Note: COVID-19, Biological Warfare, and the Odds and Ambiguities

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Start here —

Lee, Bruce Y. “No, COVID-19 Coronavirus Was Not Bioengineered. Here’s The Research That Debunks That Idea.” Forbes, March 17, 2020.

Then go here —

Vorndick, Wilson. “Weaponizing Biotech: How China’s Military is Preparing for a ‘New Domain of Warfare’.” Defense One, August 14, 2019.

Before settling here —

Toosi, Nahal, Daniel Lippman, and Dan Diamond. “Before Trump’s inauguration, a warning: ‘The worst influenza pandemic since 1918’.” Politico, March 16, 2020.


BackChannels acknowledges its most basic function: Collect; Select; Opine.

The first of the series suggests the Coronavirus COVID-19 could not and would not have come out of a laboratory. However, contemporary Big Defense Worldwide addresses novel unknown threats within the dimension referred to as “CBRN”, i.e., “Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear” (Warfare). As indicated by the second piece, the same scans “over the horizon” into both the possible and the unthinkable.

Nahal Toose et al. writing for Politico reports on a Presidential “what-if” congruent with the latest news.

That, of course, seems a little spooky.

Go a little bit backward and sideways: this gem surfaced during the Obama Administration —

Meyer, Josh. “The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.” Politico, December 22, 2017.

Count the Hezbollian transnational crimes; reflect on the truncated FBI investigation (“Project Cassandra”); know that the secret lives of states as well as Transnational Crime Organizations generally become opaque (syn. “black”) the closer one gets to the “business of the business” (i.e. how things work “behind the curtains”).

So: black labs? An untraceable attack (from China)? A “false flag operation” (by the USA)?

The “Open Source” seldom to never knows or tells.


BackChannels has expressed concern (an understatement) in relation to Maryland’s “standing down” its bar and restaurant businesses plus entertainment / events that involve complex business communities on which thousands people depend, and, in many ways, the state’s economy and well-being depend as related revenues vanish right along with associated tax revenues and — should we go more than six weeks (just a guess) with the doctor’s program — jobs and tax base.

Will the now dragging Trump Administration allow the emergency to extend into November with inevitable political unrest and violence as his economy melts down over the bug?

Might the President and states now participating in similar suppression of the transmission of COVID-19 take the opportunity to apply additional “Draconian Measures” for the same reasons?

Could this be America’s Reichstad Fire?

BackChannels notes that the worst of COVID-19 cases require biologically secure environments and ventilators (until better answers come along). The nation has the capacity to produce both post-haste —

Fox 2 Detroit. “America’s next producers of ventilators could be Ford and General Motors.” March 18, 2020.

BackChannels has published on the need for and period of application of emergency measures —

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2020/03/18/ftac-a-note-on-covid-19-and-americas-complex-basic-services-economy/ – March 18, 2020.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2020/03/17/ftac-covid-19-one-question-please/ – March 17, 2020.

Stand down and buy a month’s worth of time or a little more?

Okay.

Institutionalize emergency measures into an ongoing American reality that will become a quagmire of suffering and violence (outcomes possibly worse than the illness itself)?

No.

Localities and states may need to embrace the idea of ponying up for temporary facilities and ventilators PDQ to keep their economies afloat and even vigorous while Washington, the President, and the Federal Government on the Emergency Management and Politicking side of things dick around with other “bugs” up their butts.


Disclosure: the editor of this blog has cause to believe he experienced his worst of the latest between February 15 and February 25 with spiking into a full Bronchial Symphony of Wheezing (you have no idea how many the sounds!) and days and nights without sleep between the 21st and 24th (right on time). Impression: whatever it was dominated the immune system. Three weeks out: all passageways (and voice) stunningly clear and normal! Thank God.

Related Online

This reference section includes citations updated through March 23, 2020.

AP. “Trump Disbanded NSC Pandemic Unit That Experts Had Praised.” The New York Times, March 14, 2020.

Arms Control Association. “Biological Weapons Convention Signatories and States-Parties.” September 2018.

Bender, Bryan and Megan Cassella. “Will Trump be able to get emergency medical supplies fast enough?” Politico, March 18, 2020.

BESA. “China and Viruses: The Case of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu.” January 29, 2020.

Bocchi, Alessandra. “China’s Coronavirus Diplomacy: Rome praises Beijing’s ‘solidarity’ in sending ventilators, face masks, doctors and nurses.” WSJ Opinion, March 20, 2020.

Geraghty, Jim. “The Comprehensive Timeline of China’s COVID-19 Lies.” National Review, March 23, 2020.

Lanese, Nicoletta. “Only one lab in China can safely handle the new coronavirus.” Live Science, January 22, 2020.

Pauls, Karen. “Canadian government scientist under investigation trained staff at Level 4 lab in China.” CBC, October 3, 2019.

Qiu, Jane. “How China’s “Bat Woman” Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus.” Scientific American, March 11, 2020.

The Conversation. “Why Singapore’s coronavirus response worked – and what we can all learn.” March 18, 2020.

Tsan-Yuk Lam, Tommy and Marcus Ho-Hin Shum, Hua-Chen Zhu, et al. “Identification of 2019-nCoV related coronavirus in Malayan pangolins in southern China.” bioRxiv, February 13, 2020. This technical paper points to the Pangolin as a potential intermediate conveyor of COVID-19 between bats and humans.

Wikipedia. “Pangolin“.

Wikipedia. “Wuhan Institute of Virology”.


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FTAC: A Note on COVID-19 and America’s Complex Basic Services Economy

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This period of catching up and becoming prepared (what emergencies have we been preparing for — and paying for — all along?) needs must be truncated at some near rather than far point.


Inspiration: Foer, Franklin. “The Coming Bailout Is a Moral Failure.” The Atlantic, March 17, 2020.

As fits BC’s normal operating routines, I posted Franklin Foer’s essay to the BackChannels page on Facebook but with this rant following the placement of the URL.


BackChannels believes America has only a short window — two to six weeks, best and worst case — to get back to business or watch (in horror) for lack of earning and spending in the complex ecology defining dining and event services in their totality. Eviction relief and a thousand-dollar payoff against normal business, family, and personal expenses: who’s kidding whom on that?

We generally understand basic checks against basic expenses, but we don’t always take in larger images where, when restaurants close, even the rats may starve — or start to hunt new food sources. I’ll post above this one an example of how complex our economy has become and dependent on the reliability of basic private business services. Suffice it to say that every small business we have — and some, as with the chains, quite large — serve a lot more “stakeholders” than their owners and customers. That little bit of financial productivity down on the corner pays for space and insurance, supports suppliers of every kind (even if just a little bit as they make their rounds) — and then all engaged, employed, and investing have their lives and spending _upward_ (money trickles up in healthy economies before it trickles back down in discretionary spending). This period of catching up and becoming prepared (what emergencies have we been preparing for — and paying for — all along?) needs must be truncated at some near rather than far point.


Posted on BC/FB above Foer’s piece: Paynter, Ben. “This App Delivers Leftover Food to The Hungry, Instead Of To The Trash.” Fast Company, May 3, 2018.

So far, the company claims to have diverted 900,000 pounds food—about 850,000 meals. In some cases, that’s pre-made sandwiches, but it’s also bulk ingredients, which community groups figure out how to use.

Imagine taking out that kind of carefully developed and efficient service for three months.

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FTAC: COVID-19: One Question, Please

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From CDC —

The complete clinical picture with regard to COVID-19 is not fully known. Reported illnesses have ranged from very mild (including some with no reported symptoms) to severe, including illness resulting in death. While information so far suggests that most COVID-19 illness is mild, a report out of China suggests serious illness occurs in 16% of cases. Older people and people of all ages with severe chronic medical conditions — like heart disease, lung disease and diabetes, for example — seem to be at higher risk of developing serious COVID-19 illness.

Situation Summary, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, March 15, 2020

So how much higher are COVID-19 rates of infection and morbidity compared to the full suite of respiratory illnesses involving the same set of variables, especially x patient / target’s age, preexisting conditions, and vulnerability (physical condition)?

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Afghanistan’s Violence-Stalling Peace-Encouraging Doha Agreement

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Left: Diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, U.S. Department of State; right: Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Chief of Taliban’s Diplomatic Office, Doha, Qatar. Screen capture, February 29, 2020.

Where it may have begun —

Schindler, John. “Exploring Al Qaeda’s Murky Connection to Russian Intelligence.” Business Insider, June 10, 2014.

How it may have been sustained —

Gibbons-Neff, Thomas. “Russia is sending weapons to Taliban, top U.S. general confirms.” The Washington Post, April 24, 2017.

Where it may have ended this day —

George, Susannah and Dan Lamothe. “U.S. signs peace deal with Taliban, a turning point in the 18-year war in Afghanistan. The Washington Post, February 29, 2020.

Civilizational Narcissism

Bellis, Charlotte. “US-Taliban talks: Who is Mullah Baradar? Taliban Cofounder turned political chief, Abdul Ghani Baradar has worked in the shadows his entire life.” Al Jazeera, May 2, 2019.

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Threat Assessments Unthinkable, But They Are Here — and Sometimes Actionable

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Two articles have caught my attention from the damnably nasty regions of Biological and Chemical Warfare:

Bob, Yonah Jeremy, Neville Teller. “Ex-CIA official warns of Iran, ISIS drones armed with chemical weapons.” The Jerusalem Post, February 10, 2020.

Kania, Elsa B. and Wilson Vorndick. “Weaponizing Biotech: How China’s Military is Preparing for a ‘New Domain of Warfare’.” Defense Once, August 14, 2019.

COVID-19?

It may be a taste of poison on the sophisticated tips of the arrows developing in radically different kinds of quivers.

One bullet point from the list included in the Defense One article:

In 2015, then-president of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences He Fuchu (贺福初) argued that biotechnology will become the new “strategic commanding heights” of national defense, from biomaterials to “brain control” weapons. Maj. Gen. He has since become the vice president of the Academy of Military Sciences, which leads China’s military science enterprise. 

What New Demons are these of formerly great Dynasties?

Totalitarian genius cannot be but evil.

Drone Bomb Swarms?

From The Jerusalem Post piece:

The greatest threat confronting the US and Israel may be swarms of drones armed with chemical weapons released by Iran or ISIS, an ex-CIA official has told The Jerusalem Post.The warning takes on greater meaning following a call on January 28 by ISIS’s new leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi, to direct greater attention to attacking Israel and Jews, including using chemical weapons.

In relation to the latter piece, attack have been already thwarted but with the details withheld by the CIA.

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FTAC: A Speculation Involving Bernie Sanders and Felix Adler

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America’s “Far White Right” Republicans, who haven’t had much to do with reality either these days, have scraped up the mud mixture to attempt to splatter the Democrats thoroughly in the old Soviet zeitgeist and call their opposition “Un-American!”


Times of Israel blogger Fred Maroun asked on his Facebook page, “Is Netanyahu racist, as Sanders claims?”

After taking care of the Netanyahu question — not racist! — Maroun went on to defame Sanders. Here’s what he said:

Sanders, on the other hand, is an antisemite. He’s using the antisemitism of many on the left to gain support, and he has no problem associating with virulent antisemites like Linda Sarsour. He’s never apologized for any of it, on the contrary, he only gets worse. His accusation against Netanyahu is part of his game to attract those people. If he wants to criticize Netanyahu on the settlements, fine, but he knows that wouldn’t distinguish him from other Democrats, so he accuses the leader of the Jewish state of being a racist, code word for Jews being racist. His antisemitic base loves it. He uses exactly the same tactics to attract antisemites that Trump uses to attract right-wing racists.

Those who support Sanders are engaging in the the exact same moral acrobatics as those who support Trump. Shame on them.

Bernie Sanders may or may not be far from the habits known to the most religious of synagogue goers — the form of his personal ablutions are an I-Don’t-Know for me (and I don’t want to know!) — but one may recognize in Sanders the crossing point where Judaism became a Jewish Humanism so oriented toward people — and not so obsessed with God — that the rabbi who chose his conclusions over his upbringing (Felix Adler) would go on to establish a new American religious society represented by the term “Ethical Movement”.

From the Awesome Conversation

My response to the accusation: Sanders — anti-Semite!

Sanders has the frameworks of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left — a term I used to use as I arrived here a conservative, and, sigh, the Left of my youth seemed to have drifted toward Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges on the barricades. That could have been just the way I arrived and “channeled” into Facebook.

Judaism’s Orthodox–>Conservative–>Reform Spectrum has had a last note pinned to it in the figure of Felix Adler.

— In 1876, Adler at age 26 was invited to give a lecture expanding upon his themes first presented in the sermon at Temple Emanu-El. On May 15, 1876 he reiterated the need for a religion, without the trappings of ritual or creed, that united all of humankind in moral social action.[7] To do away with theology and to unite theists, atheists, agnostics and deists, all in the same religious cause, was a revolutionary idea at the time. A few weeks after the sermon, Adler started a series of weekly Sunday lectures. In February 1877, aided by Joseph Seligman, president of Temple Emanu-El, Adler incorporated the Society for Ethical Culture. —

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Adler_(professor)

One might imagine, easily, that those promoting and living a strongly behavioral view of Judaism and Jewish Law bound into Jewish Obedience to the Commandments and related codes (“613 Commandments”) were not too happy with Professor Adler.

Sanders may have that ethical-humanist strain of ultimately Jewish thought in him, but he must also know as a Jew that he is not part of Russo-Soviet complex on the left that spread the “Protocols” throughout Russia and conveyed the same through White Russian emigre into Germany. America’s “Far White Right” Republicans, who haven’t had much to do with reality either these days, have scraped up the mud mixture to attempt to splatter the Democrats thoroughly in the old Soviet zeitgeist and call their opposition “Un-American!”

Bernie’s a liberal Jew. (I’ve been part of Reform Judaism — and Ethical Society much, much earlier — but am tired now “of all that” and prefer a quiet supper in a good restaurant on the Sabbath). Regarding Sanders’ political and social views, I would bet his position similar to Adler’s and what I without study would refer to as “Jewish Humanism”.


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FTAC: Jews Beware Conservative Agitprop

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The Facebook post directed to a publication that screamed, “Report: Chief Dem Staffer Says Office Doesn’t Care About Anti-Semitism.”

So there!

The poster had claimed that not one of the Democratic Party candidates for President had condemned anti-Semitism within the party.

That might be so — and here the modern propaganda challenge weighs in: how much TIME has one to check the assertion?

And how cogent is the issue, really?

And can anything be done about it?

Always check the dateline, sez I!

January 19, 2018 – and fairly balanced by journalist Aaron Bandler, who at least sought to verify the alleged quote by an “unidentified staffer” (to Sen Patty Murray, D-WA) that began this way: “We don’t care about anti-Semitism in this office. We care about transgenders, we care about blacks. We care about Hispanics, we care about lesbians . . . .” Bandler checked, and Murray’s office disputed the accusation, suggesting, at the least, that a responsible Democratic senator would not endorse such a claims if it had been made!

Before coffee, right?

“Not one Democratic Party candidate condemns anti-Semitism within the Party!”

And there’s the proof of an article right there — expect it dates back more than year, so it had to be dredge from that past, and then it doesn’t really pan out, but, hey, the damage, presumably, would have been done.

Who else (but yours truly) would take a second look?

Instead, heads will nod!

This answered the “What is to be done” part of the puzzle earlier this morning.

Editor here — and Indie Influencer, perhaps — chose to tweet Seema Nanda, CEO of the Democratic Party with this:

Another “Seema Nanda” is a mathematician, and I tweeted in a hurry.

😦

A mistake was made, and I will apologize here for my confusion — and what might have been a stunning opener but may be still no less true for being a little less custom than supposed. So let it fly — the American Democratic Party will have to grapple with devious Republican agitprop — near disinformation and innuendo — as the opining season heats up many fold for the November contest.


Related on BackChannels

Active Measures

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FTAC: Middle East Conflict (MEC): The Peace at Hand

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Think Peace.

It’s already at hand.

The energies and numbers of Israelis and Palestinians engaged in cross-cultural activities (like this one with Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi), in trade, even in commiseration, have been stable and strong for years.

Do the extremists the west calls “terrorists” authentically represent Islam?

Do yesterday’s rockets from Gaza represent today’s Palestinians?


The PLO/PA and Hamas have ways of making the news look bad.

TOI Staff. “As PA seethes at Trump plan, top officials say all of Israel is Palestine.” The Times of Israel, February 25, 2020.

i24 News. “Liveblog: Barrage of rockets launched into Israel from Gaza as violence in south escalates.” February 24, 2020.


Other Palestinians, however, have ways of getting things done despite the efforts of the Phantoms of the Soviet to repeat their declarations — year after year for 72 years — while handily lifting some money from Palestinian pockets and skimming more from UNCHR revenues intended for Palestinian development. While the war that exists in the minds of Palestinian “Leaders” — and ticks off the IDF most of all — goes on and on and on and on, Palestinians have long been working.

Here are a few references that BackChannels regards as positive indicators for the region. The URL titles provide the story headers:

https://institute.global/insight/middle-east/israeli-palestinian-trade-depth-analysis – 10/17/2018.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/quietly-israeli-high-tech-companies-contract-gaza-engineers/ – 9/20/2017.

https://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Gaza-nurses-train-in-Israel-We-speak-of-health-not-politics-612887 – 1/3/2020.

https://www.jns.org/report-palestinian-economy-flourishing-despite-pa-financial-crisis/ – 8/25/2019.

https://www.thenation.com/article/palestinians-israelis-mourning-our-dead-together/ – 5/22/2019.

https://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Gaza-nurses-train-in-Israel-We-speak-of-health-not-politics-612887 – 1/3/2019.

Rawabi, Palestinian Territories

https://www.businessinsider.com/west-bank-palestine-rawabi-city-israel-news-2018-10 – 10/20/2018.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-palestinians-tech/palestinian-contractors-poised-for-riches-from-israeli-tech-firms-takeover-idUSKCN1TI0QX – 6/17/2019.

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