” people (the lowest cast in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”).

The current heads of governments (sic-sic) probably have been promised important roles, Alpha or Beta types, in the New OWO government – a compensation for obeying the Global Cabal’s orders, betraying their people, destroying their economy – and driving millions, literally tens of millions into misery and outright death. For this service to the Global Cabal, they deserve a decent compensation, of course.

One of the key priorities in this “satanic” plan is getting everybody injected, what they call officially “vaccinated”. Though what the west so far has to offer are not vaccines, but mRNA, “gene-therapy” injections, that are supposed to modify the human genome, so as to produce antibodies for the corona virus… that’s what they pretend. In fact, they contain many toxic substances that have already now, as immediate reactions – horrendous side effects, with many people dying.

See this.

RT reports on 1 February 2021 that 7 die at a Spanish care home after getting Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. ALL 78 residents test positive for the virus after the jab. The second doses are still to come.

On 22 January CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) lists the latest numbers of 329 deaths, of which 285 were from the US and 44 from other countries. The average age of those who died was 76.5, which shows that “vaccinating” the elderly as part of the most vulnerable – is like a death sentence for them. Its purposefully “deleting” those who cost society the most – medical expenses, housing and food. These figures represent vast under-reporting. Perhaps only one percent of all vaccine-related adverse effects are reported.

In 1936, a young German journalist named Konrad Heidan wrote a book called, Hitler: A Biography.

In it, he described the street fighting between the communists and Nazis which characterized much of early 1930s Germany.

But one interesting thing he mentioned about the paramilitary Nazi S.A. known as the Brownshirts or Stormtroopers, was that:

“There were large numbers of Communists and Social Democrats among them; many of the storm troopers were called ‘beefsteaks—brown [outside] and red within. Jest were retailed such as the following: one S.A. man says to another: ‘In our storm troop there are three Nazis, but we shall soon have spewed them out.”

Some historians surmise that a lot of these young men just liked to fight– they didn’t really care much who they were fighting, or for what cause.

They were angry at the establishment and for good reason. Germany was left in horrible shape by WWI and the disastrous monetary policies of the Weimar Republic. The people who felt left behind were going to express their rage in any way they could.

When the seat of German government, the Reichstag Building, was set aflame in 1933, the Nazis accused communist agitators of setting the fire.

In reality, it’s likely that the Nazis burned the Reichstag themselves, and scapegoated the Communists to justify a brutal crackdown.

Before I go further, let me just say that the United States in 2021 is not the same as Germany in 1933.

And even if the US was on a similar trajectory, we haven’t even seen the Weimar inflation yet, which would put us sometime around 1921.

Prior to World War I, one US dollar was worth 4.2 German marks. But the Germans owed massive debts to pay back the other nations for the war,. With no way to come up with the money, they simply printed more and more marks.

By 1923, a single US dollar was worth 4.2 TRILLION marks.

Did you get your stimulus check yet?

But that is also what is so concerning. All this unrest, and we haven’t even witnessed widespread economic devastation yet. It seems like only the beginning.

People are angry. People have good reason to be angry, whether it is over unjust police killings, or a completely corrupt political process.

People feel no agency or control over their own situation, or their government. And people want to take that control back.

But in Germany, if power hadn’t gone to the Nazis, it would have gone to the communists, funded by Soviet Russia which had a much higher death count than Nazi Germany.

There comes a point where there is no political solution, no good party to throw your support behind, no collective action that can right the ship.

Take the absurd trillion dollar COVID “relief” bill that Congress passed before the holidays that handed out billions of dollars to foreign governments like Sudan, Vietnam, $33 million to Venezuela for “democracy programs,” $10 million to Pakistan for gender studies…

I was shocked to actually agree with AOC– Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez– when she said, “This isn’t governance, this is hostage taking.” Well guess what, she voted for the bill anyway.

The president also heavily criticized the bill… and then signed it into law.

Call me crazy, but I thought politicians debasing the currency to hand out billions of dollars to foreign governments was a bigger assault on our country than a bunch of idiots rioting. 

If politicians aren’t afraid of being torn apart by an angry mob, is this even America?

And by the way, I also enjoyed watching the police precinct in Minneapolis burn this summer. 

AOC, the queen Bolshevik herself, said around that time that protests are supposed to make people uncomfortable.

Well as Congress cowered in fear from the people, that was a nice change from the people having to fear their government.

Too bad they could face 10 years in prison under a national monuments protection executive order that Trump signed when protesters against police brutality were tearing down statues this past summer.

No meaningful change is coming to Washington, even if we could hold a free and fair election.

Antifa and right-wingers will keep battling in the streets, likely only intensifying.

We’ll see more Occupy Seattle CHAZ takeovers, police stations like the precinct in Minneapolis set on fire, and more violent protests surrounding government buildings.

Really ask yourself, and be realistic: what would it take for everything to settle down and go back to normal? Flipping the page on the calendar to reveal a new digit at the end of the year, shockingly, didn’t do the trick.

This does not end well.

Keep in mind that the party of the woke-mobsters just took control of Congress and the Whitehouse. Higher taxes, more draconian COVID response, and more regulation is a given.

But they could also wield enormous power to punish their political enemies.

As much as I enjoy watching politicians cower in fear of the voters, whatever truly happened at the storming of the Capitol, it will be used as an excuse for increased government surveillance, new policing powers, more weapons regulations, controls on free speech, and who knows whatever else the Bolsheviks think up.

I never want to be alarmist, but if this isn’t a neon sign flashing that it is time to take action, I don’t know what is. And I don’t mean vote harder, or join the protests.

The idea of troops in U.S. streets for an extended period of time — an extreme measure even when temporary — has now become close to a sacred consensus.

Washington, DC has been continuously militarized beginning the week leading up to Joe Biden’s inauguration, when 20,000 National Guard troops were deployed onto the streets of the nation’s capital. The original justification was that this show of massive force was necessary to secure the inauguration in light of the January 6 riot at the Capitol.

But with the inauguration over and done, those troops remain and are not going anywhere any time soon. Working with federal law enforcement agencies, the National Guard Bureau announced on Monday that between 5,000 and 7,000 troops will remain in Washington until at least mid-March.

The rationale for this extraordinary, sustained domestic military presence has shifted several times, typically from anonymous U.S. law enforcement officials. The original justification — the need to secure the inaugural festivities — is obviously no longer operative.

So the new claim became that the impeachment trial of former President Trump that will take place in the Senate in February necessitated military reinforcements. On Sunday, Politico quoted “four people familiar with the matter” to claim that “Trump’s upcoming Senate impeachment trial poses a security concern that federal law enforcement officials told lawmakers last week requires as many as 5,000 National Guard troops to remain in Washington through mid-March.”

The next day, AP, citing “a U.S. official,” said the ongoing troop deployment was needed due to “ominous chatter about killing legislators or attacking them outside of the U.S. Capitol.” But the anonymous official acknowledged that “the threats that law enforcement agents are tracking vary in specificity and credibility.” Even National Guard troops complained that they “have so far been given no official justifications, threat reports or any explanation for the extended mission — nor have they seen any violence thus far.”

---

It is hard to overstate what an extreme state of affairs it is to have a sustained military presence in American streets. Prior deployments have been rare, and usually were approved for a limited period and/or in order to quell a very specific, ongoing uprising — to ensure the peaceful segregation of public schools in the South, to respond to the unrest in Detroit and Chicago in the 1960s, or to quell the 1991 Los Angeles riots that erupted after the Rodney King trial.

Deploying National Guard or military troops for domestic law enforcement purposes is so dangerous that laws in place from the country’s founding strictly limit its use. It is meant only as a last resort, when concrete, specific threats are so overwhelming that they cannot be quelled by regular law enforcement absent military reinforcements. Deploying active military troops is an even graver step than putting National Guard soldiers on the streets, but they both present dangers. As Trump’s Defense Secretary said in response to calls from some over the summer to deploy troops in response to the Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests: “The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.” 

Are we even remotely at such an extreme state where ordinary law enforcement is insufficient? The January 6 riot at the Capitol would have been easily repelled with just a couple hundred more police officers. The U.S. is the most militarized country in the world, and has the most para-militarized police force on the planet. Earlier today, the Acting Chief of the Capitol Police acknowledged that they had advanced knowledge of what was planned but failed to take necessary steps to police it.

Future violent acts in the name of right-wing extremism, as well as other causes, is highly likely if not inevitable. But the idea that the country faces some sort of existential armed insurrection that only the military can suppress is laughable on its face.

Recall that ABC News, on January 11, citing “an internal FBI bulletin obtained by ABC News,” claimed that “starting this week and running through at least Inauguration Day, armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitols and at the U.S. Capitol.” The news outlet added in highly dramatic and alarming tones:

The FBI has also received information in recent days on a group calling for “storming” state, local and federal government courthouses and administrative buildings in the event President Donald Trump is removed from office prior to Inauguration Day. The group is also planning to “storm” government offices in every state the day President-elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated, regardless of whether the states certified electoral votes for Biden or Trump.

None of that happened. There was virtually no unrest or violence during inauguration week — except for some anti-Biden protests held by leftist and anarchist protesters that resulted in a few smashed windows at the Oregon Democratic Party and some vandalism at a Starbucks in Seattle. “Trump supporters threatened state Capitols but failed to show on Inauguration Day,” was the headline NBC News chose to try to justify this gap between media claims and reality.

This threat seems wildly overblown by the combination of media outlets looking for ratings, law enforcement agencies searching for power, and Democratic Party operatives eager to exploit the climate of fear for a new War on Terror.

But now is not a moment when there is much space for questioning anything, especially not measures ostensibly undertaken in the name of combatting white-supremacist right-wing extremism — just as no questioning of supposed security measures was tolerated in the wake of the 9/11 attack. And so the scenes of soldiers on the streets of the nation’s capital, there in the thousands and for an indefinite period of time, is provoking little to no concern.

---

What makes this all the more remarkable is that a mere seven months ago, a major controversy erupted when The New York Times published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) which, at its core, advocated the deployment of military troops to quell the social unrest, protests and riots that erupted over the summer after the killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd. To justify the deployment of National Guard and active duty military forces, Cotton emphasized how many people, including police officers, had been seriously maimed or even killed as part of that unrest:

Outnumbered police officers, encumbered by feckless politicians, bore the brunt of the violence. In New York State, rioters ran over officers with cars on at least three occasions. In Las Vegas, an officer is in “grave” condition after being shot in the head by a rioter. In St. Louis, four police officers were shot as they attempted to disperse a mob throwing bricks and dumping gasoline; in a separate incident, a 77-year-old retired police captain was shot to death as he tried to stop looters from ransacking a pawnshop. This is “somebody’s granddaddy,” a bystander screamed at the scene.

(Cotton’s claim that police officers “bore the brunt of the violence” was questionable, given how many protesters were also killed or maimed, but it is true that numerous police officers were attacked, including fatally).

Cotton acknowledged that the central cause of the protests was a just one, noting they were provoked by “the wrongful death of George Floyd.” He also strongly affirmed the right of people to peacefully protest in support of that cause, accusing those justifying the violence of “a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters,” adding: “A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.”

But he insisted that, absent military reinforcements, innocent people, principally ones in poor communities, will suffer. “These rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives,” Cotton wrote, adding: “Many poor communities that still bear scars from past upheavals will be set back still further.”

The backlash to the publication of this op-ed was immediate, intense, and, at least in my memory, unprecedented. Very few people were interested in engaging the merits of Cotton’s call for a deployment of troops in order to prove the argument was misguided.

Their view was not that Cotton’s plea for soldiers in the streets was misguided, but that advocacy for it was so obscene, so extremist, so dangerous and repugnant, that the mere publication of the op-ed by The Paper of Record was an act of grave immorality.

“I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but to not say something would be immoral. As a black woman, as a journalist, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this,” pronounced the paper’s Nikole Hannah-Jones in a now-deleted tweet. The New York Times Magazine writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner posted a multi-tweet denunciation that compared Cotton to an anti-Semite who “says, ‘The Jew is a pig,’” argued that “hatred dressed up as opinion is not something I have to withstand,” and concluded with this flourish: “I love working at the Times and most days of the week I’m very proud to be part of its mission. But tonight, I understand the people who treat me like I work at a tobacco company.”

Former NYT editor and Huffington Post editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen announced, also in a now-deleted tweet: “I spent some of the happiest and most productive years of my life working for the New York Times. So it is with love and sadness that I say: running this puts Black @nytimes staff – and many, many others – in danger.” That publication of the Cotton op-ed “puts Black New York Times staff in danger” became a mantra recited by more journalists than one can list.

Two editors — including the paper’s Editorial Page editor James Benett and a young assistant editor Adam Rubenstein — were forced out of their jobs, in the middle of a pandemic, for the crime not of endorsing Cotton’s argument but merely airing it. Media reports attributed their departure to a “staff revolt.” The paper itself appended a major editor’s note: “We have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.” In addition to alleged flaws in the editorial process, the paper also said “the tone of the essay in places is needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate.”

There is a meaningful difference between deploying National Guard troops and active duty soldiers on American streets. But both measures are extraordinary, create a climate of militarization, have a history of resulting in excessive force against citizens engaged in peaceful protest and constitutionally protected dissent, and present threats and dangers to civil liberties far beyond ordinary use of law enforcement.

Why was the idea of troops in American streets so grotesque and offensive in June, 2020 but so normalized now? Why were these troops likely to indiscriminately arrest and murder black reporters and other journalists over the summer but are now trusted to protect them? And what does it say about the current climate, and the serious dangers it poses, that the public is being trained so easily to acquiesce to extreme measures in the name of domestic security?

We are witnessing the media and their public treat what ought to be regarded with great suspicion as not only normal but desirable, all through the manipulation of fears and inflation of threats. That does not bode well for those who seek to impede the imminent attempt to begin a new domestic War on Terror.

Anyone who spends any sort of time on social media can’t have missed the increasingly frequent disagreements that have bloomed over the threat posed by the Covid-19 virus.

Debate, it seems, has begun to fall into two distinct camps: those who consume and then regurgitate the ‘facts’ as told to the world at large by the UK and other governments; and those whose hunger for knowledge on the subject has led them to other sources of the truth.

One of the scientists regularly quoted in these frequently heated social media exchanges is Dr Mike Yeadon whose public debunking of much of the data being peddled in support of what many consider to be Draconian anti-Covid measures was widely reported in the UK media in the late summer.

Many critics of Dr Yeadon denounced the evidence he presented on the basis that he was a former Chief Scientific Officer with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer – the same company that manufactured the vaccine currently being rolled out to frontline workers and the vulnerable.

His professional associations aside – none of which should really have any bearing on his reputation as a scientist, by the way – it is hard to ignore the weight of the evidence that his work offers.

Dr Yeadon is one of 22 scientists who make up the International Consortium of Scientists in Life Science (ICSLS) which has released compelling data to prove the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test – widely used around the world diagnose Covid-19 infection – is ‘fatally flawed’.

At the end of November, the ICSLS called on an organisation called Eurosurveillance to withdraw its study in support of the protocols that are used in the PCR test.

The study – known as the Corman-Drosten paper – was published in January this year, just one day after it was submitted.

Quite apart from raising serious questions about the integrity of what is considered to be the shortest scientific peer review in history, it also raises serious questions about the motivation for fast-tracking its publication.

The ICSLS says its own research proves the PCR test – the test, remember, upon which every single piece of the government’s increasingly dictatorial anti-Covid strategy is based – is all but completely useless and says it makes a nonsense of Eurosurveillance’s January study.

The most significant of the 10 fatal flaws in the PCR test, according to a report by respected science journalist Peter Andrews, include:

• Non-specificity due to erroneous design, meaning it is not accurate in determining evidence of a specific covid strain;
• Test results are enormously variable
• An inability to differentiate between virus fragments and whole virus
• It has no positive or negative controls
• It has no standard operating procedure – meaning that even if you disregard the accuracy of the test itself, results are not consistent with each other due to variable application protocols

Obviously, there is a great deal of hard science that sits behind the ICSLS findings, but in a nutshell what it means is that the test returns an astonishingly high number of false positive results – estimated by some to be as great as 97%.

The extent of the disingenuity of the original January paper becomes clearer when you learn that, according to Peter Andrews’ report, at least three of its authors are allegedly on the payroll of the first companies to win the PCR testing contracts.

So, what does this mean to you and me? In essence the biggest impact on our everyday lives is that we are living under stringent restrictive measures that have been informed by poor science with no credible basis in fact.

It also lends weight to Yeadon’s own views that much of the country had achieved herd immunity as early as the summer and that the virus is on the wane, not on the rise. It also lends credence to data that shows mortality rates during November of this year were actually lower than in the same period five years previously.

More than that, though, it also raises another question which is about the extent of the virus itself.

No one doubts that the virus exists, or that it poses a threat to the vulnerable and the elderly. But does the real extent of the virus – which is to say not the extent suggested by what we can now safely conclude are statistically unsafe tests – justify the societal and economic impact of the measures that affect our daily lives?

My own view is that they do not. As Peter Andrews concludes at the end of his report, it is far more likely that we are seeing a pseudo-pandemic that bears no relation to the supposed ‘truth’ the government and its narrow church of scientific advisers would have us believe.

I have written previously on the power of Vitamins C and D in helping to combat covid infection naturally, and you can read more on that here and here.

As we approach Christmas, it’s a good time of year to question the facts around the pandemic and the government’s response to it. Use these links to read the full January paper from Eurosurveillance and also find out more about ICSLS and its own review of the Corman-Drosten report.

There is a wealth of evidence and data out there relating to Covid-19 and the basis on which government strategy is based – we all just need to be interested enough to look for it and then question what we are being told by a government which seems disinclined to take advice from a wide body of expertise.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in these blogs are expressly those of the author, Dr Nyjon Eccles PhD, and are intended for informational and educational purposes only. They do not constitute medical advice of any sort.

Throughout human history the art and weapons of warfare have evolved continuously, and much as with natural evolution itself, warring sides have been locked in a never-ending cycle of increasing one-upmanship. Our relentless arms race goes way back to ancient times, going from clubs, to spears, to arrows, and beyond, in modern days bringing us firearms, missiles of increasing lethality, and of course nuclear weapons, but even this is not seen as the ultimate weapon of devastation. Research and development has continued to find and refine better ways to kill each other, to beat the other guy, and among these the realm of space has been seen as a sort of last frontier of warfare. What if you could wield weapons of mass destruction orbiting in space where the enemy would be helpless to do anything about it, and what if you could whisk these weapons to anywhere on the globe in minutes to rain down death from above? To the military this is almost too good to pass up, and it might be disturbing to many readers that this science fiction scenario has been hotly pursued. Let’s take a look.

One of the main problems with using space as a battlefield is that it is technically banned, in a sense. The Outer Space Treaty, which was signed by 107 countries in 1967 prohibits nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons from being placed in or used from Earth’s orbit. This is a bummer for warmongers, but there is a loophole. What if the weapon wasn’t nuclear, biological, or chemical? How could we devise something that skirted the treaty, yet was still utterly devastating? Lasers have been proposed in the past, but far from what you see in the Death Star in the Star Wars films, lasers just haven’t proven to be that effective at blowing things up. They require too much power to focus, are ineffective at long distances, and simply cost too much to develop. Laser technology for warfare, especially that from space, has been considered largely a dead end, and our technology in this area is woefully inadequate for anything other than perhaps burning through a piece of plywood with a concentrated burst at short range for sustained periods on an unmoving object, or perhaps shining a little mini cat toy laser in an enemy’s eyes. But what if you could just drop something heavy on them from space? It might sound absurd, like something Wile. E. Coyote might try, but this is a very real, and very frightening area of research, and far more powerful than you might think.

It’s called “Kinetic Bombardment,” also known as a “Kinetic Orbital Strike,” which is a lot scarier-sounding than “big heavy thing dropped from space,” and indeed it is scary. The basic premise behind it involves using an inert projectile, no explosives, no moving parts, propellants, or chemicals, just a, well, big solid heavy thing, to drop down from orbit at a target. The idea is that a satellite would carry a magazine of these objects, most likely tungsten rods about the size of a telephone pole and weighing around 9 tons, with fins attached to keep them straight, and more or less just drop them towards a target. So, it’s just a big heavy object falling towards earth, right? You’d just have to get out the way and you’d be fine, right? Well, not exactly.

As it travelled towards the surface of the earth powered by gravity alone, the projectile would gain tremendous velocity and speed, going 8 kilometers per second in orbit and eventually getting up to an impact speed of about Mach 10. When just one of these “rods from God” hit the surface, it would penetrate hundreds of feet into the ground, while releasing its built up kinetic energy to create an explosion roughly on par with over 11.5 tons of TNT (or 7.2 tons of dynamite). If more than one was dropped over an area, they could create incredible devastation on par with a tactical nuclear strike. For instance, one hundred rods would have the total destructive power of 1,150 to 14,000 tons of TNT, approaching the yield of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, all without the fallout, no radiation, and no need for actual explosives of any kind. Often called Project Thor, there are envisioned to be between 6 to 8 satellites in orbit at any given time carrying these projectiles, giving them the capability to hit any target on the planet’s surface within 10 to 15 minutes from order to launch to impact. This would give the enemy very little time to prepare, and furthermore the launch would be difficult to detect, the rods would be hard to see on radar, and they would be moving so fast that they would be nearly impossible to defend against. It sounds horrifying, and there would not really be much an enemy could do to predict or stop such attacks, but surely this is all just science fiction speculation, right? Again, not exactly.

It does sound a lot like science fiction, and indeed the rods from God have appeared in many science fiction stories and were even originally conceived of by Boeing employee turned science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle back in the 1950s, but make no mistake this is not purely fantasy. Indeed, not only is the concept and theory behind it totally sound and achievable, but kinetic strikes in one form or another have already been used in real life. Using heavy solid objects dropped from great heights has been going on since World War I, when masses of metallic objects, called flechettes, were dropped in great numbers on enemy positions from aircraft, with the effect being on par to machine gun fire. During the Vietnam and Korean wars, the U.S. occasionally used what were called “Lazy Dog bombs,” which scattered hundreds of little solid hunks of metal with fins of sheet metal welded on to allow a straighter fall and higher velocity, with each one hitting with enough force to penetrate 9 inches of concrete after being dropped from as little as 3,000 feet. In as recently as 2020, a kinetic weapon, in this case basically a 100 pound modified missile fitted with detachable blades for added lethality, was dropped from an aircraft to obliterate a vehicle carrying a senior Al Qaeda official.

This technology is very real, the theory is sound, and it really works. The rods of God of Project Thor could definitely be a reality today, and the only reason it isn’t is down to money. It just simply costs too much to haul such heavy projectiles into space, making it too cost-prohibitive, with it costing at least $10,000 to carry just one pound into space at the moment. To carry hundreds of 9 ton rods into orbit would be astronomically expensive, and this is likely the only reason Project Thor has not been more seriously pursued. Yet, the plan has continued to come across the table of military officials, and has been reconsidered on more than one occasion, if even in a limited capacity as a bunker busting weapon. If the cost wasn’t so exorbitant, they would absolutely pursue this to fruition, and if they can work this out, then who knows? For now we are probably safe, but it does make one look up and hope there is not a satellite up there with a rod aimed at you.

On December 28th, President Donald Trump signed into law a huge spending bill that allocates $1.4 trillion in federal funding for the 2021 fiscal year.

The bill covers a lot issues, but one in particular that has caught the attention of some media outlets is the topic of unidentified aerial phenomenon, also known as UFOs or UAPs.

This large spending bill also contains the Intelligence Authorization Act, which outlines clandestine reporting requirements to the congress.

In the “black budget” world, many of these programs have been, and probably still are, completely exempt from reporting requirements to the Congress.

There are developments in this world that not even a president of the United States has access to.

I am talking about Special Access Programs (SAP). From these we have unacknowledged and waived SAPs. These programs do not exist publicly, but they do indeed exist.

They are better known as ‘deep black programs.’ A 1997 US Senate report described them as “so sensitive that they are exempt from standard reporting requirements to the Congress.” (source)

This presentation PROOVES WITHOUT DOUBT that America is in for a major fight that will put you and your family in the firing line, literally… So make sure you watch this presentation while it’s still online…

The bill states that intelligence agencies must address “observed airborne objects that have not been identified and include a “detailed analysis of unidentified phenomena data collected by: a geospatial intelligence, b. signals intelligence; c. human intelligence; and d. measurement and signals intelligence.”

The report required within 180 days must also contain “[a] detailed analysis of data of the FBI, which was derived from investigations of intrusions of unidentified aerial phenomena data over restricted United States airspace … and an assessment of whether this unidentified aerial phenomena activity may be attributed to one or more foreign adversaries.”

Chris Mellon, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, told The Debrief that “the newly enacted Intelligence Authorization Act incorporates the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report language calling for an unclassified, all-source report on the UAP phenomenon. This was accomplished in the Joint Explanatory Statement accompanying the bill….

“Consequently, it’s now fair to say that the request for an unclassified report on the UAP phenomenon enjoys the support of both parties in both Houses of Congress,” said Mellon, who is also a former staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Concluding Comments: 

The implications of the UFO/Extraterrestrial phenomenon are huge. It represents a major paradigm shift, possibly the biggest in human history. It leaves no aspect of humanity untouched and forces us to ask deeper questions about ourselves and our understanding about the true nature of reality.

History, science, technology, education, medicine, economics, a proper acknowledgement and study of metaphysics, non material science and human consciousness will change forever. The biggest thing is to look at the way we live here on Earth, and ask ourselves why we live the way we do when it doesn’t have to be this way. Why do we give so much value to a piece of paper that determines what we are able to do and achieve?

We have unlimited potential to create a human experience where all life on the planet, including the planet itself, can thrive. We already have the solutions. Solutions are not what is stopping us, human consciousness is – the way we think, relate etc. For example, technological breakthroughs are available to solve many major needs within society, but they are too disruptive to our current systems or the consciousness behind these breakthroughs are used for more authoritarian means – not human thrivability. At the moment, we are still dominated by and operate from ego, greed, scarcity, fear and the will for power. A shift in consciousness means we operate from a different place, perhaps one of connection, abundance, love, peace, cooperation, understanding, empathy, service to others etc. Funnily enough, all words that have been co-opted by a ‘new age’ movement that can sometimes make it tough to take these discussions seriously.

We have no doubt the phenomenon is real, but we are concerned that mainstream UFO disclosure will involve a sanitized version of it, meaning the UFO topic is deep and leaves no aspect of humanity untouched and the story is much larger than what will be presented. There are many pieces to the puzzle and what we get from the government or via mainstream media won’t even represent a fraction of what has been or is going on ‘out there.’ Will we be getting another form of perception control as they’ve done so many times with so many other topics, like the war on terror, for example?

Are we seeing a move towards “false flag” UFO disclosure? Will the truth about UFOs be used to developed a lie about them? Will there be a threat narrative attached to it via mainstream media when in reality, if you examine all of the cases, there is no real reason or activity, in my opinion, that suggests any type of threat? Perhaps I’m wrong.

In this short VIDEO, I will unearth A lost super-food will bulletproof you against any food shortage or famine. It’s a food that vanished with the Incas over 6 centuries ago

In the next crisis these lost skills will be more valuable than gold, food supplies and survival equipment combined. These skills have been tested and proven to work for centuries.

Here is just a small glimpse of what you’ll find in this massive 300-page sequel (in color) to The Lost Ways:

• A lost super-food will bulletproof you against any food shortage or famine. It’s a food that vanished with the Incas over 6 centuries ago. This mysterious dish was just recently rediscovered by NASA who has been giving away rations of it to our brave men and women in their month-long space missions. The Incas stored it in pit holes for up to 10 years, ate it year-round, and actually used it to survive a 4 year long super-drought that wiped out their southern neighbors. So, if it managed to save the Incas centuries ago and it still works for our astronauts today, you can bet your last dollar it will keep you and your family well fed in any crisis. And the best part is that you probably already have the ingredients in your kitchen right now.

Americans that have only known the post WWII prosperity are ill equipped and educated to deal with depression level living. Easy credit and instant gratification have created a nation of whining, self absorbed, entitlement minded people with no moral or mental toughness.

I believe we are headed for what he calls a super depression created by the ending of a debt super cycle. The bigger the debt cycle the bigger the depression that follows. That’s how reality works and most people are not prepared for reality.

When this depression, which has already started, gets momentum, it will overwhelm the plans of a society that is expecting to get things like social security, pensions and payouts from retirement plans they have paid into for many years. All of those things will disappear almost overnight and leave society gasping and stupefied over what to do. Their reactions will be to yell and scream and try to identify who to blame but the only person they should blame is the one in the mirror.

Many very smart people have raised the alarm and done their best to warn the sleeping public, but those slumbering masses have ignored the warnings and hit the snooze button one more time. The masses do not understand economics, do not want to understand economics and they will pay dearly for that ignorance in the coming days.

When the real unemployment rate becomes common knowledge as it increases substantially, people will be left to survive on what resources they have saved up outside the banking system that cannot be stolen by the politicians and bankers. That is a key point here. The assets you have outside the system that cannot be stolen from you with a few key strokes on some computer.

Those hoping for some miraculous event that will send the U.S. back to the days of manufacturing might and jobs for all will never see it happen. Those days are gone. The west line theory tells us our economy will slow down and become more modest as the shipping center of the world moves west to the next powerhouse region which is Asia. This is what history teaches us.

When people suddenly wake up one morning and they have no job, their retirement is gone and they need to care for their family, what will they do? When government services have collapsed and they suddenly realize they are now living in a third world country with few government services, what will they do? When the banks are closed and only a select few connected people have any type of money or access to goods, what will they do?

This is the reality that many people will face in the future and they have no idea how bad it can get. They refuse to contemplate the harsh reality they will be living in and take steps to mitigate the effects. To do so would be to acknowledge it could happen and they are taking personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is a dirty phrase in today’s entitlement society. To see some of the effects one only has to look at the collapse of society in Venezuela today to see what awaits.

When it happens it will all fall back to you to take responsibility for your family and take care of them for the duration. To do that you need to plan now for that eventuality and build up the resources you will need to provide food, shelter, clothing and security when the system fails to do it for you. You need to be Noah on his ark not the people watching as he floated away.

Having resources stored up is a must but it may not get you all the way through if the situation lasts for many years. That is why you need some type of plan to replace those resources as time goes by and have some way to generate some type of income or at least items to trade. Usable goods are for the short term and things like gold ,silver and production equipment are for the long term to help you get through the crisis with the least amount of pain.

Even with proper planning the days ahead will not be easy as the standard of living of society will fall substantially to levels only seen in failed third world countries or old pictures. The assets actually owned by people today is very small compared to how they live. They will default on their home loan, their car loan, and their credit card debt leaving them with very few real possessions and few ways to move what they have left even if they have some place to go. Ultimately these people will become the new serfs to the wealthy class that will take possession of anything of value. Feudalism will once again rule.

The lack of planning by society will make this a reality if it is allowed.

It seems like people don’t actually want democracy anymore, they want a dictator who agrees with them.

The choice is, do you and I consume what is here now and change the planet to something unknown and different for the next generations?

Or do you and I slow our consumption to a regenerative rate, ensuring the same planet we live on now is here for the generations to come?

This is a personal choice.

It isn’t something an outside party, such as the government is going to fix.

You and I are the consumers. You and I are the ones making the choices.

What choice will you and I make in the future? They will be governed by Climate change.

You will not find these choices in the cloud.

I believe in the next ten years, science will prove that too much technology (e.g. heads always in our phones) is actually a negative thing for the mind and longevity.

I believe we’ll be forced by climate change to find a sustainable balance between technology use and real-life experiences.

All too often, problems being solved in tech are first world problems.

Many of us forget that there are some huge global problems, particularly in the developing world, that need to be solved for the benefit of us all.

But we have to take charge soon and make it so.

UNFORTUNATELY, OUR HISTORICAL FOOTPRINT TELL US THAT THIS IS A TOTAL IMPOSSIBILITY.

Society will tear itself apart! The root causes will remain the same.

We have no clue about what we are doing, but we are the best at

telling others what to do!

In other words, the virus is calling the shots, which is the singular reason for the protracted probable depth and length of the coming post-virus urban hangover even as increasing numbers of states elect to reopen. And the longer that businesses are in limbo and shoppers in large numbers remain leery of crowds, the worse the economic fallout will be. “Without an effective testing and tracing infrastructure in place, ‘re-opening’ is just a synonym for ‘second wave of the pandemic,’” Erik Brynjolffson, a professor at MIT, tweeted last week.

One conspicuous fallout is a potentially final blow to Main Street — the future likelihood that, when you walk or drive down your favorite roads, many of the shops and restaurants you love won’t reopen. In an April 22 note to clients, Barclays said Covid-19 had accelerated what it calls the “retail death curve,” the shift of business to e-commerce. Over the coming five years, 30% to 40% of still-existing physical shops will close, the bank said. Neighborhood shops hoping to survive may have to feature cashierless technology resembling Amazon Go, vending machine sales, and kiosks offering grab-and-go clothing combinations such as T-shirts, jeans, and jackets.

It will be the same with restaurant takeout and delivery. Restaurants will be far from finished as an urban thing. Some restaurants will vanish, but others will arise in their place. Dining out, however, may no longer be the main alternative to cooking at home. The winners will be Amazon and Uber, Walmart, DoorDash, and Target, whose boom in delivery will grow at almost everyone else’s expense. Other emerging businesses, perhaps to support the unicorns, will be reliable, close-at-hand farms growing enough food so the nearby city needn’t worry about future pandemic disruptions, said Alice Charles, a cities analyst for the World Economic Forum.

Much of our current aversion to crowds will dissipate with time. Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto, said that after the 1918–1919 flu pandemic, it took five or six years until people got comfortable taking trains again but that ultimately they did. “There was short-term adaptation and then no long-term change,” Florida said. It’s hard to know what residue of the Covid-19 pandemic will remain with us long-term — an obsession with disinfectant? Different dating practices? “Hindsight suggests that some behavioral and societal changes spurred by a pandemic can be lasting,” Barclays said, “and a vaccine may not be available for at least another year, at which point behaviors could be more ingrained.”

The Taiwanese capital of Taipei is an example of how a city can reopen before a treatment or vaccine are created. In the city, temperatures seem to be taken at every building entrance — at shops, malls, apartments, schools, workplaces, and offices. IDs are checked on the way in and out of apartment buildings. Movements are tracked by cellphones. If you have just arrived in the country, you are subject to a 14-day quarantine. Today, the island’s case count for the entire pandemic is 429 with six deaths.

That is not how the story ends in American cities. For us, life is likely to return to normal only when herd immunity is reached, Covid-19 burns itself out, or a treatment or a vaccine takes its course.

Bythe measure of the 2008–2009 crash, the Covid-19 recession should propel Generation Z to flock to the urban core and reignite the fortunes of New York and Chicago. But powerful counterforces suggest that history may not repeat nor even rhyme. One of them is the probable duration of social distancing, the depth of the economic downturn, and the hit to city comforts. The greater anti-urban force, though, may be geopolitics.

Even before the virus, President Donald Trump’s trade war with Beijing had initiated a decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies. Last year, U.S. manufacturing imports from China dropped 17%, “evidence that U.S. companies were starting to significantly” shift away from a reliance on Chinese goods suppliers, according to a recent report by Kearney, a consulting firm. Now, Covid-19 looks likely to accelerate the decoupling. The driver is how the virus laid bare the perilous fragility of globally stretched supply lines. U.S. companies will want far more diverse sources of parts and places to manufacture. “Companies will bring their strategic stockpiles closer to the U.S., maybe to Mexico,” said Sridhar Tayur, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

But the shift may directly affect U.S. cities, too, because some companies will bring factories back home. Michele Acuto, director of the Connected Cities Lab at the University of Melbourne, said that the U.S. lacks sufficient numbers of engineers to restore manufacturing at scale. But to the degree manufacturing does return, companies will shun expensive urban centers and intensify the buildup of city outskirts, where there is cheap, plentiful land and access to labor and transportation. “Rebounding manufacturing jobs would probably favor suburbs and red-leaning counties,” said Jed Kolko, chief economist at Indeed. Lily Fang, a professor at France’s Insead, said medical technology — China is often the singular provider of critically needed pharmaceuticals and medical gear — is a primary example of an industry that would return to the U.S. and specifically to smaller cities. “Paris will still be Paris,” Fang said, using her own capital as a proxy for our great cities. “But it reduces the distance between Paris and the rest of the country.”

Always, pandemics seem to lead to a scapegoat — often perceived outsiders. During the Roaring ’20s, the U.S. went into an immigrant scare. Among those ringing the alarm was Calvin Coolidge, then governor of Massachusetts, who argued that the U.S. had become a “dumping ground” for “the vicious, the weak of body, the shiftless or the improvident.” The United States needed “the right kind of immigration,” he said. In 1921 and 1924, Congress passed a new quota system that clamped down on the immigration of eastern and southern Europeans and banned Asians outright. The closure of borders hit the U.S. with almost immediate effect and lasted for four decades: a 68% plunge in U.S. patents in the fields where the blocked immigrants worked, including electrochemistry, fluid dynamics, and mathematical analysis, according to a recent paper co-authored by Petra Moser, a professor at New York University. The innovation drought continued through 1965 when the Johnson administration’s Immigration Act reopened the country.

On April 22, Trump ordered narrow new restrictions on immigration that largely affected the families of green-card holders, and Moser says the hit to innovation is likely to repeat. “Our research suggests that blocking immigration today will damage U.S. science and innovation and that any damage may persist for a very long time,” Moser said. “Even when such policies have targeted low-skilled immigration, they are likely to discourage scientists and other high-skilled immigrants from the same countries to come to the United States.”

Even in a Hobbesian age of one nation, one state, and one city against the other, the pandemic is making a lot of people at least silently concede that we are all in this together.

Moser also says that the new law seems likely to accelerate the shrinkage of major cities across the country. Some 85% of U.S. immigrants live in the top 100 metro areas, according to a report last year by the New American Economy, a pro-immigration think tank. From 2014 to 2017, the population would have declined without immigration in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Memphis, Tennessee; San Jose, California; Dayton, Ohio; Omaha, Nebraska; and St. Louis, Missouri. The new loss of immigrants will morph into a worker shortage in certain professions: Foreign-born U.S. residents are 34% of the health care workers in El Paso, Texas; 18% in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and 16% in Tuscon, Arizona, for instance.

Some of the country’s most important companies have launched during adverse times, going back to the depressions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (GE, GM, IBM) and right up to the last financial crash (Square, WhatsApp, Slack). Cities seem likely to continue to be founts of creativity. But they will be hobbled by Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Brynjolffson, the MIT professor and co-author of the classic on automation, The Second Machine Age, said the Trump administration’s immigration policy had already had a “clear negative effect” on innovation in his own lab. “It’s not just the written rules but also the people enforcing them who have now become much more nitpicky: delaying responses, being uncooperative, and denying visits for minor mistakes or bureaucratic obstacles,” Brynjolffson said.

“The key thing to understand is that [U.S.-born] American researchers and innovators are not hurt when the U.S. is a talent magnet, and neither is the general public,” he said. “On the contrary, immigration is a big part of what has made Silicon Valley, the Boston area, and many other parts of the U.S. so innovative, increasing everyone’s living standards. Forcing innovators to do their work in other countries hurts the U.S. in the long run.”

Roger Keil, a professor at York University, points out that urban life has already changed from what it was a few months ago. “Being urban is about freedom and mingling,” he said. “But now we are prisoners in our homes.”

Yet it is not all bad in the city. Even in a Hobbesian age of one nation, one state, and one city against the other, the pandemic is somewhat breaking through the usual hardcore divide and making a lot of people at least silently concede that we are all in this together. The virus, says Rebecca Katz, a professor at Georgetown University, is showing cities that they need each other. While Trump parcels out blame, local political leaders are forming alliances. Largely they are governors — on the West Coast, in the East, and in the Midwest. But at their core are the big cities that dominate them. “Governors and cities are taking this approach because of a lack of national leadership,” Katz says.

This is a global trend. For instance, in order to protect their own populations, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Vietnam have stopped new rice exports. As a response, seven food-importing and -exporting countries have formed a pandemic trading union. Australia, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, Myanmar, Brunei, and Singapore have agreed to keep their own mutual supply lines open regardless of conditions.

All this détente is a gigantic black eye for another epidemic: populism. Countries where garrulous demagoguery has taken root over the last four or so years — the U.S., the U.K., and Brazil, for instance — have shown themselves to be less-adept crisis managers than technocratic places like Singapore, Denmark, Austria, Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan. Pushan Dutt, a Singapore-based professor for Insead, the French graduate business school, notes that all the latter countries are electoral democracies, putting the kibosh on the idea that you can only effectively impose pandemic strictures if you are a king. These countries learned the lessons of the last pandemics, had plans in place, and executed them. The U.S. government also had a plan in place but distrusted “the deep state.” The resulting chaos has left what successes there have been to old-fashioned city mayors and state governors.

“The rise of populism in the West is proving very expensive in this crisis,” Dutt says. “The correct dichotomy isn’t between democratic and autocratic countries. It’s between competence and incompetence.”

That thought, while reassuring politically, still doesn’t leave much room for comfort if you live in a city where it does matter if the trains run on time — and whether you feel safe riding on them.