David Dobrodt

Just as British military intelligence had instructed months ago, the heart of the Biden-Harris “strategy” for the elections – along with the dirty tricks and coup mobilization – is to try to lay the 220,000 U.S. COVID deaths on Trump’s doorstep. That pandemic, and those deaths, are actually the result of British economic policies implemented over a half century by the likes of the Bush and Obama administrations, and those policies are what the Biden campaign would continue in spades. But the problem is that, while critical progress is being made on the vaccine front, the pandemic itself – infections, hospitalizations, deaths – continues to escalate out of control, both in the United States and internationally.

The following formulation from Reuters is typical of the British line: “Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 221,000 Americans so far, has become the top issue for him and Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the Nov. 3 election.” 

On Friday, the U.S. hit its highest one-day number of infections at more than 83,000 — more than 6,000 higher than the country’s previous record set in July. The seven-day average of new daily cases was over 63,000 Friday – which, according to Johns Hopkins University tracking is an 84% increase over mid-September, which is when things started increasing again. And all of this is before the expected increase coming from colder weather, Thanksgiving and so on. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, warned yesterday that “We easily will hit six-figure numbers in terms of the number of cases. And the deaths are going to go up precipitously in the next three to four weeks, following usually new cases by about two to three weeks.”

Testing has been increasing over the recent period, but nowhere near as rapidly as the new infections. CNBC reports that the U.S. conducted more than 1.1 million tests on Thursday and a record 1.2 million tests on Friday, and that testing has increased by nearly 11% since Oct. 1. “That compares with a 46% jump in the average daily rate of new infections over that same period, from roughly 42,000 per day to more than 60,000.” Reuters reports that “on Thursday, there were 916 reported fatalities in the United States, a day after the country recorded over 1,200 new deaths for the first time since August. Also on Thursday, the number of COVID-19 patients in U.S. hospitals climbed to a two-month high. There are now more than 41,000 hospitalized patients with coronavirus across the country, up 34% from Oct. 1.”

There is of course a differentiated picture, state by state, which is important to keep in mind; but it is also the case that there is a national (and international) dynamic of the disease, since we function as a single country, people cross states lines all the time, and so on.

U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar attributed the recent increase in cases nationwide to large numbers of people not following the required personal guidelines, adding that household gatherings have become a “major vector of disease spread.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci also continued to warn about the coming Fall-Winter surge, and pressed for broader use of masks. The needed measures “sound very simple, but we’re not uniformly doing that and that’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing these surges,” Fauci said Friday. “We can control them without shutting down the country. We don’t want to shut the country down. Every time I talk about things that we need to do, people get concerned. We’re not talking about shutting down, but we’re talking about doubling down on some of the fundamental public health measures that we need to adhere to,” Fauci said. Asked about a national mask mandate, Fauci said: “I think that would be a great idea to have everybody do it uniformly. If people are not wearing masks, then maybe we should be mandating it.”

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation also weighed in on the question of masks, as usual deriving numbers from statistical extrapolations: a new study of theirs reports that if 95% of Americans wore masks in public, more than 100,000 lives could be saved through February.

Despite Pompeo’s bellicose demand that the Vatican cut all relations with China because of their supposedly horrible human rights abuses, the Chinese government and the Vatican have decided to extend their provisional agreement from 2018 on the appointment of bishops by another two years, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced Thursday. It is hoped by both sides that further cooperation can lead to eventual official recognition between the two. 

Under the agreement, Chinese religious authorities elect candidates for the Pope to decide, and appoint, new Bishops. 

“The Chinese and Vatican parties have dialogued and certainly the provisional agreement is and remains the strong basis for continuing the dialogue,” Antonio Spadaro, an Italian Jesuit priest and editor-in-chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, a Rome-based periodical, told the Global Times.

He noted that “the agreement is of a pastoral nature and intends to ensure that the Gospel is preached easily on Chinese soil and that the right attitude grows, indicating to Chinese Catholics the main path for the correct and fruitful relationship between the Church and the country: to be fully Catholic and to be fully Chinese.”

Although electric vehicles (Evs) are a central element of the Green Deal/Great Reset scheme, it is clear that their means of production are not green at all.

In order to equal the energy stored in a conventional car filled with approximately 40 Liters of gasoline, an EV needs a battery with the weight of at least half a ton. The production of those batteries is extremely energy intensive, and includes the mining and processing of huge amounts of copper, alumina and lithium.

The material consumption for a full electric conversion of the car fleet of a country like England would be twice the annual global production of cobalt, three quarters of the world’s production of lithium carbonate, more than half the world’s production of copper and nearly the entire world annual production of neodymium, according to Michael Kelly (https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2020/05/KellyDecarb-1.pdf).

If we consider a full electric conversion of the car fleet of all EU member states as planned by the EU Commission until 2050, taking into account the average age of cars being 10.8 years, we would need 26 million Evs produced every year. This would require an increase of world cobalt production by 17 times, of lithium by 6 times, of copper by over 4 times and 8 times the entire world production of neodymium.

To reach the target of 55% replacement by 2030 in the EU, those figures become: 9 times cobalt, 6 times lithium carbonate, more than 4 times copper and 8 times neodymium.

Pollution produced by mining and processing such an amount of materials would be gigantic. Additionally, there would be the need to double the capacity of electric grids and electricity production as well as a new distribution system to be able to charge all cars and trucks at home or at their working place.

Production of electric engines requires rare earth mineral neodymium. Currently, due to environmental concerns (manly raised by the green movement), there is almost no mining of neodymium in the west and China is its main world producer. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2019/08/04/why-china-is-dominating-lithium-ion-battery-production/)

We have previously calculated the giant increase of electricity production required to fuel Evs. Now consider the power needed to fulfill the above list of material. The green idea in the West to go fully electric and at the same time reject energy-intensive primary power sources like nuclear and fusion guaranties that the energy intensive parts of EV production will never take place in the West (China has a 75% market share in Lithium batteries) and that its economies will die fast, like East Block economies in the post-1988 period.

In her weekly press conference Jan. 19, Dr. Carissa Etienne, Director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the regional adjunct of the World Health Organization (WHO), warned that coronavirus situation in the Americas–including the United States–had become extremely alarming. Just in the week previous to her report, she said, there were 2.5 million new COVID cases in the Americas, more than half of all global infections. During the same period 42,000 people died in the region. In her understated fashion, Dr. Etienne indicated that the situation is out of control. Public health policies have failed, infrastructure is inadequate and there’s no predicting what might evolve just in the next two weeks.

Dr. Etienne pointed to the crisis in Manaus, Brazil where the surge in new COVID cases has so overwhelmed the hospitals and caused an acute shortage of oxygen, that patients had to be flown to other cities to seek care. But the situation isn’t limited to Manaus, she said,  Look at Peru, where there are practically no beds available in the metropolitan Lima region–not even ICU beds–and oxygen supplies are very low. As in Manaus, people here are lining up in the street to try to purchase oxygen canisters. ICU occupancy rate in Peru is at 90%, and even in the U.S., there are “some locations” where oxygen is being rationed, Dr. Etienne reported. As also reported by regional media, the situation across the Southern Cone–Argentina, Chile, Uruguay–is also bad. In Chile, ICU occupancy is above 90%, almost as bad as last June. In Ecuador, hospitals nationwide are overwhelmed to the point where at Quito’s largest Carlos Andrade Marin Hospital, patients are sitting in hallways with oxygen cannisters next to them, waiting for a bed to become available.

In the first week of 2021, the Caribbean saw the highest rate of new cases since the beginning of the pandemic; Barbados saw a 61% increase in new cases over the past two weeks.

Dr. Etienne said she is encouraged at the rate by which vaccines are being developed, but emphasized that the problem for much of the Americas will be access. There aren’t yet enough doses available to have a visible impact on transmission; in addition, the new variants from the U.K,, Brazil and South Africa are beginning to show up in the region and likely affecting transmission as well.

In an op-ed in the Washington Times on Sunday, Oct. 17, Professor Edward Lozansky, the president of American University in Moscow, called on President Donald Trump to use his influence “calling [Turkey’s] President Erdoğan to order” in his attempts to foment the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. He cited the rare positive moment recently when the leaders of the U.S., Russia, the EU, NATO, and the UN together called for a ceasefire over Nagorno-Karabakh. “However, Turkey, which is also a NATO member, is doing everything possible to pour gasoline into this fire. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s words and deeds are the major obstacles to stopping the violence,” he writes. “I believe it is the time for President Trump to make a major effort to resolve this crisis, thus increasing his list of achievements as a peacemaker,” referring to the Abraham Accords between the U.A.E., Bahrain, and Israel.

Lozansky also observed the influx of radical extremist groups being sent from Syria to Azerbaijan “through the guiding hand of Turkey. It is an open secret among the international intelligence community (and one exposed by Gen. Michael Flynn in 2014) that many of the ‘moderate rebels’ fighting to overthrow the Syrian government were actually trained and armed by the U.S. during the Obama years. Mr. Trump has demonstrated a commitment toward fighting terrorism and it is the time for him to step in while calling Mr. Erdoğan to order.”

He affirmed that in resolving such conflicts, there is a need for a clear development policy to alleviate the dire conditions in these hard-stricken regions. The recent Serbia-Kosovo deal, he demonstrates, was also backed up by a commitment to build the International North-South Transportation Corridor, and references the positive role that is being played by China’s Belt and Road Initiative. “Why could level-headed nations of the West, led by the U.S., not begin to assist in this new system of long-term, win-win cooperation by helping poor nations to build new industries, create new markets and open up new corridors of cooperation upon which trust and dialogue can finally occur? It is obvious that the benefits are not only economic but can foster a climate of productivity, mass job creation, new skills and abundance in place of the tension, poverty, and despair to inflaming hostilities between neighbors…. Why not apply these lessons to the Middle East where Christians, Jews and Muslims of all denominations share so many common needs, from water, education, food production and security?…

“No matter how we choose to look at the situation, the fact is that time is running out. If groups committed to peace from all ethnicities and religions across America and Europe were to begin organizing toward concrete and realizable goals as those mentioned above, and if Mr. Trump and other leaders were to offer their political and economic support, then it is certain that the future may yet look bright indeed.”

Two interesting nuclear events occurred roughly two months ago: South Africa’s Energy Minister proclaimed that South Africa was seeking offers of up to 12 small nuclear reactors to add 2,500 gigawatts to its grid; and the United States’ International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) moved decisively to end the ban from the Obama Administration on financing nuclear power development projects abroad. IFDC was actually a new and better capitalized successor to the old Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), and was created by bipartisan legislation pushed through by the Trump White House in 2018 (that’s right, bipartisan). DFC came to be referred to as “America’s development bank” by its head, long-time Jared-Kushner associate Adam Boehler. It has just taken on transport infrastructure projects in Serbia and Kosovo as part of the Trump Administration’s mediation effort between them.

                These two steps toward advanced nuclear reactors are now bearing fruit. NuScale Power LLC, the only company thus far to have NRC approval for its small modular reactor (SMR) design, has gotten a letter of intent for the 2500 MW project in South Africa from the U.S. DFC. {Neutron Bytes} reported Oct 18 DFC’s letter of intent to support Oregon-based NuScale in developing the 2,500 megawatts of power with its 60 megawatt SMR. Just days earlier, it reported, the U.S. Department of Energy committed $1.355 billion to Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems to keep it on track as NuScale’s first U.S. customer for its SMR. That 12-SMR plant will be built Idaho National Laboratory but provide power mostly to the Utah utilities, which were concerned about depressed electricity demand and therefore financing.

                The South African program is called the independent power producer (IPP) program, and its time scale is not yet definite. In a statement to Bloomberg News Oct. 16, NuScale said, “If successful, NuScale would be the first U.S. nuclear energy IPP on the continent and would help support energy resilience and security in one of Africa’s leading economies.” The letter of intent is not yet a funding commitment.

                At the same time Power Magazine reported Oct. 14 that two other American advanced nuclear design firms, TerraPower and X-energy, will each receive $80 million in initial federal funding under the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP) to build their two distinct advanced nuclear reactors and begin operating them within seven years. Bellevue, Washington–based TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates, will demonstrate the Natrium reactor, a 345 MWe sodium-cooled fast reactor that it unveiled last month as part of a consortium that includes GE Hitachi (GEH) and Bechtel. Maryland–based X-energy plans to deliver a commercial four-unit power plant based on its 80 MWe pebble-bed high-temperature gas reactor (HTGR), which can be scaled as a four-pack to 320 MWe. The DOE plans to invest $3.2 billion overall, with matching funds from industry, over the seven-year demonstration program, subject to future appropriations.

In a wide-ranging and very provocative dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, she opened by commenting that if Joe Biden is truly committed to “unity”, as he said in his Inauguration Address, he should adopt Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, “Development Is the New Name of Peace”, as his policy. This would require dropping “identity politics” and the Green New Deal — which he shows no sign of doing — in favor of the LaRouche movement’s plan to create 1.5 billion productive jobs, including developing a modern health system in every nation to address the COVID pandemic.

She also asked whether the paranoia shown by Hillary and Pelosi toward Russia and Trump voters makes them the “Q” twins; provided insights into the psy-war operation of “QAnon”, which she described as sharing common traits with the romantic movement, which was created by the oligarchy after the Napoleonic wars to destroy classical modes of thinking, in favor of dissociative emotions; and why she believes the disunity of the EU on the Green New Deal, and the disastrous effects it will have on industry, open the door to defeating it; and the implications of the discovery of new variants of COVID 19.