COVID-19 Update Morning 2-14-2020

There are currently 65,213 confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide, including 1,486 fatalities. Of which 4,823 new cases and 116 new deaths were reported in Hubei province, China.
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There are several trends in this update, as well as the headline summary. First Community spreading of COVID-19 is now established in Hong Kong (attached graphic), Japan and Singapore.
COVID-19 in Hong Kong
COVID-19 in Hong Kong
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Second, the shut down of China as an economic power seems near complete. See the JP Morgan coal for electricity usage and the Goldman Sachs economic projection charts attached to this post. The JP Morgan chart shows that while traditionally daily coal consumption – the primary commodity used to keep China electrified – rebounds in the days following the Lunar New Year collapse when China hibernates for one week. This is not the case this now. There hasn’t been even a modest increase, indicating that so far there hasn’t been a return to work.
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2020 Chinese Coal/Electrical Consumption
2020 Chinese Coal/Electrical Consumption
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Short Form — Lack of Chinese coal use/electric power generation indicates the scale of Chinese industries that are shut down…AKA near total.
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And the “Just-In-Time/Sole-Source in China” world-wide, Multi-national corporation, economic shut down virus is gathering a huge economic momentum. Nissan has shut down auto production in addition to South Korea’s Hyundai for lack of Chinese parts. Rumor has it that Ford has the same issue — as their heater coils in their autos are sole sourced in China — and will soon shut down auto production.   Anything cheap or disposable in the world economy is sourced in China, and the Chinese economy is now off-line for the foreseeable future.
Near Term Economic Projections for China
Near Term Economic Projections for China
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Third, China is again playing games with COVID-19 numbers and particularly the announced deaths to keep the death rate at 2.1%, saying deaths were “double counted”?!? (See JP Morgan graphic).
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Dodgy Chinese COVID-19 Infection Numbers
Dodgy Chinese COVID-19 Infection Numbers
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 This has been ‘officially noticed’ by the White House.
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See:
White House does not have ‘high confidence’ in China’s coronavirus information, official says
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Fourth, American COVID-19 are now officially 15 with a case in San Antonio, Texas from a Wuhan evacuation flight and no deaths. I say “officially” as there possible COVID-19 death in Boise, ID. See:
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The possible COVID-19 victim was a 71-year-old man found dead on Feb 9 in an advanced state of decomposition. He returned from China Feb 5. The initial testing came up negative, but additional tests are being run. The cause of death has not been released.
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An idea of what “Community spreading” in Singapore means can be seen in the following report:
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“Singapore Casino employee confirmed with COVID-19; symptomatic Feb 5, hospitalized Feb 9
On February 13, 2020, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) pointed out that the confirmed case of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Singapore announced on February 11 is an employee at the casino in Resorts World Sentosa Casino. The employee developed symptoms on February 5 and was hospitalized in isolation on February 9. Travelers who visited the casino during the communicable period (February 4-9) are advised to call 1922, put on a face mask and seek immediate medical attention as instructed if suspected symptoms develop within 2 weeks. Moreover, such travelers should inform the physician of any relevant travel history when seeking medical attention.”
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World Headline Summary:
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o China says 1,716 medical workers have been infected
o Singapore reports largest daily jump in cases amid increased human-to-human transmission
o Hong Kong reports 3 new cases
o Hubei’s new party boss orders quarantine tightened
o President Xi touts new “biosecurity law”
o Hong Kong Disney land offers space for quarantine
o Chinese company says blood plasma of recovered patients useful in combating the virus
o US mulling new travel restrictions

-end-

Pres. Trump Sends Iran’s “Red Napoleon” to Meet The Reaper

On Friday night Jan 3, 2020, President Trump directed a successful strike killing IRGC Commander Gen. Qassem Soleiman at the Baghdad International Airport.   Four AGM-114N Metal Augmented Charge (MAC) Thermobaric Hellfire missiles launched from an General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper turned Soleiman’s SUV and his accompanying   security SUV into funeral pyres. [1]

IRGC Commander Gen. Qassem Soleiman meets three AGM-114N Metal Augmented Charge (MAC) Thermobaric Hellfire missiles launched from a a MQ-9 Reaper Drone
IRGC Commander Gen. Qassem Soleiman meets three AGM-114N Metal Augmented Charge (MAC) Thermobaric Hellfire missiles launched from an MQ-9 Reaper Drone.   Graphic Source: UK Daily Mail

See full story at this Daily Mail link:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7848729/Trump-taunts-Iran-saying-never-won-war-ordering-strike-killed-Soleimani.html

Some in the media have compared this strike to Operation Vengeance, the American military operation to kill Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy on April 18, 1943.

The Trump Administration drone strike was in fact far more consequential than Operation Vengeance. If only because of how much more of the IRGC Quds force senior chain of command were eliminated compared to the Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto strike.   And how much more important Gen. Qassem Soleiman was to Iran than Yamamoto was to Imperial Japan.

Also killed in the strike were Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis also known as Jamal Jafaar Mohammed Ali Ä€l Ebrahim, the commander of the Iraqi Shia Kata’ib Hezbollah militia and mastermind behind the December 1983 bomb attacks on U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait.

In additional to Soleiman and al-Muhandis/Ä€l Ebrahim, also killed were IRGC Brigadier General Hussein Jafari Nia, Major-General Hadi Taremi, LTC. Shahroud Mozaffari Nia and Captain Waheed Zamanian. Nor does the list end there as senior pro-Iranian Iraqi Shia PMF militia leaders Heydar Ali, Muhammed Reza al-Jaberi and Hassan Abdul Hadi, were in the second SUV struck by one of four AGM-114N Hellfire guided missiles fired by the MQ-9 Reaper.

IRAN’S RED NAPOLEON

IRGC Commander Gen. Qassem Soleiman was to Iran what Heinrich Himmler, Gen Oberst Kurt Daluege, Gen Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Gen Sepp Dietrich were to Nazi Germany, all rolled into one.

In many ways Gen. Qassem Soleiman ran Iran’s foreign policy and strategy as principal adviser to the theocratic leadership. Soleiman made his bones in the 1990’s suppressing Iranian student riots in the style of Belisarius and the Nika riots. Post 9/11/2001, he has been orchestrating the killings of US service personnel, is the architect Iran’s proxy forces in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yeman and ran covert ops forces world wide.

In fact, Gen. Qassem Soleiman was Iran’s “Red Napoleon.

The idea of “The Red Napoleon” came from the 1929 novel of that name by Floyd Gibbons predicting a Soviet conquest of Europe and invasion of America by The Red Napoleon’s massive multi-racial army. Written as a screed against white racial supremacy, the concept in the Western Left of a 3rd World military leader who could routinely defeat the West over and over again the same way that General and later French Emperor Bonaparte Napoleon did to the leaders of Western Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century has hung on in the Left’s Noosphere [2] in the decades since.

If anyone was a “Red Napoleon” in the 21st century,   Gen. Qassem Soleiman was that man.

On January 12, 2016, two United States Navy riverine command boats were seized by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy after they entered Iranian territorial waters near Iran's Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf. The subsiquent release was hailed by the Obama administration as an unintended benefit of the new diplomatic relationship.
On January 12, 2016, two United States Navy riverine command boats were seized by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy after they entered Iranian territorial waters near Iran’s Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf. The subsequent release was hailed by the Obama administration as an unintended benefit of the new diplomatic relationship. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_U.S.%E2%80%93Iran_naval_incident

Gen. Qassem Soleiman was a man from the 3rd World. One who had created and lead a team in the form of the Quds Force that had killed American servicemen in their hundreds, for decades, got a pair of US Navy riverine command  boat crews to surrender in humiliation to support Pres. Obama’s “Opening to Iran” and executed   both the Benghazi, Libya and Baghdad, Iraq embassy assaults.

And Pres. Trump just sent Iran’s “Red Napoleon” to “…meet the Reaper.

IRGC Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani. He was the Iranian government’s “Red Napoleonand was killed by a thermobaric Hellfire missile launched from a MQ-9 Reaper at the orders of President Trump on 3 Jan 2020.

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The Forgotten and Buried Intelligence Lessons of Pearl Harbor, December 7th 1941

December 7th 2019 is the 78th anniversary of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s surprise Pearl Harbor attack on the capitol ship battle line of the US Pacific Fleet.   After that attack there was a round of American elite political and military leaders a collective swearing of “Never Again.”   That is, “Never again will the USA be so surprised by a foreign enemy.”

Pearl Harbor Through Japanese bomb sights
This is what Pearl Harbor looked like through Imperial Japanese Naval Air Force (IJNAF) bomb sights on December 7th 1941.

Yet despite that, America has indeed been “surprised” in exactly the way of Pearl Harbor repeatedly since 1941.   The Korean war is one example five years after WW2 ended.   The Soviet Invasions of both Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan in 1968 and 1979 are two others    It was certainly an intelligence surprise on 9/11/2001 with the attacks on the World Trade Center in NY City and the Pentagon in Washington D.C.,   and the “surprise” of there being few/no Weapons of Mass destruction in post 2003 Iraq, and Iran’s recent drone and cruise missile attack on Saudi Arabian oil refining facilities.

The reason for this pattern of failure boils down to the forgotten and unlearned   — frankly impossible for American elites to learn —   intelligence lessons of Pearl Harbor.   Those unlearned lessons being that the interlocking   patron-client political relations inside the American federal civil government, military and intelligence organizations lead to narrow self-interested group think over the concerns of outside reality.   And that this tendency towards self-interested group think is at its absolute worse when facing a foreign enemy with a police state internal security system that is running a campaign of strategic deception and denial.

If that “worst case” foreign enemy sounds a lot like Imperial Japan, the People’s Republic of North Korea, China, the Soviet Union, Iraq and Iran. It means you have paid attention to both American history since Pearl Harbor and to current events.

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The Collapse of Atomic Diplomacy…Again?

The end of the Pacific War historiography of “Atomic Diplomacy” seems destined for a second round of debunking, after the 1980’s declassification of WW2 Ultra files, with what looks like a “Jon Parchell talking to Japanese scholars about Commander  Mitsuo  Fuchida’s version of Midway” moment. [1]

That is, an accepted American Pacific War historiography is about to be ‘up ended’ by Japanese language scholarship little/unknown in English language for years after its appearance. In this particular case, the ‘scholarship’ is a 2011 NHK documentary titled as follows:

 “Atomic bombing – top secret information that was never utilized”

原爆投下 活(い)かされなかった極秘情報

Original link:

http://www.nhk.or.jp/special/onair/110806.html

Currently accessible link:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkev97

Atomic Bomb Pit #2 - B-29 BocksCar Loading Site
Atomic Bomb Pit #2 – B-29 BocksCar’s Loading Site on Tinian.   This was the plane that killed Nagasaki.   Japanese intelligence tracked it, but Japanese military leaders could not bring themselves to stop it.

The NHK documentary answers questions that “Atomic Diplomacy” has never bothered to ask.    Specifically “What did the Imperial Japanese Military & Government know about the American nuclear weapon program, when did it know it, and what did it do about it.”

NHK’s documentary lays out the following:

  1. The Japanese military knew of the Manhattan project in 1943 and started its own nuclear weapons programs (IJA & IJN) as a result.[2]
  2. The Imperial Japanese Military gave up these nuclear programs in June 1945. [3]
  3. The Imperial Japanese Military & Foreign Ministry were informed of the American Atomic test on July 16, 1945 and refused to believe it was a nuclear detonation.
  4. The code breakers of the Imperial Japanese Army had been tracking the combat operations of the 509th Composite Group including both A-bomb drops.[4] The Imperial General Staff was told of the special message to Washington DC for the Hiroshima attack, sat on the information, and warned no one.
  5. The Imperial General Staff repeated this non-communication performance for the 2nd nuclear attack on Nagasaki.

Not having Japanese language skills myself, I had a link to a 2013 English language translations of the documentary sent to me by an acquaintance.

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How Air Superiority Over Nazi Germany was Really Won

I sometimes write history posts on the Quora.com site.   I did that yesterday with   Colonel Hubert “Hub” Zemke’s “Fighter Pilot Conspiracy” in the Combined Bomber Offensive that I’ve mentioned in a previous post here on Chicagoboyz.
This is the cover of Col. Hubert “Hub” Zemke’s book “Zemke’s Wolf Pack” on the exploits of the 56th Fighter Group in the Combined Bomber Offensive.   Zemke is pictured under his P-47D.
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Effectively, starting from July 1943, Zemke organized an expanding mutiny to 8th Air Force commanding General Ira Clarence Eaker’s orders that USAAF fighters stick close to the bomber stream.
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By it’s end, the Zemke’s Mutiny had an international cast of hundreds that included the signals intelligence spooks of the RAF and elements of the following USAAF organizations: the VIIIth & IXth Fighter Commands, three USAAF fighter wings, and a large number of the 8th and 9th Air Force’s fighter groups under those wings and the signals section of 8th Air Force Headquarters AJAX.
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The story of how this came about and ended is at this link:
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