So I assumed the rumbling about a Korean cult spreading nCoV was a QAnon-grade turd, yet that turns out to be true. You'll see a lot of headlines about "KOREAN DEATH CULTS" or "Doomsday Cults," but it's just a basic-ass Korean Prot splinter cell -- so basic-ass, in fact, it's just a schism of the original Korean Cult, Park Tae Son's Olive Tree.
Via: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandso ... s-outbreak"If authorities fail to contain the spread of the COVID-19 in Daegu, there is a high possibility that COVID-19 could spread nationwide," Vice Health Minister Kim Gang-lip told reporters on Monday.
Most of South Korea's 833 cases, as of Monday, are in Daegu. And most are connected to an obscure religious group called the Shincheonji Church of Jesus.
For a purported "death cult," Shincheonji (I've seen this explained as both "New World" and, more colorfully, "New Heaven and New Earth") shows a mighty keen interest in recruiting living followers and expanding both their reach and income -- trawling SERPs gives you no shortage of articles from outraged Christians discovering that Shincheonji operatives are trying to poach their flock.
So as the Republic of Korea rocketed into second place with 800+ confimed cases, Italy also witnessed an explosion of cases, and reacted by closing down the affected areas.
This dynamic is going to absolutely define the months to come: no matter what, ahem, "system of government" any given nation has, you can absolutely depend on them to over-react when it's too late to make a difference.Another dynamic that's occuring over and over again: once a nation starts finding cases, they undertake a serious effort to look for more. And then they find a whole lot more.
A lot has been made of Johns Hopkins guru Amesh Adalja stating that nCoV most likely cannot be contained, especially in light of his involvement with the Gates Foundation / World Economic Forum exercise "Event 201" -- which war-gamed a simulation that is, undeniably, a 1:1 outline of the current situation. However, Adalja has been calling this tune for a long time now, it's his career, his life work, his beat. (ie, his 2018 assertion that
"the next global pandemic will be respiratory related" is either damning or inevitable, depending on your reading comprehension skillset.) Further,
it's a pretty fucking obvious point. He's talking about how the world system works, not making some insider prophecy about the nature of this new virus outbreak.
Related:
Does the World System Actually Work?There's going to be a lot of flailing around to find a narrative in the next two weeks as the "Wuhan animal market" story continues to fall apart under scrutiny (and epidemiology). Finding a proper Patient Zero may well be completely impossible at this late point in the game, especially as the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak keeps getting post-dated.
Interestingly, it's looking like one of the major vectors for a lot of international seeding isn't Wuhan in the Hubei province, but Wenzhou, over in the Zhejiang province. Why is Italy having an outbreak? 90% of their Chinese population are textile workers from Wenzou. (
Really.) Why is Iran having an outbreak? There's actually a high speed freight rail line running from nearby Wiwu to Tehran. (
Really.) Nothing conclusive, but interesting.
Meanwhile, the United States has been fucking up to a worrying degree. The Diamond Princess evacuation was a shit-show of a rush job, but the domestic situation might be even worse. After
fucking up the initial shipments of testing kits, the CDC states they've only tested 426 people -- up from 414 on Feb. 21st. For perspective, there are 325 people under observation
in Michigan alone.
The bottleneck is the fact
only three states have any capacity for testing, so everyone is waiting on the CDC. The cynic in me wonders if that's a deliberate bid to give them a monopoly on declaring "official" cases in the month to come. (Worse yet, one of those three states is California, a burning herpes crater.)
The CDC is claiming there are 14 confirmed cases, in addition to 53 from the Princess airlift. The story from Costa Mesa, California, where their city government is strenuously objecting to the tranfer of
up to 50 patients to a facility in their jurisdiction, is most likely related to those Princess cases. The CDC, like anyone else paying attention, expects that number to keep growing.
(However, it's also possible that the extent of the outbreak in the US is being kept secret and Costa Mesa is one of dozens of facilities that will be seeing transfers in the weeks to come.)
Speaking of Event 201, it's interesting one of the core participants was Matthew Harrington, a PR hack from
Edelman. There is a lot of institutional and NGO interest in fighting/regulating "misinformation" regarding health issues. This is of course a bid for more online censorship, and a likely long-term outcome of the nCoV / COVID-19 phenomenon. It's a classic story: leaders fuck up, take zero accountability, and get expanded powers over their serfs in exchange for their catastrophic failure.
Without question, leaders have to lie. The problem is, the elites we get stuck with tend to only exercise this sovereign power in the service of covering their own incompetent asses.