dizastar posted:peace out to all da guyz working in logistics, busting their asses off toiling more hours than usual because of the aisles being pillaged all through the country
sincerely hoping that the teamsters and grocery workers unions officials are spending the entire lockdown sharpening knives for the next contract negotiations. or dulling them, really, thats up to them.
dizastar posted:8pm .... some huge speaker playing the national anthem as loud as possible, people cheering. This and the martial law really gives me a sour feeling about the near future
considering how bad and late the gov was on stomping on the virus' progression this is so dumb
we didn't have the national anthem out in my banlieu but i've been joining in the applause and pot banging. national anthem is creepy though.
The American pharmaceutical company which produces a potential covid-19 treatment rose its prices by almost 100% in January as the virus spread across China, the Financial Times has reported (paywall).
Rising Pharmaceuticals, a New Jersey-based company, increased the price of chloroquine — an antimalarial which is one of the drugs that is being tested against Covid-19 — on January 23, according to data from research firm Elsevier.
The price rose 98% to $7.66 per 250mg pill and $19.88 per 500mg pill, according to the FT.
Rising said the price rise was coincidental and that it restored the old price upon realising it might be in demand, but the reversal of the price lift was reportedly not yet reflected by the data.
GameStop has informed employees that if local authorities attempt to shut down their store in states with orders to close establishments deemed “non-essential,” they are to inform law enforcement that the company believes they should be “classified as essential retail and therefore is able to remain open during this time.” The instructions came with a flyer to hand over to law enforcement, and includes the phone number for GameStop’s corporate office.
Five employees with access to the instructions and accompanying flyer showed copies to VICE Games today. GameStop did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Due to the products we carry that enable and enhance our customers’ experience in working from home,” reads the memo, “we believe GameStop is classified as essential retail and therefore is able to remain open during this time. We have received reports of local authorities visiting stores in an attempt to enforce closure despite our classification. Store managers are approved to provide the document linked below to law enforcement as needed.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20200319233514/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkew4g/gamestop-instructs-employees-ignore-law-enforcement-not-shut-down-coronavirus
tears posted:coronavirus minivacation
I don't really have any value to add to the fact or anything by tweeting about it but THE CHAIRMAN OF THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE AND HIS WIFE, A UNITED STATES SENATOR, WERE INSIDER-TRADING OFF THE IMPENDING CORONAVIRUS DISASTER WITH SENATE BRIEFING INFORMATION
— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) March 20, 2020
slipdisco posted:the geographical location with the greatest diversity of virus strains must be the original source because a single strain cannot emerge from nothing. He demonstrated that only the US has all the five known strains of the virus (while Wuhan and most of China have only one, as do Taiwan and South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam, Singapore, and England, Belgium and Germany), constituting a thesis that the haplotypes in other nations may have originated in the US.
radiologists and others in amerika seem to think similarly
https://twitter.com/MrsPA_C/status/1238588104195346438I know far too many healthy guys like @AJA_Cortes
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) March 18, 2020
, @EdLatimore
, and @JJBrotherhood
who got some "super flu" last year.
These are highly fit people.
I'm calling it now.
Coronavirus hit the U.S. back in December, we just didn't know it, and called it the "normal" flu.
there are a shit ton of people replying to the Cernovich thread with stories. I don't know what significance this has, but I went to a pathology conference in the US in early november, and me and my work colleague who attended both got absolutely fucking steamrolled by something, we were both completely off work for an entire week, i had a bad fever, it was definitely the worst cold/flu-like thing i've ever had. had a lingering dry cough afterward for two months, no exaggerating. my mom had a super super bad flu in october, she says. and someone very close to me got intensely sick in january and got completely wiped out as well.
it seems believable. or there was just a bad flu on top of everything else, but when i look up 2019 flu stats they seem normal.
i guess i'll move my posts to the conspiracy thread but hmmmmm
marlax78 posted:What do you mean
There is a brand of Red contrarianism, sometimes endorsed by people I otherwise like fine, that irrationally extends Marx's conclusions about Malthus and Marxist analysis of human power over the material world, so it can laugh into its hands at the idea that like, a plague or a giant meteor or climate change could have a devastating and lasting effect on contemporary humanity and its developed productive power. David Harvey is one of those people.
I understand the impulse, but I think it maybe has less to do with science and more to do with scrupulosity among some older Marxists about anything that sounds like or seems like chiliasm, because Marxists have so often been accused of it. "Marxism is an apocalyptic religion" was very recently one of the main lines of attack. There is probably also academic turf war stuff going on with eco-Marxists but I don't know much about that and honestly I don't give a fuck.
It's not like David Harvey is setting state policy though, the only problem I have with that position is its mathematically inevitable outcome, making those particular Marxists look like dopes. Which I don't like when they're someone like Harvey who I don't think has everything right but works hard to get more people to actually read Marx. It's also more and more tempting nowadays because of the burgeoning industry of capitalist end-of-the-world exploitation by dweebs like Elon Musk, but that's no reason to cede ground imo.
drwhat posted:there are a shit ton of people replying to the Cernovich thread with stories. I don't know what significance this has, but I went to a pathology conference in the US in early november, and me and my work colleague who attended both got absolutely fucking steamrolled by something, we were both completely off work for an entire week, i had a bad fever, it was definitely the worst cold/flu-like thing i've ever had. had a lingering dry cough afterward for two months, no exaggerating. my mom had a super super bad flu in october, she says. and someone very close to me got intensely sick in january and got completely wiped out as well.
it seems believable. or there was just a bad flu on top of everything else, but when i look up 2019 flu stats they seem normal.
i guess i'll move my posts to the conspiracy thread but hmmmmm
under exceptional circumstances like those now confronting us all, these sorts of things suddenly take on a greater significance.. i think there is a natural urge to treat existential crisis as an intellectual problem to solve, as though grasping some imagined occult knowledge will in turn give us some power over the crisis itself. and as people share their anecdotes they seem to coalesce into a larger 'truth'. but as the forum's professional kkkonspiracy appraiser, let me ask you: does it make any sense that covid was spreading late last year in the US without any evidence of its dreaded high infectiousness and resulting spike in deaths?
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:does it make any sense that covid was spreading late last year in the US without any evidence of its dreaded high infectiousness and resulting spike in deaths?
i don't endorse the idea but it's not absurd prima facie
What the chart shows is that the virus has mutated and continues to mutate rapidly, which is one of the most important things to know about it in terms of epidemiology and public health. It doesn't really say anything else, and that's close to the most solidly confirmed fact about it period.
While, again, I don't think there's any strong evidence it originated in the U.S. or even outside of China, it's not a question of whether or not it "makes sense" that it might have spread unnoticed among people before it mutated into its current form, with those hypothetical cases lumped into statistics with other coronaviruses like SARS or MERS or with influenza, or among those categories. That's completely possible and stuff like that has happened before. It's not a question of sense or nonsense but of evidence among the many possibilities that do make sense.
the chart is very pretty but it doesn't mean nothing, right? the coloration is by geographical region, there are observations over time, and if you plot the genetic variation of the samples and then colour the variation by geography you end up with a lot of blue on the left suggesting an origin in China. the argument that it has an American origin is mostly "look, you have red dots in the yellow and blue zones. but blue and yellow dots mostly stay to their own branches".
suggesting that if you had more of a complete picture to the left of the chart, the common ancestor viruses are actually from america rather than china.
it's possible. there was also a massive spike of Influenza-Like Illness in clinical visits in Washington State from October 2019 onward, to like 400% of the average of the previous five flu seasons (I just looked at the CDC data). also big spikes in Illinois and Maryland. I am not really arguing this *definitely* happened, just that it's possible. I will be super interested to see what the antibody tests show once that starts being accessible. Of course, we will never really know -- and if the virus has mutated into a much more awful form, it doesn't help anyway, unless gaining immunity to a less deadly strain gives you immunity also to the worse ones
anyway I'm just locked in an apartment typing posts, I don't know shit
So e.g. what's currently observed doesn't rule out that this coronavirus spread among humans before it mutated to be more often fatal, or more rapidly contagious, and crossed that threshold. It doesn't provide evidence for it either, though.
Something that would offer strong evidence that the virus was spread among people in other countries before the Wuhan case would be something like an aggressive antibody testing program in other countries finding that something recognizable as this same coronavirus likely reached that area of China from elsewhere, instead of, say, leaping from bats or pangolins to humans in that region. That's one reason, if a lesser one, why it's such a problem that so many other countries haven't taken China's lead in testing thoroughly and repeatedly among the population and making tests widely and cheaply available, because a knock-on effect of that is that it helps build the body of data that's there to analyze. Testing shouldn't be restricted, it should be aggressively expanded to cover more people and more types of tests.
If this hypothetical mutation were something like an adaptation that helps the virus dodge antibodies, meaning that it had a remarkable fatality rate in those who developed the illness but few people who came into contact with it ever did—and those deaths were chalked up to influenza or other illnesses—it could take a lot of data gathered to figure that out, if it ever happened.
Establishing this stuff is important for a lot of reasons, but way down the list, there is the whole business where the Western-dominated global media advances as proven that the virus developed in China, but because of Communist lies and trickery, the entire world got infected, when a heaping helping of free-market democracy would have stopped it in its tracks. So I think it does kind of matter to Communists who aren't medical professionals to know in laymen's terms what's possible and what's not about its origins.
cars posted:It seems unnecessary to imply my opinion is an extreme position i've already said isn't mine.
relax mate i was just psoting
https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/china-locked-in-hybrid-war-with-us/ posted:China locked in hybrid war with US
Fallout from Covid-19 outbreak puts Beijing and Washington on a collision course
By PEPE ESCOBAR
MARCH 17, 2020
Among the myriad, earth-shattering geopolitical effects of coronavirus, one is already graphically evident. China has re-positioned itself. For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the US as a threat, as stated a month ago by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference during the peak of the fight against coronavirus.
Beijing is carefully, incrementally shaping the narrative that, from the beginning of the coronovirus attack, the leadership knew it was under a hybrid war attack. Xi’s terminology is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a “people’s war” had to be launched.
Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means “white devils” or “foreign devils”: guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code.
When Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, voiced in an incandescent tweet the possibility that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan” – the first blast to this effect to come from a top official – Beijing was sending up a trial balloon signaliing that the gloves were finally off. Zhao Lijian made a direct connection with the Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019, which included a delegation of 300 US military.
He directly quoted US CDC director Robert Redfield who, when asked last week whether some deaths by coronavirus had been discovered posthumously in the US, replied that “some cases have actually been diagnosed this way in the US today.”
Zhao’s explosive conclusion is that Covid-19 was already in effect in the US before being identified in Wuhan – due to the by now fully documented inability of US to test and verify differences compared with the flu.
Adding all that to the fact that coronavirus genome variations in Iran and Italy were sequenced and it was revealed they do not belong to the variety that infected Wuhan, Chinese media are now openly asking questions and drawing a connection with the shutting down in August last year of the “unsafe” military bioweapon lab at, the Military Games, and the Wuhan epidemic. Some of these questions had been asked – with no response – inside the US itself.
Extra questions linger about the opaque Event 201 in New York on October 18, 2019: a rehearsal for a worldwide pandemic caused by a deadly virus – which happened to be coronavirus. This magnificent coincidence happened one month before the outbreak in Wuhan.
Event 201 was sponsored by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the CIA, Bloomberg, John Hopkins Foundation and the UN. The World Military Games opened in Wuhan on the exact same day.
Irrespective of its origin, which is still not conclusively established, as much as Trump tweets about the “Chinese virus,” Covid-19 already poses immensely serious questions about biopolitics (where’s Foucault when we need him?) and bio-terror.
The working hypothesis of coronavirus as a very powerful but not Armageddon-provoking bio-weapon unveils it as a perfect vehicle for widespread social control – on a global scale.
Cuba rises as a biotech power
Just as a fully masked Xi visiting the Wuhan frontline last week was a graphic demonstration to the whole planet that China, with immense sacrifice, is winning the “people‘s war” against Covid-19, Russia, in a Sun Tzu move on Riyadh whose end result was a much cheaper barrel of oil, helped for all practical purposes to kick-start the inevitable recovery of the Chinese economy. This is how a strategic partnership works.
The chessboard is changing at breakneck speed. Once Beijing identified coronavirus as a bio-weapon attack the “people’s war” was launched with the full force of the state. Methodically. On a “whatever it takes” basis. Now we are entering a new stage, which will be used by Beijing to substantially recalibrate the interaction with the West, and under very different frameworks when it comes to the US and the EU.
Soft power is paramount. Beijing sent an Air China flight to Italy carrying 2,300 big boxes full of masks bearing the script, “We are waves from the same sea, leaves from the same tree, flowers from the same garden.” China also sent a hefty humanitarian package to Iran, significantly aboard eight flights from Mahan Air – an airline under illegal, unilateral Trump administration sanctions.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic could not have been more explicit: “The only country that can help us is China. By now, you all understood that European solidarity does not exist. That was a fairy tale on paper.”
Under harsh sanctions and demonized since forever, Cuba is still able to perform breakthroughs – even on biotechnology. The anti-viral Heberon – or Interferon Alpha 2b – a therapeutic, not a vaccine, has been used with great success in the treatment of coronavirus. A joint venture in China is producing an inhalable version, and at least 15 nations are already interested in importing the therapeutic.
Now compare all of the above with the Trump administration offering $1 billion to poach German scientists working at biotech firm Curevac, based in Thuringia, on an experimental vaccine against Covid-19, to have it as a vaccine “only for the United States.”
Social engineering psy-op?
Sandro Mezzadra, co-author with Brett Neilson of the seminal The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism, is already trying to conceptualize where we stand now in terms of fighting Covid-19.
We are facing a choice between a Malthusian strand – inspired by social Darwinism – “led by the Johnson-Trump-Bolsonaro axis” and, on the other side, a strand pointing to the “requalification of public health as a fundamental tool,” exemplified by China, South Korea and Italy. There are key lessons to be learned from South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.
The stark option, Mezzadra notes, is between a “natural population selection,” with thousands of dead, and “defending society” by employing “variable degrees of authoritarianism and social control.” It’s easy to imagine who stands to benefit from this social re-engineering, a 21st century remix of Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.
Amid so much doom and gloom, count on Italy to offer us Tiepolo-style shades of light. Italy chose the Wuhan option, with immensely serious consequences for its already fragile economy. Quarantined Italians remarkably reacted by singing on their balconies: a true act of metaphysical revolt.
Not to mention the poetic justice of the actual St. Corona (“crown” in Latin) being buried in the city of Anzu since the 9th century. St. Corona was a Christian killed under Marcus Aurelius in 165 AD, and has been for centuries one of the patron saints of pandemics.
Not even trillions of dollars raining from the sky by an act of divine Fed mercy were able to cure Covid-19. G-7 “leaders” had to resort to a videoconference to realize how clueless they are – even as China’s fight against coronavirus gave the West a head start of several weeks.
Shanghai-based Dr. Zhang Wenhong, one of China’s top infectious disease experts, whose analyses have been spot on so far, now says China has emerged from the darkest days in the “people’s war” against Covid-19. But he does not think this will be over by summer. Now extrapolate what he’s saying to the Western world.
It’s not even spring yet, and we already know it takes a virus to mercilessly shatter the Goddess of the Market. Last Friday, Goldman Sachs told no fewer than 1,500 corporations that there was no systemic risk. That was false.
New York banking sources told me the truth: systemic risk became way more severe in 2020 than in 1979, 1987 or 2008 because of the hugely heightened danger that the $1.5 quadrillion derivative market would collapse.
As the sources put it, history had never before seen anything like the Fed’s intervention via its little understood elimination of commercial bank reserve requirements, unleashing a potential unlimited expansion of credit to prevent a derivative implosion stemming from a total commodity and stock market collapse of all stocks around the world.
Those bankers thought it would work, but as we know by now all the sound and fury signified nothing. The ghost of a derivative implosion – in this case not caused by the previous possibility, the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz – remains.
We are still barely starting to understand the consequences of Covid-19 for the future of neoliberal turbo-capitalism. What’s certain is that the whole global economy has been hit by an insidious, literally invisible circuit breaker. This may be just a “coincidence.” Or this may be, as some are boldly arguing, part of a possible, massive psy-op creating the perfect geopolitlcal and social engineering environment for full-spectrum dominance.
Additionally, along the hard slog down the road, with immense, inbuilt human and economic sacrifice, with or without a reboot of the world-system, a more pressing question remains: will imperial elites still choose to keep waging full-spectrum-dominance hybrid war against China?
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:relax mate i was just psoting
come on, man
Edited by Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia ()
first, what dizastar is talking about, the coronavirus restructuring in imperialist countries
secondly the concentration and centralisation of capital which this will bring about and is already doing so
thirdly, the Flying horse in saudi arabia
wow, exciting time
Edited by tears ()
cars posted:marlax78 posted:What do you mean
There is a brand of Red contrarianism, sometimes endorsed by people I otherwise like fine, that irrationally extends Marx's conclusions about Malthus and Marxist analysis of human power over the material world, so it can laugh into its hands at the idea that like, a plague or a giant meteor or climate change could have a devastating and lasting effect on contemporary humanity and its developed productive power. David Harvey is one of those people.
I understand the impulse, but I think it maybe has less to do with science and more to do with scrupulosity among some older Marxists about anything that sounds like or seems like chiliasm, because Marxists have so often been accused of it. "Marxism is an apocalyptic religion" was very recently one of the main lines of attack. There is probably also academic turf war stuff going on with eco-Marxists but I don't know much about that and honestly I don't give a fuck.
It's not like David Harvey is setting state policy though, the only problem I have with that position is its mathematically inevitable outcome, making those particular Marxists look like dopes. Which I don't like when they're someone like Harvey who I don't think has everything right but works hard to get more people to actually read Marx. It's also more and more tempting nowadays because of the burgeoning industry of capitalist end-of-the-world exploitation by dweebs like Elon Musk, but that's no reason to cede ground imo.
I'm sympathetic towards what you're saying. there is a trend that, to paraphrase Marx, looks for the end of Capitalism in the soil, and the response isn't to be poor materialists and disregard any consideration of ecological matters. But I don't know if Harvey is particularly guilty of this sin, but maybe I misremember that part of the Enigma where I recall him considering this matter. The paragraph on this in his article on Hurricane Harvey is kinda ambiguous but the general gist doesn't seem disagreeable https://www.redpepper.org.uk/theres-nothing-natural-about-a-natural-disaster/
https://mronline.org/2018/03/22/imperialist-realities-vs-the-myths-of-david-harvey/
The article quoting Harvey:
Disparities in the global distribution of wealth and income between countries have been much reduced with rising per capita incomes in many developing parts of the world. The net drain of wealth from East to West that had prevailed for over two centuries has been reversed as East Asia in particular has risen to prominence as a powerhouse in the global economy. The recovery of the global economy (anaemic though it was) from the traumas of 2007–9 had largely been based by 2013 on the rapid expansions in so-called “emerging” markets (mainly the BRIC countries). This shift had even extended to Africa, which was the one part of the world that seemed to have escaped almost entirely from any effects of the crisis.
Doctors in northwest Syria say 1 million people there could contract the coronavirus, 100,000 to 120,000 could die, and 10,000 will need ventilators. There are 153 ventilators in the region now, thanks to Russian-Syrian bombers' targeting of health care. https://t.co/zTPqgM3iMW pic.twitter.com/NjnakiJADd
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) March 20, 2020
Health Dept in #SDF areas says its scientists developed kit to detect #COVID19 'in under 30 seconds'
— Riam Dalati (@Dalatrm) March 20, 2020
-'works in all weather conditions'
- 'contains no harmful chemicals'
- detects '85% of cases'
- tested 'successfully' in #Wuhan
- NE #Syria's administration 'gift to humanity' pic.twitter.com/10cAdBXPJX
trakfactri posted:it's also possible the virus mutated to become more contagious -- selection pressures and all -- rather than becoming more lethal than it already was. but that's just a guess in a post here for the lurkers, who have been in my thoughts more often, lately
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih.html
International relief, health and humanitarian organizations should execute their obligation of sending necessary equipment, medicine and aid to areas under our control and we shall lay the groundwork for their secure travel.
Our brotherly businessmen – in line with their Islamic and humanitarian responsibility – must also support their fellow people in this time of crisis. They must refrain from unlawful profit, price hikes and hoarding and instead show affinity towards the people.
chickeon posted:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih.html
yeah not a good look since two of the viruses that the NIH okayed a path to approval to make more transmissible or deadly are coronaviruses, one of which is the closest genetic relative to the current virus, SARS-CoV, and then for this latest illness the WHO issued guidance not to call the current illness SARS, ostensibly to keep East Asians from panicking over memories of 2003, even though the virus is SARS-CoV-2 to researchers. Which is why the name in the news is COVID-19. it doesn't surprise me that accusations are flying, that NIH stuff is extremely creepy regardless.