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If you want expertise, don’t bother reading any further here. I know as much about coronavirus as any stunned disbeliever with a sudden, irresistible urge to touch his face.
This is a news story that’s spookily personal — far more personal, somehow, than all those other ongoing horror stories out there, about war, refugees, climate change. Those stories are real, yet compared to the coronavirus story, they feel like abstractions. This is about a potential pandemic — the possibility of hundreds of millions of deaths worldwide — and it’s about the need to use hand sanitizer. Right now. And also, don’t touch people anymore. And stay home.
Part of me feels positively Donald Trumpian about this: Come on, this isn’t real. Indeed, my urge is to defy the warnings and hug my friends, shake strangers’ hands, continue living a connected and joyous life. But part of me stops cold, thinks about the post-World War I influenza pandemic that wound up infecting almost a quarter of the world’s population and killed as many as 100 million people. These things really happen. Don’t be ignorantly dismissive. But don’t panic either.
The unwanted truths about the connections between 1) our immune systems’ resistance to infectious organisms and 2) the immunotoxic electromagnetic radiation of 5G networks have been intentionally kept out of the breathless 24/7 media coverage by our “Bought-and-Sold” Politicians, Medical “Experts”, Public Health Bureaucrats and the Obedient Mainstream Media’s Talking Heads – each of whom appear to be controlled by the ruling class’s multibillionaire 1% that profits from every crisis, whether designed/man-made or accidental (except for their occasional irritating losses in stock market crashes (that the most of the savvy ones manage by short-selling maneuvers before the crashes occur).
One could ask the logical question: Is what is happening in the world of mandatory over-vaccinating everybody who will stand still the Zombie Apocalypse or is it just another false flag Swine Flu, SARS, MERS or Zika “Pseudo-epidemic”?
Norman Solomon is cofounder and coordinator of RootsAction.org as well as founder and director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy and Made Love, Got War. He has written op-ed pieces for almost every large daily U.S. newspaper and appears often on a wide range of radio and TV outlets. We discuss the U.S. presidential election.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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President Trump addresses the media at the White House on Super Tuesday. (Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP)
“…so what if another corporate-neoliberal Democratic presidency in the Clinton/Obama/Biden-Buttigieg/Bloomberg/Council on Foreign Relations mode would birth a 2025 Republican presidency even more fascistic than Trump’s (if Biden could somehow defeat a possibly recession-plagued Trump)? The oligarchs don’t care. They’ll work out a comfortable accommodation with that monster, too.”
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Sacred Fools has long been among my favorite theater companies and its West Coast premiere of Antigone, Presented by the Girls of St. Catherine’s only confirms this critic’s longstanding admiration and affection for this imaginative enclave of theatrical envelop-pushers.
The ancient myth of Antigone - a young woman who suffered for heroically standing up to authority - has been oft-adapted by top talents for literally 2,500 years, starting with tragedies by both Sophocles and Euripides. The 20th century saw Antigone-related stage productions by dramatists Jean Cocteau, Jean Anouilh, Athol Fugard and Bertolt Brecht, as well as a ballet and opera by the great Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis (who composed memorable scores for Costa-Gavras films, including 1969’s Z, as well as 1964’s Zorba the Greek and 1973’s Serpico).
By Theodore de Macedo Soares
A grisly old PR pro waddles into a conference room where elite technocrats are waiting for his assessment of propaganda issues. He sits down, looks around, and says, “If you’re going to launch a phony epidemic, the ideal place for it is mainland China. The government will lock down that country quicker than a missile fired from a drone. And then nobody will be able to figure out what’s going on.
Which is exactly what you want.
The night before Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren spoke to several thousand people in a quadrangle at East Los Angeles College. Much of her talk recounted the heroic actions of oppressed Latina workers who led the Justice for Janitors organization. Standing in the crowd, I was impressed with Warren's eloquence as she praised solidarity and labor unions as essential for improving the lives of working people.
Now, days later, with corporate Democrat Joe Biden enjoying sudden momentum and mega-billionaire Mike Bloomberg joining forces with him, an urgent question hovers over Warren. It's a time-honored union inquiry: "Which side are you on?"
How Warren answers that question might determine the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. In the process, she will profoundly etch into history the reality of her political character.
"The urgency of Warren's decision can hardly be overstated."
The most commonly reported mainstream media account of the creation of the Coronavirus suggests that it was derived from an animal borne microorganism found in a wild bat that was consumed by an ethnic Chinese resident of Wuhan. But there appears to be some evidence to dispute that in that adjacent provinces in China, where wild bats are more numerous, have not experienced major outbreaks of the disease. Because of that and other factors, there has also been considerable speculation that the Coronavirus did not occur naturally through mutation but rather was produced in a laboratory, possibly as a biological warfare agent.