COVID 9-11: Powder Keg

The geopolitical chessboard is complex and multidimensional. Figuring out who the players are, what their objectives are in each theatre and how these factor into the larger game seems like an impossible task, and yet it is the only way to make ultimate sense of what is going on around us. Phrases like ‘the 1%’, ‘the global elite’ and ‘the powers that be’ simply don’t cut it, since we’re neither dealing with an homogeneous entity nor a singular agenda. There is no grand conspiracy theory through which to frame all of the actors and events, rather there are myriad conspiracies in play, and conspiracies within conspiracies. There are national interests. There are transnational interests. There are corporate financial interests. There are transnational corporate financial interests. More broadly there is an ideological struggle between competing models of globalism and nationalism, and zooming out still further, MacKinder and Spykman’s theory of containment suggests that the game of empire is ultimately a competition between sea and land powers – Europa vs Eurasia; markets vs resources. Finally there is the broader historical context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in which events are currently unfolding. All of these ideas must inform our analysis.

Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.

The disease starts in pig farms in Brazil, quietly and slowly at first, but then it starts to spread more rapidly in healthcare settings. When it starts to spread efficiently from person to person in the low-income, densely packed neighborhoods of some of the megacities in South America, the epidemic explodes. It is first exported by air travel to Portugal, the United States, and China and then to many other countries. Although at first some countries are able to control it, it continues to spread and be reintroduced, and eventually no country can maintain control.

There is no possibility of a vaccine being available in the first year. There is a fictional antiviral drug that can help the sick but not significantly limit spread of the disease.

Since the whole human population is susceptible, during the initial months of the pandemic, the cumulative number of cases increases exponentially, doubling every week. And as the cases and deaths accumulate, the economic and societal consequences become increasingly severe.

The scenario ends at the 18-month point, with 65 million deaths. The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90 % of the global population has been exposed. From that point on, it is likely to be an endemic childhood disease.

We seem to be in the proverbial calm before the storm. A surreal kind of calm with roughly a third of the earth's population under house arrest, the only certainty being that the world we return to will not be the same as the one we stepped out of. Never before in the history of new diseases has the whole world responded to a new disease in this way. Flights have been suspended leaving citizens stranded. States of emergency declared across multiple countries. Entire populations placed under lock down. There seems to be a surreal disjunction between the rise of a military police state and the not-all-that-deadly SARS CoV-2 virus, for which there is still no reliable test, and which will have probably run its course well before any vaccine is found.

This pandemic is, in every sense that matters, a live training exercise, as per the Rockefeller Foundation's 2010 Lock Step simulation scenario and last year’s Event 201. The heads of large investment banks and charitable foundations and their policy wonks who advise government have all been briefed on how to deal with the threat of novel pandemic disease. Perhaps not this particular disease, but one which they knew was certainly coming. They are like first time pilots who have been trained using a flight simulator.

David Crowe breaks it down in an interview with Celia Farber:

"Okay. So, so pilots are tested on an aircraft simulator. So if you’re flying along in an airplane and there’s a loud bang and you see smoke coming from an engine on the right hand side, this is probably the first time a pilot has ever been in an airplane that had an engine failure. But he’s tested this scenario 25 times on an aircraft simulator. So, he knows exactly what to do without being told. He goes through the procedure. He doesn’t have to think, he just does the steps that he’s been taught through the, the aircraft simulator and he successfully lands the airplane with one engine. So, a pandemic simulator is just like that. You sit down at the computer, you see the virus going around the world, um, and you say, okay, so what we need to do is we need to dress everybody in protective clothing." "We need to quarantine everybody who’s positive. Next step. We need to do social isolation. It’s a mathematical model. And at the end you always win, right? So, in the end, the good guys win, and the pandemic is defeated. But there’s, there’s never been like an actual real pandemic since they built this machine."

COVID19 was a powder keg. It doesn't matter who lit the fuse. What has happened is exactly what Gates and his Davos buddies have been betting on for the last 10 years. They were basically playing a futures market. Did they preempt the pandemic? It doesn't really matter. Will they use it to give us all gay frog autism vaccines and put microchips in our buttholes? The future is more likely to be tracking apps, social credit underpinned by blockchain technology and haptic-controlled tele-presence labour, but you get the general idea.

I use the term ‘powder keg’ deliberately, to draw comparison with pre WWI Europe which is often described in similar terms.

The Second Industrial Revolution gave us WWI, a war which was 30 years in the making. Just as the rise of Athens had instilled fear in ancient Sparta, so the entente powers saw Germany's rapid expansion as an existential threat. The primary objective of WWI was to keep Germany from becoming an industrial superpower and dominating the Eurasian subcontinent. This required among other things cutting off its oil supply. (The secondary objective was to conquer the Ottoman Empire and divide its spoils - this was all done in secret long before the war ended, with Russia being squeezed out of the deal at the last minute due to an internal revolution, but that’s a story for another time.)

And so a series of treaties were set up with the collective purpose of pushing Europe into a state of total war. It’s interesting that when the war eventually broke out, Britain's first priority was not to defend its ally France, but rather to protect its 51% stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. (Britain’s first troop deployment was to the port of Basra.)

100 years after the first great Oil War, Iran’s vast reserves of untapped crude still paint a target on its back, and by now we’re all familiar with Wesley Clark’s “seven countries in five years” prediction.

Currently it would appear that Russia and Saudi have conspired to boost oil production to squeeze the US out of the market. At the same time the fall in demand since global lock downs took effect has pushed prices even lower. The huge cost of extraction (US shale oil breaks even at $50 a barrel) means the US cannot sustain a price war for long.

A US attack on Iran would mean Iran closing down the strait of Hormuz and cutting off 20% of the world's oil supply. Up until now this would have been devastating for the world economy. But with oil at less than $1 a barrel suddenly a 20% cut in supply could be exactly what's needed to save US oil production and also the Trump presidency.

Did somebody say powder keg?