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    Seconding Margo, David. Two ideas about the outbreak, published by Dmitry Orlov, but on his pay Archived Message

    Posted by Rhisiart Gwilym on May 15, 2020, 5:56 pm, in reply to "Re: American Genie - engineering a catastrophe.. a new conspiracy theory.."

    -walled site, deserve at least summary airing here:

    First, stating that he has no firm notion whether the pathogen was bio-engineered or natural, he says, without qualification, that either way China treated it as if it were a bio-weapon attack, and demonstrated very pointedly just how ready and able they are to deal with it - just to discourage any possible attackers. About the only other place in the world, of which I know, which has been so thoroughly effective in dealing with the pathogen is Kerala - also a place with a lot of communist social investment and popular health provision, but perhaps a bit more multi-party democratic than China.

    As Dmitry points out repeatedly, the US military machine, both conventional and nuclear, is now so hopelessly dysfunctional that it has literally no realworld chance of attacking and defeating either Russia of China by either means; and as for a victorious land-invasion of either adversary... sick joke! That leaves only hybrids of biological and other indirect forms of aggression as being still possibly workable for the low-grade reality-disconnected lunatics in the Swanp who retain their megalomanic lust for world-domination.

    Second, in another comment just published, Dmitry points out that there is another notion, standing alongside the one which you outline in the AHT piece, David, but fitting with it very well. He has pointed out repeatedly that US Treasury bonds have just recently fallen from their status as the world's 'safest' - hah! - investment, when they became unacceptable as collateral for that obscure, but rather crucial, overnight bank repo. trade. Since that red-alert warning signal began flashing, last Summer, the big global economic crash which everyone - with their brains in gear and not permanently buried in their own recta - knew was clearly imminent is seen to have shifted into about-to-break mode. This has always promised to wreak utter havoc in the global economy, as the gigantic derivatives hyper-lunacy unwinds, then accelerates into the mother of all crashes. Blue funk time all round for 'our masters'! What to do?

    The epidemic - says Dmitry - whether engineered as you suggest here, or simply seized as a handy tool appearing by chance at the right moment, has been used to impose panic-driven draconian economic cut-backs, whereby the world's richest large economies begin to rid themselves, behind the smokescreen of the 'emergency', of their inessential parts, such as tourism and mass air-travel: All the secondary pampering indulgences which no soberly-run economy really needs to provide the real necessities to its people. It also begins the process of making thinkable the culling of the old 'useless-eaters', as a new-normal that we must learn guiltily, uncomfortably to live with. And as for social security provision such as public universal health services. Sorry folks! Very rapidly becoming a thing of the more generous past.

    This crash-priority 'creative' destruction now becomes unvoidable for what is to me a most compelling reason: both Dmitry, I and many other outsiders amongst the global free-thinking dissident community reckon that the underlying lethal problem for the world economy right now at this crunch time is the unfolding depredations of peak oil - which we think really did happen in 2005.

    The absolutely disastrous effect of a slow choking off of the world's major - and irreplaceable - power-source has been exacerbated by the erratic zig-zagging switchback of barrel prices - predicted by JMGreer, amongst others - between levels too high for economic growth to have any chance at all of continuing, and too low for the oil companies to have any chance at all of covering their non-negotiable production costs. This terminal dilemma was staved off briefly by the fracking hyper-lunacy in the US. But that flash-in-the-pan is now largely over, and we are back to staring energy-supply-driven economic disaster in the eye again - even whilst the zig-zag happens to be at one of its deepest down-lurches: Lots of oil at silly prices, but nobody buying much more than the essentials.

    Knowing that there was a much-worse-than-1929 crash now bearing down imminently, and knowing that this could well provoke widespread civil unrest when it finally struck, panicked power-wielders around the world grabbed the excuse of a universal curfew "to fight the war against the disease" as a means to mask and explainaway the economic carnage that was coming anyway.

    Weirdly, no conspiracy is needed to explain this response. It only requires the realisation to arise at about the same time amongst many governments that this is how desperate things have become, for hordes of power-wielders to grab the chance to cover their own arses against raging and rising pleb-hordes.

    And so here we are: slowly realising that general curfew was really not a good way to face the epidemic, but nevertheless manoeuvred by the torrent of screeching panic propaganda into the psychological position where we are becoming resigned to the idea that a steep economic downturn for all is now an inevitability; and being at least grudgingly open to the smokescreen excuse that the powers-that-shouldn't-be (James Corbett's phrase) did what they did in good faith, believing in that chaotically ill-informed time at the beginning of the outbreak that it was necessary to do it.

    And now - just by mere happenstance, of course! - we have a superficially persuasive explanation about why we're all going to have to accept major economic shrinkage everywhere, and learn to live with it.

    The Long Descent unfolds precisely on schedule...

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