COVID-19 (coronavirus)

Santiago de Cuba. Photo: Bill Hackwell
Today Cuba celebrates the 67th anniversary of the assault on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks that mark the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. From this beginning, Cuba’s altruistic view of making the world safer and healthier began.

The US Senate returned to work this week after a two-week vacation during which COVID-19 exploded and the economy imploded. The moment of truth has now arrived. Will the House and Senate now bring forth a Covid relief package adequate to the Covid health and economic crises?

So, how are you enjoying the “New Normal” so far? Is it paranoid and totalitarian enough for you? If not … well, hold on, because it’s just getting started. There is plenty more totalitarianism and paranoia still to come.

In front of White House
Americans are angry. I suspected they would be, but I got confirmation that they are, all over the place: in Miami, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Minneapolis, New York, and Boston. Basically, everywhere I went, while “taking pulse and temperature” of this country where I used to live, cumulatively, for more than a decade, I felt frustration and bewilderment.

As the coronavirus, once again, surges out of control in the United States, it is safe to say that even those few lessons learned have been cast aside by those who place profits before people. Greed and ignorance, not public health policy, is deciding the fate of tens of thousands in our nation who are likely to die and many times that who will suffer from COVID-19 as we stumble from one surge to another.

Melbourne — The Victorian Premier turned up for his weekend delivery of coronavirus infections, gruffly delivering the news.  It has become grim if compelling viewing: the announcement about the next spike in coronavirus infections, the next gruesome statistical spread on transmission.  On Sunday, Daniel Andrews had a pose that has become legend, a cross between plasticine figure and instructive despair.  Stern, humourless, with little to be humour filled about, his role of late is telling people what to do.  With stern command he had a message: All those in the state of Victoria,

Personality is persona, a mask…The mask is magic…Larva means mask; or ghost…it also means mad, a case of demoniacal possession.
– Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body, 1966

After the corona crisis, may the world be facing a monumental paradigm shift of power towards a more balanced civilization, more social justice and equity? The global almost total lockdown, chosen by most governments around the globe in response to mastering the Covid-19 crisis, devastated the world economy, as we know it, and hundreds of millions of lives. Was it necessary? Will there be a time when those responsible for this universal, scientifically unnecessary lockdown be held accountable?

The many similarities in the unfolding narrative of Covid-19 to that of September 11, 2001 — the mass hysteria, the banker bailouts, the insider trading, the censorship of dissent, the apparent foreknowledge (Lockstep, Event 201, PNAC, Catastrophic Terrorism, A Clean Break etc), the rollout of mass surveillance measures and more — make the two seem like parallel conspiracies. Covid-19 could also be compared to 9-11 in that it seems to be a ‘controlled demolition’ of the world economy by the global financial powers, one that was either planned, or at very least allowed to happen.

COVID Dollars from Fiscal Times