|
The MoA Week In Review – OT 2020-100
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
> While Kushner was not a driving force behind AMMC, the source who spoke on a condition of anonymity explained, the joint effort was led by campaign lawyers to reassure a paranoid Trump that no one was taking secret cuts. Parscale, it was thought, should not hold dual roles as head of a company serving as a campaign clearinghouse and campaign manager. Parscale and Kushner both signed off the arrangement, the source confirmed. <
—
Other issues:
737:
Covid-19:
There is a new variant (B.1.1.7) of SARS-CoV-2 circulating in Britain. It seems to be more transmissible and has become the predominant variant. There are no signs so far that it causes a more severe Covid-19 disease or more deaths.
Prof Francois Balloux @BallouxFrancois – 7:02 UTC · Dec 20, 2020
I felt it may be helpful to provide an update on the new #COVID19 lineages in the UK and in SA that might both be more contagious than any #SARSCoV2 in circulation until recently. Those comments should be considered preliminary as the evidence available to me is still sketchy.
1/…
Nick Stripe @NickStripe_ONS – 21:39 UTC · Dec 19, 2020
I have seen the table below being widely shared to falsely imply that deaths are no higher than normal this year
The table is both factually incorrect and misleading
Those who created it deliberately sow confusion and doubt
1/6
M4A:
Syria:
Saudi Arabia:
Use as open thread …
It seems like I’ve read this same Global Times op/ed 6-10 times in the last few months berating the West for its inability to contain the virus as China has proven:
“As the epidemic is out of control in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Sunday said they ‘cannot continue with Christmas as planned.’
“It’s frustrating not being able to enjoy the most important holiday. Some Westerners may have a need to vent their anger and desperation, and Nigel Farage, leader of UK Brexit Party, is one of them. Farage tweeted to accuse China for the ‘canceled’ Christmas. However in China, many Western expats and some Chinese people are ready to celebrate the coming holiday season.
“A Twitter user said under Farage’s tweet, ‘They’re going clubbing in Wuhan for Christmas. Why can’t this great country [UK] do that?’ Indeed, why has China, the country stigmatized, blamed, and scapegoated by the West, largely returned to normal life? Why are the UK and many other developed Western countries sinking into another epidemic spiral?
“The reason is simple. The Chinese government and Chinese people have attached utmost importance to epidemic prevention. But until today, Western societies still haven’t realized that being indifferent toward the coronavirus is the chief culprit of their mess.”
The frustration on the part of the writer is made clear by being truthful, although that probably won’t budge governments who have so much invested in the many lies they’ve told their citizens:
“The British government should take all necessary measures to tackle the virus spread before it is too late. Nobody likes lockdowns, but they save lives. Is a lockdown worse than COVID-19 that kills? Perhaps the answer is always ‘Yes’ to the politicians who care about only their political interests and see ordinary people as roadside grass.
“These politicians have never stopped misleading people since the very beginning of the pandemic. They avoided making hard decisions which might jeopardize their political interests. They are the reason why the pandemic is still fierce in the West. But they declined to see it squarely, and carry on their tricks of ducking their responsibility to others.
“UK politicians like Farage exploited the so-called universal values, such as freedom and democracy, to misguide their people. These, not China, are what led the UK to this place.
“Western-style governance has been at a loss as to what to do in the face of COVID-19. Demonizing China didn’t help the West address the pandemic. Instead, it made Western people misunderstand China’s measures, which have proven to be among the most successful ones, and refuse to accept similar moves.” [My Emphasis]
Of course, those that need the bolded entries smashed into their faces will never see them and continue to treat their citizenry as expendable. What ought to happen is for the People to rise up like a Tsunami and remove those proven incapable of governing, replace them, then lock down tight while adopting very rigorous controls to finally bring the virus under control. Hell, China’s even offered to help these refusenik nations; and in it’s main editorial today, Global Times again calls for global solidarity as the #1 requirement needed to control the pandemic:
“The US has almost given up efforts to mobilize society to fight the virus, but pinned all of its hopes on vaccine. The harm of this attitude has so far been fully proven. The US’ attitude has profoundly affected many countries in the West and even the world, which is a bad example of giving up the COVID-19 fight because of the difficult work.
“There are too many infected people worldwide. This provides more possibilities for the virus to fight human beings for a long time through mutation and other methods. If the infection level of most parts of the world is the same as that in China and East Asia, it would definitely be much easier to wipe out COVID-19 after the vaccine is released. But now, COVID-19 has spread to all parts of the world, and the conditions that cause their mutation are very different. It will be much harder to eliminate them, and by no means can vaccines developed by American companies such as Pfizer quickly achieve it.
“To defeat COVID-19, in addition to relying on vaccines, the world must unite as soon as possible and take coordinated actions. The world should truly form as a whole from detection, monitoring the latest trends of the pandemic, to responding to it. There is a mutated virus in the UK and many European countries have temporarily suspended flights from Britain. But the US and some countries are slow to take action, and most countries have close aviation ties with the other US. Such kind of prevention and control is far from being networked. Many countries believe that by suspending flights, their governments have done their job. But many infected people may have already entered their country. Such a COVID-19 fight is largely superficial.
“The US took the first step to ban flights when the coronavirus broke out in China and Europe. However, the US later experienced the world’s worst epidemic explosion. This is a lesson for countries and regions that have cut off flights from Britain.
“The current ruling team in Washington is the main obstacle to the world’s unity in fighting the pandemic. They are the main culprit of why the world lacks cooperation when facing the coronavirus. According to the current situation, the mutated virus in the UK has a high possibility of spreading to all parts of the world. The consequences will depend on whether the mutated virus is really more contagious and deadly. Human beings are almost resigned to their fate.” [My Emphasis]
The words are harsh yet unfortunately true. China and other’s cries for cooperation have been ignored–deliberately–for ideological reasons, not for any rational reason. The West has dug a gigantic hole which it’s fallen into and will pull in other nations it has ties to that cannot afford to also fall in. Many were predicting just this sort of tragedy and offered ways to avoid it that were again ignored.
Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 21 2020 17:37 utc | 112
gm@102&106 makes a response. And I have to make a confession. For too many years as a youth I really believed in Stalinism as a cynical pack of lies, told solely to justify killing political enemies. I didn’t accept that people could sincerely believe that people with a years long record could suddenly turn out to be traitors, who had wormed themselves into power by preying on the naivete and trust of an honest leader struggling against odds. You know, Bukharin the party’s favorite was a traitor and thank God Stalin found out. And Yagoda and Trotsky and Zinoviev and Kamenev etc. etc. etc. But people like gm have proven to over and over again that gullibility, ignorance, fearfulness, an ill temper can turn a defective understanding into blind approval of utter nonsense.
First of all, it’s still true: Barr was Trump’s choice, and Trump’s friend, and has been long criticized for acting like Trump’s personal lawyer instead of the nation’s. If Barr has refused to prosecute this person or that at Trump’s whim, you don’t assume he’s betraying Trump, but that, like a Pentagon general telling Trump he can’t guarantee an easy win, Barr didn’t want to humiliate the administration and, even worse, get people to seeing the enemy du jour as vindicated, or worst of all, as a martyr. It’s true that like the mass media (forget the increasingly meaningless MSM acronym!) Barr isn’t nearly as interested in servicing a lame duck. That is just politics. People are now putting the eye on the coming man and that isn’t Barr. Barr doesn’t think Trump is worth personal loyalty in the face of defeat? That’s a friend’s judgment on Trump and you are still in no position to say, nay.
Second, we should have some inkling of how Byrne knows Cipollone, unless he dialed the NY Times or CNN for Cipollone. If he was correct, if I was to guess, he was told this by a Trumper who checked with Cipollone’s secretary or some other way of spying on him. A far fetched possibility is he is trying to knife Cipollone, or indirectly Cipollone’s old associate Barr, for some personal reason or to curry favor with Trump, so he just makes an accusation. The real problem here is, does it matter if Cipollone leaked anything? Leakers often leak the truth because they want to stop some policy they disagree with. And all that really matters is, did whoever, Cipollone, outright lie? Is Byrne simply lying? Or in a room of people shouting did the two men react differently to some words? I am not at all certain we can really say that the meeting discussed a coup, because such discussions need to be with the relevant parties, like actual military men, not a disorganized bunch of prima donnas. (And yes, serious coup plotting does work at lot harder at discretion…but yes, no matter what the Trumpers here say, political conservatives BSing about government is the problem and businessmen are smart, government is the solution to many problems and businessmen are some of those problems. Men addled by their own nonsense don’t do good jobs.) Assholes like Trump have been screaming treason about enemies for a long time, just like all conservatives for decades. If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out!
Third, George H.W. Bush was old money rich, (more the Walkers than the Bushes,) and old politics (uncle Senator Prescott Bush,) open elite Yale Skull&Bones, military service. Unless you’re implying Bush had the CIA send family friend scion John W. Hinckley Jr. to shoot Reagan, there’s nothing very “deep” about this so-called Deep Stater. Establishment, meaning upper class, the English call this. But that’s not a state. Given the supernatural powers routinely attributed to the “Deep State” here, how ever could GHW Bush have been merely a one term president?
To expand just a little, thing about how the CIA could continue to have its own policies and programs, inevitably enacted by the all powerful CIA, when the upper administration keeps changing with the President, when the budget has to be approved by numerous politicians, when the official retirement packages are paychecks from the public treasury and, perhaps most decisive, the legendary revolving door and the post-career high-level, high-paying executive positions and seats on the board are dispensed by…who? Generals have arms companies and news media commentator sites. It is the people who give out the jobs, who cut the checks who ultimately have the real power. The CIA as an institution doesn’t have an independent budget to make it an independent institution. (Suggestions that the drug money are like the fines and court costs our corrupt judicial system should be judged forget that the dirty money has to be laundered. Dirty money? It’s the Trumps who move in that world.)
Least, calling something “mockingbird” isn’t an argument or a fact. And by the way, there is indeed a lot of fake news, but the faking is usually by pretending something is a crisis or an existential threat or a hideous outrage or an obvious crime by the designated villains, all against us, where “us” is *never* defined. The real corruption is in what’s legal. To pick an example from Barr, Hunter Biden’s apparent efforts to peddle influence are probably legal because the system is deliberately vague or sets arbitrarily high standards to permit it, and on top of that, it really only matters if there is evidence to connect Joe Biden as actually doing something to abet it. None has *ever* been publicly provided, no, not the laptop either. If there’s any mocking of birds going on, it’s Trumper mocking reason.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Dec 21 2020 20:03 utc | 129
|
