On Thursday, friend-of-the-blog Michael P. Senger posted an important essay to Substack, in which he asks whether the “Response to COVID” was “effectively a coup by the Western intelligence community.” Everyone should read it, as it summarises in one place a range of evidence that Senger and others have collected pointing to the role of the defence and intelligence actors in promoting lockdowns, especially in America.
People think intelligence agents are like James Bond or Jack Ryan (speaking of Main Characters), but they're by and large the same type of gray-souled managerial hive mind sludge that gets used as the raw material for the rest of the professional class.
all competence having evaporated from the rest of the bureaucrat classes, it becomes attractive to imagine it has merely migrated and concentrated itself somewhat off-stage with the intelligence services.
Planned violent oppression is more comfortable than random such, since the former is predictable and thus manageable.
This has been observed among other mammals such as rats and dogs: they prefer knowing that they'll be hurt for specific things (like pushing the wrong lever) to being hurt at random intervals with no pattern or logic to it.
You cannot operate in an environment you cannot model and predict. Animals subjected to random punishment eventually give up and just sit and won't react no matter how they're abused.
Surveillance makes us hide. But it's fun to do to others... to a degree. That's why I like the way this article started. When will surveillance and its opposite - coverup! - provide each other with privacy?
The people drawn to working for intelligence agencies have the fantasies of 12-year-olds and the same capacity for self-restraint. The people who end up running them are worse. They always look at what their adversaries are doing and think "we can top this!"
The caretaker, janitor, cleaner, secretary or groundskeeper with a bitter personal vendetta about something is well-known to be the ideal candidate when you're looking for a spy.
Like-minded functionaries and bureaucrats, with job security incentives aligned with protecting turf and authority (power) result in an institutional mission corroborating the tacit objective without any confirming conspiracy--it's implicit, unspoken--simply understood as the course of action to be pursued.
"In any bureaucracy, people devoted to the benefit of bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals that bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and eventually are eliminated entirely."
Thanks for the tip to that Jerry Pournelle quote! It's definitely a keeper. Here it is fleshed out a little more, and the actual title, The Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Free bonus of an illustrated example.
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."
Interesting… I think you’re right that greed is a major driver, yet I’m compelled to think PRIDE (hubris, prestige, status) may be a bit further ahead, and drives humans to really trample on each other to get to the top. Perhaps greed is simply an outgrowth of pride.
I suspect one could have stipulated ANY of the seven deadly sins. And easily provided a well reasoned justification for their choice.
I chose greed because it seems to fit well into the context of this post. Consider the mind boggling riches accruing to the pharmaceutical industry, the Scrooge McDuck-ish wealth accumulated by the bureaucrats who cycle between government regulatory bodies and the industries they purport to regulate. Or the lifestyles and personal wealth flaunted by many legislators, who, on paper, show incomes barely into the six figure range, but who seem to possess multiple luxury residences, private jets, yachts - all the trimmings of the idle rich.
Can I add a very contentious and highly tendentious thought?
For how many years was the "psychosphere" laced with pandemic-themed movies, games and other pop-cultural phenomenons of similar narrative?
At the least, 15 years or so. Enough for the age bracket who turned 15-30 in 2020 to have grown up with hearing about or coming into contact with the idea of pandemic equals lockdown and quarantine (and shooting the zombies in the head and so on among the shopping-list of clichés called Hollywood script-writing).
You see, zombies in movies et c are the pandemic, pop-culturally speaking. The response in movie after movie, game after game, is always the same:
Quarantine of Patient Zero, which fails. Then lockdown and curfew and locking up those suspected of infection. Then walling off city-blocks. Then trying to hem the infected in, in a specific area and finally "Our Heroes" fighting their way through the zombie-hordes to some end or other, depending on the tone of the production.
Was it in 2010 that app-game came, that spawned zombies on a map in your phone, as a way to LARP a zombie-apoclypse and get exercise? Plushies, hoodies, comics, dolls, classic novels re-written as the zombie-genre, and so on.
Between fifteen and twenty years of constant pop-cultural messaging about "The Pandemic" preceded the panic. It's fully possible that no conspiracy was needed, but that it instead came down to enough functionaires having been pre-conditioned to respond the way they did, without knowing so.
Just a thought.
Here's one to sleep on:
All social interaction is manipulation. All communication aims to make you do/don't do something, in a certain way inside a specific time-frame.
There's no avoiding it, and we all do it all the time.
(Edited for silly errors, english grammar being what it is.)
This is interesting: I've heard of some designs of vehicles, space-ships etc were influenced by the various sci-fi writers and film-makers of the first part of the last century. Famously, Reagan's SDI programme is known as 'Star Wars'.
In my profession one of the things that has to be dealt with early on is the clutch of misconceptions that many have about medicine, e.g. a long, flat tone during asystole in cardiac arrest for instance. This is all a consequence of a certain 'look' in films and so on.
Another example might be the heated response when you suggest that men are more physically capable than women. Anyone who has spent an afternoon playing a physical sport like rugby or in a boxing gym could tell you that! However after years of little blonde girls filling in brutish men in films there are some who think that the two sexes are equal, or at least pretend to think so at least.
I've had to have talks about the effects of real fights with some students as I was the teacher the difficult cases of fatherless teenaged students formed the stereotypical hate/respect-relationship with.
As an adult it was difficult to grasp how much less these kids knew or understood about such things. Getting colleagues to understand that you cannot always use non-violent options were even more baffling.
Chalk it up to the (stereo)typical middle class lacking real life experience maybe? Or that's my prejudice anyway.
I wonder how many women have been hurt because they've been conditioned/indoctrinated to believe a 50 kilo woman can put down a 100 kilo man with one punch.
Isn't it true, though, that if a well-trained small-ish woman strikes a large man who's not expecting it in the chin, she can basically knock him out? Not me, mind you. I have precisely zero martial arts competence. But in principle, it's true, isn't it?
If she's a well-trained fighter/martial artist, she'd put me on my back with one strike. But that strike doesn't keep me down unless she's built like an MMA/UFC-fighter, it just hurts and makes me angry.
There's been a couple of bouts where a trans has fought a real woman in a cage fight. It's not pretty. She lands several blows to no effect, while "she" totals the real woman in under a minute. Both athletes, both trained fighters, both used to taking hits.
That's what the difference in body mass and strength does. When a man hits another man, or a woman, his strength doesn't just hurt, it injures the victim. That's the difference.
A normal woman would need to hit and kick multiple times, uninterrupted, to put a normal man down and out. However, a very painful hit (scrotum, eyes, throat, bending the middle finger out of socket et c) can very well put an attacker of his stride and frighten him to give up his assault - that's the theory behind feminist self defence.
But if it doesn't work, the poor woman now has to deal with an enraged opponent she cannot put down.
As my judo-trainer used say 40 years ago: "For training and matches we have rules. When it's for real, the rule is: 'survive'."
I've always found "hit and run like diarrhea" to be the best tactic.
It's possible in theory for anyone to win a fight given the right circumstances, skill and luck. It is however extraordinarily unlikely in the situation he pictures. The point is that the silly Marvel/thriller-type films portray it as routine for an audience of millions and some will be stupid enough to believe it.
Thanks for your reply. I haven't watched a Hollywood movie in, oh, something like 20 years. ;-) But my understanding is that if a woman is well-trained in martial arts, and she suddenly finds herself needing to defend herself against a man, then she basically has one single shot: if she manages to hit him hard and suddenly (when he doesn't expect it), she might get away. But she'd better be willing to badly hurt him (or even kill him), otherwise it's hopeless. If one strike doesn't do it, she's basically doomed: he'll overpower her with raw strength her even if she's a far more skilled fighter. Anyway, that's my understanding of the matter. It's basically correct, right? (Of course, avoiding dangerous men if at all possible should always be Plan A.)
Most women are not interested in training in even a little martial arts , much less actually becoming skilled. Whereas, a far higher percentage of men actually do become skilled, thus even broadening the real-life probability that women are crushed by men nearly always, physically.
I typed my reply above and then saw this. That'll teach me to read first, reply later.
You and James have it correctly - James' remark about Marvel et al are true.
In fact, an adult female teacher will struggle to handle a twelve-year old boy. The physical difference in strength is that pronounced, thanks to testosterone.
A good exercise for our blue-haired feminists would be sawing and cleaving firewood. The 2' thick 12 yards long pine-log to be cut up in 12" pieces which are then to be chopped into bits no thicker than a man's wrist doesn't care about Judith Butler or Gertrude Stein or any other theorist.
I've always wanted to teach history using movies (as a history teacher). As to your comment what I can't understand is how young people raised on years of movies based on the idea of an evil government having plans to take control, divide them, put them into detention camps and take away their freedom or pandemics/aliens/mega-disasters killing large groups of people who must then fight to save their small family-pod couldn't see that what was happening in the last 4 years was a parallel to all the movies they had watched. (I know, a run-on sentence). I wanted to force everyone during lockdown to watch the following movies then answer these questions - Does the end justify the means? What would you do? Minority Report; The Hunger Games; Divergent' The Giver; I Am Legend; Network, The Manchurian Candidate; The Twilight Zone: Eye of the Beholder; The Fifth Wave; World War Z.
That would be my start. I just don't know how kids can watch programs like the Walking Dead and not see how important it is to resist and fight instead of just doing what they're told by the authorities around them.
Re-watch the movies (games et c): you always have the "reasonable authority figure" who also happens to be right post-hoc/post-fact, but isn't in charge having to give way to the Carter Burke-archtype of corrupt corporate executive and the equally archetypical General Ripper-esque character, aide by snivelling wretches and sycophants.
There's no concept of cricising authority as such in modern post-2000 works, none at all. There's absolutely no challenge to the justification of authority or any justification of it being authority. The only conflict is about whether authority's actions are the correct ones or not.
Look at "Aliens" and compare it to "Alien Resurrection": in the first one, when (spoiler alert as the kids say) Burker's actions are revealed, he is universally reviled by the survivors. His authority counts for nothing, and not even the android tries to carry out his orders. His formal positional authority is gone, replaced by authority founded in actual deeds and proven ability.
In "Resurrection", no-one challenges the military-corporate organisation's authority. The cast just runs around setting up dioramas to show off "cool" scenes and grandstanding before escaping on a ship. The explicit rebellion against authority evident in "Aliens" (and in the original movie too) isn't there.
That's why the 30ish and younger crowd act the way you see: they are conditioned to obey authority and to accept authority, while being taught to criticise by said authority, making any criticism they try to put words be one wholly within a framework laid down by authority.
Which is also why schools in virtually all WEF-influenced nations have virtually stopped using books, boardgames and music from before the 1980s: in older works authority's justification is challenged - compare Robin Hood and Ivanhoe to The Hunger Games f.e. Or Brave New World to World War Z.
Sorry if I'm rambling a bit, I used to teach "the history of ideas/the ideas of history" (the swedish term doesn't translate properly) and I'm typing this free-hand as stream of consciousness.
Oh, just thank you for understanding my thought and idea. You are so right about this though. Young people don't know how to think on their own, so even though they do rage against authority they still go along with whatever they are told to do by the crowd. They aren't able to critically think over what information is being given to them and then act on their own judgement especially if it goes contrary to what they've believed their whole life or what their group of friends believe. That's what makes it hard for them to change when they're lied to by someone of authority, especially if they've always believed that person or agency to be a reliable or authentic source.
And you're right about schools and other educational sources taking away real books and using only resources from the internet that are post 1980s. I've purposely begun seriously collecting books that were printed and not digital (although I've always had lots of books!), so that someday kids could see that books had different information in them before they were rewritten by digital sources. When they started seriously taking books off library shelves in the US, like Dr. Seuss, Twain, Uncle Tom's Cabin, To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone With the Wind, and such, I made sure I had as many of them as I could find. And I did the same with the movies we've discussed, as well as some solid older histories of the US, Europe, and the World.
During the pandemic and the protests in the US during the summers of 2019 and 2020 liberal progressive groups used the term "resistance" in talking about being part of Black Lives Matter or feminist groups, part of the woke crowd that was changing how the rest of us were allowed to talk, think, or speak. It was horribly annoying to me because I have always known that during WWII I would have been a resistance fighter in some form or another, whether smuggling people out of the country, making leaflets, moving money around, hiding refugees, passing messages and intel, or actually fighting. The fact that these people thought wearing pink knitted genitals on their heads and screaming in people's ears with bullhorns while burning downtown buildings and telling me that I was a racist homophobe made them a resistance fighter really irritated me. They didn't realize that my refusing to wear a mask and get a COVID shot was more radical than their marching on Washington DC because it was restricting my freedom of movement, freedom to work, freedom to obtain medical care, and freedom to speak.
Our young people don't have the history of war, suffering, loss of freedom or liberty, that we do, whether from our parents, our friends, or ourselves who all witnessed war and the results. They don't have the benefit of global travel and world experience seeing real poverty and destruction. They don't have empathy, perspective, kindness, self-respect, self-motivation, independence, spiritual love for others, or pride in their nation. I do hope this is temporary, but right now it's really a sad and depressing time that's lasted too long.
We’re already long governed by film scripts; “Wag The Dog” led to Kosovo War, every day since 2008 has been government by Heist Film, there’s no reason to not add PANDEMIC to our Governing models .
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Coming soon; War of The Worlds (UFOs drama now in US Senate).
Starring; Senator Marco Rubio, supporting cast Senator Charles Schumer who has introduced legislation claiming Eminent Domain over all Alien Technology.
Oh, I agree. And I think part of the picture is that the central people like Fauci’s circle knew about the lab leak, and that they were at least indirectly implicated in it, and thus found themselves cast in the role of the “bad guys” in the Supervirus/Zombie apocalypse movie – and, amazingly, they ran with it.
The screenplay conventions required that the escaped, engineered bug be of world-ending virulence, so that’s what SARS-cov-2 became in their minds, and its true origins had to concealed.
Basically these movies got closer to closer to trying to look real that they replaced science with pure fiction, a lie.
"Contagion" was the apex of this, where for most people they internalized all 'facts' as science.
This movie could not be possibly more far from truth: it is very hard, to create a virus, that can at the same time a) propagate without stopping through a large heterogeneous population b) kill a large number of them.
And if you look at history of all known cases you will find that the original myth narrative does not hold.
I want to also mention Camus 'The Plague'. I really do not know why people like this book. Not only is it extremely boring and portraits a huge number of characters that basically go from one uninteresting philosophical problem to another uninteresting though, but also all these problems could be solved with a half an hour chat and a coffee. And just like 'Contagion' it is spreading falsehoods and the idea of massive containment as something normal.
Matt Hancock said he was inspired in his support for lockdowns by rewatching Contagion in March 2020 -- and if I recall the movie was the #1 trending title on Netflix UK at the time.
I tend to look at things anthropologically. Terry Pratchett was the first one that made me aware that humans have always viewed things in terms of story.
Excellent analysis. May I add - these zombie apocalypse movies and series (as a European who moved to the USA in 2013, I found the notion of the "zombie apocalypse" far more developed as an idea in the public mind. Even those who considered themselves 'awake' to mind manipulation) kill healthy people for the "safety" of others...
Thank you. Not having visited the Americas I can't speak to that, but I have no reason to doubt it.
I do think that cultural separation of european nations/cultures and USAmerican would benefit both; the interplay of ideas in academia, economics and politics from the fall of the Berlin Wall (not discounting the preceding decades preparing the field but the Cold War put a lid on the worst of it) has resulted in our present troubles on both sides of the Atlantic.
Healthy nationalism the way siblings and cousins treat each other, sort of. Different and individual but of the greater same at the same time.
We should share in our very positive value system and there’s definitely worth in the cultural interplay. I think we should regard all unification of policy, excessive fraternization of our officials, & attempts at new layers of supra-governance with extreme suspicion, because that’s where the trouble begins.
Governmental and “institutional” leaders are not the brightest people. Most people are motivated by money and fear of losing it all so it is extremely easy for a few key people to manipulate the world by making those fearful cowards follow along like little puppies. Just work for a large corporation once (remove blinders first) and watch the sheep follow the lost. I have been in many meetings at various levels where coworkers and “friends” sat quietly and watched me take the abuse for saying what we all spoke about outside the meeting. It happens in churches too. Everyone wants it to be fixed but nobody wants to wear the tool belt for fear of being called a repair man. It won’t get better until backbones are found but that would require stepping outside of the consumer driven machine.
The same thing has happened with me: I've spoken to people individually about the 'trans' nonsense and unsurprisingly "sensible people are sensible" and disagree with most of it. They know precisely what a woman is and isn't and don't want their wives, daughters and mothers sharing changing rooms and toilets with men. When I stuck my neck out in public in front of the whole organisation only one or two took my side. The rest just sat mutely, miserable, staring into space.
Totally agree. "where coworkers and “friends” sat quietly and watched me take the abuse for saying what we all spoke about outside the meeting". An exact description of what happened to me. I'm sure afterwards, I had 'troublesome' written in my HR file...
A good strategy for getting along as a worker in a corporation, while still doing a good job, is to act cooperative during meetings and then to go back to one's desk and doing whatever one wants. The workplace is too weird now to ply that tactic without feeling compromised.
Has anyone figured out what is for me the key question: did everyone involved sincerely believe the virus was extremely dangerous (because of bio-weapon research, Chinese intelligence, etc. etc.) or did they take advantage of a known nothing-burger to orchestrate political goals?
seems to be a little of both, varying upon the country. virus anxiety among planners and elites started to boil off after wave 1, and thereafter pandemic terror became increasingly just a resource for the bureaucrats and the politicians to use.
Surely they must have looked at the Third World e.g. Africa which could not afford the various Western pandemic measures and concluded that corona was not that lethal after all? I must admit that initially I believed that which was purported about corona lethality and imagined that there would be tens of millions dead across that continent. When it happened neither in Britain nor in Africa/Middle East etc I knew something was off.
In the US it appeared to be the latter, at least at first. Through February the media and political establishment had an "it's just a flu and the president's travel ban is just racist" attitude. I saved tweets from late February encouraging people to go eat and shop in Chinatown to fight the baseless harm that was being done. Most of this seems to have been their usual knee-jerk need to oppose the president. I saved a screenshot of a CDC flyer published after cases had been confirmed in the US, that had mere sensible recommendations like "stay home if you're sick" and "do not use facemasks."
It wasn't until March that they shifted toward panic, and even then it was clearly opportunistic. For instance, they forced churches and small businesses to close but made an exception to the stay-at-home rules for those attending BLM "protests." There were many contradictions like that which wouldn't have happened if they'd been truly afraid of the virus. I live near the border between one state that had strict closures and one that didn't, so everyone from the strict side was driving to the other state regularly to shop and dine out, and no attempt was made to stop that. Things like that showed how fake and silly the panic really was.
Some of them may have talked themselves into a real panic after a while, and the Karens and others who take all their cues from the media certainly did, completely forgetting those first couple months when they believed it was nothing.
'did everyone involved sincerely believe the virus was extremely dangerous (because of bio-weapon research, Chinese intelligence, etc. etc.) or did they take advantage of a known nothing-burger to orchestrate political goals?'
I remember at the time thinking that the reported deaths from China were in wild disproportion to the response, and whether the various governments knew something that we didn't. I do wonder if the various intelligence agencies had good information that the virus did come from the Wuhan lab and (not unreasonably) panicked that it was something nastier/a deliberate released of an engineered weapon and so pushed lockdowns as a defence. This might also explain why the lab theory was squashed quite so abruptly, perhaps?
Amnesty was co-opted to become a tool for some globalist group or other in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when they started having opinions on specific criminal issues, instead of focusing on everyone's right to a fair process.
Like this: earlier, Amnesty opposed capital punishment in regimes who did not respect due process, fair trials and so on - dictatorships using it as a political tool f.e. Then, they suddenly came out against it as such on pure principle, became pro-abortion, and so on, the usual lib-prog-laundry list.
Meaning they went from trying to safeguard basic human rights to playing politics and endorsing specific political stances over others.
In the context of the psychological and cultural shifts that happened during the pandemic, I'm struck by the explanation of journalism's need to reduce a complex situation to a comprehensible plot*. Being as we're all so steeped in fiction, television, and movies, this makes perfect sense, and also helps explain the widespread need for a silver bullet or a master-villain-cackling-under-a-volcano (i.e. Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates). You perfectly label it as a 'non-fiction novel'. Humans see the world as story. During the initial lockdown I, like many others, obsessively consumed movies like Contagion and books like Station Eleven and Year of Wonders (based on the English village of Eyam which quarantined itself in 1665), reinforcing that pattern.
Biology is a complex system. Human sociology is also a complex system; the two interact. Because of our need for silver bullets or master villains, which is the general paradigm upon which reductionist western science operates, we're mostly incapable of appreciating or understanding this complexity. In our hubris we believe we *do* understand, which explains why so many of our attempted interventions (in many fields) fail.
Rather than a narrative description, journalism digging into what actually happened (dare I say fact-based) takes an effort to read. A good example is Whitney Webb's three-part series, which includes the military and intelligence involvement in the run-up to the Covid mess. The array of actors is huge — a cast of thousands — and contains familiar characters like Rudy Giuliani, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, and many others, in repeating roles. Over the last few years I've increasingly pictured myself as a baby duck innocently paddling around on the surface of a vast, deep ocean with monstrous denizens only vaguely sensed. These articles deepen that impression to a Mariana Trench of monster habitat beneath our tiny webbed feet.
* That's probably more realistic than my own super-cynical opinion that most people need to reduce a complex situation to bumper-sticker level (i.e. "Hammer and Dance").
I love the Yglesias argument that is, essentially, "If we do nothing society will cease to function. Therefore we must stop society from functioning in order that society may function."
Bravo eugyppius! Especially the "autistic' part- perfect description.😉
The coup thing though. . . I still think the "intelligence" agencies and the DoD used covid as a way to try out proceedures, responses, etc for a biowarfare attack in real time, at scale. It was the perfect opportunity for such an "experiment."
yes, pandemic mitigation is indeed crank science. worrying about pandemics is imho a huge mistake and the root of much evil.
I’m aware of Tucker’s arguments and I even link to another post where I takk about one of them. here, I address the very similar and related ideas of Senger. not every post can be about everything at once, and many readers have asked me my thoughts on senger’s recent post, which is why i wrote this.
i would only reiterate that i don’t dispute intelligence agency involvement, particularly in the US response. the question is simply whether this involvement was decisive and foundational, or whether intelligence/defence actors were simply following a broader, pre-established trend set in motion by other forces. so far i think the evidence only gets us to the latter scenario.
If mitigation measures didn’t work then Hawaii would now have the same age adjusted Covid death rate as states in the mainland as millions of mainlanders have visited and spread Omicron the last 15 months. Yes everyone got infected but the vaccines mitigated severity of Delta and then Omicron wasn’t as severe and so the mitigation measures clearly saved lives.
So you have two arguments—the mitigation measures weren’t worth it from an economic/mental health/education standpoint…or that public health officials simply got lucky Omicron was less severe and had it been more severe the vaccines wouldn’t have held and everything we did to mitigate spread merely delayed the inevitable in which case it wasn’t worth the costs from the first argument.
no, Hawaii wouldn’t have the same age-adjusted death rate as the Continental US, as the behaviour of Covid (especially pre-Omicron Covid) varies drastically across regions and in the entire Asia-Pacific was less deadly regardless of what anybody did. hence Japan.
the case for mitigation largely rests on these oversimplified false cross-regional comparisons and the selective neglect of regional and seasonal trends (when it comes to Sweden, suddenly everybody remembers to confine comparison cases to Scandinavia). Western containment regimes appear to have some effects on official case rates (confounding here is a huge problem), but don’t produce clear mortality signals once you account for regional and seasonal trends. even if they did, your use of the word „work“ would need more differentiation, of course.
So basically you just ignore data and make stuff up about why Arizona (which did the least amount of mitigation in 2020) and Hawaii (which did the most) are on opposite ends of the Covid death rate. I will continue to look at data to determine what worked and didn’t work—we never found a silver bullet to stop Covid but mitigation measures worked to some degree and the vaccines mitigated severity prior to Omicron. Btw, the Covid death rate varies greatly within states as the wealthiest county in America adjusted for cost of living is in Tennessee and it has the highest vaccination rate in Tennessee and by far the lowest Covid death rate…but according to you it should have the same death rate as the rest of the state adjusted for age.
no, you don't ignore data, but you have to interpret case and mortality rates in light of regional and seasonal trends and avoid arbitrary one-on-one comparisons. I can play the same game in the other direction: For example, Italy did far more than Japan in the first wave and suffered vastly more deaths. Arizona and Hawaii are in totally different regions, with different climates and seasonal patterns of infection.
As for high vaccination rates in a county in Tennessee and Covid death rates:
1) you need to look up the phenomenon of statistical confounding and the healthy vaccinee effect. not only regionality and seasonality, but age structure, obesity, and poverty independently predict higher Covid mortality.
2) excess mortality, not Covid mortality, is the statistic we're looking for, for reasons that I'm sure will be obvious to you upon reflection.
I have studied America’s response and America’s data because I’m an American and America has a 330 million people that live across a huge country and states that responded to Covid differently. The notion you don’t have everything you need to come to conclusions by analyzing America is absurd.
NY had 900 deaths per day in the initial wave and that is a state with 20 million people!! So that is a 9/11 every 3 days from spread prior to any mitigation measures. NY then Implemented mitigation measures and the state’s death rate never got close to the rate in the initial wave from unimpeded spread. NY is also a state with a similar population to Florida but NY has a significantly larger nursing home population. And on 1/2021 Florida had roughly half as many overall Covid deaths as NY. Florida did fewer mitigation measures after 1/2021 and now it has significantly more overall Covid deaths than NY!! Florida’s age adjusted excess mortality superficially looks not too bad because it has a very healthy elderly population and they did a good job with vaccinations early on…but that is also why during the Delta death surge the median age of Covid death actually dropped! You can check all of these numbers in the states at the county levels as Orange County had a lower Covid death rate as it continued to mask and the Trump counties in NY with few wealthy Republicans had a higher Covid death rate.
Lastly if you overlaid a graph of excess deaths with Covid deaths per day it looks the same with just excess deaths higher…so you don’t have to look at excess deaths because it’s the same as Covid deaths except we are clearly undercounting Covid deaths!!
How do I love thee? I ain't got the math skills to count the ways.
But let me give my own general theory here too. Think of everyone as a bright HS freshman. That's the time when kids hate to feel not as smart as the smart kids; not aware from the first of the latest cool thing; really afraid of making a mistake that other people will mock.
It's only a few kids, anywhere, who are truly cunning malevolent manipulative disruptors. They are a separate species. But most of the intelligent ones are as I describe. They're not geniuses; they don't follow their own paths of curiosity and discovery. They have no stomach for sticking out too far.
And we live in a world where they're in charge of everything. Fuck's sake! I think my theory fits with everything you've written from the start.
It was annoying working mostly for idiots (some of them very intelligent ones) but they often found me quite useful as their subordinate. That helped to mitigate their annoyance at my refusal to be perfectly obedient.
I've never wanted to run my own show and found it quite useful to be a mere wage-earner. I could take vacations without any concern about an enterprise that needs the proprietor's oversight. I could look for better jobs, or survive brief periods of unemployment (I got fired a lot).
Not everyone wants a career. I never had a "goal" other than being able to support myself and have enough money for my modest enjoyments. There should be more respect, in the scheme of things, given to boring jobs that allow people to do what I did with my paycheck, which was adequate, in the Long Agoes, for a lower-middle-class life. That I'm a dinosaur and kids like me can't do that anymore is one of the tragedies of our time.
"Many readers have asked me in sometimes polite and sometimes highly hostile and dismissive ways to comment on these ideas" might be the most precise summation of a certain sector of online discourse I've seen. In any event, made me chuckle on this rather pleasant Sunday morning.
You characterize these as 'civilian', because the nominal affiliation of these entities is not military, and essentially you are arguing they were random events: The WHO February 24 memo, the March Italian lockdown , Thomas Pueyo out-of-nowhere postings, and Neill Ferguson's crash memo . Why are you so convinced that the CIA, five eyes, et al did not coordinate this? That idea definitely does not come out of nowhere, or fiction/nonfiction-writing journalists.... I am assuming you've read Robt Malone MD's recent two-part essay on "puppet Masters" where the notion is well-summarized. I am not being hysterical, nor am I hostile; I appreciate your analysis and ponderings. I would liken your interpretation of all this to the person who insists that e g this, other, phenomenon was also not concerted, organized or a conspiratorial event : that 6 states in the USA, some a thousand miles apart, never in history having done anything similar, or giving any prior notice, all simultaneously closed their polling sites and forcibly removed polling observers, at exactly 10:00 o'clock pm on the Nov 3 , 2020 USA presidential election, due to "worker fatigue" and other odd, inexplicable reasons, and each state transformed a very significant lead of one candidate , to a loss, by hundreds of thousands of votes, by the following early morning- using primarily mailed in votes , deliberately counted last, not first.
Sure, that was a random event too.
The idea that the CIA/intelligence agencies have this power, to create and promulgate a world economic/health disaster, and that vigorous across the board censorship has and is occurring, and that free speech is no longer a right, and elections are rigged, is a very difficult notion to behold; it implies the loss of everything. I am not sure I can come to grips with this evidence either. I'd also rather come up with an alternative explanation.
I don't mean to make any positive claim that the 24 Feb WHO report, the Italian lockdowns, Ferguson's 16 March modelling study, or Pueyo's posts are random events. I suspect they're not random at all, but I just don't think we can say what forces acted to produce these events. They could be intelligence or military forces, but I think other forces equally if not more likely. What I'm trying to say here, is that the case for an 'intelligence coup' does not yet extend to these fundamental events, and so the significance of specific intelligence/defence actors demanding masks, closures, etc. downstream of them is unclear.
Ferguson has a long and distinguished history of wolf-crying and doom-mongering about every disease. He's been preaching some variant of containment for almost 20 years, every time some banal thing comes up. Covid was in fact the second time he struck lucky (UK foot and mouth epidemic, where his models caused billions of pounds worth of livestock to be slaughtered and burned or buried).
But I suspect the 3 years of utter panicked, self-reinforcing insanity we got were beyond even his wildest wet dreams.
He at least is not a CIA-steered "asset", he is a genuine obsessive crank with idiotic models that always exponentially model the wrong assumptions they are fed in the same direction. If he wasn't a professor with a few grants and phone numbers of important people, he'd be wandering the streets with a "the end is nigh" sandwich board. He is an obsessive, if he is doing the CIA's dirty work it's for free, and likely in complete ignorance of the fact.
I very much second this. I've spent (wasted) untold hours of my life going over dozens of Ferguson papers, the 16 March modelling study is largely of a piece with the rest, only substantially escalated in the scope and scale of its vision. He's been a consistent doomer virus crank since at least 2001, who steadily accumulated a cloud of students and associates with similar views. There is an interventionist pandemicist faction intertwined with Ferguson that I think plays an important, apparently autonomous role in the events of 2020, and their influence extends to Italy too, most clearly in the Vo' study of asymptomatic infections.
Ferguson was made to release his code. I suspect that this, like climate code, makes a lot of the simple arithmetical principle that A^X1 * A^X2 ... = A^(X1+X2+...). You can put plenty of negative feedbacks in with Xn of <1 to prove to the skeptics you aren't maniplulating things, but unless you can get sum(X) to less than 1, which is the holy grail of declining covid cases, declining temperature etc, the model will ultimately ALWAYS show an exponential rise, just faster or slower.
The models of course are not manipulated such that you can only get sum(X) to less than 1 by implementing predetermined politically selected measures.
How do you square the points you have made with the general incompetence of the American state?
OK, clearly there is still a good deal of residual ability otherwise planes would be falling from the sky as we speak. However, I doubt that such a large, complicated operation that relies very heavily on psychology (and is therefore highly unpredictable) would succeed in the fashion that it supposedly did.
In my view it's not one-global-conspiracy (supervillain) versus no-conspiracies-at-all (random events).
Rather, it feels to me like in this whole global phenomenon there are a number of "conspiracies" or, better, organized efforts by various actors or groups of actors, each perhaps acting (with various degrees of conscious intent or planning) in its own interests, but also interacting with any number of other groups that have their own agendas. It's kind of a pseudo-biologic ecosystem or organism, a complex system comprised of a number of small or complex systems, all interacting and affecting each other. Alternatively, I picture it as a kind of fluid dynamics.
I wish I was articulate enough to describe it better.
I agree. All over the world, peripherally related groups were infected with a severe case of terminal groupthink. Each, seemingly, triggered by others, in some kind of insane circular firing squad.
IMHO the biggest problem with big conspiracy theories is that they try to explain a complex world with a single B&W solution.
At any particular moment in time, there are thousands of conspirations trying to grab some money, or power, or usually both.
Whenever any of these conspiracies seems to be getting some traction, opportunistic agents detect a chance to take a bit of money, and they escalate. The only priority of these opportunists is to maintain or strengthen their position, with no real values, so they have plenty of opportunities to prosper.
When you look in retrospective, you can trace the acts of these actors and deduce that it was all planned out from the beginning.
But in reality, it was not. By mere chance, things happened in a particular way. Most of the people or groups involved simply aligned their position to whatever had the biggest prospect of winning at different moments.
It is true that there was a growing desire by the "pandemicists" to become a thing. They had been trying unsuccessfully for decades and finally succeeded.
Also, it is true that the intelligence services are usually involved in anything that increases their already excessive control over the societies they are tasked to protect.
In summary, conspiracy theories are completely true, but also they are not the whole story, they are just a consequence of how badly are we organised.
People think intelligence agents are like James Bond or Jack Ryan (speaking of Main Characters), but they're by and large the same type of gray-souled managerial hive mind sludge that gets used as the raw material for the rest of the professional class.
all competence having evaporated from the rest of the bureaucrat classes, it becomes attractive to imagine it has merely migrated and concentrated itself somewhat off-stage with the intelligence services.
Spook conspiracy theories as cope to avoid confronting the horrifying depth of the competence collapse.
Planned violent oppression is more comfortable than random such, since the former is predictable and thus manageable.
This has been observed among other mammals such as rats and dogs: they prefer knowing that they'll be hurt for specific things (like pushing the wrong lever) to being hurt at random intervals with no pattern or logic to it.
We're no different.
You cannot operate in an environment you cannot model and predict. Animals subjected to random punishment eventually give up and just sit and won't react no matter how they're abused.
I know. I've read the summaries of a study or two where they basically tortured animals to see what would happen, behaviour-wise.
I'd like to do the same to those researchers.
And it's exactly the same with people. When people are exposed to chaos, they eventually cease functioning.
yeah well just because we are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get us
Surveillance makes us hide. But it's fun to do to others... to a degree. That's why I like the way this article started. When will surveillance and its opposite - coverup! - provide each other with privacy?
The Repression was competent they got rid of Trump, smashed the populace and got rich
Imagine away, they’re dullards
The people drawn to working for intelligence agencies have the fantasies of 12-year-olds and the same capacity for self-restraint. The people who end up running them are worse. They always look at what their adversaries are doing and think "we can top this!"
The caretaker, janitor, cleaner, secretary or groundskeeper with a bitter personal vendetta about something is well-known to be the ideal candidate when you're looking for a spy.
Don't forget Matt Helm and Jason Bourne--Austin Powers is too ridiculous.
Matt Helm was pretty ridiculous. At least the Dino movies were.
Exhibit A, Christopher Steele.
Yes. The film model we have to use is not James Bond, but the tailor of Panama.
Like-minded functionaries and bureaucrats, with job security incentives aligned with protecting turf and authority (power) result in an institutional mission corroborating the tacit objective without any confirming conspiracy--it's implicit, unspoken--simply understood as the course of action to be pursued.
Yes, bureaucracy becomes a pseudo-organism.
Pournelle's Law
"In any bureaucracy, people devoted to the benefit of bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals that bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and eventually are eliminated entirely."
Thanks for the tip to that Jerry Pournelle quote! It's definitely a keeper. Here it is fleshed out a little more, and the actual title, The Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Free bonus of an illustrated example.
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."
https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C5112AQHMfllVU-cFCA/article-cover_image-shrink_600_2000/0/1521603559413?e=2147483647&v=beta&t=gmq1CbzCYXB9LUa2fDEFwwBkRFZU8bBR71Y_tMiB4pE
They work for the ruling class / conspirators, not the people nor the nation.
Yep, follow the money
Future historians, (assuming there ARE any), will conclude that GREED was the primary driver of the societal collapse we are witnessing.
Interesting… I think you’re right that greed is a major driver, yet I’m compelled to think PRIDE (hubris, prestige, status) may be a bit further ahead, and drives humans to really trample on each other to get to the top. Perhaps greed is simply an outgrowth of pride.
I suspect one could have stipulated ANY of the seven deadly sins. And easily provided a well reasoned justification for their choice.
I chose greed because it seems to fit well into the context of this post. Consider the mind boggling riches accruing to the pharmaceutical industry, the Scrooge McDuck-ish wealth accumulated by the bureaucrats who cycle between government regulatory bodies and the industries they purport to regulate. Or the lifestyles and personal wealth flaunted by many legislators, who, on paper, show incomes barely into the six figure range, but who seem to possess multiple luxury residences, private jets, yachts - all the trimmings of the idle rich.
Can I add a very contentious and highly tendentious thought?
For how many years was the "psychosphere" laced with pandemic-themed movies, games and other pop-cultural phenomenons of similar narrative?
At the least, 15 years or so. Enough for the age bracket who turned 15-30 in 2020 to have grown up with hearing about or coming into contact with the idea of pandemic equals lockdown and quarantine (and shooting the zombies in the head and so on among the shopping-list of clichés called Hollywood script-writing).
You see, zombies in movies et c are the pandemic, pop-culturally speaking. The response in movie after movie, game after game, is always the same:
Quarantine of Patient Zero, which fails. Then lockdown and curfew and locking up those suspected of infection. Then walling off city-blocks. Then trying to hem the infected in, in a specific area and finally "Our Heroes" fighting their way through the zombie-hordes to some end or other, depending on the tone of the production.
Was it in 2010 that app-game came, that spawned zombies on a map in your phone, as a way to LARP a zombie-apoclypse and get exercise? Plushies, hoodies, comics, dolls, classic novels re-written as the zombie-genre, and so on.
Between fifteen and twenty years of constant pop-cultural messaging about "The Pandemic" preceded the panic. It's fully possible that no conspiracy was needed, but that it instead came down to enough functionaires having been pre-conditioned to respond the way they did, without knowing so.
Just a thought.
Here's one to sleep on:
All social interaction is manipulation. All communication aims to make you do/don't do something, in a certain way inside a specific time-frame.
There's no avoiding it, and we all do it all the time.
(Edited for silly errors, english grammar being what it is.)
This is interesting: I've heard of some designs of vehicles, space-ships etc were influenced by the various sci-fi writers and film-makers of the first part of the last century. Famously, Reagan's SDI programme is known as 'Star Wars'.
In my profession one of the things that has to be dealt with early on is the clutch of misconceptions that many have about medicine, e.g. a long, flat tone during asystole in cardiac arrest for instance. This is all a consequence of a certain 'look' in films and so on.
Another example might be the heated response when you suggest that men are more physically capable than women. Anyone who has spent an afternoon playing a physical sport like rugby or in a boxing gym could tell you that! However after years of little blonde girls filling in brutish men in films there are some who think that the two sexes are equal, or at least pretend to think so at least.
I've had to have talks about the effects of real fights with some students as I was the teacher the difficult cases of fatherless teenaged students formed the stereotypical hate/respect-relationship with.
As an adult it was difficult to grasp how much less these kids knew or understood about such things. Getting colleagues to understand that you cannot always use non-violent options were even more baffling.
Chalk it up to the (stereo)typical middle class lacking real life experience maybe? Or that's my prejudice anyway.
I wonder how many women have been hurt because they've been conditioned/indoctrinated to believe a 50 kilo woman can put down a 100 kilo man with one punch.
I am a very "woman's lib" woman but there are certain things woman simply do not have the strength to do
Not all women. Some women are as strong as a man.......because.....they are men!
That's what the Derringer was invented for. 😃
Isn't it true, though, that if a well-trained small-ish woman strikes a large man who's not expecting it in the chin, she can basically knock him out? Not me, mind you. I have precisely zero martial arts competence. But in principle, it's true, isn't it?
Thumbs in the eyes, or palm to the nose. Better is a S&W to the chest or head.
Absolutely.
There's no greater equaliser between humans than guns.
That's why all "leaders" with dictatorial aspirations wants to ban them.
My west Texas grandmother was a fan of the rapid eye gouge. :)
If she's a well-trained fighter/martial artist, she'd put me on my back with one strike. But that strike doesn't keep me down unless she's built like an MMA/UFC-fighter, it just hurts and makes me angry.
There's been a couple of bouts where a trans has fought a real woman in a cage fight. It's not pretty. She lands several blows to no effect, while "she" totals the real woman in under a minute. Both athletes, both trained fighters, both used to taking hits.
That's what the difference in body mass and strength does. When a man hits another man, or a woman, his strength doesn't just hurt, it injures the victim. That's the difference.
A normal woman would need to hit and kick multiple times, uninterrupted, to put a normal man down and out. However, a very painful hit (scrotum, eyes, throat, bending the middle finger out of socket et c) can very well put an attacker of his stride and frighten him to give up his assault - that's the theory behind feminist self defence.
But if it doesn't work, the poor woman now has to deal with an enraged opponent she cannot put down.
As my judo-trainer used say 40 years ago: "For training and matches we have rules. When it's for real, the rule is: 'survive'."
I've always found "hit and run like diarrhea" to be the best tactic.
Remember, "Eyes, ears, nose and throat." Thumbs in the eyes, Cupped hands to both ears, ball of the palm to the nose, fist to the throat.
If they can't see or breathe, your chances go up a lot.
Yup.
Anywhere is a target; everything is weapon-school of martial arts.
The only one where you wear normal clothes, not short-shorts or pyjamas allowing for free movement.
It's possible in theory for anyone to win a fight given the right circumstances, skill and luck. It is however extraordinarily unlikely in the situation he pictures. The point is that the silly Marvel/thriller-type films portray it as routine for an audience of millions and some will be stupid enough to believe it.
Thanks for your reply. I haven't watched a Hollywood movie in, oh, something like 20 years. ;-) But my understanding is that if a woman is well-trained in martial arts, and she suddenly finds herself needing to defend herself against a man, then she basically has one single shot: if she manages to hit him hard and suddenly (when he doesn't expect it), she might get away. But she'd better be willing to badly hurt him (or even kill him), otherwise it's hopeless. If one strike doesn't do it, she's basically doomed: he'll overpower her with raw strength her even if she's a far more skilled fighter. Anyway, that's my understanding of the matter. It's basically correct, right? (Of course, avoiding dangerous men if at all possible should always be Plan A.)
If I remember correctly Bruce Lee rarely trained women and his philosophy was 'kick them in the balls and run away'. He was not very modern.
Most women are not interested in training in even a little martial arts , much less actually becoming skilled. Whereas, a far higher percentage of men actually do become skilled, thus even broadening the real-life probability that women are crushed by men nearly always, physically.
Doh!
I typed my reply above and then saw this. That'll teach me to read first, reply later.
You and James have it correctly - James' remark about Marvel et al are true.
In fact, an adult female teacher will struggle to handle a twelve-year old boy. The physical difference in strength is that pronounced, thanks to testosterone.
A good exercise for our blue-haired feminists would be sawing and cleaving firewood. The 2' thick 12 yards long pine-log to be cut up in 12" pieces which are then to be chopped into bits no thicker than a man's wrist doesn't care about Judith Butler or Gertrude Stein or any other theorist.
Uh, yeah James Alexander about the Space Vehicles
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-hearing-congress-uap-takeaways-whistleblower-conference-david-grusch-2023/
The Omega Man, 1971.
The Andromeda Strain, 1971.
Yes, and the earlier film version of Omega Man was The Last Man on Earth, 1964. Vincent Price! Based on the book I Am Legend 1954 Richard Matheson.
I've always wanted to teach history using movies (as a history teacher). As to your comment what I can't understand is how young people raised on years of movies based on the idea of an evil government having plans to take control, divide them, put them into detention camps and take away their freedom or pandemics/aliens/mega-disasters killing large groups of people who must then fight to save their small family-pod couldn't see that what was happening in the last 4 years was a parallel to all the movies they had watched. (I know, a run-on sentence). I wanted to force everyone during lockdown to watch the following movies then answer these questions - Does the end justify the means? What would you do? Minority Report; The Hunger Games; Divergent' The Giver; I Am Legend; Network, The Manchurian Candidate; The Twilight Zone: Eye of the Beholder; The Fifth Wave; World War Z.
That would be my start. I just don't know how kids can watch programs like the Walking Dead and not see how important it is to resist and fight instead of just doing what they're told by the authorities around them.
Re-watch the movies (games et c): you always have the "reasonable authority figure" who also happens to be right post-hoc/post-fact, but isn't in charge having to give way to the Carter Burke-archtype of corrupt corporate executive and the equally archetypical General Ripper-esque character, aide by snivelling wretches and sycophants.
There's no concept of cricising authority as such in modern post-2000 works, none at all. There's absolutely no challenge to the justification of authority or any justification of it being authority. The only conflict is about whether authority's actions are the correct ones or not.
Look at "Aliens" and compare it to "Alien Resurrection": in the first one, when (spoiler alert as the kids say) Burker's actions are revealed, he is universally reviled by the survivors. His authority counts for nothing, and not even the android tries to carry out his orders. His formal positional authority is gone, replaced by authority founded in actual deeds and proven ability.
In "Resurrection", no-one challenges the military-corporate organisation's authority. The cast just runs around setting up dioramas to show off "cool" scenes and grandstanding before escaping on a ship. The explicit rebellion against authority evident in "Aliens" (and in the original movie too) isn't there.
That's why the 30ish and younger crowd act the way you see: they are conditioned to obey authority and to accept authority, while being taught to criticise by said authority, making any criticism they try to put words be one wholly within a framework laid down by authority.
Which is also why schools in virtually all WEF-influenced nations have virtually stopped using books, boardgames and music from before the 1980s: in older works authority's justification is challenged - compare Robin Hood and Ivanhoe to The Hunger Games f.e. Or Brave New World to World War Z.
Sorry if I'm rambling a bit, I used to teach "the history of ideas/the ideas of history" (the swedish term doesn't translate properly) and I'm typing this free-hand as stream of consciousness.
Oh, just thank you for understanding my thought and idea. You are so right about this though. Young people don't know how to think on their own, so even though they do rage against authority they still go along with whatever they are told to do by the crowd. They aren't able to critically think over what information is being given to them and then act on their own judgement especially if it goes contrary to what they've believed their whole life or what their group of friends believe. That's what makes it hard for them to change when they're lied to by someone of authority, especially if they've always believed that person or agency to be a reliable or authentic source.
And you're right about schools and other educational sources taking away real books and using only resources from the internet that are post 1980s. I've purposely begun seriously collecting books that were printed and not digital (although I've always had lots of books!), so that someday kids could see that books had different information in them before they were rewritten by digital sources. When they started seriously taking books off library shelves in the US, like Dr. Seuss, Twain, Uncle Tom's Cabin, To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone With the Wind, and such, I made sure I had as many of them as I could find. And I did the same with the movies we've discussed, as well as some solid older histories of the US, Europe, and the World.
During the pandemic and the protests in the US during the summers of 2019 and 2020 liberal progressive groups used the term "resistance" in talking about being part of Black Lives Matter or feminist groups, part of the woke crowd that was changing how the rest of us were allowed to talk, think, or speak. It was horribly annoying to me because I have always known that during WWII I would have been a resistance fighter in some form or another, whether smuggling people out of the country, making leaflets, moving money around, hiding refugees, passing messages and intel, or actually fighting. The fact that these people thought wearing pink knitted genitals on their heads and screaming in people's ears with bullhorns while burning downtown buildings and telling me that I was a racist homophobe made them a resistance fighter really irritated me. They didn't realize that my refusing to wear a mask and get a COVID shot was more radical than their marching on Washington DC because it was restricting my freedom of movement, freedom to work, freedom to obtain medical care, and freedom to speak.
Our young people don't have the history of war, suffering, loss of freedom or liberty, that we do, whether from our parents, our friends, or ourselves who all witnessed war and the results. They don't have the benefit of global travel and world experience seeing real poverty and destruction. They don't have empathy, perspective, kindness, self-respect, self-motivation, independence, spiritual love for others, or pride in their nation. I do hope this is temporary, but right now it's really a sad and depressing time that's lasted too long.
We’re already long governed by film scripts; “Wag The Dog” led to Kosovo War, every day since 2008 has been government by Heist Film, there’s no reason to not add PANDEMIC to our Governing models .
==========
Coming soon; War of The Worlds (UFOs drama now in US Senate).
Starring; Senator Marco Rubio, supporting cast Senator Charles Schumer who has introduced legislation claiming Eminent Domain over all Alien Technology.
And I’m not kidding.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-hearing-congress-uap-takeaways-whistleblower-conference-david-grusch-2023/
Oh, I agree. And I think part of the picture is that the central people like Fauci’s circle knew about the lab leak, and that they were at least indirectly implicated in it, and thus found themselves cast in the role of the “bad guys” in the Supervirus/Zombie apocalypse movie – and, amazingly, they ran with it.
The screenplay conventions required that the escaped, engineered bug be of world-ending virulence, so that’s what SARS-cov-2 became in their minds, and its true origins had to concealed.
Revelation of the Method.
Very fair.
https://alphaandomegacloud.wordpress.com/2021/09/26/fear-is-the-key/
Basically these movies got closer to closer to trying to look real that they replaced science with pure fiction, a lie.
"Contagion" was the apex of this, where for most people they internalized all 'facts' as science.
This movie could not be possibly more far from truth: it is very hard, to create a virus, that can at the same time a) propagate without stopping through a large heterogeneous population b) kill a large number of them.
And if you look at history of all known cases you will find that the original myth narrative does not hold.
I want to also mention Camus 'The Plague'. I really do not know why people like this book. Not only is it extremely boring and portraits a huge number of characters that basically go from one uninteresting philosophical problem to another uninteresting though, but also all these problems could be solved with a half an hour chat and a coffee. And just like 'Contagion' it is spreading falsehoods and the idea of massive containment as something normal.
Pass. Hard Pass.
Matt Hancock said he was inspired in his support for lockdowns by rewatching Contagion in March 2020 -- and if I recall the movie was the #1 trending title on Netflix UK at the time.
It was a good excuse for the little weasel anyway.
https://alphaandomegacloud.wordpress.com/2021/06/04/matt-hancock/
Excellent comment.
Heh, saw yours and thought "Hey, it's not just me!" plus "Great minds and so on! Yay!"
Narrative discourse theory might actually be real.
I tend to look at things anthropologically. Terry Pratchett was the first one that made me aware that humans have always viewed things in terms of story.
Excellent analysis. May I add - these zombie apocalypse movies and series (as a European who moved to the USA in 2013, I found the notion of the "zombie apocalypse" far more developed as an idea in the public mind. Even those who considered themselves 'awake' to mind manipulation) kill healthy people for the "safety" of others...
Thank you. Not having visited the Americas I can't speak to that, but I have no reason to doubt it.
I do think that cultural separation of european nations/cultures and USAmerican would benefit both; the interplay of ideas in academia, economics and politics from the fall of the Berlin Wall (not discounting the preceding decades preparing the field but the Cold War put a lid on the worst of it) has resulted in our present troubles on both sides of the Atlantic.
Healthy nationalism the way siblings and cousins treat each other, sort of. Different and individual but of the greater same at the same time.
We should share in our very positive value system and there’s definitely worth in the cultural interplay. I think we should regard all unification of policy, excessive fraternization of our officials, & attempts at new layers of supra-governance with extreme suspicion, because that’s where the trouble begins.
Governmental and “institutional” leaders are not the brightest people. Most people are motivated by money and fear of losing it all so it is extremely easy for a few key people to manipulate the world by making those fearful cowards follow along like little puppies. Just work for a large corporation once (remove blinders first) and watch the sheep follow the lost. I have been in many meetings at various levels where coworkers and “friends” sat quietly and watched me take the abuse for saying what we all spoke about outside the meeting. It happens in churches too. Everyone wants it to be fixed but nobody wants to wear the tool belt for fear of being called a repair man. It won’t get better until backbones are found but that would require stepping outside of the consumer driven machine.
The same thing has happened with me: I've spoken to people individually about the 'trans' nonsense and unsurprisingly "sensible people are sensible" and disagree with most of it. They know precisely what a woman is and isn't and don't want their wives, daughters and mothers sharing changing rooms and toilets with men. When I stuck my neck out in public in front of the whole organisation only one or two took my side. The rest just sat mutely, miserable, staring into space.
So true...
We call them sheep.
Well done for sticking your neck out.
https://alphaandomegacloud.wordpress.com/2022/12/29/transgender-and-other-trans-words-definitions/
Totally agree. "where coworkers and “friends” sat quietly and watched me take the abuse for saying what we all spoke about outside the meeting". An exact description of what happened to me. I'm sure afterwards, I had 'troublesome' written in my HR file...
Along with, perhaps, "rabble rouser", and "conspiracy theorist "...
"Non-compliant".
A good strategy for getting along as a worker in a corporation, while still doing a good job, is to act cooperative during meetings and then to go back to one's desk and doing whatever one wants. The workplace is too weird now to ply that tactic without feeling compromised.
Has anyone figured out what is for me the key question: did everyone involved sincerely believe the virus was extremely dangerous (because of bio-weapon research, Chinese intelligence, etc. etc.) or did they take advantage of a known nothing-burger to orchestrate political goals?
seems to be a little of both, varying upon the country. virus anxiety among planners and elites started to boil off after wave 1, and thereafter pandemic terror became increasingly just a resource for the bureaucrats and the politicians to use.
Surely they must have looked at the Third World e.g. Africa which could not afford the various Western pandemic measures and concluded that corona was not that lethal after all? I must admit that initially I believed that which was purported about corona lethality and imagined that there would be tens of millions dead across that continent. When it happened neither in Britain nor in Africa/Middle East etc I knew something was off.
Many people have a stunning capacity for cognitive dissonance.
In the US it appeared to be the latter, at least at first. Through February the media and political establishment had an "it's just a flu and the president's travel ban is just racist" attitude. I saved tweets from late February encouraging people to go eat and shop in Chinatown to fight the baseless harm that was being done. Most of this seems to have been their usual knee-jerk need to oppose the president. I saved a screenshot of a CDC flyer published after cases had been confirmed in the US, that had mere sensible recommendations like "stay home if you're sick" and "do not use facemasks."
It wasn't until March that they shifted toward panic, and even then it was clearly opportunistic. For instance, they forced churches and small businesses to close but made an exception to the stay-at-home rules for those attending BLM "protests." There were many contradictions like that which wouldn't have happened if they'd been truly afraid of the virus. I live near the border between one state that had strict closures and one that didn't, so everyone from the strict side was driving to the other state regularly to shop and dine out, and no attempt was made to stop that. Things like that showed how fake and silly the panic really was.
Some of them may have talked themselves into a real panic after a while, and the Karens and others who take all their cues from the media certainly did, completely forgetting those first couple months when they believed it was nothing.
'did everyone involved sincerely believe the virus was extremely dangerous (because of bio-weapon research, Chinese intelligence, etc. etc.) or did they take advantage of a known nothing-burger to orchestrate political goals?'
Both.
Agreed
I remember at the time thinking that the reported deaths from China were in wild disproportion to the response, and whether the various governments knew something that we didn't. I do wonder if the various intelligence agencies had good information that the virus did come from the Wuhan lab and (not unreasonably) panicked that it was something nastier/a deliberate released of an engineered weapon and so pushed lockdowns as a defence. This might also explain why the lab theory was squashed quite so abruptly, perhaps?
Yes and human rights organizations let them do it. Amnesty international sided with Trudeau against the truckers: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/amnesty-international-silence-ccp-esg-covid
Amnesty was co-opted to become a tool for some globalist group or other in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when they started having opinions on specific criminal issues, instead of focusing on everyone's right to a fair process.
Like this: earlier, Amnesty opposed capital punishment in regimes who did not respect due process, fair trials and so on - dictatorships using it as a political tool f.e. Then, they suddenly came out against it as such on pure principle, became pro-abortion, and so on, the usual lib-prog-laundry list.
Meaning they went from trying to safeguard basic human rights to playing politics and endorsing specific political stances over others.
They seemingly rebranded to Amnesty Global to aid disparaged individuals such as Neil Ferguson and Bill Gates.
Stupid ideas spread faster than covid, the infections last longer, and are far more serious.
In the context of the psychological and cultural shifts that happened during the pandemic, I'm struck by the explanation of journalism's need to reduce a complex situation to a comprehensible plot*. Being as we're all so steeped in fiction, television, and movies, this makes perfect sense, and also helps explain the widespread need for a silver bullet or a master-villain-cackling-under-a-volcano (i.e. Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates). You perfectly label it as a 'non-fiction novel'. Humans see the world as story. During the initial lockdown I, like many others, obsessively consumed movies like Contagion and books like Station Eleven and Year of Wonders (based on the English village of Eyam which quarantined itself in 1665), reinforcing that pattern.
Biology is a complex system. Human sociology is also a complex system; the two interact. Because of our need for silver bullets or master villains, which is the general paradigm upon which reductionist western science operates, we're mostly incapable of appreciating or understanding this complexity. In our hubris we believe we *do* understand, which explains why so many of our attempted interventions (in many fields) fail.
Rather than a narrative description, journalism digging into what actually happened (dare I say fact-based) takes an effort to read. A good example is Whitney Webb's three-part series, which includes the military and intelligence involvement in the run-up to the Covid mess. The array of actors is huge — a cast of thousands — and contains familiar characters like Rudy Giuliani, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, and many others, in repeating roles. Over the last few years I've increasingly pictured myself as a baby duck innocently paddling around on the surface of a vast, deep ocean with monstrous denizens only vaguely sensed. These articles deepen that impression to a Mariana Trench of monster habitat beneath our tiny webbed feet.
Part I https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/all-roads-lead-dark-winter/
Part II https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/killer-enterprise-how-big-pharmas-most-corrupt-companies-plans-corner-covid-19-cure-market/
Part III https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/head-hydra-rise-robert-kadlec/
* That's probably more realistic than my own super-cynical opinion that most people need to reduce a complex situation to bumper-sticker level (i.e. "Hammer and Dance").
I love the Yglesias argument that is, essentially, "If we do nothing society will cease to function. Therefore we must stop society from functioning in order that society may function."
I think they were very specifically worried that hospitals would collapse. That's what motivated the whole thing in the early days.
Laugh and cry.
Bravo eugyppius! Especially the "autistic' part- perfect description.😉
The coup thing though. . . I still think the "intelligence" agencies and the DoD used covid as a way to try out proceedures, responses, etc for a biowarfare attack in real time, at scale. It was the perfect opportunity for such an "experiment."
How do I get the last fifteen minutes of my life back?
“Pandemic mitigation” is crank science which was obvious in 2020 and more so now.
The intelligence agencies were heavily involved in our Covid response. Check out Jeffrey Tucker.
yes, pandemic mitigation is indeed crank science. worrying about pandemics is imho a huge mistake and the root of much evil.
I’m aware of Tucker’s arguments and I even link to another post where I takk about one of them. here, I address the very similar and related ideas of Senger. not every post can be about everything at once, and many readers have asked me my thoughts on senger’s recent post, which is why i wrote this.
i would only reiterate that i don’t dispute intelligence agency involvement, particularly in the US response. the question is simply whether this involvement was decisive and foundational, or whether intelligence/defence actors were simply following a broader, pre-established trend set in motion by other forces. so far i think the evidence only gets us to the latter scenario.
If mitigation measures didn’t work then Hawaii would now have the same age adjusted Covid death rate as states in the mainland as millions of mainlanders have visited and spread Omicron the last 15 months. Yes everyone got infected but the vaccines mitigated severity of Delta and then Omicron wasn’t as severe and so the mitigation measures clearly saved lives.
So you have two arguments—the mitigation measures weren’t worth it from an economic/mental health/education standpoint…or that public health officials simply got lucky Omicron was less severe and had it been more severe the vaccines wouldn’t have held and everything we did to mitigate spread merely delayed the inevitable in which case it wasn’t worth the costs from the first argument.
no, Hawaii wouldn’t have the same age-adjusted death rate as the Continental US, as the behaviour of Covid (especially pre-Omicron Covid) varies drastically across regions and in the entire Asia-Pacific was less deadly regardless of what anybody did. hence Japan.
the case for mitigation largely rests on these oversimplified false cross-regional comparisons and the selective neglect of regional and seasonal trends (when it comes to Sweden, suddenly everybody remembers to confine comparison cases to Scandinavia). Western containment regimes appear to have some effects on official case rates (confounding here is a huge problem), but don’t produce clear mortality signals once you account for regional and seasonal trends. even if they did, your use of the word „work“ would need more differentiation, of course.
So basically you just ignore data and make stuff up about why Arizona (which did the least amount of mitigation in 2020) and Hawaii (which did the most) are on opposite ends of the Covid death rate. I will continue to look at data to determine what worked and didn’t work—we never found a silver bullet to stop Covid but mitigation measures worked to some degree and the vaccines mitigated severity prior to Omicron. Btw, the Covid death rate varies greatly within states as the wealthiest county in America adjusted for cost of living is in Tennessee and it has the highest vaccination rate in Tennessee and by far the lowest Covid death rate…but according to you it should have the same death rate as the rest of the state adjusted for age.
no, you don't ignore data, but you have to interpret case and mortality rates in light of regional and seasonal trends and avoid arbitrary one-on-one comparisons. I can play the same game in the other direction: For example, Italy did far more than Japan in the first wave and suffered vastly more deaths. Arizona and Hawaii are in totally different regions, with different climates and seasonal patterns of infection.
As for high vaccination rates in a county in Tennessee and Covid death rates:
1) you need to look up the phenomenon of statistical confounding and the healthy vaccinee effect. not only regionality and seasonality, but age structure, obesity, and poverty independently predict higher Covid mortality.
2) excess mortality, not Covid mortality, is the statistic we're looking for, for reasons that I'm sure will be obvious to you upon reflection.
I have studied America’s response and America’s data because I’m an American and America has a 330 million people that live across a huge country and states that responded to Covid differently. The notion you don’t have everything you need to come to conclusions by analyzing America is absurd.
NY had 900 deaths per day in the initial wave and that is a state with 20 million people!! So that is a 9/11 every 3 days from spread prior to any mitigation measures. NY then Implemented mitigation measures and the state’s death rate never got close to the rate in the initial wave from unimpeded spread. NY is also a state with a similar population to Florida but NY has a significantly larger nursing home population. And on 1/2021 Florida had roughly half as many overall Covid deaths as NY. Florida did fewer mitigation measures after 1/2021 and now it has significantly more overall Covid deaths than NY!! Florida’s age adjusted excess mortality superficially looks not too bad because it has a very healthy elderly population and they did a good job with vaccinations early on…but that is also why during the Delta death surge the median age of Covid death actually dropped! You can check all of these numbers in the states at the county levels as Orange County had a lower Covid death rate as it continued to mask and the Trump counties in NY with few wealthy Republicans had a higher Covid death rate.
Lastly if you overlaid a graph of excess deaths with Covid deaths per day it looks the same with just excess deaths higher…so you don’t have to look at excess deaths because it’s the same as Covid deaths except we are clearly undercounting Covid deaths!!
How do I love thee? I ain't got the math skills to count the ways.
But let me give my own general theory here too. Think of everyone as a bright HS freshman. That's the time when kids hate to feel not as smart as the smart kids; not aware from the first of the latest cool thing; really afraid of making a mistake that other people will mock.
It's only a few kids, anywhere, who are truly cunning malevolent manipulative disruptors. They are a separate species. But most of the intelligent ones are as I describe. They're not geniuses; they don't follow their own paths of curiosity and discovery. They have no stomach for sticking out too far.
And we live in a world where they're in charge of everything. Fuck's sake! I think my theory fits with everything you've written from the start.
I was an A and C/D student.
It was annoying working mostly for idiots (some of them very intelligent ones) but they often found me quite useful as their subordinate. That helped to mitigate their annoyance at my refusal to be perfectly obedient.
I've never wanted to run my own show and found it quite useful to be a mere wage-earner. I could take vacations without any concern about an enterprise that needs the proprietor's oversight. I could look for better jobs, or survive brief periods of unemployment (I got fired a lot).
Not everyone wants a career. I never had a "goal" other than being able to support myself and have enough money for my modest enjoyments. There should be more respect, in the scheme of things, given to boring jobs that allow people to do what I did with my paycheck, which was adequate, in the Long Agoes, for a lower-middle-class life. That I'm a dinosaur and kids like me can't do that anymore is one of the tragedies of our time.
You sound like me.
Kinda makes sense.
"Many readers have asked me in sometimes polite and sometimes highly hostile and dismissive ways to comment on these ideas" might be the most precise summation of a certain sector of online discourse I've seen. In any event, made me chuckle on this rather pleasant Sunday morning.
You characterize these as 'civilian', because the nominal affiliation of these entities is not military, and essentially you are arguing they were random events: The WHO February 24 memo, the March Italian lockdown , Thomas Pueyo out-of-nowhere postings, and Neill Ferguson's crash memo . Why are you so convinced that the CIA, five eyes, et al did not coordinate this? That idea definitely does not come out of nowhere, or fiction/nonfiction-writing journalists.... I am assuming you've read Robt Malone MD's recent two-part essay on "puppet Masters" where the notion is well-summarized. I am not being hysterical, nor am I hostile; I appreciate your analysis and ponderings. I would liken your interpretation of all this to the person who insists that e g this, other, phenomenon was also not concerted, organized or a conspiratorial event : that 6 states in the USA, some a thousand miles apart, never in history having done anything similar, or giving any prior notice, all simultaneously closed their polling sites and forcibly removed polling observers, at exactly 10:00 o'clock pm on the Nov 3 , 2020 USA presidential election, due to "worker fatigue" and other odd, inexplicable reasons, and each state transformed a very significant lead of one candidate , to a loss, by hundreds of thousands of votes, by the following early morning- using primarily mailed in votes , deliberately counted last, not first.
Sure, that was a random event too.
The idea that the CIA/intelligence agencies have this power, to create and promulgate a world economic/health disaster, and that vigorous across the board censorship has and is occurring, and that free speech is no longer a right, and elections are rigged, is a very difficult notion to behold; it implies the loss of everything. I am not sure I can come to grips with this evidence either. I'd also rather come up with an alternative explanation.
M Weiss, MD
I don't mean to make any positive claim that the 24 Feb WHO report, the Italian lockdowns, Ferguson's 16 March modelling study, or Pueyo's posts are random events. I suspect they're not random at all, but I just don't think we can say what forces acted to produce these events. They could be intelligence or military forces, but I think other forces equally if not more likely. What I'm trying to say here, is that the case for an 'intelligence coup' does not yet extend to these fundamental events, and so the significance of specific intelligence/defence actors demanding masks, closures, etc. downstream of them is unclear.
Ferguson has a long and distinguished history of wolf-crying and doom-mongering about every disease. He's been preaching some variant of containment for almost 20 years, every time some banal thing comes up. Covid was in fact the second time he struck lucky (UK foot and mouth epidemic, where his models caused billions of pounds worth of livestock to be slaughtered and burned or buried).
But I suspect the 3 years of utter panicked, self-reinforcing insanity we got were beyond even his wildest wet dreams.
He at least is not a CIA-steered "asset", he is a genuine obsessive crank with idiotic models that always exponentially model the wrong assumptions they are fed in the same direction. If he wasn't a professor with a few grants and phone numbers of important people, he'd be wandering the streets with a "the end is nigh" sandwich board. He is an obsessive, if he is doing the CIA's dirty work it's for free, and likely in complete ignorance of the fact.
I very much second this. I've spent (wasted) untold hours of my life going over dozens of Ferguson papers, the 16 March modelling study is largely of a piece with the rest, only substantially escalated in the scope and scale of its vision. He's been a consistent doomer virus crank since at least 2001, who steadily accumulated a cloud of students and associates with similar views. There is an interventionist pandemicist faction intertwined with Ferguson that I think plays an important, apparently autonomous role in the events of 2020, and their influence extends to Italy too, most clearly in the Vo' study of asymptomatic infections.
Ferguson was made to release his code. I suspect that this, like climate code, makes a lot of the simple arithmetical principle that A^X1 * A^X2 ... = A^(X1+X2+...). You can put plenty of negative feedbacks in with Xn of <1 to prove to the skeptics you aren't maniplulating things, but unless you can get sum(X) to less than 1, which is the holy grail of declining covid cases, declining temperature etc, the model will ultimately ALWAYS show an exponential rise, just faster or slower.
The models of course are not manipulated such that you can only get sum(X) to less than 1 by implementing predetermined politically selected measures.
Ferguson is a psychopath. How he has any credibility is beyond me to understand.
How do you square the points you have made with the general incompetence of the American state?
OK, clearly there is still a good deal of residual ability otherwise planes would be falling from the sky as we speak. However, I doubt that such a large, complicated operation that relies very heavily on psychology (and is therefore highly unpredictable) would succeed in the fashion that it supposedly did.
In my view it's not one-global-conspiracy (supervillain) versus no-conspiracies-at-all (random events).
Rather, it feels to me like in this whole global phenomenon there are a number of "conspiracies" or, better, organized efforts by various actors or groups of actors, each perhaps acting (with various degrees of conscious intent or planning) in its own interests, but also interacting with any number of other groups that have their own agendas. It's kind of a pseudo-biologic ecosystem or organism, a complex system comprised of a number of small or complex systems, all interacting and affecting each other. Alternatively, I picture it as a kind of fluid dynamics.
I wish I was articulate enough to describe it better.
I agree. All over the world, peripherally related groups were infected with a severe case of terminal groupthink. Each, seemingly, triggered by others, in some kind of insane circular firing squad.
Yes, the 2020 response was a coup.
Birds flying in the same direction. ...?
IMHO the biggest problem with big conspiracy theories is that they try to explain a complex world with a single B&W solution.
At any particular moment in time, there are thousands of conspirations trying to grab some money, or power, or usually both.
Whenever any of these conspiracies seems to be getting some traction, opportunistic agents detect a chance to take a bit of money, and they escalate. The only priority of these opportunists is to maintain or strengthen their position, with no real values, so they have plenty of opportunities to prosper.
When you look in retrospective, you can trace the acts of these actors and deduce that it was all planned out from the beginning.
But in reality, it was not. By mere chance, things happened in a particular way. Most of the people or groups involved simply aligned their position to whatever had the biggest prospect of winning at different moments.
It is true that there was a growing desire by the "pandemicists" to become a thing. They had been trying unsuccessfully for decades and finally succeeded.
Also, it is true that the intelligence services are usually involved in anything that increases their already excessive control over the societies they are tasked to protect.
In summary, conspiracy theories are completely true, but also they are not the whole story, they are just a consequence of how badly are we organised.
The chance was whatever caused them to shut down the biolab.