Dakota Beacon

Since most of us have time on our hands at the moment,  many of us, sitting there, stunned, having just learned we are suddenly out of work for an indefinite period of time, are thinking, what?!  How did this happen? It gives us time to wonder, and we are pretty angry and upset. Weddings and festivals are getting cancelled, restaurants, theaters, gyms, salons, libraries, all closed “until further notice”.  It is a breathtaking implosion. If that were not enough we are seeing other nations’ healthcare systems already overwhelmed and resorting to letting people 80 and over just die of neglect, untreated.

It is only natural for us to wonder how this came about, tracking its progress, everyone wants to blame someone for this.  It seems to satisfy a basic need to know whose fault this all is. So as I was idly scrolling through various headlines on my computer I happened upon an idiotic twit I had not seen before - Kim Iversen.  I gather from other angles that she is primarily famous for promoting the hopeless candidacy of Tulsi Gabbard.  Presumably she has some kind of following. I can pretty well get the profile of this following from the broadcast I watched last evening.  

Her premise seems to be that the coronavirus really isn’t hard to figure out - it was basically a U.S. lab-engineered virus.  The reason it first appeared in China is because China is an economic rival of the U.S. and Trump has been trying to find ways to outperform and surpass China and he also doesn’t like their government’s persistent theft of intellectual property.  Russia thinks so, what the hey - they wouldn’t say that if it weren’t true, would they? I mean, the Putin government can be trusted, right? If you don’t trust Putin, you know you can rely on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He says Trump did it. These are both excellent sources, after all.

Well, then, why Iran?  Well, Trump is mad at Iran right now, over the plot to blow up our embassy in Iraq and their shooting rockets at us there and planning lots of future terrorist attacks.  So of course we would send a package of coronavirus over there to them. Well, how plausible that all sounds, right? We don’t like them so they go “poof!” and all fall down sick.

Okay.  So we’ve accounted for them.  What about Italy, then? Here Iversen really stretches.  It is because of Italy's joining in China’s “New Silk Road” partnership.  She characterizes disappointment expressed by both the E.U. and U.S. Secretary of State as a “major blow”.  To what? To the American economy? This so-called “slap in the face” of Italy’s decision to get on board with China is supposed to be sufficient reason to unleash a massive attack on the innocent people of Italy, killing off the more rational, adult generation of Italians?  

Iverson seems unable to think of any reason why we decided to attack South Korea, another of our trading partners, and for a time, the second-highest impacted nation after China.  I guess she couldn’t think of a good reason there. So she just doesn’t mention them.  

She does spend a lot of time rehashing many instances of bio-weaponry going back centuries, including the famous blankets infected with smallpox which she incorrectly attributes to the “colonists” - it was not the colonists (who had to live in proximity to the Indians, after all) it was the British military who did this.  They did a lot of horrible things, including an artificial “famine” in Ireland, and barbarous punishments (their last drawing and quartering seems to have been of Robert Emmet, an Irish patriot, in the early 19th Century). Her inaccuracies combined with her clumsy mispronounced delivery, really indicate that she’s not worth answering.  Her excuse for her topic is that fingers are being pointed at the Chinese government. She says, over and over that she “doesn’t mean to peddle conspiracy theories”. She says we might not be prepared if someone else attacks us, so this is all in the public interest.    

Either say it or don’t, Kim.  This kind of passive-aggressive “discussion” is anything but objective.  So let’s take these charges you “kind of but don’t” make one at a time. We needn’t bother with your historical inaccuracies and word-flubs.  Let’s just set them aside and get to the insubstance of your accusations and insinuations - or whatever you have decided to call them.

We are calling this a “Chinese” or “Wuhan” virus because that identifies its first known case.  We have called other viruses “Ebola”, “Zika”, “Asian flu”, MERS (which stands for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome”, “Spanish flu” and others, as well as “German” measles.  No one blamed the people of Spain for the Spanish flu - it was so named simply because Spain, being neutral in WWI, when the illness was ravaging war-torn Europe, had the time and uncensored newspapers and neutral raido air space to cover it.  Many people first happened to hear about it via Spanish radio broadcasts. No one blames the Germans for the measles. No one blames the unfortunate people of Wuhan or China, nor their relatives outside of that hellhole, for this. No one blamed the people of Afghanistan or Iran for MERS, either.  We must call it something. In the case of this virus, Iverson might be on the right track insofar as it looks suspiciously like a bioweapon. It appeared first in Wuhan, China. Hereafter I will refer to it as the “Wuhan” virus. Or, alternatively, the “Chinese” virus, although it is less specific and could apply to other virus episodes, so it is less useful.

So - back to the insubstance of Iverson’s sort-of attack on the government of the United States.  There has to be no worse way for the U.S. to “attack” its “enemies” than by unleashing a pandemic on the entire world which would have disastrous effects on all the nations on earth regardless of their politics, a virus which has spread freely within the U.S. coming from all sides.  An illness to which we would be completely vulnerable, with hourly flights coming in from these supposed “targets” of our “attacks” - and with no control whatsoever over our southern border and no apparent interest in even monitoring our northern border.  

On January 31, Trump shut down direct air travel from China.  This was his earliest response, a decision taken under some pressure by members of the Senate, approximately a week after it became known that the illness was out of control in the area of its apparent origin.  Many thought this was too little and too late. And in truth, how could this have stopped it? Anyone wishing to come here from China need only have made a stop in South Korea or Japan or Indonesia or Taiwan or any of a number of countries which we did not ban.  So if Trump thought we had a good bioweapon attack underway, why would we have been left so vulnerable?  

The virus was first documented in a man who bought food in the wet market in Wuhan.  Wuhan also happens to be the site of China’s bioweapons lab.  A worker at that lab tweeted that a co-worker was in the habit of moonlighting by selling lab animals at the wet market instead of destroying them.  Shortly after her tweet it was taken down and another appeared in which she claimed someone had “used her account” and she “never said that”. Let’s look at this - in China, land of the social credit score, you don’t say “hi” on the street without someone making a record of it.  Literally. If you jaywalk it goes in your permanent file. It would take a lot of concern for anyone to have tweeted anything like this - no one would do it as a joke, and no one could have done it on another’s account. That was the last we have heard from her on Twitter (or the Chinese equivalent).  Then there was the warning issued by a conscientious Chinese physician, Dr. Li Wenliang, quickly hushed up, the doctor being hauled in before the local committee and reprimanded and warned against “rumor-mongering” when he expressed his concern that a virus he had been seeing in Wuhan resembled SARS - another horrific epidemic originating there.  Their efforts to silence him were too late and backfired and Li Wenliang became a martyr when he subsequently died of the disease himself. So there was a massive program underway to silence any discussion of this outbreak and to prevent people asking questions in an effort to bring this under control and figure out its source.  And on about January 1, long before any travel restrictions were involved, the government in Wuhan disinfected and then demolished this large open, wet market which had been in operation for years, precluding any real investigation into what conditions there might have caused it. Why?  

A picture emerges simply from the behavior of the government of China - an employee working at a lab which researches bioweaponry steals lab-kill and illicitly sells it in the marketplace in Wuhan.  A virus which had been injected or otherwise administered to the animal she sold was then manifest in someone who consumed it. We have, then, a mysterious kind of influenza similar to SARS, which causes a local doctor to take to the media to warn people and caution them about its spread.  He is first shut up, then harshly reprimanded, then dies, but not before he has become a hero to the people, the victims of the government of China. And then the marketplace disappears also, and with it valuable information for fighting the virus.

It would be easy to connect dots here - and the marketplace would probably not have yielded any evidence to support a natural occurrence of this virus, which would then lead us to other sources.  If it were a natural evolution of a virus the government would have wanted to know, right? The only reason not to want to examine this market thoroughly would be if they already knew they would find nothing there, and that the story about the stolen lab animal would be confirmed.  So there is every reason why we should strongly suspect the secretive, remorseless and inscrutable communist government of China in this. For almost two months, China allowed thousands and thousands of people to fly out of China around the world while they sat on the facts and covered it up.

Why South Korea?  Because South Korea has a brisk trade with China.  There are many businessmen who were traveling every day back and forth in the normal course of doing business.  Why Iran? This is an intriguing question, but it has long been known that Iran has had a military relationship with China, that the Chinese government has been colluding with Iran’s leadership to bring it into the community of nuclear powers.  The illness struck first at the higher levels of Iran’s government.  It was a slam-dunk that it would have spread like wildfire there. The hygiene is terrible in many areas, religious and folk customs which involve the licking of public shrines guarantees that it will spread, plus the massive gatherings and close contact the people have with one another, which that government has struggled to discourage.

It is easy to see a connection between two countries working on weaponry together coming into contact with something like this.  

So, why Italy?  Let’s be realistic here.  Can anyone really believe that Pompeo’s “disappointment” with Italy’s decision to fast-track and express-route their trade relations with China would prove that huge a threat to the exclusive American fashion industry?  It seems hardly the existential threat which would warrant a deadly attack on Italy. Many nations have “disappointed” us. There is a difference between sinking a ship of ours or imploding a building full of 3,000 Americans or shooting down a plane or otherwise committing gross acts of terrorism and war, and a disappointing trade decision.  But what that decision did, in addition to the obvious, affirming China’s corrupt and totaliltarian government and its unethical trade practices, was to mainline Chinese workers into northern Italy. The Spectator has an interesting review.  Millions of Chinese work in Italy now, doing the same sweatshop work which made Chinese goods second-rate, only now with the prestigious “made in Italy” designation.  Chinese-Italian air travel was direct, ferrying millions of Chinese and some Italians as well, back and forth. As it happens, the lunar New Year celebrations in China, which bring people back from all over the world to celebrate with families in China, coincided with the incubation period accounting for the sudden explosion of deadly flu cases in Italy.  Unfortunately, it is decimating the native Italian population, and especially the older generations.  

So - whodunit?

We’ve already seen the old “Zionist Plot” dusted off yet again for another turn around the floor, but what about the E.U.?  Should Iversen maybe devote a program to the possibility that the E.U., feeling its structure crumbling in the wake of Brexit and now threatened by a new Sino-Italian Axis probably did this?  I mean, they must be mad at China as well as Italy. But no. Can’t be them - they’d have poisoned Turkey, not Iran, right? Or what about, um, Sweden? They could use a break from the bad press they are getting day in and day out about the massive uptick in bombings there since “diversity”.  Japan? In a desperate attempt to even out the population slump they’ve been suffering for 20 years? Russia? They look like a prospective villain. They might even have a secret cure - they’re very slow to get sick from it there and have a rivalry with China as well. And their jumping on the Blame Trump Bandwagon might be protesting too much.  Greta Thunberg working with Prince Phillip to decimate the world population so that the Earth could return to a state of pre-human nature?  Was it Argentina trying to finesse the Falkland Islands back from Britain while they are preoccupied with coronavirus? Was it perhaps a consortium of Italian fashion houses, upset with the erosion of the great Italian fashion tradition, maybe getting together with labs fronting as outlets of the perfume industry? We could even devise a board game of this to while away the time while under quarantine.  Or we could just apply the rule of Occam’s Razor - “the simplest explanation is most likely the right one”.  The virus originated in China at the site of its bioweapons lab. It was kept secret under threat to anyone who would speak up for weeks. The site of the first known infection was demolished without any investigation and refused to allow experts onsite, refusing even assistance offered by Trump to help. It’ll do at least until someone comes up with something a little more logical that Kim Iversen has thus far. In fact, if I were Tulsi, before this goof manages to ruin my career by association, I think I’d practice some social distancing myself and perhaps even politely decline her endorsement as I backed slowly away.

We need to keep calling it the Wuhan, or Chinese Flu, partly to distinguish it from other virus epidemics and also to remind us, when this crisis phase is past, that there is an actor on the world stage which has no sense of ethics, for whom human life has absolutely no value, and who is willing, when its bioweapon escapes, to point the finger of blame at its economic and political rival.  And we need to consider adjusting our relationship with China.

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