COVID-19: No Need To Panic!

COVID-19 is a threat alright, but there’s no need to panic. The rate of growth in new cases in China is already slowing down and there have been very few deaths outside China, thankfully.

The deaths in China are sad, but the Chinese have brought this upon themselves. I respectfully agree with the Administration’s approach, save that they need to go public on the origins of COVID-19. There is no point in the West living a lie.

I stand by my analysis that the virus is airborne. How else to explain the rapid growth of new cases on board the air-conditioned MV Diamond Princess? I suspect that the Cabinet Office and Foreign Office knew it was airborne when the passengers were advised to stay in their cabins. Put another way of protecting the Chinese government is a higher priority for Whitehall than saving lives.

Right now there are some very confused public health officials in Vacaville, CA, who are trying to work out how COVID-19 reached the city. Since Travis Air Force Base is only about 10 miles away it’s that not difficult, once you know that you’re dealing with a genetically modified bio-weapon capable of airborne transmission. I’ll be sending a copy of this column to the good folk in Solano County as a courtesy. Washington will never tell them the truth.

I still maintain that the quarantine period should be 28 days. Travel bans on those coming from infected areas make complete sense. That means closing the border with Mexico and a total ban on travel to and from China. That will hurt the Chinese but it’s their disease, so tough.

As with any intelligence analysis, one’s opinion should be kept under review. I now incline to the view that the lethality rate is down around 1%. That still makes COVID-19 about ten times as deadly as flu, but it’s not the killer the MSM is making it out to be. My guess is that worldwide deaths will be kept under 50,000, which sounds bad, but is only around 10-20% of deaths from flu in a typical year.

Most of the deaths will be the elderly or the already sick. The Chinese might manage to knock off the odd pope and a few thousand vulnerable people in the West, but it’s not going to be Armageddon. It’s not even going to be like Nottingham on a Saturday night.

Because the MSM are either fooling themselves or their readers or both, they haven’t thought this through. If you’re a mad Chinese scientist and you’ve been told to create a bio-weapon you have a problem. It’s the same problem every nutty scientist who’s ever tried to make a killer bug faces – the more lethal your bug the more likely it is to kill the host. The quicker it kills the host the less likely it is to transmit.

COVID-19 looks to me like it’s been designed to cause maximum economic disruption, rather than maximum casualties. Just look at the chaos it’s caused in China, even though the death toll is running at only about 10% of road deaths. (The Chinese manage to kill about 5,000 people a week on their roads.)

The next question is the intended target. Logic would suggest you guys, but Japan and South Korea are other possibilities. Launching a WMD attack on a nuclear-armed power with a serious leader would be a lunatic operation. If a pussy like Joe Biden were to become president I suppose it might make more sense, but there’s not much chance of that.

On the other hand, a COVID attack in East Asia would risk a blowback onto China herself. That nutty South Korean cult (they sound worse than the Methodists!) is just one example of cross-border links in Asia. There was a big internal bust-up in China a few years ago, manifesting itself outside the country in the PLA Navy’s shoot-down of MH370.

It is just possible that the Chinese king-ping Jinping came to the same strategic conclusion and having won the internal battle called off the program. The unintended release of the virus may have occurred as the program was being wound down, which would help explain the lax biosecurity.

In the UK, as indicated, the priority is on protecting China’s WMD programs and sparing the Chinese government embarrassment, at the cost of human life if necessary. Officials are desperate to conceal the truth about the origins of COVID-19. Since the airborne transmission is a sign of weaponization the public and doctors are not being told about it. The calculation is that the additional deaths suppressing the truth will cause, as in the case of the MV Diamond Princess, will not be that many.

Even if suppressing the truth was to cause mass casualties however Whitehall would prefer that to embarrass the Chinese government, especially if the casualties were mostly British, so long as they weren’t civil servants of course. I should explain that the UK is not a functioning democracy. The policy is decided by the Cabinet Office and dictated to ministers by officials. It is not decided upon by the Cabinet.

The Prime Minister is a powerless figurehead, one reason he has shut himself off from the public during the flooding crisis. He knows that he cannot order the Environment Agency to start dredging rivers, the best way to stop these disastrous floods. Put another way he could order the Environment Agency to stop causing floods, but they would simply refer his order to the Cabinet Office, who would countermand it. He’s only the Prime Minister after all.

The government’s strategy for imposing control seems to be restricted to hoping that the Cabinet Secretary will travel to northern Italy for a holiday and catch Coronavirus. If so it’s not working, much as all men and women of goodwill in England may hope that Sir Mark will come down with some terrible disease, no offense intended.

Intelligence is about telling truth to power. This website is about telling the truth to the public, on the theory that in a democracy the people should have power. Since Germany’s role in developing Spanish Flu was revealed after the Iraq War, when Spanish Flu samples were recovered, governments have been running from the truth.

Had they been more willing to face up to the reality that the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1919/20 was the greatest crime in history, murdering between 50 and 100 million people, they would have been readier for the latest variant. I think it’s tolerably clear that COVID-19 is a descendant of Spanish Flu and was developed with covert German technical assistance.

The ChiComs are trying to lie their way out of trouble, but I’m not sure it’s going to work. The MSM will kowtow to them but VeteransToday.com won’t and we’re not the only website telling the truth about COVID-19.

Sir Philip Rutnam

Wonderful news came on Saturday morning – Sir Philip Rutnam, the Permanent Secretary (or, if you prefer, oberführer) of the Home Office resigned. His eagerly-awaited departure signaled a great victory over the anti-British state bureaucracy by the talented Home Secretary, Priti Patel. The Cabinet Office tried to undermine her with a briefing campaign but failed.

Sadly however Sir Philip’s acting replacement has been chosen by Der Kabinettratsführer, ‘Ritter’ Mark ‘von’ Sedwill, in other words, is likely to be just as useless. With the rest of Cabinet being house-trained idiots, no offense intended, Priti Patel is probably now the front-runner to replace Boris Johnson when he goes, possibly in early 2021. (The PM has now proposed to his girlfriend, assuming it wasn’t the other way round on Saturday, and she is expecting in the autumn, which will allow the PM to resign with dignity to spend more time with his young family.)

Sir Philip is going to take the Home Office to the Employment Tribunal for constructive unfair dismissal. The left-wing media are working themselves into a lather of excitement about Priti Patel having to resign if she loses, but this is nonsense. Of course, she’s going to lose – Britain no longer has an independent judiciary, sadly, and the Cabinet Office are bound to arrange for a tame judge, of which there is no shortage these days.

Unfair dismissal hearings used to be heard before an ‘industrial jury’ consisting of a legally trained chairman, an employers’ representative, usually nominated by the Europhile CBI and an employees’ representative, usually nominated by the TUC. They were actually quite fair and usually came to a sensible decision – I did many an Industrial Tribunal cases in the old days, starting in 1982 as a pro bono rep for the Bar’s Free Representation Unit.

Under Cabinet Office pressure the system changed. Unfair dismissal cases are now heard by an employment judge, nominally chosen by the Judicial Appointments Commission but in practice chosen by the Cabinet Office, sitting alone. Since there’s almost no possibility of a fair hearing, any more than there is before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (no offense intended), nobody’s going to be too worried when Priti Patel loses.

Sadly the Cabinet Office had a victory over Dominic Cummings last week when they torpedoed the new defense and security review. The chairman will be Sir Alex Ellis, who has been handpicked by Der Kabinettratsführer. No offense to Sir Alex intended, but this is a bit like appointing our community partner Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler as Equality and Human Rights Commissioner. That is to say, there are some grounds for concern that he may not fully have grasped all of the core concepts.

The PM’s original idea was a review addressing Britain’s defense posture and security needs post-Brexit. What will emerge is a review addressing Germany’s and China’s defense and security needs post-Brexit, or rather how the UK might best address them. I am not saying that Sir Alex will necessarily kow-tow to the Chinese, but I bet the lunches will be cooked on woks.

Dominic Cummings has been reduced to having an ‘input’, poor chap, Civil Service speaks for being marginalized. His opinions will be considered before being rejected.

The Caroline Flack Corporate Manslaughter

As predicted, nobody is doing anything to rein in those homicidal maniacs, no offense intended, at the CPS. As anyone who has dealt with serial killers up close knows (I was forced to share a cell with one) the kill cycle tends to shorten. That is to say, the gaps between murders tend to narrow.

Having tasted Caroline Flack’s blood CPS managers are no doubt on the prowl for their next victim. The case against Caroline, by the way, was formally dropped last week. Fair trials don’t happen at Highbury Corner at the best of times, no discourtesy to the court intended, but with a dead defendant, the chances of a fair trial were if anything reduced, not that participation by a live defendant would have made much difference to the outcome in this case.

The UK-USA Titanic Treaty

By the ‘Titanic Treaty’ I don’t mean the big treaty. Der Kabinettratsführer has effectively vetoed that by foisting the Huawei G5 contract on the government. I mean the Anglo-American agreement of 2003 (UKTS 2019 No 8), signed by Secretary Pompeo in November. The treaty is essentially aimed at blocking the recovery of Titanic’s radio equipment. A well-run US firm, RMS Titanic Inc., is proposing to do just that, prompting panic in Langley and Frankfurt, from where the CIA is controlled.

Readers of Spyhunter will know why. In April 1912 the Imperial German Secret Service, working with German Naval Intelligence, arranged for the sinking of the White Star liner RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic in order to murder key opponents of German control of the new Federal Reserve.

Planning for the German attack on France was well advanced, but our community partners needed more cash. The plan, which was implemented after the sinking, was to have large US corporations purchase $100m Medium Term Notes, which would be traded offshore in High Yield Trading Programs, with Germany taking the lion’s share of the proceeds.

There are two keys to understanding the tragedy: the lookouts spotted the iceberg in ample time for Titanic to have steered clear had First Officer Murdoch wanted to (the warning time depicted in ‘von’ Cameron’s movie is a joke) and the Titanic had two radio sets, not one. The important transmissions, monitored by the US Navy, were those on the emergency waveband, using the second set.

These were between the Marconi officers on board Titanic, who were working for the Hun, and the German naval vessel stationed by the iceberg. As I keep saying, intelligence analysis is an ongoing thing. In Spyhunter I thought that she was an oil-fired cruiser, or possibly an auxiliary, based on the German oil tanker Deutschland, which was in the vicinity of the sinking.

However, I was impressed by James Becker’s use of a diesel-powered submarine in the plot of The Titanic Secret. I discounted a sub initially as German U-Boats of that era were essentially coastal vessels, designed for use in the North Sea. Indeed without the use of bases on the west coast of Ireland in World War II the German submarine campaign would not have been nearly as effective as it was.

Moreover, the first German diesel-powered U-Boat, the U-19, was not commissioned until later in 1912, although all German official statements about their military have to be viewed with reserve. The earlier paraffin powered boats, however, could have made it to the sinking area, particularly with refueling. The calm seas would have assisted fuelling and the rv could have been achieved with radio assistance.

I now suspect that the German vessel was indeed a U-Boat, which would, of course, have dived and moved clear as soon as the Titanic struck the ‘berg. The Deutschland could easily have carried paraffin in her tanks. Alternatively, a paraffin powered boat such as SM U-16 might have been refitted with the 8-cylinder MAN two-stroke diesel used in U-19. Interestingly our community partners failed to surrender U-16 as agreed at the end of the war. Were they hiding something? (She supposedly sank in an “accident” en route to Scapa Flow but with the Germans that could mean anything.)

It’s vital that the Titanic’s emergency Marconi sets (transmitting and receiving) are recovered. They are probably still at their last settings since neither Jack Phillips nor Harold Bride would have had any reason to suppose that the equipment would ever be seen again. Titanic was sunk in deep water for a reason.

As the Senate confirmed to me on Friday the State Department has yet to send the treaty to the Hill. That means that the Secretary of State’s signature is worth about the same as President Wilson’s on the equally silly Treaty of Versailles. Please contact your Senators and urge that this treaty is stopped in its tracks! The shameful cover-up of the real reason for the loss of Titanic has gone on for long enough.

The Labour leadership challenge

Ballot papers have gone out this week. The Cabinet Office choice, Sir Keir ‘von’ Starmer, named for the German agent Keir Hardie, is the runaway favorite. He would be a disaster as Prime Minister, indeed he would be even more of a figurehead than poor old Boris Johnson.

There are fewer runners and riders than in the Democratic Party primaries (alright, primaries and caucuses!), none of them is nearly 80 and none have had heart surgery. In fact, only three candidates made the cut, the others being Rebecca Long-Bailey, Jeremy Corbyn’s choice, and republican Lisa Nandy, who seems to want the Queen’s job as well as Boris Johnson’s.

Between them they have managed to make even Keir Starmer look sensible, a not insignificant feat, given that he’s a former Director of Public Prosecutions, no offense intended. (In fairness he didn’t manage to knock over any reality TV presenters.)

Global Cooling

There were some goods new from Which magazine this week. A new report suggests that the CO2 output of modern vehicles has gone up, not down. This will help green the planet and should increase crop yields, if only by a tiny amount.

The reason, of course, is not that modern engines are less efficient but that modern vehicle is larger and heavier. The first generation Golf weighed less than a ton, even the heaviest version. Curb weight of the eighth generation automobile is anything up to 1.5 tons.

Congratulations are due to the auto industry for helping to green the planet. Vehicle emissions do not, of course, affect the climate. The only way a vehicle could warm the planet would be to tow the Earth closer to the Sun, but you’re not going to be able to do that with a VeeDub. (You’d need a Range Rover for that!)

HMS Exeter

Yesterday marked the 78^th anniversary of the sad loss of the famous heavy cruiser HMS Exeter in the Sunda Strait. Part of Dutch Rear-Admiral Doorman’s squadron in the Battle of the Java Sea she had been damaged by a hit to her boiler room and was making for Soerabaya when she was caught by the Jap cruisers Nachi and Haguro.

She had fought in the Battle of the Java Sea alongside the USS Houston (CA-30, Captain Albert H. Rooks commanding), which was also sunk on March 1^st, again in the most gallant circumstances. Java Sea was the first large-scale surface engagement in which our two great navies fought alongside each other, the American battle squadron in the Grand Fleet in World War I sadly not having had an opportunity to get to grips with Harry Hun.

Exeter had distinguished herself at the Plate, where she put in good work against our community partner Kapitän zur See Langsdorff in Graf Spee, who was later forced to commit suicide by the Abwehr. The Director of Naval Construction was seriously hampered by absurd treaty restrictions when designing Exeter, although he managed to work in better protection than in the preceding York.

Her main battery, of 6 8”/50 cal. BL Mark VIII guns was inadequate, but sadly there was no room for more. Exeter, of course, had the Mark II mounting, with a maximum elevation of 50 deg., training and elevating power having proved insufficient to take full advantage of the 70 deg. of the Mark 1, the world’s first heavy dual-purpose gun, an advanced weapon for its time.

She may be gone, but this gallant ship and her equally gallant crew are not forgotten, any more than the Houston and her brave crew.

Michael Shrimpton

Michael Shrimpton was a barrister from his call to the Bar in London in 1983 until being disbarred in 2019 over a fraudulently obtained conviction. He is a specialist in National Security and Constitutional Law, Strategic Intelligence and Counter-terrorism. He is a former Adjunct Professor of Intelligence Studies at the American Military University.

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