The Covid response was a lot of things, but above all it was just really, really stupid. This stupidity was in no way unique; a lot of what modern states do is mind-numbingly idiotic. Covid was different only to the extent that intense media attention cast this stupidity in unusually sharp relief.
Book progress report: All four chapters more or less finished in draft, need brief introduction and conclusion, and I still have to sort out many of the notes. Undecided on whether to include an additional section on the wretched protocols of this Expert Council, if I do that the whole thing will probably be ca. 120 pages long (this depends on format of course), if I don't more like 110 pages I would guess. I am tired.
Well, this is a pretty great post, so your tiredness isn't showing. A really nice, concise explanation of how to understand how the Expertocracy thinks.
I'd suggest you include the additional section. It's only 10 more pages, as you've estimated. You may regret not doing it while you're engrossed in the topic. Your (assumedly trusted) editor will advise whether to include it. If not, it may become the first chapter of your next book.
Maybe I’ll post it here if I end up pulling it. What i (and others) had hoped to find there - insight into vaccination campaign in its later stages - is largely missing, which is one of the reasons i thought of forgetting it.
All part of the vast international money-laundering scheme. Pfizer and BioNTech profit from sale of overpriced rubbish "vaccines" to the U.S. and the E.U.
Plenty of kickbacks and room for advancement for all the promoters in gov't and medicine.
The New York Times recently casually admitted that covid deaths in the U.S. were inflated. I wrote about this the other day, and how the CDC’s death certificate reporting guidelines didn't require that covid be causally responsible to be listed on a death certificate. To say nothing of the egregiously inaccurate tests, which created a "casedemic." The skewed stats distorted the actual risk that covid poses and contributed to the mass hysteria that became the defining feature of the pandemic.
Worth mentioning here that incidence was inflated not only by the "with Covid" and "from Covid" confusion, but that PCR tests were run to such excessively high threshold cycles that they produced positive results even where there was no live virus, or insufficient live virus to produce disease.
Exactly! In November of 2020, the FDA warned that up to 96% of all covid antigen test positives could be false positives in screening programs at a low 0.1% active disease prevalence. Which you’d think would matter quite a bit, given that we were at or near that level of active disease prevalence for most of the pandemic. And after antigen tests were rolled out widely for weekly or even biweekly screening in the UK, government officials warned in internal email discussions that up to 98% of the antigen test positive results could be false positives because of low active disease prevalence.
And in an August 2020 New York Times article, a number of virologists warned that the much ballyhooed PCR tests, supposedly the gold standard for covid testing, were being used in such a way that up to 90% of the positive tests were effectively false positives.
Kary Mullis, Nobel Laureate and inventor of the PCR test, who died in 2019, said that the test was no good for screening. Rather, it was useful to confirm. So, for example, if a patient was exhibiting all the signs and symptoms of Covid infection, then it would help to confirm the disease, but giving it across the board to everyone who showed up at a hospital for even completely unrelated reasons was irrational, unless the real goal was grift, i.e., maximize fear to sell vaccine.
To expand a little on the grift aspects, hospitals that classified patients as Covid got substantial extra payment from the government. They also then had an excuse to infuse Remdesivir, a very dangerous drug for which they received yet more money. Independent bllood testing companies also had an incentive to run PCR tests to excessively high cycle thresholds, as every positive would bring in multiple contacts for testing.
if you're interested look into the financial statements from the relevant period for publicly traded hospital companies (like HCA). Low bed utilization rates, but very high profitability...something that is not seen in that industry.
I did write in quite a few comments ,how they murdered my brother in a Canadian hospital along many others ,with the treatment that leads to the death of the victim and a large profit for the hospital .
Brad none of what they said was true, or made any sense.
I worked through the madness, served thousands of customers, handled endless amounts of cash, didn’t wear a mask shopping or do the hand sanitiser ritual.
It was August 2021 before I caught anything, sore throat for four days and that was it.
They shut the world down using fraudulent testing for a scabby virus, they created more harm and damage than if they’d left it alone. Of course it wouldn’t have been as profitable or criminal in how many rights were swiftly removed, they’ll do it again and the same folk will fall in the same manure.
Yeah, I came to mention the NYT Aug '20 article that up to 90% of positives were false positives. A story that should've gotten some traction yet was overwhelmed by all the panic porn.
Brad Than how do we know that the other 10% where effectively correct positives .?Please tell us the difference . Would you disagree if I say,they where and are all bullshit ?
The source is, remarkably, the CDC itself. It admitted that PCR testing does not distinguish between COVID, influenza, and other corona viruses. "Somehow" not every media outlet felt this news was fit to print....
So finally ,if someone runs the tests at lower cycles ,we will see the live Whyrusses ? The ones we can't see because the cycles are too high ? Why did no one think of that until now? I do have a new magnifying glass and will look inside Ganmaas mouth for the virus .
I did! It was glorious! I never realized that Wales is stunningly beautiful countryside. (I thought Wales = coal mines.) I finally saw Stonehenge. Edinburgh is very cool--in a medieval sort of way. I absolutely MUST get back to London. So much to see and not enough time.
Excellent! It's a bit like people who say 'I've been to America'. I always ask 'which bit?'. It's so huge and diverse; the statement makes no sense otherwise. Likewise, our little island is just as diverse, except in minature.
So true. Stupidity. But this "stupidity" needs thinking about.
The most shocking thing about the "mass" reaction to covid was the abandonement of rational thought and descent into superstition, driven by irrational fear.
I was absolutely shocked at how quickly several centuries of technological and scientific "progress" was brushed aside.
It was as if all the education, all the classes in chemistry, physics, biology ... meant nothing. And especially mathematics, which is about logic.
We have not eliminated our lust for supersitition, but simply replaced it with "high-tech superstition". If that sounds like an oxymoron, it is not. The base sensation is still there. It has just received a "make-over".
It makes me wonder about basic defects in the human "software" (or maybe hardware?) so that, we are doomed to make the same mistakes as in burning witches, but with just that "make-over" or "update".
re: "The most shocking thing about the "mass" reaction to covid was the abandonement of rational thought and descent into superstition, driven by irrational fear."
I stopped paying attention to the 'experts' when everyone aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess didn't die from Covid-19. This was early/first half of 2020. Also, in vitro treatment of the contagion with common drugs (we know what they are) was effective. Vaccine free since having been jabbed with the Swine Flu vaccine in the mid 70's.
Very astute observation Tareq. All humans are superstitious to varying degrees. We have an irrational part of our minds that we cannot "educate" away. It would be like trying to educate away fear or anger. It can only be redirected. The worst offenders are usually the ones who consider themselves to be completely rational. I favor religion in peoples' lives because it is a constructive way to channel our irrationality. It may not be rational to believe in an all-powerful creator or the accounting of our actions after death, but it brings with it both personal and societal benefits. In the new, secular West, supposedly intelligent people have rejected religion, believing themselves to be free of irrational superstition, however they end up redirecting these irrational impulses into areas that harm society. Each of these people will insist that they are acting rationally - even when confronted with evidence to the contrary. A truly intelligent individual understands and accepts their own irrational nature and accounts for it.
As a quote ascribed to G.K. Chesterton (erroneously or otherwise) goes: "When a man stops believing in God, he doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything".
That we were able to convince, not only Joe Normie, but highly-trained Medical professionals of the validity of the most outlandish gimmicks, was staggering. Like standing on circles a foot apart was protective, or a surgical mask made to stop a snotty sneeze from contaminating a surgical field, or a mask designed for carpenters and woodworkers to stop dust, could both now just pivot to double as microscopic-virus blockers. Or that a 2ft x 2ft perspex screen could somehow stop floating airborne particles, that simply walking past someone showing zero symptoms could send out the Covid-infection deathray. Or that natural immunity was now an urban myth. These were TRAINED MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS!
What Covid showed us was that 90% of people are extremely vulnerable to propaganda and suspension of rationality and logic, no matter their education level.
I agree, but the difficulty lies in finding an irrational pursuit that does not contradict reality. Most theological arguments have no effect on the real world, and the moral precepts are mostly internal/individual. Pseudo-religions like Environmentalism, Marxism, Materialism, and Scientism unfortunately have great effects on the real world.
All the rules in Torah and Talmud, Bible and Quran are nothing but theological arguments affecting the real world.
As opposed to the old celtic, teutonic, roman, greek - any non-semitic and non-abrahamic beliefsystem, where the religious rules were based in reality, and not vice versa.
Perhaps I should have said "impact individual behavior rather than impose their version of reality". All human belief systems impact the real world to various degrees, but consider the Buddhist's impact on society vs. an Environmentalist's. The former is mostly inward directed, and the utopian outcome happens personally after death, while the latter is outward directed, and the utopian outcome requires its imposition on society now.
Theological arguments are the only thing feasible in the modern world because "reality based" religions were merely irrational explanations of natural phenomena. These became superceded by science. Ancient religions explained how and why the universe worked. Science now describes accurately and logically HOW the universe works, but religion is still required to answer the WHY, which is NOT tied strongly to logic.
You must be a person who knows how things work. The rest of us haven't a clue. I am tapping away on a phone. I have no idea how it works. It might as well be magic that I activate with my superstitious ritualistic tapping and swiping. My superstitions work. I believe you are underestimating them.
Zing! You gave me a good laugh; until my mind flipped into a mobius trying to grok the potential implications for our brains and perceptions throughout history. Yikes!
The masses chose fear over faith . Their education proved worthless and they should be refunded most of the cost. Also , can you please elaborate on your term “ high tech superstition “ ?
I think Bill Resner demonstrated the superstition theory with his cellphone extrapolation(above). It may as well be magic under another name for most users. They don't expect to understand the mechanism or the physics; they just "know" it will work because they believe in the the High Priests of High Tech. Just like they believe in "safe and effective" and globull warming. It never occurs to them to question anything that the high priests decree.
The deployment of behavioral science to induce panic, keeps leading me back to Stoddard's observations about reversal of adaptive learning. Building on Skinner's experiments, Stoddard mapped reversal of reinforcement stimuli.
I mention this because your highly astute observation about repetitive error had me thinking about how easily things are "unlearned" when cortisol is continuously overproduced.
It seems rather akin to losing one's temper when an opponent lands a strike to the face. The combatant forgets years of training and swings wildly away in response, usually losing the fight. You're quite correct; all of that learning was forgotten in an instant. By the time the panic subsided, too much had been invested in The Narrative to allow any return to reason.
't makes me wonder about basic defects in the human "software"'
Robert Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist, explains some of the wiring that's behind this. I can't recall the name of the book right now where I read about that. And evolutionary biologists like Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying have more insights into it. Our hardware, and therefore most of our software, or maybe you could call it firmware, is still Paleolithic, after all.
These are only defects in the context of man's more recent history. There were reasons for these behaviors to have evolved. We're caught in an evolutionarily mismatch between our biology and our culture. This is the theme of Weinstein & Heying's book A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
I love Sapolsky, though he is an adamant atheist and does not believe in any free will at all.
Robert Sapolsky Rocks has his entire Human Behavioral Biology course at Stanford online, which is like Physics for Poets or Conceptual Physics in that you don't have to grok statistics or math to comprehend the lectures. http://www.robertsapolskyrocks.com/
And this from the late E.O. Wilson:
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
If we set aside the truth claim of metaphysical evil for a moment, most every horror that humans inflict seems explicable by evolutionary vestiges. Randy Thornhill, whom Jordan Peterson interviewed, has proposed the parasite stress theory of human values. We get much more authoritarian, according to his analysis, under pathogen stress. Though there is a layer of the parfait that is just officious petty tyrannical cretins come into their own at last, there is also a dark layer of those that know all about how to manipulate us, IMHO, and they know to keep the pathogen stress up perpetually and how to bootstrap the pathogens (deploy the new variant wastewater, summer surge, monkeypox etc.) to climate terror. See also Jordan Peterson on percentage of dark triad types who seek power. Academia has spent decades teaching that the brain is a blank slate and firing the evolutionary interdisciplinarians. No accident that to my mind, at least at the level that considers itself Olympus.
I don't know about the pathogen bit, but it sounds related to my personal pet theory: that we evolved to live in smaller tribes and don't do well in huge numbers. The inevitable organizational systems that result become controlled by the opportunistic sociopaths and psychopaths who make up a not-insignificant proportion of the human population.
They could easily have declared victory after "two weeks to flatten the curve" and proclaimed themselves heroes. But that's not how technocrats work. Every crisis must be exaggerated and exploited.
Now that I’ve read everything again for the second or third time, I’ve developed this slightly speculative but moderately well-supported thesis:
Lockdowns as originally deployed in China and sold to the West were supposed to be a spring 2020 exclusive. Everyone was supposed to open and declare victory thereafter. Various hints this was the scheme, including the fact that this is exactly what China did. It was Ferguson at imperial college who introduced the idea of rolling indefinite lockdowns until some ill-defined future date.
he had the supply when the demand was there, but he or at least people in his circle helped create the demand with their red zone testing in italy. ferguson is very important node in this story.
And if it had ended there, we likely would have seen vast public support for the public health regime. Even though it was all dumb, people would’ve felt they’d done something, we all came together, blah blah blah, and mission accomplished! But a golden rule of bureaucracies is, once they are empowered and given credence, they just grow forever and ever. Their only real mission becomes to have more “resources”, add staff and intrude in more areas of governance. In my own little world, I’ve seen this with planning and transportation bureaucracies, which have a record of utter failure for 100 years, but nevertheless continue to grow and act to acquire more power and “tools.”
Anecdotal. Tylenol (paracetamol for Brits, and Panadol for Aussies) does nothing for me; it's just a hepatotoxic placebo. Steve Kirsch says "Tylenol makes everything worse", while A Midwestern Doctor says "unshakable faith in vaccination, in turn, is why we still won't follow practices that could dramatically reduce the rate of harm from vaccination (e.g., spacing vaccinations out, not giving the most harmful vaccines, and not giving Tylenol after a vaccine-induced fever). It's allegedly an antipyretic, thus suppressing immune response (from interferon). Regardless, interferon suppression allows viral infections to rage on longer, thus spawning more mutations. Other NSAIDs supposedly don't increase autism incidence. I've no idea why that should be. I'd suggest taking no antipyretic NSAIDs at all during an active infection or following a vaccination if you get those.
I never take Tylenol for a rare headache or fever since it never worked for me in those instances. But I've recently discovered it's effective (for me) against muscle strain/pain. I only use ONE regular-strength tablet.
I agree fever reducers are to be avoided for short-term low-grade fevers which have a healing purpose not to be interfered with.
I'm more than happy to learn fresh evils about acetaminophen. My four-year-old almost died of liver failure in 2001 after receiving a 1/3 dose for his bodyweight in an over-the-counter cough medication.
The educated are chosen because they are more easily manipulated than those who are merely stupid (admittedly many educated people are really stupid)
The educated have a "credientilited ego" that demands deference. They are incredibly easy to con, just dangle the perceived benefits of in-group status before them. Once inside the cult, they will never admit they are conned. After all, multiple degree's from elite academic institutions provide them a shield to being conned. See Sam Harris for how this works IRL.
I can't stop thinking of the priesthood of ancient Egypt as one of the earliest bureaucratic models for all this crap. Plus ca change. Human nature and all that jazz. We ain't got nowhere in 3,000 years.
nevermind nowhere, modern America is a backwards barbarian cesspool compared to 12th Dynasty Egypt...all the cool religious festivals down by the riverside, the elegant art and fashion, the gods and rituals...those people knew how to live.
You do know "slave" then did not necessarily mean what you think it means in a modern-day americanised context?
Slave then was a societal class with rights, and gong into slavery was a way to pay taxes and debts, all regulated by contracts.
The practices we associate with slavery (humans used as animals) is largely an invention of the late christianised Roman Empire; in ancient days that kind of slave was most often a criminal sentenced to slavery until death.
The egyptian "Book of the Dead" with the original scholarly preface is a goldmine in ideas and understanding how this now long-dead culture influenced and continues to influence everything in the Eastern Mediterranean region.
(Which is poetically fitting given their beliefs.)
What I admire about their priesthoods is that their religion and burial practices necessitated the invention of industry. Every dead person had to have their prayer-scrolls andritual whatnots with the in death, but scribbling these took time, so the priesthoods came up with the idea of making oodles of scrolls (and other ritual parafernalia, the ancient egyptians make orthodox jews seem positively secular when it comes to ritualising daily life), with blank spaces left out for the name and description of the deceased.
You could buy them buy the gross in advance, and you could hire people to go do your rituals for you so you didn't have to take time off from work.
To us it of course looks like simoni, but to them there was no conflict between rational thought and action, and being an ardent faithful. That whole thing, that belief must needs handicap your intellect comes into existence some time between Nicaea and Hastings.
Just had to butt in, I'm avoiding laundry day you see.
"It is precisely the representation of asymptomatic cases that is important for calculation infection waves and their peak. Symptom surveillance is not a substitute for incidence."
It still boggles my mind that anyone bought this concept on any level. How on earth can asymptomatic people affect the hospital admission rate, which is their premise for the whole lockdown thing in the first place. Asymptomatic people are not ill, else they would have symptoms. Healthy people do not need hospital attention. Doh. Saying that these asymptomatic people might be spreading it to others is equally bonkers. IF someone becomes ill there is no way of establishing a route of transmission in any way, except perhaps close contact with a symptomatic ill person.....
As I say, it's mind boggling that this didn't get laughed out immediately it was presented as a concept.
I think it's because most people have had this experience: John has a mild case of the sniffles one day. He never has the full symptoms of a cold, but when his wife Mary gets a bad cold a week later, he assumes he had a basically asymptomatic cold and gave it to her, and it was worse for her because her immune system was weaker that day for whatever reason.
Of course, John and Mary have no way of knowing that John had a cold and not a bit of allergies, or that Mary didn't get the cold from a checkout girl who sneezed on her hands before handling Mary's groceries. But it wasn't unusual to hear that sort of "folk wisdom" explanation for colds that seemed to have no clear source before corona-fest, so people who wanted to be afraid bought into it as a major vector of transmission when they first heard "asymptomatic cases."
Sure, that's sort of my point, there is no way of telling from where an airborne germ comes from. ... except that neither your John or the checkut girl were asymptomatic. He had the sniffles, and she had a sneeze. As you say, those may or may not be related to an illness, but for someone to be Asymptomatic that means they are Without symproms. Asymptomatic - the absence of symptoms. However mild they could be, a truly healthy person not suffering from anything which causes symptome whatever the source. People seem easily to conflate asymptomatic with mild symptoms, they are not the same thing at all!
"...They could, after all, concoct self-serving false visions which would merely ensure their success and vindicate their expertise, but this never occurs to them."
I think they have : there are numerous self-annointed personages, bureaucrats, and unbelievably, doctors, in the USA , Canada, especially Australia and UK, who have claimed now that they have "saved millions" with 'safe and effective' vaccines for Covid19. I just saw an article in NEJM last week or so, from some fool who claimed this absurd notion , among other things, and exhorted the need for continued vigilance for 'variants' of SARS2. And so on. This is a good example of false visioning, perpetuated to 'vindicate their expertise and foresight, and above all, virtue( which of course is nonexistent with these people).
They have the maturity of children. They cannot acknowledge mistakes and therefore have to did deeper into their lies. Only if they are held accountable will things change.
I think that is the main thing - not being willing to admit mistakes or that your are wrong. In some ways this seems like human nature, but the authoritarian and media types are much worse about it. When they do admit a mistake, like the New York Times in the above comment, they don't acknowledge that it is a correction from their past position or acknowledge that they were once wrong.
Perhaps we need to change the social impulse to “go along to get along.” People need to stand up to bad behavior. It is also amazing how people mistake psychopathy for true leadership - and many psychopaths can either be charismatic or seemingly completely in control of their emotions the makes them appear to be good leaders.
Yep. Most all. Regimental (I like the German preference for "Regime" in preference to "government" (Regelung or Regierung), religious, academic, media, "science", etc.
Jul 29, 2023·edited Jul 29, 2023Liked by eugyppius
I suppose it's that the administrators far outweigh the strategists, in the modern administrative state. Once a direction is set in motion, administrative inertia keeps it moving in the same direction forever (or near enough as makes no difference).
This is why after 20 years, we are still forced to remove our shoes to board an airplane.
And now ladies and gentlemen, and others who don't know the difference, enter Climate Change and the lunacy of CO2 control.....yep as our society disintegrates into an economic hell hole we will are being blasted with meaningless statistics to build the "clown" world.
I’ve gotten to the point where I trust nothing coming from the government, media or supposed experts, regardless of their field. It’s a sad state of affairs, but they’ve done it to themselves, and to us. As more normal people wake up to this reality, perhaps something can be done about it - and something better be done about it…
Your typically incisive and poignant observations consistently underscore the fundamental truth that all liars are ultimately vulnerable to their own deceptions.
Utterances endlessly repeated will always form a reinforcement feedback loop. The observation is agnostic; verifiable facts instantiate themselves in human consciousness with repetition, in equal measure with falsehoods.
It appears that each era must "reinvent the wheel," by which I mean that the practical underpinnings of the time-honored injunction against "bearing false witness" will be ignored and rediscovered ad infinitum.
Relevant to your central thesis, I'd add that there is no bigger fool than one who believes their own lies. Seems rather a "big tent" is required to accommodate this cohort of "erudite" fools.
Intelligence is no inoculation against self-deception.
In Germany a lot of this is just down to it always being the idiots wanting power, and EVERYONE being generally nonskeptical of this.
Your mileage in Bavaria may vary, but remember, this is the country where a group of friends can't go walking in the woods on a Saturday afternoon without someone insisting you set up an e.V. with a Satzung, and committee meetings, and elected office holders and liability insurance and whatnot. A country you can't play a round of golf in without an officially recognized handicap, and where the local tip wants to see your Personalausweis to make sure you aren't sneaking in garden waste from the neighbouring areas. We have a civil code with over 2000 sections saying "don't be a c***" in 2000 slightly different ways and people still manage it. All the time.
If anything is surprising its that we didn't accept the need for permission from a judge to go outside before 2020.
Beautifully, concisely stated! USA is headed down the same path via bureaucratic rule making, rather than proper legislation--micro-manager-class power trip on steroids. I have good friends who're attorneys with significantly "counter-culture," libertarian pasts, but they've virtually all become total slaves to the propaganda and power trips of mere bureaucrats. They think I'm a "conspiracy theorist," but I know they're complicity absolutists.
Since the bottom line of the prevailing vision is that the anointed are moral surrogates to make decisions for other people, those other people must be seen as incapable of making the right decisions for themselves... The issue is precisely that there is no issue as far as the anointed are concerned; mass irrationality may simply be assumed.
Book progress report: All four chapters more or less finished in draft, need brief introduction and conclusion, and I still have to sort out many of the notes. Undecided on whether to include an additional section on the wretched protocols of this Expert Council, if I do that the whole thing will probably be ca. 120 pages long (this depends on format of course), if I don't more like 110 pages I would guess. I am tired.
Well, this is a pretty great post, so your tiredness isn't showing. A really nice, concise explanation of how to understand how the Expertocracy thinks.
Ditto.
I'd suggest you include the additional section. It's only 10 more pages, as you've estimated. You may regret not doing it while you're engrossed in the topic. Your (assumedly trusted) editor will advise whether to include it. If not, it may become the first chapter of your next book.
Maybe I’ll post it here if I end up pulling it. What i (and others) had hoped to find there - insight into vaccination campaign in its later stages - is largely missing, which is one of the reasons i thought of forgetting it.
Understood.
I would enjoy reading on Substack the discarded section on "wretched protocols of this Expert Council" if you decide not to publish it.
There may not be much more to the vaccination program in later stages than an effort to sell off rejected surplus inventory.
Sending kind encouragement as you do revisions and put the finishing touches on your manuscript.
It's free (gummint, well, embezzlement on the national debt, paid for it). How can it be "sold off"?
All part of the vast international money-laundering scheme. Pfizer and BioNTech profit from sale of overpriced rubbish "vaccines" to the U.S. and the E.U.
Plenty of kickbacks and room for advancement for all the promoters in gov't and medicine.
Personally, I think getting your health back is a priority over finishing a book. Please take care of yourself!
The New York Times recently casually admitted that covid deaths in the U.S. were inflated. I wrote about this the other day, and how the CDC’s death certificate reporting guidelines didn't require that covid be causally responsible to be listed on a death certificate. To say nothing of the egregiously inaccurate tests, which created a "casedemic." The skewed stats distorted the actual risk that covid poses and contributed to the mass hysteria that became the defining feature of the pandemic.
https://www.euphoricrecall.net/p/the-new-york-times-admits-covid-numbers
Worth mentioning here that incidence was inflated not only by the "with Covid" and "from Covid" confusion, but that PCR tests were run to such excessively high threshold cycles that they produced positive results even where there was no live virus, or insufficient live virus to produce disease.
Exactly! In November of 2020, the FDA warned that up to 96% of all covid antigen test positives could be false positives in screening programs at a low 0.1% active disease prevalence. Which you’d think would matter quite a bit, given that we were at or near that level of active disease prevalence for most of the pandemic. And after antigen tests were rolled out widely for weekly or even biweekly screening in the UK, government officials warned in internal email discussions that up to 98% of the antigen test positive results could be false positives because of low active disease prevalence.
And in an August 2020 New York Times article, a number of virologists warned that the much ballyhooed PCR tests, supposedly the gold standard for covid testing, were being used in such a way that up to 90% of the positive tests were effectively false positives.
Kary Mullis, Nobel Laureate and inventor of the PCR test, who died in 2019, said that the test was no good for screening. Rather, it was useful to confirm. So, for example, if a patient was exhibiting all the signs and symptoms of Covid infection, then it would help to confirm the disease, but giving it across the board to everyone who showed up at a hospital for even completely unrelated reasons was irrational, unless the real goal was grift, i.e., maximize fear to sell vaccine.
To expand a little on the grift aspects, hospitals that classified patients as Covid got substantial extra payment from the government. They also then had an excuse to infuse Remdesivir, a very dangerous drug for which they received yet more money. Independent bllood testing companies also had an incentive to run PCR tests to excessively high cycle thresholds, as every positive would bring in multiple contacts for testing.
if you're interested look into the financial statements from the relevant period for publicly traded hospital companies (like HCA). Low bed utilization rates, but very high profitability...something that is not seen in that industry.
Very suspicious.
I did write in quite a few comments ,how they murdered my brother in a Canadian hospital along many others ,with the treatment that leads to the death of the victim and a large profit for the hospital .
Brad none of what they said was true, or made any sense.
I worked through the madness, served thousands of customers, handled endless amounts of cash, didn’t wear a mask shopping or do the hand sanitiser ritual.
It was August 2021 before I caught anything, sore throat for four days and that was it.
They shut the world down using fraudulent testing for a scabby virus, they created more harm and damage than if they’d left it alone. Of course it wouldn’t have been as profitable or criminal in how many rights were swiftly removed, they’ll do it again and the same folk will fall in the same manure.
Yeah, I came to mention the NYT Aug '20 article that up to 90% of positives were false positives. A story that should've gotten some traction yet was overwhelmed by all the panic porn.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html
Brad Than how do we know that the other 10% where effectively correct positives .?Please tell us the difference . Would you disagree if I say,they where and are all bullshit ?
And don't forget the recent admission that the PCR tests cannot distinguish between coronaviruses, among which is the common cold.
hmmm. I am not sure about that. Source?
The source is, remarkably, the CDC itself. It admitted that PCR testing does not distinguish between COVID, influenza, and other corona viruses. "Somehow" not every media outlet felt this news was fit to print....
So finally ,if someone runs the tests at lower cycles ,we will see the live Whyrusses ? The ones we can't see because the cycles are too high ? Why did no one think of that until now? I do have a new magnifying glass and will look inside Ganmaas mouth for the virus .
A disease so deadly that we had to test healthy people to see if they had it
Excellent point, JJ. That's covid-19 in a nutshell.
Great comment & if you tested "positive" stay at home until you get really sick. I'll NEVER ( forgive ?) forget the dills lining up for their "test."
Wanted to donate their DNA for the common good.
Sigh. Bigger sigh. Yeah, I knew this, it was SO obvious.
Politically engineered fear/terror is a major component of the Covid response.
Hi Rosie, (Off topic) Did you get to UK for your holiday?
I did! It was glorious! I never realized that Wales is stunningly beautiful countryside. (I thought Wales = coal mines.) I finally saw Stonehenge. Edinburgh is very cool--in a medieval sort of way. I absolutely MUST get back to London. So much to see and not enough time.
Thanks for asking.
Excellent! It's a bit like people who say 'I've been to America'. I always ask 'which bit?'. It's so huge and diverse; the statement makes no sense otherwise. Likewise, our little island is just as diverse, except in minature.
Glad you had a great trip. Catch you next time!
So true. Stupidity. But this "stupidity" needs thinking about.
The most shocking thing about the "mass" reaction to covid was the abandonement of rational thought and descent into superstition, driven by irrational fear.
I was absolutely shocked at how quickly several centuries of technological and scientific "progress" was brushed aside.
It was as if all the education, all the classes in chemistry, physics, biology ... meant nothing. And especially mathematics, which is about logic.
We have not eliminated our lust for supersitition, but simply replaced it with "high-tech superstition". If that sounds like an oxymoron, it is not. The base sensation is still there. It has just received a "make-over".
It makes me wonder about basic defects in the human "software" (or maybe hardware?) so that, we are doomed to make the same mistakes as in burning witches, but with just that "make-over" or "update".
re: "The most shocking thing about the "mass" reaction to covid was the abandonement of rational thought and descent into superstition, driven by irrational fear."
I stopped paying attention to the 'experts' when everyone aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess didn't die from Covid-19. This was early/first half of 2020. Also, in vitro treatment of the contagion with common drugs (we know what they are) was effective. Vaccine free since having been jabbed with the Swine Flu vaccine in the mid 70's.
Very astute observation Tareq. All humans are superstitious to varying degrees. We have an irrational part of our minds that we cannot "educate" away. It would be like trying to educate away fear or anger. It can only be redirected. The worst offenders are usually the ones who consider themselves to be completely rational. I favor religion in peoples' lives because it is a constructive way to channel our irrationality. It may not be rational to believe in an all-powerful creator or the accounting of our actions after death, but it brings with it both personal and societal benefits. In the new, secular West, supposedly intelligent people have rejected religion, believing themselves to be free of irrational superstition, however they end up redirecting these irrational impulses into areas that harm society. Each of these people will insist that they are acting rationally - even when confronted with evidence to the contrary. A truly intelligent individual understands and accepts their own irrational nature and accounts for it.
As a quote ascribed to G.K. Chesterton (erroneously or otherwise) goes: "When a man stops believing in God, he doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything".
That we were able to convince, not only Joe Normie, but highly-trained Medical professionals of the validity of the most outlandish gimmicks, was staggering. Like standing on circles a foot apart was protective, or a surgical mask made to stop a snotty sneeze from contaminating a surgical field, or a mask designed for carpenters and woodworkers to stop dust, could both now just pivot to double as microscopic-virus blockers. Or that a 2ft x 2ft perspex screen could somehow stop floating airborne particles, that simply walking past someone showing zero symptoms could send out the Covid-infection deathray. Or that natural immunity was now an urban myth. These were TRAINED MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS!
What Covid showed us was that 90% of people are extremely vulnerable to propaganda and suspension of rationality and logic, no matter their education level.
Good observation, except I'd like to think it doesn't always require religion to achieve a level of reasonableness.
I agree, but the difficulty lies in finding an irrational pursuit that does not contradict reality. Most theological arguments have no effect on the real world, and the moral precepts are mostly internal/individual. Pseudo-religions like Environmentalism, Marxism, Materialism, and Scientism unfortunately have great effects on the real world.
'Most theological arguments have no effect on the real world, and the moral precepts are mostly internal/individual.'
History begs to differ.
All the rules in Torah and Talmud, Bible and Quran are nothing but theological arguments affecting the real world.
As opposed to the old celtic, teutonic, roman, greek - any non-semitic and non-abrahamic beliefsystem, where the religious rules were based in reality, and not vice versa.
Perhaps I should have said "impact individual behavior rather than impose their version of reality". All human belief systems impact the real world to various degrees, but consider the Buddhist's impact on society vs. an Environmentalist's. The former is mostly inward directed, and the utopian outcome happens personally after death, while the latter is outward directed, and the utopian outcome requires its imposition on society now.
Theological arguments are the only thing feasible in the modern world because "reality based" religions were merely irrational explanations of natural phenomena. These became superceded by science. Ancient religions explained how and why the universe worked. Science now describes accurately and logically HOW the universe works, but religion is still required to answer the WHY, which is NOT tied strongly to logic.
You must be a person who knows how things work. The rest of us haven't a clue. I am tapping away on a phone. I have no idea how it works. It might as well be magic that I activate with my superstitious ritualistic tapping and swiping. My superstitions work. I believe you are underestimating them.
On the contrary, to paraphrase Socrates, the covid debacle has upended everything I thought I knew.
Zing! You gave me a good laugh; until my mind flipped into a mobius trying to grok the potential implications for our brains and perceptions throughout history. Yikes!
As described by Arthur C Clarke.
Bill ,no need to know how the phone works ,as long as we know how the whyrusses work .They need lots of the Pfizer juice to thrive .
re: " We have not eliminated our lust for supersitition, but simply replaced it with "high-tech superstition". "
AND the basis for what Richard Feynman called "Cargo Cult Science". https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html
Good post Tareq !
The masses chose fear over faith . Their education proved worthless and they should be refunded most of the cost. Also , can you please elaborate on your term “ high tech superstition “ ?
I don’t follow.
I think Bill Resner demonstrated the superstition theory with his cellphone extrapolation(above). It may as well be magic under another name for most users. They don't expect to understand the mechanism or the physics; they just "know" it will work because they believe in the the High Priests of High Tech. Just like they believe in "safe and effective" and globull warming. It never occurs to them to question anything that the high priests decree.
The deployment of behavioral science to induce panic, keeps leading me back to Stoddard's observations about reversal of adaptive learning. Building on Skinner's experiments, Stoddard mapped reversal of reinforcement stimuli.
I mention this because your highly astute observation about repetitive error had me thinking about how easily things are "unlearned" when cortisol is continuously overproduced.
It seems rather akin to losing one's temper when an opponent lands a strike to the face. The combatant forgets years of training and swings wildly away in response, usually losing the fight. You're quite correct; all of that learning was forgotten in an instant. By the time the panic subsided, too much had been invested in The Narrative to allow any return to reason.
't makes me wonder about basic defects in the human "software"'
Robert Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist, explains some of the wiring that's behind this. I can't recall the name of the book right now where I read about that. And evolutionary biologists like Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying have more insights into it. Our hardware, and therefore most of our software, or maybe you could call it firmware, is still Paleolithic, after all.
These are only defects in the context of man's more recent history. There were reasons for these behaviors to have evolved. We're caught in an evolutionarily mismatch between our biology and our culture. This is the theme of Weinstein & Heying's book A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
I love Sapolsky, though he is an adamant atheist and does not believe in any free will at all.
Robert Sapolsky Rocks has his entire Human Behavioral Biology course at Stanford online, which is like Physics for Poets or Conceptual Physics in that you don't have to grok statistics or math to comprehend the lectures. http://www.robertsapolskyrocks.com/
And this from the late E.O. Wilson:
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
If we set aside the truth claim of metaphysical evil for a moment, most every horror that humans inflict seems explicable by evolutionary vestiges. Randy Thornhill, whom Jordan Peterson interviewed, has proposed the parasite stress theory of human values. We get much more authoritarian, according to his analysis, under pathogen stress. Though there is a layer of the parfait that is just officious petty tyrannical cretins come into their own at last, there is also a dark layer of those that know all about how to manipulate us, IMHO, and they know to keep the pathogen stress up perpetually and how to bootstrap the pathogens (deploy the new variant wastewater, summer surge, monkeypox etc.) to climate terror. See also Jordan Peterson on percentage of dark triad types who seek power. Academia has spent decades teaching that the brain is a blank slate and firing the evolutionary interdisciplinarians. No accident that to my mind, at least at the level that considers itself Olympus.
I don't know about the pathogen bit, but it sounds related to my personal pet theory: that we evolved to live in smaller tribes and don't do well in huge numbers. The inevitable organizational systems that result become controlled by the opportunistic sociopaths and psychopaths who make up a not-insignificant proportion of the human population.
Cool. I'm in adamant atheist also, but if people want to be religious that's fine with me. I just wish they would quit telling me I should be too :)
Thank you for the EO Wilson quote, which is spot-on.
Administrators and the medical mafia don't think. They're largely Myers-Briggs F (Feeling, NF for the medical mob), types.
They could easily have declared victory after "two weeks to flatten the curve" and proclaimed themselves heroes. But that's not how technocrats work. Every crisis must be exaggerated and exploited.
Now that I’ve read everything again for the second or third time, I’ve developed this slightly speculative but moderately well-supported thesis:
Lockdowns as originally deployed in China and sold to the West were supposed to be a spring 2020 exclusive. Everyone was supposed to open and declare victory thereafter. Various hints this was the scheme, including the fact that this is exactly what China did. It was Ferguson at imperial college who introduced the idea of rolling indefinite lockdowns until some ill-defined future date.
But how on earth did Ferguson manage to gain so much prominence??
he had the supply when the demand was there, but he or at least people in his circle helped create the demand with their red zone testing in italy. ferguson is very important node in this story.
And here I thought his primary evil deed was the Model. There's even more?
And if it had ended there, we likely would have seen vast public support for the public health regime. Even though it was all dumb, people would’ve felt they’d done something, we all came together, blah blah blah, and mission accomplished! But a golden rule of bureaucracies is, once they are empowered and given credence, they just grow forever and ever. Their only real mission becomes to have more “resources”, add staff and intrude in more areas of governance. In my own little world, I’ve seen this with planning and transportation bureaucracies, which have a record of utter failure for 100 years, but nevertheless continue to grow and act to acquire more power and “tools.”
Right. It was over in April 2020. The countermeasures (and Tylenol) largely created the variants.
OK, can you please expand on the acetaminophen/Tylenol angle?
Anecdotal. Tylenol (paracetamol for Brits, and Panadol for Aussies) does nothing for me; it's just a hepatotoxic placebo. Steve Kirsch says "Tylenol makes everything worse", while A Midwestern Doctor says "unshakable faith in vaccination, in turn, is why we still won't follow practices that could dramatically reduce the rate of harm from vaccination (e.g., spacing vaccinations out, not giving the most harmful vaccines, and not giving Tylenol after a vaccine-induced fever). It's allegedly an antipyretic, thus suppressing immune response (from interferon). Regardless, interferon suppression allows viral infections to rage on longer, thus spawning more mutations. Other NSAIDs supposedly don't increase autism incidence. I've no idea why that should be. I'd suggest taking no antipyretic NSAIDs at all during an active infection or following a vaccination if you get those.
I never take Tylenol for a rare headache or fever since it never worked for me in those instances. But I've recently discovered it's effective (for me) against muscle strain/pain. I only use ONE regular-strength tablet.
I agree fever reducers are to be avoided for short-term low-grade fevers which have a healing purpose not to be interfered with.
I'm more than happy to learn fresh evils about acetaminophen. My four-year-old almost died of liver failure in 2001 after receiving a 1/3 dose for his bodyweight in an over-the-counter cough medication.
The stupid are chosen because they can be easily manipulated.
Make no mistake, this is intentional ..
The educated are chosen because they are more easily manipulated than those who are merely stupid (admittedly many educated people are really stupid)
The educated have a "credientilited ego" that demands deference. They are incredibly easy to con, just dangle the perceived benefits of in-group status before them. Once inside the cult, they will never admit they are conned. After all, multiple degree's from elite academic institutions provide them a shield to being conned. See Sam Harris for how this works IRL.
Bingo !
…see: Joe Biden.
Women can have penises, and men can breast feed and menstruate.
In the new normal all humans will have a penis and vagina side by side ,so you can get married to yourself .
I can't stop thinking of the priesthood of ancient Egypt as one of the earliest bureaucratic models for all this crap. Plus ca change. Human nature and all that jazz. We ain't got nowhere in 3,000 years.
human nature has not changed in that time. This is why we keep repeating history.
nevermind nowhere, modern America is a backwards barbarian cesspool compared to 12th Dynasty Egypt...all the cool religious festivals down by the riverside, the elegant art and fashion, the gods and rituals...those people knew how to live.
They knew how to die too. Elegance, yes, that's the key.
Tell that to the slaves.
You do know "slave" then did not necessarily mean what you think it means in a modern-day americanised context?
Slave then was a societal class with rights, and gong into slavery was a way to pay taxes and debts, all regulated by contracts.
The practices we associate with slavery (humans used as animals) is largely an invention of the late christianised Roman Empire; in ancient days that kind of slave was most often a criminal sentenced to slavery until death.
You couldn't be more wrong.
You know the old saying about omlettes and breaking eggs? Elegance doesn't come free. Someone has to do the dirty work.
After they finished the pyramids ,they migrated north and they are still coming .because that's where the fun is now .
The egyptian "Book of the Dead" with the original scholarly preface is a goldmine in ideas and understanding how this now long-dead culture influenced and continues to influence everything in the Eastern Mediterranean region.
(Which is poetically fitting given their beliefs.)
What I admire about their priesthoods is that their religion and burial practices necessitated the invention of industry. Every dead person had to have their prayer-scrolls andritual whatnots with the in death, but scribbling these took time, so the priesthoods came up with the idea of making oodles of scrolls (and other ritual parafernalia, the ancient egyptians make orthodox jews seem positively secular when it comes to ritualising daily life), with blank spaces left out for the name and description of the deceased.
You could buy them buy the gross in advance, and you could hire people to go do your rituals for you so you didn't have to take time off from work.
To us it of course looks like simoni, but to them there was no conflict between rational thought and action, and being an ardent faithful. That whole thing, that belief must needs handicap your intellect comes into existence some time between Nicaea and Hastings.
Just had to butt in, I'm avoiding laundry day you see.
I got so annoyed, one Passover season, that I wrote this (I am undoubtedly a disgrace to the ancestors but I think they love me anyway...):
https://redfoliot.substack.com/p/back-to-egypt
PS: In case you don't know this wonderful book which I've got on my shelf: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Land-Black-Daily-Ancient/dp/0061252751
For those non French
“ the more things change, the more they …. “
"It is precisely the representation of asymptomatic cases that is important for calculation infection waves and their peak. Symptom surveillance is not a substitute for incidence."
It still boggles my mind that anyone bought this concept on any level. How on earth can asymptomatic people affect the hospital admission rate, which is their premise for the whole lockdown thing in the first place. Asymptomatic people are not ill, else they would have symptoms. Healthy people do not need hospital attention. Doh. Saying that these asymptomatic people might be spreading it to others is equally bonkers. IF someone becomes ill there is no way of establishing a route of transmission in any way, except perhaps close contact with a symptomatic ill person.....
As I say, it's mind boggling that this didn't get laughed out immediately it was presented as a concept.
Thanks eugyppius :)
I think it's because most people have had this experience: John has a mild case of the sniffles one day. He never has the full symptoms of a cold, but when his wife Mary gets a bad cold a week later, he assumes he had a basically asymptomatic cold and gave it to her, and it was worse for her because her immune system was weaker that day for whatever reason.
Of course, John and Mary have no way of knowing that John had a cold and not a bit of allergies, or that Mary didn't get the cold from a checkout girl who sneezed on her hands before handling Mary's groceries. But it wasn't unusual to hear that sort of "folk wisdom" explanation for colds that seemed to have no clear source before corona-fest, so people who wanted to be afraid bought into it as a major vector of transmission when they first heard "asymptomatic cases."
Sure, that's sort of my point, there is no way of telling from where an airborne germ comes from. ... except that neither your John or the checkut girl were asymptomatic. He had the sniffles, and she had a sneeze. As you say, those may or may not be related to an illness, but for someone to be Asymptomatic that means they are Without symproms. Asymptomatic - the absence of symptoms. However mild they could be, a truly healthy person not suffering from anything which causes symptome whatever the source. People seem easily to conflate asymptomatic with mild symptoms, they are not the same thing at all!
Exactly right, Green Fields.
That's where I started to have my first inkling of doubt.
Another Bingo !
"...They could, after all, concoct self-serving false visions which would merely ensure their success and vindicate their expertise, but this never occurs to them."
I think they have : there are numerous self-annointed personages, bureaucrats, and unbelievably, doctors, in the USA , Canada, especially Australia and UK, who have claimed now that they have "saved millions" with 'safe and effective' vaccines for Covid19. I just saw an article in NEJM last week or so, from some fool who claimed this absurd notion , among other things, and exhorted the need for continued vigilance for 'variants' of SARS2. And so on. This is a good example of false visioning, perpetuated to 'vindicate their expertise and foresight, and above all, virtue( which of course is nonexistent with these people).
M Weiss, MD
They have the maturity of children. They cannot acknowledge mistakes and therefore have to did deeper into their lies. Only if they are held accountable will things change.
I think that is the main thing - not being willing to admit mistakes or that your are wrong. In some ways this seems like human nature, but the authoritarian and media types are much worse about it. When they do admit a mistake, like the New York Times in the above comment, they don't acknowledge that it is a correction from their past position or acknowledge that they were once wrong.
Perhaps we need to change the social impulse to “go along to get along.” People need to stand up to bad behavior. It is also amazing how people mistake psychopathy for true leadership - and many psychopaths can either be charismatic or seemingly completely in control of their emotions the makes them appear to be good leaders.
Quit smoking THC, and use psychedelics instead.
They facilitate examining one's (also externally imposed) belief systems.
More than that. Cultural institutions cultivate psychopathic and sociopathic traits in their devotees.
Yep. Most all. Regimental (I like the German preference for "Regime" in preference to "government" (Regelung or Regierung), religious, academic, media, "science", etc.
We’ve go one where I live
I suppose it's that the administrators far outweigh the strategists, in the modern administrative state. Once a direction is set in motion, administrative inertia keeps it moving in the same direction forever (or near enough as makes no difference).
This is why after 20 years, we are still forced to remove our shoes to board an airplane.
And now ladies and gentlemen, and others who don't know the difference, enter Climate Change and the lunacy of CO2 control.....yep as our society disintegrates into an economic hell hole we will are being blasted with meaningless statistics to build the "clown" world.
I’ve gotten to the point where I trust nothing coming from the government, media or supposed experts, regardless of their field. It’s a sad state of affairs, but they’ve done it to themselves, and to us. As more normal people wake up to this reality, perhaps something can be done about it - and something better be done about it…
Your list is way too short .
At a bare minimum , add public health , the courts and every current education institution to your list of those not to trust .
Your typically incisive and poignant observations consistently underscore the fundamental truth that all liars are ultimately vulnerable to their own deceptions.
Utterances endlessly repeated will always form a reinforcement feedback loop. The observation is agnostic; verifiable facts instantiate themselves in human consciousness with repetition, in equal measure with falsehoods.
It appears that each era must "reinvent the wheel," by which I mean that the practical underpinnings of the time-honored injunction against "bearing false witness" will be ignored and rediscovered ad infinitum.
Relevant to your central thesis, I'd add that there is no bigger fool than one who believes their own lies. Seems rather a "big tent" is required to accommodate this cohort of "erudite" fools.
Intelligence is no inoculation against self-deception.
In Germany a lot of this is just down to it always being the idiots wanting power, and EVERYONE being generally nonskeptical of this.
Your mileage in Bavaria may vary, but remember, this is the country where a group of friends can't go walking in the woods on a Saturday afternoon without someone insisting you set up an e.V. with a Satzung, and committee meetings, and elected office holders and liability insurance and whatnot. A country you can't play a round of golf in without an officially recognized handicap, and where the local tip wants to see your Personalausweis to make sure you aren't sneaking in garden waste from the neighbouring areas. We have a civil code with over 2000 sections saying "don't be a c***" in 2000 slightly different ways and people still manage it. All the time.
If anything is surprising its that we didn't accept the need for permission from a judge to go outside before 2020.
Beautifully, concisely stated! USA is headed down the same path via bureaucratic rule making, rather than proper legislation--micro-manager-class power trip on steroids. I have good friends who're attorneys with significantly "counter-culture," libertarian pasts, but they've virtually all become total slaves to the propaganda and power trips of mere bureaucrats. They think I'm a "conspiracy theorist," but I know they're complicity absolutists.
"complicity absolutist" is in the running for neologism of the year.
Since the bottom line of the prevailing vision is that the anointed are moral surrogates to make decisions for other people, those other people must be seen as incapable of making the right decisions for themselves... The issue is precisely that there is no issue as far as the anointed are concerned; mass irrationality may simply be assumed.
-Sowell