Conspiracy and coordination were important at the beginning, but national governments and their institutions rapidly assumed the initiative in all areas of pandemic policy.
"As for the conspirators: They are to be sought in the earliest months of 2020. China played a very important role here, through its influence within the WHO, and perhaps also via separate channels."
Yep. That's why it's so conspicuous that we still have nothing close to an official explanation of how China's containment measures came to be adopted as global policy. Still more conspicuous for the fact that no mainstream journalist has yet touched this question, which is by far the most important of the past three years. The longer the rat festers, the more it stinks.
"Arguing the conspiracy-or-emergence question with respect to pandemic policy is a little like weeding the garden. You are never quite done with it, and every few months you find you have something more to say." Indeed. I am and pretty much have always been the person who ascribes evil to the people who "control" the government. I wholeheartedly believe that power not only corrupts, but it (more importantly) attracts the corruptible. People who are, with apology for language choice, shitty in almost every way seek to enjoy the responsibility-free power that government positions afford. That personal belief aside, I think the description used so often by another substacker-extraordinaire, The Bad Cat, is apropos. Most of these decisions made by people like Hancock, Fauci, Johnson, Trump, Biden and the whole lot, represented "the low energy path" and so, dumb-assed bureaucrats, drunk on too much power, took them. Masks. Lockdowns. Mandated vaccination. That said and accepted, here's another uncomfortable truth. The response of the public at large--including acceptance of these nitwit solutions, up to still doing them--confirms what the dumb-assed bureaucrat's user manual suggested. Those bureaucrats are dumb, but the people they lead are, in far too high a proportion, just as damned dumb.
There is an old adage that "a sucker is born every minute"... the corollary to that is that there is a manipulative sob born every hour to take care of 60 suckers ... aka the bureaucrat... the lesson in this is that the masses are not referred to as the "Herd" for no good reason.
The basic human lust for power is everywhere in everyone. Sometimes we're lucky that the guy who grabs it is a competent leader with practical goals. Most often it's a bunch of morons who don't know what to do with the burning coal in their hands.
"Sometimes" is a long, long, LONG time in practice. I would argue "almost never" and gets worse as time progresses. (Then again, I am a bit of an unapologetic libertarian!)
The system (at least in the US) is well tuned to select for the worst, and most self-aggrandizing types. And then they always play off of each other, and get louder every cycle. "See?! You have to vote for me to get rid of **THAT** guy!!!"
It's the political equivalent of The Little Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly.
"The little old lady then swallowed a horse. She died, of course."
Indeed. My Son mentioned an episode of Epic Rap Battles of History that spoke to the fact that our elections should NOT be aimed at picking the shiniest turd. However, I might mention that Professor Carroll Quigley, who taught at Georgetown, and who President Clinton mentioned in his acceptance speech, spelled out the ostensibly proper approach to electoral politics in the U.S. with this.
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy. … Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies."
Simply put, from his standpoint, the parties being similar in actual deed, but LOOKING different enough to drive partisanship and anger, was PERFECT.
The thing of it is, Cindi, and I mentioned this in another thread, someplace. US electoral politics is (and in some ways has long been), the selection of the shiniest turd. So, who got voted in says more about how much people value or identify with the animal-shaped idol on their flag than anything else.
The real issue is that many people don't even want to have these conversations, and will attack your knight on the board by using every piece as their queen, cheating themselves and our planet of dignity. However, if we attain a critical mass of consciousness, I do believe things will change for the better. Thanks for your work. I believe 5G is what many of us haven't been talking about enough during the mRna distraction years: Didn't Neil Ferguson also incorrectly predict Mad Cow disease mortality, leading to the murder of tens of thousands of cattle? It's operation lockstep for sure. We need to be in lockstep with our emotions now, and control them, otherwise we won't be able to think about the real issue that's not being discussed in my opinion, 5G satellites: https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-5g
"Is there a pre-requirement of being a sociopath or a psycho-path to occupy any level of authority?"
No, but the upper levels of power are nearly exclusively populated by precisely those competitors who were willing to perform the most heinous betrayals to win their elections or promotions, so the system perfectly self-selects. Human nature, and the fact that those pathologies are actual medical conditions, demands that it cannot do otherwise.
A westerner expecting the political process to produce benevolent statesmen is no less deluded than a Soviet expecting Communism to produce perfectly unselfish citizens.
Exactly this! It feels so good to see the composure and intelligence of a real constructive debate. That's the way forward, but it obviously needs at least one common shared idea.
I'm not convinced that the pandemic will be used as a caution against future abuse of power rather more like a test run. From what I'm seeing, we are being herded into a future where control over the many by the few will become easier and easier: continued impoverishment of the poor and middle class through inflation, densely packed cities, the WHO pandemic treaty (sorry, I'm not sure that's the official name) that wants authority over the declaration and handling of pandemics in the hands of the WHO solely, CBDC's, shutting down cheap energy in the west, reduction of farming to name a few of the tools.
I hope I'm wrong but the rights we've lost aren't coming back to us, rather they're further eroded. Where I live, pandemic measures have only been suspended to be called back as needed and the unvaxxed still can't cross the US border (officially).
I agree completely there was no prolonged conspiracy (barely even an initial one). Of all the converging factions that landed on lockdown, I feel that big finance is often overlooked.
Post 2008 financial crash, the enormous financial engines of the west got hooked on disaster funding, and seek out opportunities to blackmail politicians into printing more free money for them.
Everyone at the time of the lockdowns thought they’d have to end to “save the economy”, not realising the day to day economic transactions you or I make had been completely decoupled from the closed loop of central bank->big finance->stock exchange.
Maybe when history looks back at this period, it’ll be the timely inflation that ultimately ended any ability for lockdowns and the like to continue.
Well, of course. They're the ones (in the US, at least, I don't know how it works in other countries) that the Federal Reserve pushes out all of its inflationary money through. The Fed "prints" it, they give it to the big banks for some interest rate (which, a few years ago, was *negative*) and then the big banks get to lend it to other people for higher interest rates. They're the first ones in line at the trough, so of course they're in love with this mechanism.
They print money but the want to control money in circulation and money on the accounts of ordinary people. In order to avoid hyperinflation and going out of control.
Credit expansion is inflation. Calling increased cost of living "inflation" is a widespread, mostly bankster-promulgated, misnomer. Regardless, it embezzles the peons' savings (some contemplative, such as interim borrowing to stave off starvation and eviction), forcing them back to work after the brief respite of the meth and cocaine stimulus payments. Cram Janet Yellen's lifeless corpse into the gold window!
It is a complete failure of the historical form of thought. We have already had a respiratory viral pandemic in 1918. We learned from that pandemic close confinement drove both the contagion and its severity. We had during the Spanish Influenza very effective therapies to reduce the pathogen load exposures: Fresh air and sunlight. Three years ago, we already knew respiratory viral pathogens are in fact, replicating toxins. We have known that for years, decades. We can effectively mitigate these types of viral contagion by reducing the pathogen load.
We already knew the base viral load. There are billions of viral particles in a typical ounce of seawater (30 grams), three billion on average to be more precise. Every cubic meter of air typically contains millions to billions of viral particles. The idea you could do anything with a mask except concentrate viral particles on its surface was well established through good old clinical trials, lot of them. This was all old, settled, science at the pandemic's beginning. It was easily available to anyone with google.
Eugyppius recently wrote about how academia these days suppresses discovery, especially experimental method discovery. Nothing could be truer. Establishment academia and establishment science have become, in fact, the forgetful enemies of truth. They can't remember the truth because they have abandoned the historical form of thought. They will have nothing to do with the remaining few souls who insist historical consciousness is the only doorway to truth we've been given. We have to face the facts - academia is the enemy. Their conspiracy is a refusal to remember what is true.
Regarding the Spanish flu and sunshine, vitamin D3 cholecalciferol was discovered shortly after, 100 years ago, but it took until the late 1960s to determine its chemical structure and that the kidneys (and, as is now known, the immune system) run from 25-hydroxyvitamin D calcifediol, made in the liver and stored over weeks to a month or two in the bloodstream. Neither of these compounds act as hormones.
In the 1920s to 1950s researchers and doctors did not know this, or that it is a third compound - 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D calcitriol - which activates the (much later discovered) "vitamin D receptor" which alters gene expression and so the behaviour of cells. This would better be known as the "calcitriol receptor". They did know that ultraviolet B light from sunshine (ideally high elevation) without filtering by glass (which blocks UV-B) greatly improved health as did supplements of a plant-based related compound vitamin D2, which is nearly as effective as vitamin D3. Calcitriol is used as a hormone (long distance blood-borne signaling molecule) by the kidneys to regulate calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism. The immune system does not use hormonal signaling. It uses calcitriol within each cell for intracrine signaling, which enables each cell to respond to its changing circumstances. Some cell types also use calcitriol for paracrine signaling to affect the behaviour of other cell types.
If most doctors had been as interested in nutrition as they should be, they and everyone else would recognise the importance of 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D for full immune system function, which is 2 to 10 times what most people have without proper vitamin D3 supplementation, such as 0.125 mg 5000 IU a day for 70 kg bodyweight.
The role of low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in the Spanish flu epidemic has been researched: Grant and Giovannucci 2009 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4161/derm.1.4.9063 . Likewise, the influence of 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels on later forms of influenza is well researched, but apparently of little interest to most doctors, who remain largely ignorant of it in their corrupted groupthunk ineptitude. Seasonal variations in 25-hydroxyvitamin D are the primary mechanism driving the seasonality of both influenza and COVID-19: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/covid-19-seasonality-is-primarily .
My point was sunlight drastically reduces the viral load in air. Fresh air dilutes the pathogen load with pathogen-free air because of sunlight. As far as sunlight's beneficial effects on the health and immune system, the experimental evidence has been growing for, like you implied, over 100 years.
Sunlight's therapeutic applications were essentially non-existent during the pandemic. If you can't write a prescription for it, modern medicine does not seem very interested. Go back to when that was all the doctor had it was a totally different story.
Ultraviolet B does indeed reduce the number of infectious viruses in aerosols and formites (deposits on surfaces). However, it is largely or entirely blocked by glass, so this only affects transmission outside buildings and vehicles. That may be important in the people of one household or office infecting those of another, but - now especially, compared to 1918 - so much of life takes place indoors or in vehicles that this is where most transmission occurs. Another seasonal influence on transmission may be drier (relative humidity, not absolute, which doesn't matter), hotter, air inside buildings and vehicles in winter, with more recirculation.
However, the primary cause of seasonality is surely the pervasive effects of lower winter 25-hyroxyviitamin D driving even more immune immune system incompetence than the lousy levels most people have in summer.
Perhaps outdoor therapies are needed. The Spanish Flu was most virulent in troop transport, barracks, tenement housing and hospitals. Outdoor field hospitals enjoyed almost total recovery in patients treated outdoors. Outdoor therapies are inexpensive and effective.
Not to denigrate uvb and vit d, red/near infrared sunlight also affect our health. The role of 650 to 900 nm 8n our biology is much newer discovery. No pill available as with vit d and vit k2. An experiment was done on hospitaluzed covid patients and absolutely all treated with red/nir light recovered. Dr. Roger Seheult has posted several good presentations on the role of red/nir in our health. I refer further explanation to him.
Well, Igor and Eugyppius, see what you've done? Now all I can hear is Faye Dunaway getting slapped as she screams "My sister! My daughter!" Gonna be playing in my head all day and the day is just starting.
His email came first of course, but I've read this which arrived just in time.
Now, I like both of you, and despite all the Disappointers who've fallen out of my regard, these past three years (earlier, really, since 2016 to be sure), I trust both of you too. And with no scientific background of my own I can only trust, not verify.
I think Igor gets a little wild-eyed and emotional at times, but what seem to me his undeniable good will and hunger for justice make me give him a little leeway for that.
So the steadiness of your hand, as I've expressed my admiration for several times in the course of our human existence already, is even more appreciated.
I remember how it surprised me, after discovering you and reading you steadily thereafter, to realize you're a young man and not an old one. This gives me hope, that common sense is still being bred in the species.
Academics always believe it is stupidity that leads to bad decision making - instead of immoral conduct by people lacking spiritual conviction. The Hebrew bible says again and again that those who violate the Ten Commandments and worship false idols will end up sacrificing children. It was that behavior - the corruption of these officials and their worship of false idols - that has lead to the COVID sacrifice of our world’s children. In addition, these people who work against religion and believe they are just “rational” and “secular” just embody another cult.
Just because they justify themselves doesn't mean they're aren't evil. Satan himself believes he's justified and hard done by. Most everybody is inventing excuses to justify their actions and beliefs, especially when it involves screwing someone over for their own benefit and especially when it involves inaction on their own part.
Ever disagree with the union worker that thinks it's a good thing that their industry is subsidized? You run into this problem almost everytime you get into a disagreement with someone, even over clear cut issues. Say that hydrogen fuel cell cars make no sense and watch the fur fly. Yet hydrogen electrolysis was the first chemical reaction ever discovered and has the simplest thermodynamic relationship. A 5 year old could google an answer to the "source to wheel" efficiency of hydrogen fuel cell cars in 5 minutes but the proponents will bother (there's more to it but most factors work against it).
I think what's missing in this discussion is that spiritual issues deal with the true source of our motives and few are willing to examine them. The arc of history appears to have motives of it's own that go back centuries or millennia. The history of science, equal rights, religion or political philosophy, if plotted on a graph, all seem to have nonlinear curves that have spun out of control as of late. Even Galileo and Copernicus are suspected to be Jesuit inventions (every free thinker was skinned or burned alive, so why not these).
If we just look at the physical sciences, their spinning off into fantasy and their contribution to the idiotic belief system of society in general, then maybe Newton, Darwin and the Royal Society being a bunch of occultists was giving us foreknowledge.
We spent $26 billion finding some boson that most theoretical physicists don't even believe in, while we can't explain conclusively what causes skin effect in an electrical conductor. Even math is wrong (Kline - Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty). Pharmacology, medical science, psychology, economics. All disasters. Only chemistry has it together. Engineering kind of has it together but they don't really. They just get things to work.
All the problems above originate in the human heart. The philosophy of science has been around a long time and maybe Popper didn't get it all right but still, nobody's practicing the scientific method. They're just stamp collecting.
I think the rot goes a lot deeper then people want to admit and I can't find and explanation that doesn't include it being orchestrated by Satan himself. I know that if you dont believe in a spirit world populated with personal entities then that seems like a colossal failure of logic. I can't help that. All material explanations put together don't add up to 1% of what's happening though.
"Just because they justify themselves doesn't mean they're aren't evil."
The problem is defining evil. If I believe all life is sacred, then even killing animals for food becomes evil. Obviously, 90% of humanity is not evil but from the point of view of an alien society where any kind of killing is forbidden, humans would appear to soulless evil creatures who kill billions of animals to satisfy their lust for delicious food.
There is an interesting tendency in the industrialized world to abandon individual integrity in favor of adherence to procedures.
Working for the most "advanced" (biggest) companies in the world will reveal that mistakes or lack of integrity (alternatively: "evil deeds") are excused by pointing to inadequate procedures. When asked why an individual made a mistake (or got caught) they will respond by saying "the procedure wasn't adequate." An "8D" "5-whys" analysis of what went wrong will reveal the obvious... The procedural documentation was inadequate (despite it being impossible to document complex tasks perfectly). In response to these inadequate procedural documents, well meaning engineers or scientists will attempt to create new, all encompassing, procedural documents.
These procedural documents become doctrine. If you deviate from these procedures, you are punished or fired. If you follow the procedures and create problems, it wasn't your fault.... It was a bad procedure.
Here's how it goes:
1. A union worker botches a job.
2. The corporation tries to discipline/fire the person responsible.
3. The union protects the person who screwed up by pointing to bad procedures.
4. The corporation updates the procedures so they can fire the next guy who screws up.
5. The procedure grows.
6. Head girls who write and adhere to procedures well climb the corporate ladder.
Eugyppius, you know...you gotta write that book. So much research over the years shouldn't go to waste and, selfishly, I like and share your non-agressively non-conspiratorial, non-biblethumping outlook. I think the idea that stupid people-with-power dabbled with Things Beyond Their Ken and got it horribly wrong is one that even moderate covidians could get behind, leading to a little bit less hostility between covidians and covid measure critics and skeptics.
I am really interested in the role social media/Silicon Valley played. Sure, they were to profit from lockdown policies. But do you think they very early realized this was the perfect opportunity to advance a more digital lifestyle and line their pockets in the process and began to actually push for lockdowns? Or do you think they got on the lockdown bandwagon later on because it was more convenient for them? Did they meet with government representatives early on and were made to mute criticism or did the gatekeepers in social media share policymakers' sensibilities?
It must be a conspiracy or a grand master plan, or the world doesn't make sense.
Children before puberty tend to think that everything that happens does so for a reason beyond mere causality; this is due to their neurological and psychological development.
With experience and knowledge and the brain maturing comes the subconscious realisation that most things happen through complex interaction and that there's often no other reason for something happening (to the individual in question) than random chance and probabilities.
This of couse is very bleak and uncomfortable, and also engenders a sense of alienation and detachment: we want to belong and we want to matter so we seek out patterns, circumstances and groups that makes us feel welcome and wanted and as having a purpose with life (which life doesn't have, it just is).
Which of course doesn't in any way mean there aren't co-ordination, plans and planning - there is, and must be for any society to exist. And any such co-ordination when institutionalised and made routine or even ritual is very easy to co-opt and utilise for more purposes than the original one.
In short, it's not either conspiracies or no conspiracies, just as it's not salt /or/ pepper -it's salt /and/ pepper.
But the world is more comforatble under control (false sense of such, i.e. a safety blanket) if a conspiracy can be said to exist which the individual in question then can use as an ad hoc and omniversal explanation for everything, rather than accepting their own insignificance and the (objectvely speaking) pointlessness of their existence.
I appreciate your level-headed thinking on this, Eugyppius. This is such a complicated thing, and while the conspiracy angle just helps explain it, the answer has to be more layered than that. The constant intellectual degradation of education and thus public service, and the relentless attack on Westen, liberty-minded ideologies, the weaponization of the white, liberal female, the general and historical belief in vaccines and our fear of even routine illnesses - it all worked in concert to create the hurricane. A group of conspirators can’t plan a giant scam and have everyone go along in lockstep...unless the conditions were right. And that was not necessarily in any one camp’s control. It’s still baffling to think how quickly people I used to admire abandoned their common sense. And the conspiracy alone doesn’t answer that to my satisfaction.
You're right of course. Dramatic seemingly conspiratorial events often come together as a result of the mundane opportunism of various groups with their own individual agenda.
I honestly think the popular image of a global elite who conspire to kill us all off to save the Earth is a kind of psychological attempt by people at externalizing their own environmental concerns. Whenever I see these theories emerge, I think to myself: "You haven't integrated your shadow."
It's similar to how the "elites" are always accused of "eugenics" by the conspiracy theorists. Anyone can figure out we don't want heroin addicted prostitutes to have 10 children that have to be raised by CPS, but we don't want to have someone forcibly dragged off the street to have her tubes tied either.
And so at some level we all want eugenics, but we also all don't want to be called nazi racists. So it's seductive to externalize this dark aspect of our personality, the shadow, projecting it onto an evil global elite, who are the antithesis in every way of our own imagined qualities.
That way we don't have to worry about the problem: It will be solved by the evil ruthless elite and even better, we don't have to feel guilty about the problem being solved, in fact we bravely if impotently tried standing up against these ruthless elites who solved the problem. You get to enjoy the best of both worlds.
And so whatever problem is real (global IQ is declining, the planet is overpopulated and rapidly warming up, etc) is ultimately addressed, but our own hands are washed free of blood.
> I honestly think the popular image of a global elite who conspire to kill us all off to save the Earth is a kind of psychological attempt by people at externalizing their own environmental concerns.
Except there really *are* people who have stated that the world would be much better off with a population of 1 Billion, rather than the current population of 8 Billion. Now, I don't know if there are *enough* of those people in positions of power to really worry about, but it's a lot like the gun debate in the US, where the antis are forever telling the pros "We don't want to take your guns!" and then someone like Beto comes along and explicitly says "Hell yes I'm going to take your AR-15". However one might feel about the subject, it's not plausible to claim that "nobody is saying that".
>Except there really *are* people who have stated that the world would be much better off with a population of 1 Billion, rather than the current population of 8 Billion.
Yes, there are such people.
But I wouldn't consider such people to be the "global elite". Whenever I ask people to prove that the global elite want to kill us all off I get a large list of quotes from Paul Ehrlich, Ted Turner, that old troll Prince Phillip saying he wants to reincarnate as a virus, some clinically depressed ecologists and a handful of psychotic new age gurus nobody ever heard of.
You may well be correct, and I certainly hope you are. Though I can't exactly discount someone as influential as Erlich, as rich as Turner, or as *connected to the bloody British Monarchy* as Prince Philip out of hand. Philip's son *is* the current King, and shares a lot of his father's positions on climate, after all. Even if he's not a *ruling* monarch, I'm under the impression that the Royal Family still has a fair bit of influence.
Still, I do tend to catastrophize, so, as I say, I certainly hope that I'm wrong and you're right. ;)
That doesn't prove anything. Coming up with a near air tight conspiracy theory to convince others is nearly impossible, even if you could. I can't even convince others of things that are demonstrably true. And conspiracy theories deal with things where the "Unknown Unknowns" are off the scale. But we have data points that cannot be ignored.
Here's my recent thinking. First Covid was sold as from a wet market. Then, after long resitance, what was known from day one was accepted in it being lab leak. But the only story that has no holes is that it was US military engineered and intentionally released in Wuhan where they knew about the SARS vaccine work and used that as cover. But what if the US military being the source is also a Psyop?
But what if the true source is secret? This way if they ever got around to hanging Fauci he couldn't spill the beans.
The pyramid with the all seeing eye symbolizes, among other things, that only the few at the top know the truth. As population has increased we haven't heard about the Druidic Council being increased from 13 to 100 to represent the larger population. Most likely the people in the know are fewer than 100 total.
One thing I've found so strange about Covid are the open stupid secrets. Ukraine biolabs all unclassified so every contract is publicly accessible. Neil Ferguson coming out with an outrageous estimate and then reducing it by 2 orders of magnitude in 5 days, then 2 orders more in another 5 days. Open knowledge of the Furan Cleavage Site from the beginning. France banning hydroxychloriquine in Sept. 2019.
On and on. Why did all this information present itself? I think it's a Psyop. They're messing with us. Wasting our time. We have data points we can't ignore so we're motivated to search and they're using our inherent weaknesses against us.
Yeah. People like Somerset Belenoff supposedly have more power than any president and most people have never heard of her. The higher up you go the more it becomes pure black magic witchcraft. The money wing just keeps the wheels turning but aren't the power.
It seems like most people, even on the right, have forgotten the initial response of the usual suspects to corona before the later flip to Covid-panic, so it's good to see that our host hasn't. At least in the US, the media narrative in Jan/Feb 2020 was that corona was a nothingburger compared to annual flu deaths, and that President Trump's attempts to close the borders were driven by pure racism. Democrats took selfies of themselves eating dinner in Chinatown and encouraged Americans to do the same. The CDC put out flyers recommending against the use of masks, and those who bought respirators were accused of hoarding and panic-mongering. Experts at the CDC and elsewhere said that a vaccine would be at least 18 months in the making, if it proved to be possible at all.
That changed in March, but it took a while for the full shift to pro-lockdowns and pro-masks to happen. The NCAA basketball tournament was cancelled on March 12, one of the first big events to be shut down. The president declared the "national emergency" the next day. Various stay-at-home orders and shutdowns came in the weeks after that. My state, which was one of the most insane, started its mask mandate on May 1.
So if I wanted to claim that the entire thing was planned--not in the sense of globalist disaster contingency plans opportunistically brought into use, but in the sense of a planned agenda followed step-by-step starting with the release of the virus--I would have to believe that all these governments and corporate partners and every media organ participated in a 2- to 3-month head-fake where they downplayed the virus, just so they could spend the next couple months backtracking and brainwashing the populace into forgetting all that and accepting the new narrative of panic. Why? No one would plan it that way because there'd be no reason to. You'd release the virus, let it spread a little, and then start spreading the panic and enacting your restrictions. There would be no reason to make the job more difficult by preaching the opposite narrative at first.
Maybe that's why everyone's forgotten those first months. Leftists had to forget because the new narrative couldn't allow for any doubts, and because the shift was so obviously politically motivated. But maybe right-wingers forgot because the idea of a well-planned conspiracy jerking us around is easier to take than the possibility that much of it took on a life of its own, driven by bureaucrats jumping on an opportunity to enhance their power without needing anyone to order them to do what they did.
The virus wasn't released. The PCR test was released to take the fomented fear to great levels. The "vaccine" was produced in hours on Jan 13 allegedly. It wasn't a serendipitous Eureka moment, it was the result of years of synthetic generic research based on a contrived synthetic genome that was probably not in the wild until the injections were deployed starting with the early trials which PREDATED 12 March.
Maybe it's because if there's a Dr. Evil-style room full of villains directing things through a hierarchy, that's something that can be fought. If your heroes can take out those villains, the whole thing falls apart and you've fixed the problem. But if something like this mostly has a life of its own, with some nudging from villains at the top but not an orderly hierarchy, that's much harder to fight. Taking out the top men (or beating them in elections) doesn't actually change anything then, because your local schoolboard Karens aren't going to stop pushing masks, because no one ever ordered them to push masks in the first place. It means every single brainwashed cultist has to be fought individually.
Yes, I know a lot of people who will complain about this or that corrupt department, corporation, or individual in power; but if you suggest that that's the rule rather than the exception and the whole system is corrupt, they say that's crazy conspiracy stuff.
In their minds, complete systemic corruption isn't supposed to be possible; something is supposed to prevent it. Democracy is supposed to keep elected representatives from completely ignoring the wishes of the people. Journalists are supposed to want the big scoop too badly to all go along with the same lies. The profit motive is supposed to keep major corporations from going along with schemes that will reduce or impoverish their customer base.
And so on. The "system" is supposed to be flawed but self-correcting, so it can't become truly evil. They (especially Americans) take that on faith, so they don't have to know what guarantees this self-correction; it just is. Any theory which says it can be broken beyond repair is automatically discarded.
Thanks, Cale, for three excellent comments in a row. I just chanced upon them four-and-a-half months later while reading through some old Eugyppius articles. So many commenters here still fail at a fundamental level to understand Eugyppius's approach, so it's gratifying to see someone who not only understands it, but can then run with the ball. (In case you can't remember or find the comments, here's a memorable phrase from them: "James Bond movie versus Zombie movie".]
There are certainly global elitists who are crafting narratives and coordinating actions with political leaders around the globe under the guise of a utopian future ("save the planet!") -- and said leaders are enriching themselves by playing along.
But there are also local officials and media players who are out of their depth on things like pandemics (i.e. they are dumb). These people look to the national level political leaders -- and the scientific "experts" -- for guidance on making their decisions on what to say and what to do. Thus, they perpetrate the lies and bad actions concocted at a higher level.
As thoughtful people such as eugyppius, Igor, and others debate the truth of Planet Covid, sometimes coming to different factually supported and *seemingly* contradictory conclusions, I suggest everyone keep in mind the old story of the blind men and the elephant: each blind person touches a different part of the huge beast (trunk, flank, leg, ear, tusk, tail) and describes the whole animal as just being the part they felt. They’re all speaking truthfully and accurately, but still disagree, at least until their consciousnesses expand to appreciate the scale of what they are trying to understand.
I have my own nutty theories about it all I won’t go into now, but any person who wants to tackle the truth about covid writ large seriously needs to have some humility about the immense scale of the tusk … I mean, task.
climate change is for me the classic opposite example, of an agenda fairly openly pushed from the top down. in part because I think it's an allegedly global problem that legitimises globalist institutions as the locus of solutions.
It is, but isn’t the same true for pandemics? The true meaning of pandemic is it is World-wide, or at least a large part of it, so the WHO is the top down. Certainly the WHO is making that pitch for total control to bypass National Govts. It does seem the WHO was having its strings pulled to coordinate the response of Governments.
The climate change gig didn’t start as a global enterprise in fact it started at national levels amid ‘environmentalism’ and then got adopted as a global enterprise with its guiding organisation the IPCC.
WHO and IPCC are both creatures of the UN, that big bag of pus and corruption originally intended as a forum for international communication and cooperation, but which has morphed into a Global Government in-waiting and itself a front and tool for the string-pullers.
The genesis of all this global control to save the Planet started with the great ozone layer scam.
Climate change initiatives were created to stimulate huge additional demand across all industies (renewable sources and so on) as a measures to prevent economic depression, to put industies at work. Even oil and natural gas industries benefited from climate change battle. While pandemic served to globally change behaviour and way of life masses of people to control their economic and financial behaviour.
Good of you to mention "the great ozone layer scam." I recall it clearly, and yet never find it in "weather" stories. People, scientists!, were convinced there was a hole in the ozone layer that was caused by man-made chemicals. And quietly went away when the "hole" disappeared on its own.
What are your thoughts on RFK jr running for President? I love the guy, but many are understandably worried about his views on climate change. He’s very genuine in his beliefs, but I also doubt he subscribes to views about 15 minute cities, and eating bugs. I have to research his views more. I doubt he has a chance as the DNC would never allow it, and the media has led a successful propaganda campaign against him.
I think a lot of the time there doesn't actually *need* to be a conspiracy in place, just people with similar ideals in positions of power. When presented with the same stimulus -- Climate Alarmism, Pandemic Alarmism, etc -- they produce the same output. It looks coordinated, but it's really just running the same program on similarly designed computers.
Like rats living a sinking ship in an orderly fashion - it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just what rats do naturally out of self-interest.
Just like the rats we have in Governments, it’s just what they do naturally out of self-interest, not a conspiracy per se, but there is a confluence of interests among the global rats and they do communicate, so coordination takes place as a matter of course.
Throughout the West and even on a global level, attempts at establishing common policies have been made, think of all that climate conferences that enables 30,000 delegates to travel there in style and have a Wagyu burger with likeminded people. Whatever ideas they come up with there should then be turned into policies of specific countries. It's exactly the way the EU works ("Richtlinien" and so on). Some supernational body decides on a desired outcome and the underlings implement suitable legislation at the state level.
That is so. There are dozens of international bodies regulating every aspect of our lives, none of which accountable to taxpayers and electorates. The European Commission appears to be the originator of regulation from the EU, but it is just the messenger, and the same too for non-EU Governments. People imagine it is their own Govt but it isn’t.
It's a very complex and intransparent, not to say "murky" web. If you take the EU, there are legislatory initiatives based on input from EU-wide party blocks, EU member states, NGOs, probably supernational bodies and so on.
We are having this pushed down, at great expense, to the municipal level in Canada.
"Official Community Plans" start with the top line "In Accordance with the Climate Crisis...' and it is all downhill to "You will walk or bike everywhere in your 15 minute radius..."
And this is how you get to near-total control - have a vision, have a bureaucracy, have the means and the mindset to punish people, have a weak civil society that goes along with it. (cf. "Seeing Like A State", James C. Scott).
I think the conspiracists forget how blatantly self-contradictory and obviously stoopid the pandemic policies were. Liquor stores are "essential" and must be kept open, but the DMV is non-essential and must close. We must close off the clothing section at Walmart with caution tape but leave the food section of the same store open, because potato chips are essential and shoes are not. You must mask entering the restaurant, but then take off the mask when you sit down, but then put it back on to go to the bathroom.
Even the goons at the WEF would come up with better plans were they behind it all, if for no other reason than to confuse the masses less. This was the work of dim-witted politicians desparately flying by the seat of their pants at all times.
At the start of the shutdown, Tina Kotek then an Oregon assembly member told her subjects to stockup on alcohol but not take vit D. She is now govenor of Oregon
"As for the conspirators: They are to be sought in the earliest months of 2020. China played a very important role here, through its influence within the WHO, and perhaps also via separate channels."
Yep. That's why it's so conspicuous that we still have nothing close to an official explanation of how China's containment measures came to be adopted as global policy. Still more conspicuous for the fact that no mainstream journalist has yet touched this question, which is by far the most important of the past three years. The longer the rat festers, the more it stinks.
"Arguing the conspiracy-or-emergence question with respect to pandemic policy is a little like weeding the garden. You are never quite done with it, and every few months you find you have something more to say." Indeed. I am and pretty much have always been the person who ascribes evil to the people who "control" the government. I wholeheartedly believe that power not only corrupts, but it (more importantly) attracts the corruptible. People who are, with apology for language choice, shitty in almost every way seek to enjoy the responsibility-free power that government positions afford. That personal belief aside, I think the description used so often by another substacker-extraordinaire, The Bad Cat, is apropos. Most of these decisions made by people like Hancock, Fauci, Johnson, Trump, Biden and the whole lot, represented "the low energy path" and so, dumb-assed bureaucrats, drunk on too much power, took them. Masks. Lockdowns. Mandated vaccination. That said and accepted, here's another uncomfortable truth. The response of the public at large--including acceptance of these nitwit solutions, up to still doing them--confirms what the dumb-assed bureaucrat's user manual suggested. Those bureaucrats are dumb, but the people they lead are, in far too high a proportion, just as damned dumb.
There is an old adage that "a sucker is born every minute"... the corollary to that is that there is a manipulative sob born every hour to take care of 60 suckers ... aka the bureaucrat... the lesson in this is that the masses are not referred to as the "Herd" for no good reason.
The basic human lust for power is everywhere in everyone. Sometimes we're lucky that the guy who grabs it is a competent leader with practical goals. Most often it's a bunch of morons who don't know what to do with the burning coal in their hands.
"Sometimes" is a long, long, LONG time in practice. I would argue "almost never" and gets worse as time progresses. (Then again, I am a bit of an unapologetic libertarian!)
The system (at least in the US) is well tuned to select for the worst, and most self-aggrandizing types. And then they always play off of each other, and get louder every cycle. "See?! You have to vote for me to get rid of **THAT** guy!!!"
It's the political equivalent of The Little Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly.
"The little old lady then swallowed a horse. She died, of course."
Indeed. My Son mentioned an episode of Epic Rap Battles of History that spoke to the fact that our elections should NOT be aimed at picking the shiniest turd. However, I might mention that Professor Carroll Quigley, who taught at Georgetown, and who President Clinton mentioned in his acceptance speech, spelled out the ostensibly proper approach to electoral politics in the U.S. with this.
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy. … Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies."
Simply put, from his standpoint, the parties being similar in actual deed, but LOOKING different enough to drive partisanship and anger, was PERFECT.
As evidenced by how regularly they vote them in, Wiltster
The thing of it is, Cindi, and I mentioned this in another thread, someplace. US electoral politics is (and in some ways has long been), the selection of the shiniest turd. So, who got voted in says more about how much people value or identify with the animal-shaped idol on their flag than anything else.
Rather depressing but here we are
Fine analysis. Thank you for that.
The real issue is that many people don't even want to have these conversations, and will attack your knight on the board by using every piece as their queen, cheating themselves and our planet of dignity. However, if we attain a critical mass of consciousness, I do believe things will change for the better. Thanks for your work. I believe 5G is what many of us haven't been talking about enough during the mRna distraction years: Didn't Neil Ferguson also incorrectly predict Mad Cow disease mortality, leading to the murder of tens of thousands of cattle? It's operation lockstep for sure. We need to be in lockstep with our emotions now, and control them, otherwise we won't be able to think about the real issue that's not being discussed in my opinion, 5G satellites: https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-5g
"Is there a pre-requirement of being a sociopath or a psycho-path to occupy any level of authority?"
No, but the upper levels of power are nearly exclusively populated by precisely those competitors who were willing to perform the most heinous betrayals to win their elections or promotions, so the system perfectly self-selects. Human nature, and the fact that those pathologies are actual medical conditions, demands that it cannot do otherwise.
A westerner expecting the political process to produce benevolent statesmen is no less deluded than a Soviet expecting Communism to produce perfectly unselfish citizens.
“Conspiracy or idiocy litmus test”
Or, as Sage Hana would put it: “Dolts Botching Shit” vs. “Cullers Culling Shit”
Eugyppius, we have an amazing exchange of opinions that will, hopefully, benefit our readers and will make life more interesting.
Thanks for writing a very thoughtful followup.
The history of the pandemic is being written (and rewritten) as we speak and we need to be dicscussing it further.
I hope that the Covid pandemic will be forever remembered as a caution against future abuses of power.
I think you two are setting a very good example for us all what intelligent discourse should look like!
Exactly this! It feels so good to see the composure and intelligence of a real constructive debate. That's the way forward, but it obviously needs at least one common shared idea.
I'm not convinced that the pandemic will be used as a caution against future abuse of power rather more like a test run. From what I'm seeing, we are being herded into a future where control over the many by the few will become easier and easier: continued impoverishment of the poor and middle class through inflation, densely packed cities, the WHO pandemic treaty (sorry, I'm not sure that's the official name) that wants authority over the declaration and handling of pandemics in the hands of the WHO solely, CBDC's, shutting down cheap energy in the west, reduction of farming to name a few of the tools.
I hope I'm wrong but the rights we've lost aren't coming back to us, rather they're further eroded. Where I live, pandemic measures have only been suspended to be called back as needed and the unvaxxed still can't cross the US border (officially).
We all hope this but expect it unlikely to be true. There has been great foreshadowing of "Pandemic No 2". Wait thats just more support of conspiracy.
I 100% agree. It keeps me thinking.
I agree completely there was no prolonged conspiracy (barely even an initial one). Of all the converging factions that landed on lockdown, I feel that big finance is often overlooked.
Post 2008 financial crash, the enormous financial engines of the west got hooked on disaster funding, and seek out opportunities to blackmail politicians into printing more free money for them.
Everyone at the time of the lockdowns thought they’d have to end to “save the economy”, not realising the day to day economic transactions you or I make had been completely decoupled from the closed loop of central bank->big finance->stock exchange.
Maybe when history looks back at this period, it’ll be the timely inflation that ultimately ended any ability for lockdowns and the like to continue.
It's not conspiracy on the government level. The bankers are behind this.
Well, of course. They're the ones (in the US, at least, I don't know how it works in other countries) that the Federal Reserve pushes out all of its inflationary money through. The Fed "prints" it, they give it to the big banks for some interest rate (which, a few years ago, was *negative*) and then the big banks get to lend it to other people for higher interest rates. They're the first ones in line at the trough, so of course they're in love with this mechanism.
They print money but the want to control money in circulation and money on the accounts of ordinary people. In order to avoid hyperinflation and going out of control.
Credit expansion is inflation. Calling increased cost of living "inflation" is a widespread, mostly bankster-promulgated, misnomer. Regardless, it embezzles the peons' savings (some contemplative, such as interim borrowing to stave off starvation and eviction), forcing them back to work after the brief respite of the meth and cocaine stimulus payments. Cram Janet Yellen's lifeless corpse into the gold window!
Now all profits over all enterprises and industries have fallen to zero. The economy is supported purely by issuing money.
It is a complete failure of the historical form of thought. We have already had a respiratory viral pandemic in 1918. We learned from that pandemic close confinement drove both the contagion and its severity. We had during the Spanish Influenza very effective therapies to reduce the pathogen load exposures: Fresh air and sunlight. Three years ago, we already knew respiratory viral pathogens are in fact, replicating toxins. We have known that for years, decades. We can effectively mitigate these types of viral contagion by reducing the pathogen load.
We already knew the base viral load. There are billions of viral particles in a typical ounce of seawater (30 grams), three billion on average to be more precise. Every cubic meter of air typically contains millions to billions of viral particles. The idea you could do anything with a mask except concentrate viral particles on its surface was well established through good old clinical trials, lot of them. This was all old, settled, science at the pandemic's beginning. It was easily available to anyone with google.
Eugyppius recently wrote about how academia these days suppresses discovery, especially experimental method discovery. Nothing could be truer. Establishment academia and establishment science have become, in fact, the forgetful enemies of truth. They can't remember the truth because they have abandoned the historical form of thought. They will have nothing to do with the remaining few souls who insist historical consciousness is the only doorway to truth we've been given. We have to face the facts - academia is the enemy. Their conspiracy is a refusal to remember what is true.
Regarding the Spanish flu and sunshine, vitamin D3 cholecalciferol was discovered shortly after, 100 years ago, but it took until the late 1960s to determine its chemical structure and that the kidneys (and, as is now known, the immune system) run from 25-hydroxyvitamin D calcifediol, made in the liver and stored over weeks to a month or two in the bloodstream. Neither of these compounds act as hormones.
In the 1920s to 1950s researchers and doctors did not know this, or that it is a third compound - 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D calcitriol - which activates the (much later discovered) "vitamin D receptor" which alters gene expression and so the behaviour of cells. This would better be known as the "calcitriol receptor". They did know that ultraviolet B light from sunshine (ideally high elevation) without filtering by glass (which blocks UV-B) greatly improved health as did supplements of a plant-based related compound vitamin D2, which is nearly as effective as vitamin D3. Calcitriol is used as a hormone (long distance blood-borne signaling molecule) by the kidneys to regulate calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism. The immune system does not use hormonal signaling. It uses calcitriol within each cell for intracrine signaling, which enables each cell to respond to its changing circumstances. Some cell types also use calcitriol for paracrine signaling to affect the behaviour of other cell types.
If most doctors had been as interested in nutrition as they should be, they and everyone else would recognise the importance of 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D for full immune system function, which is 2 to 10 times what most people have without proper vitamin D3 supplementation, such as 0.125 mg 5000 IU a day for 70 kg bodyweight.
Please read the research articles cited and discussed at: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/the-covid-19-pandemic-response-killed (Co-signed by Patrick Chambers MD.)
The role of low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in the Spanish flu epidemic has been researched: Grant and Giovannucci 2009 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4161/derm.1.4.9063 . Likewise, the influence of 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels on later forms of influenza is well researched, but apparently of little interest to most doctors, who remain largely ignorant of it in their corrupted groupthunk ineptitude. Seasonal variations in 25-hydroxyvitamin D are the primary mechanism driving the seasonality of both influenza and COVID-19: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/covid-19-seasonality-is-primarily .
My point was sunlight drastically reduces the viral load in air. Fresh air dilutes the pathogen load with pathogen-free air because of sunlight. As far as sunlight's beneficial effects on the health and immune system, the experimental evidence has been growing for, like you implied, over 100 years.
Sunlight's therapeutic applications were essentially non-existent during the pandemic. If you can't write a prescription for it, modern medicine does not seem very interested. Go back to when that was all the doctor had it was a totally different story.
Ultraviolet B does indeed reduce the number of infectious viruses in aerosols and formites (deposits on surfaces). However, it is largely or entirely blocked by glass, so this only affects transmission outside buildings and vehicles. That may be important in the people of one household or office infecting those of another, but - now especially, compared to 1918 - so much of life takes place indoors or in vehicles that this is where most transmission occurs. Another seasonal influence on transmission may be drier (relative humidity, not absolute, which doesn't matter), hotter, air inside buildings and vehicles in winter, with more recirculation.
However, the primary cause of seasonality is surely the pervasive effects of lower winter 25-hyroxyviitamin D driving even more immune immune system incompetence than the lousy levels most people have in summer.
Perhaps outdoor therapies are needed. The Spanish Flu was most virulent in troop transport, barracks, tenement housing and hospitals. Outdoor field hospitals enjoyed almost total recovery in patients treated outdoors. Outdoor therapies are inexpensive and effective.
Well said, and Florence Nightingale, over a 100 years ago, made the same case for fresh air, fresh water and the efficacy of sunlight!
Not to denigrate uvb and vit d, red/near infrared sunlight also affect our health. The role of 650 to 900 nm 8n our biology is much newer discovery. No pill available as with vit d and vit k2. An experiment was done on hospitaluzed covid patients and absolutely all treated with red/nir light recovered. Dr. Roger Seheult has posted several good presentations on the role of red/nir in our health. I refer further explanation to him.
Excellent information and analysis!
Well said!
Well, Igor and Eugyppius, see what you've done? Now all I can hear is Faye Dunaway getting slapped as she screams "My sister! My daughter!" Gonna be playing in my head all day and the day is just starting.
His email came first of course, but I've read this which arrived just in time.
Now, I like both of you, and despite all the Disappointers who've fallen out of my regard, these past three years (earlier, really, since 2016 to be sure), I trust both of you too. And with no scientific background of my own I can only trust, not verify.
I think Igor gets a little wild-eyed and emotional at times, but what seem to me his undeniable good will and hunger for justice make me give him a little leeway for that.
So the steadiness of your hand, as I've expressed my admiration for several times in the course of our human existence already, is even more appreciated.
I remember how it surprised me, after discovering you and reading you steadily thereafter, to realize you're a young man and not an old one. This gives me hope, that common sense is still being bred in the species.
Academics always believe it is stupidity that leads to bad decision making - instead of immoral conduct by people lacking spiritual conviction. The Hebrew bible says again and again that those who violate the Ten Commandments and worship false idols will end up sacrificing children. It was that behavior - the corruption of these officials and their worship of false idols - that has lead to the COVID sacrifice of our world’s children. In addition, these people who work against religion and believe they are just “rational” and “secular” just embody another cult.
I don’t have any problems with calling them evil, and I don’t think careful explanations of their actions and policies need be incompatible with that.
That is the most important characteristic to call them -evil and soulless.
I disagree. Most people who do evil think what they do is good. For example, killing people to save the planet.
Just because they justify themselves doesn't mean they're aren't evil. Satan himself believes he's justified and hard done by. Most everybody is inventing excuses to justify their actions and beliefs, especially when it involves screwing someone over for their own benefit and especially when it involves inaction on their own part.
Ever disagree with the union worker that thinks it's a good thing that their industry is subsidized? You run into this problem almost everytime you get into a disagreement with someone, even over clear cut issues. Say that hydrogen fuel cell cars make no sense and watch the fur fly. Yet hydrogen electrolysis was the first chemical reaction ever discovered and has the simplest thermodynamic relationship. A 5 year old could google an answer to the "source to wheel" efficiency of hydrogen fuel cell cars in 5 minutes but the proponents will bother (there's more to it but most factors work against it).
I think what's missing in this discussion is that spiritual issues deal with the true source of our motives and few are willing to examine them. The arc of history appears to have motives of it's own that go back centuries or millennia. The history of science, equal rights, religion or political philosophy, if plotted on a graph, all seem to have nonlinear curves that have spun out of control as of late. Even Galileo and Copernicus are suspected to be Jesuit inventions (every free thinker was skinned or burned alive, so why not these).
If we just look at the physical sciences, their spinning off into fantasy and their contribution to the idiotic belief system of society in general, then maybe Newton, Darwin and the Royal Society being a bunch of occultists was giving us foreknowledge.
We spent $26 billion finding some boson that most theoretical physicists don't even believe in, while we can't explain conclusively what causes skin effect in an electrical conductor. Even math is wrong (Kline - Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty). Pharmacology, medical science, psychology, economics. All disasters. Only chemistry has it together. Engineering kind of has it together but they don't really. They just get things to work.
All the problems above originate in the human heart. The philosophy of science has been around a long time and maybe Popper didn't get it all right but still, nobody's practicing the scientific method. They're just stamp collecting.
I think the rot goes a lot deeper then people want to admit and I can't find and explanation that doesn't include it being orchestrated by Satan himself. I know that if you dont believe in a spirit world populated with personal entities then that seems like a colossal failure of logic. I can't help that. All material explanations put together don't add up to 1% of what's happening though.
"Just because they justify themselves doesn't mean they're aren't evil."
The problem is defining evil. If I believe all life is sacred, then even killing animals for food becomes evil. Obviously, 90% of humanity is not evil but from the point of view of an alien society where any kind of killing is forbidden, humans would appear to soulless evil creatures who kill billions of animals to satisfy their lust for delicious food.
There is an interesting tendency in the industrialized world to abandon individual integrity in favor of adherence to procedures.
Working for the most "advanced" (biggest) companies in the world will reveal that mistakes or lack of integrity (alternatively: "evil deeds") are excused by pointing to inadequate procedures. When asked why an individual made a mistake (or got caught) they will respond by saying "the procedure wasn't adequate." An "8D" "5-whys" analysis of what went wrong will reveal the obvious... The procedural documentation was inadequate (despite it being impossible to document complex tasks perfectly). In response to these inadequate procedural documents, well meaning engineers or scientists will attempt to create new, all encompassing, procedural documents.
These procedural documents become doctrine. If you deviate from these procedures, you are punished or fired. If you follow the procedures and create problems, it wasn't your fault.... It was a bad procedure.
Here's how it goes:
1. A union worker botches a job.
2. The corporation tries to discipline/fire the person responsible.
3. The union protects the person who screwed up by pointing to bad procedures.
4. The corporation updates the procedures so they can fire the next guy who screws up.
5. The procedure grows.
6. Head girls who write and adhere to procedures well climb the corporate ladder.
7. Covid lockdowns.
Or, alternatively, for the less technical fields, substitute "procedure" with "business process."
Eugyppius, you know...you gotta write that book. So much research over the years shouldn't go to waste and, selfishly, I like and share your non-agressively non-conspiratorial, non-biblethumping outlook. I think the idea that stupid people-with-power dabbled with Things Beyond Their Ken and got it horribly wrong is one that even moderate covidians could get behind, leading to a little bit less hostility between covidians and covid measure critics and skeptics.
I am really interested in the role social media/Silicon Valley played. Sure, they were to profit from lockdown policies. But do you think they very early realized this was the perfect opportunity to advance a more digital lifestyle and line their pockets in the process and began to actually push for lockdowns? Or do you think they got on the lockdown bandwagon later on because it was more convenient for them? Did they meet with government representatives early on and were made to mute criticism or did the gatekeepers in social media share policymakers' sensibilities?
Looking forward to that book of yours. :-)
It must be a conspiracy or a grand master plan, or the world doesn't make sense.
Children before puberty tend to think that everything that happens does so for a reason beyond mere causality; this is due to their neurological and psychological development.
With experience and knowledge and the brain maturing comes the subconscious realisation that most things happen through complex interaction and that there's often no other reason for something happening (to the individual in question) than random chance and probabilities.
This of couse is very bleak and uncomfortable, and also engenders a sense of alienation and detachment: we want to belong and we want to matter so we seek out patterns, circumstances and groups that makes us feel welcome and wanted and as having a purpose with life (which life doesn't have, it just is).
Which of course doesn't in any way mean there aren't co-ordination, plans and planning - there is, and must be for any society to exist. And any such co-ordination when institutionalised and made routine or even ritual is very easy to co-opt and utilise for more purposes than the original one.
In short, it's not either conspiracies or no conspiracies, just as it's not salt /or/ pepper -it's salt /and/ pepper.
But the world is more comforatble under control (false sense of such, i.e. a safety blanket) if a conspiracy can be said to exist which the individual in question then can use as an ad hoc and omniversal explanation for everything, rather than accepting their own insignificance and the (objectvely speaking) pointlessness of their existence.
TLDR both conspiracies and emergent behavior shape our world
If you don't approve, it's a conspiracy. If you do approve it's a plan.
I appreciate your level-headed thinking on this, Eugyppius. This is such a complicated thing, and while the conspiracy angle just helps explain it, the answer has to be more layered than that. The constant intellectual degradation of education and thus public service, and the relentless attack on Westen, liberty-minded ideologies, the weaponization of the white, liberal female, the general and historical belief in vaccines and our fear of even routine illnesses - it all worked in concert to create the hurricane. A group of conspirators can’t plan a giant scam and have everyone go along in lockstep...unless the conditions were right. And that was not necessarily in any one camp’s control. It’s still baffling to think how quickly people I used to admire abandoned their common sense. And the conspiracy alone doesn’t answer that to my satisfaction.
You're right of course. Dramatic seemingly conspiratorial events often come together as a result of the mundane opportunism of various groups with their own individual agenda.
I honestly think the popular image of a global elite who conspire to kill us all off to save the Earth is a kind of psychological attempt by people at externalizing their own environmental concerns. Whenever I see these theories emerge, I think to myself: "You haven't integrated your shadow."
It's similar to how the "elites" are always accused of "eugenics" by the conspiracy theorists. Anyone can figure out we don't want heroin addicted prostitutes to have 10 children that have to be raised by CPS, but we don't want to have someone forcibly dragged off the street to have her tubes tied either.
And so at some level we all want eugenics, but we also all don't want to be called nazi racists. So it's seductive to externalize this dark aspect of our personality, the shadow, projecting it onto an evil global elite, who are the antithesis in every way of our own imagined qualities.
That way we don't have to worry about the problem: It will be solved by the evil ruthless elite and even better, we don't have to feel guilty about the problem being solved, in fact we bravely if impotently tried standing up against these ruthless elites who solved the problem. You get to enjoy the best of both worlds.
And so whatever problem is real (global IQ is declining, the planet is overpopulated and rapidly warming up, etc) is ultimately addressed, but our own hands are washed free of blood.
> I honestly think the popular image of a global elite who conspire to kill us all off to save the Earth is a kind of psychological attempt by people at externalizing their own environmental concerns.
Except there really *are* people who have stated that the world would be much better off with a population of 1 Billion, rather than the current population of 8 Billion. Now, I don't know if there are *enough* of those people in positions of power to really worry about, but it's a lot like the gun debate in the US, where the antis are forever telling the pros "We don't want to take your guns!" and then someone like Beto comes along and explicitly says "Hell yes I'm going to take your AR-15". However one might feel about the subject, it's not plausible to claim that "nobody is saying that".
*shrug*
>Except there really *are* people who have stated that the world would be much better off with a population of 1 Billion, rather than the current population of 8 Billion.
Yes, there are such people.
But I wouldn't consider such people to be the "global elite". Whenever I ask people to prove that the global elite want to kill us all off I get a large list of quotes from Paul Ehrlich, Ted Turner, that old troll Prince Phillip saying he wants to reincarnate as a virus, some clinically depressed ecologists and a handful of psychotic new age gurus nobody ever heard of.
Not exactly the global elite.
Thank God I wasn't drinking my mug of hot tea when I read this.
You may well be correct, and I certainly hope you are. Though I can't exactly discount someone as influential as Erlich, as rich as Turner, or as *connected to the bloody British Monarchy* as Prince Philip out of hand. Philip's son *is* the current King, and shares a lot of his father's positions on climate, after all. Even if he's not a *ruling* monarch, I'm under the impression that the Royal Family still has a fair bit of influence.
Still, I do tend to catastrophize, so, as I say, I certainly hope that I'm wrong and you're right. ;)
That doesn't prove anything. Coming up with a near air tight conspiracy theory to convince others is nearly impossible, even if you could. I can't even convince others of things that are demonstrably true. And conspiracy theories deal with things where the "Unknown Unknowns" are off the scale. But we have data points that cannot be ignored.
Here's my recent thinking. First Covid was sold as from a wet market. Then, after long resitance, what was known from day one was accepted in it being lab leak. But the only story that has no holes is that it was US military engineered and intentionally released in Wuhan where they knew about the SARS vaccine work and used that as cover. But what if the US military being the source is also a Psyop?
But what if the true source is secret? This way if they ever got around to hanging Fauci he couldn't spill the beans.
The pyramid with the all seeing eye symbolizes, among other things, that only the few at the top know the truth. As population has increased we haven't heard about the Druidic Council being increased from 13 to 100 to represent the larger population. Most likely the people in the know are fewer than 100 total.
One thing I've found so strange about Covid are the open stupid secrets. Ukraine biolabs all unclassified so every contract is publicly accessible. Neil Ferguson coming out with an outrageous estimate and then reducing it by 2 orders of magnitude in 5 days, then 2 orders more in another 5 days. Open knowledge of the Furan Cleavage Site from the beginning. France banning hydroxychloriquine in Sept. 2019.
On and on. Why did all this information present itself? I think it's a Psyop. They're messing with us. Wasting our time. We have data points we can't ignore so we're motivated to search and they're using our inherent weaknesses against us.
Elites have mouthpieces. You never hear from those with the real power
Start here sir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Elite
Elites are nothing without the useful idiots and the “go along to get along” types. And they know it, or propaganda wouldn’t be a thing.
Yeah. People like Somerset Belenoff supposedly have more power than any president and most people have never heard of her. The higher up you go the more it becomes pure black magic witchcraft. The money wing just keeps the wheels turning but aren't the power.
It seems like most people, even on the right, have forgotten the initial response of the usual suspects to corona before the later flip to Covid-panic, so it's good to see that our host hasn't. At least in the US, the media narrative in Jan/Feb 2020 was that corona was a nothingburger compared to annual flu deaths, and that President Trump's attempts to close the borders were driven by pure racism. Democrats took selfies of themselves eating dinner in Chinatown and encouraged Americans to do the same. The CDC put out flyers recommending against the use of masks, and those who bought respirators were accused of hoarding and panic-mongering. Experts at the CDC and elsewhere said that a vaccine would be at least 18 months in the making, if it proved to be possible at all.
That changed in March, but it took a while for the full shift to pro-lockdowns and pro-masks to happen. The NCAA basketball tournament was cancelled on March 12, one of the first big events to be shut down. The president declared the "national emergency" the next day. Various stay-at-home orders and shutdowns came in the weeks after that. My state, which was one of the most insane, started its mask mandate on May 1.
So if I wanted to claim that the entire thing was planned--not in the sense of globalist disaster contingency plans opportunistically brought into use, but in the sense of a planned agenda followed step-by-step starting with the release of the virus--I would have to believe that all these governments and corporate partners and every media organ participated in a 2- to 3-month head-fake where they downplayed the virus, just so they could spend the next couple months backtracking and brainwashing the populace into forgetting all that and accepting the new narrative of panic. Why? No one would plan it that way because there'd be no reason to. You'd release the virus, let it spread a little, and then start spreading the panic and enacting your restrictions. There would be no reason to make the job more difficult by preaching the opposite narrative at first.
Maybe that's why everyone's forgotten those first months. Leftists had to forget because the new narrative couldn't allow for any doubts, and because the shift was so obviously politically motivated. But maybe right-wingers forgot because the idea of a well-planned conspiracy jerking us around is easier to take than the possibility that much of it took on a life of its own, driven by bureaucrats jumping on an opportunity to enhance their power without needing anyone to order them to do what they did.
The virus wasn't released. The PCR test was released to take the fomented fear to great levels. The "vaccine" was produced in hours on Jan 13 allegedly. It wasn't a serendipitous Eureka moment, it was the result of years of synthetic generic research based on a contrived synthetic genome that was probably not in the wild until the injections were deployed starting with the early trials which PREDATED 12 March.
Maybe it's because if there's a Dr. Evil-style room full of villains directing things through a hierarchy, that's something that can be fought. If your heroes can take out those villains, the whole thing falls apart and you've fixed the problem. But if something like this mostly has a life of its own, with some nudging from villains at the top but not an orderly hierarchy, that's much harder to fight. Taking out the top men (or beating them in elections) doesn't actually change anything then, because your local schoolboard Karens aren't going to stop pushing masks, because no one ever ordered them to push masks in the first place. It means every single brainwashed cultist has to be fought individually.
Zombie movie versus James Bond movie, basically.
Yes, I know a lot of people who will complain about this or that corrupt department, corporation, or individual in power; but if you suggest that that's the rule rather than the exception and the whole system is corrupt, they say that's crazy conspiracy stuff.
In their minds, complete systemic corruption isn't supposed to be possible; something is supposed to prevent it. Democracy is supposed to keep elected representatives from completely ignoring the wishes of the people. Journalists are supposed to want the big scoop too badly to all go along with the same lies. The profit motive is supposed to keep major corporations from going along with schemes that will reduce or impoverish their customer base.
And so on. The "system" is supposed to be flawed but self-correcting, so it can't become truly evil. They (especially Americans) take that on faith, so they don't have to know what guarantees this self-correction; it just is. Any theory which says it can be broken beyond repair is automatically discarded.
Thanks, Cale, for three excellent comments in a row. I just chanced upon them four-and-a-half months later while reading through some old Eugyppius articles. So many commenters here still fail at a fundamental level to understand Eugyppius's approach, so it's gratifying to see someone who not only understands it, but can then run with the ball. (In case you can't remember or find the comments, here's a memorable phrase from them: "James Bond movie versus Zombie movie".]
I think it's both.
There are certainly global elitists who are crafting narratives and coordinating actions with political leaders around the globe under the guise of a utopian future ("save the planet!") -- and said leaders are enriching themselves by playing along.
But there are also local officials and media players who are out of their depth on things like pandemics (i.e. they are dumb). These people look to the national level political leaders -- and the scientific "experts" -- for guidance on making their decisions on what to say and what to do. Thus, they perpetrate the lies and bad actions concocted at a higher level.
This. It doesn’t take a vast conspiracy. Just a few key leaders who all agree on the program
As thoughtful people such as eugyppius, Igor, and others debate the truth of Planet Covid, sometimes coming to different factually supported and *seemingly* contradictory conclusions, I suggest everyone keep in mind the old story of the blind men and the elephant: each blind person touches a different part of the huge beast (trunk, flank, leg, ear, tusk, tail) and describes the whole animal as just being the part they felt. They’re all speaking truthfully and accurately, but still disagree, at least until their consciousnesses expand to appreciate the scale of what they are trying to understand.
I have my own nutty theories about it all I won’t go into now, but any person who wants to tackle the truth about covid writ large seriously needs to have some humility about the immense scale of the tusk … I mean, task.
‘... but national governments and their institutions rapidly assumed the initiative in all areas of pandemic policy.’
And the same for climate change? No global policy there.
climate change is for me the classic opposite example, of an agenda fairly openly pushed from the top down. in part because I think it's an allegedly global problem that legitimises globalist institutions as the locus of solutions.
Climate change due to CO2 is much more obvious anti-science fallacy than the pandemic policies.
C02 does not, and cannot, control the complex climate system by itself. Science simplified to a slogan.
William Happer from Princeton university of perspective research explains. Can be found on YT. The phisicists knew this from the beginning.
It is, but isn’t the same true for pandemics? The true meaning of pandemic is it is World-wide, or at least a large part of it, so the WHO is the top down. Certainly the WHO is making that pitch for total control to bypass National Govts. It does seem the WHO was having its strings pulled to coordinate the response of Governments.
The climate change gig didn’t start as a global enterprise in fact it started at national levels amid ‘environmentalism’ and then got adopted as a global enterprise with its guiding organisation the IPCC.
WHO and IPCC are both creatures of the UN, that big bag of pus and corruption originally intended as a forum for international communication and cooperation, but which has morphed into a Global Government in-waiting and itself a front and tool for the string-pullers.
The genesis of all this global control to save the Planet started with the great ozone layer scam.
Climate change initiatives were created to stimulate huge additional demand across all industies (renewable sources and so on) as a measures to prevent economic depression, to put industies at work. Even oil and natural gas industries benefited from climate change battle. While pandemic served to globally change behaviour and way of life masses of people to control their economic and financial behaviour.
Good of you to mention "the great ozone layer scam." I recall it clearly, and yet never find it in "weather" stories. People, scientists!, were convinced there was a hole in the ozone layer that was caused by man-made chemicals. And quietly went away when the "hole" disappeared on its own.
What are your thoughts on RFK jr running for President? I love the guy, but many are understandably worried about his views on climate change. He’s very genuine in his beliefs, but I also doubt he subscribes to views about 15 minute cities, and eating bugs. I have to research his views more. I doubt he has a chance as the DNC would never allow it, and the media has led a successful propaganda campaign against him.
I think a lot of the time there doesn't actually *need* to be a conspiracy in place, just people with similar ideals in positions of power. When presented with the same stimulus -- Climate Alarmism, Pandemic Alarmism, etc -- they produce the same output. It looks coordinated, but it's really just running the same program on similarly designed computers.
Eric S. Raymond coined the term "prospiracy" to describe more or less this.
Exactly, and people from a certain group tend to be flocks of one feather - in politics as well as in bureaucracies or the media or Silicon Valley.
Like rats living a sinking ship in an orderly fashion - it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just what rats do naturally out of self-interest.
Just like the rats we have in Governments, it’s just what they do naturally out of self-interest, not a conspiracy per se, but there is a confluence of interests among the global rats and they do communicate, so coordination takes place as a matter of course.
Throughout the West and even on a global level, attempts at establishing common policies have been made, think of all that climate conferences that enables 30,000 delegates to travel there in style and have a Wagyu burger with likeminded people. Whatever ideas they come up with there should then be turned into policies of specific countries. It's exactly the way the EU works ("Richtlinien" and so on). Some supernational body decides on a desired outcome and the underlings implement suitable legislation at the state level.
That is so. There are dozens of international bodies regulating every aspect of our lives, none of which accountable to taxpayers and electorates. The European Commission appears to be the originator of regulation from the EU, but it is just the messenger, and the same too for non-EU Governments. People imagine it is their own Govt but it isn’t.
It's a very complex and intransparent, not to say "murky" web. If you take the EU, there are legislatory initiatives based on input from EU-wide party blocks, EU member states, NGOs, probably supernational bodies and so on.
We are having this pushed down, at great expense, to the municipal level in Canada.
"Official Community Plans" start with the top line "In Accordance with the Climate Crisis...' and it is all downhill to "You will walk or bike everywhere in your 15 minute radius..."
And this is how you get to near-total control - have a vision, have a bureaucracy, have the means and the mindset to punish people, have a weak civil society that goes along with it. (cf. "Seeing Like A State", James C. Scott).
I think the conspiracists forget how blatantly self-contradictory and obviously stoopid the pandemic policies were. Liquor stores are "essential" and must be kept open, but the DMV is non-essential and must close. We must close off the clothing section at Walmart with caution tape but leave the food section of the same store open, because potato chips are essential and shoes are not. You must mask entering the restaurant, but then take off the mask when you sit down, but then put it back on to go to the bathroom.
Even the goons at the WEF would come up with better plans were they behind it all, if for no other reason than to confuse the masses less. This was the work of dim-witted politicians desparately flying by the seat of their pants at all times.
"Liquor stores are "essential" and must be kept open, but the DMV is non-essential and must close."
What happens if you shut down the liquors stores? Riots.
What happens if you shut down the DMV? Nothing.
At the start of the shutdown, Tina Kotek then an Oregon assembly member told her subjects to stockup on alcohol but not take vit D. She is now govenor of Oregon